Football Manager 2020 Tactics Guide — Lower League 4-1-3-2 Tutorial

Heh guys and welcome to this Football Manager 2020 Tactics guide. Using our lower league 4-1-3-2 we have created an FM 2020 tutorial video to walk you through the logic behind a great tactic. The aim is to demonstrate how an effective tactic works from role interaction, to shape and how you can find balance between attack and defence.

This is a complicated and quite hard to express in the written word, so moving away from our usual style enjoy the video below. Here is what will be covered.

• How the shape works and creates balance
• Why player role interaction is so important in Football Manager 2020
• How attacking instructions can actually help keep things tight.
• What to look for when considering players for roles.
• The mechanics of a great system and how it comes together in the match engine.

Football Manager 2020 Tactics Guide — Video Tutorial

If you have trouble watching on our website follow this link to Youtube.

Like what you see in the video? You can download this 4-1-3-2 here.

Football Manager 2020 Tactics Guide Key Takeaways

I hope this video was of use and you managed to take a few things away. There is no exact right and wrong when creating FM 2020 tactics, but their are a few best practises. Gamers want easy, black and white answers but its not that simple with this simulation. If you take anything away from this FM 2020 tactics tutorial, it should be the below:

• Tactics are all about balance and sitting on the right side of a risk to reward formula.
• When thinking about defend, support and attack duties don’t visualise them as moving backwards, forwards or statying stationary. View them as which phase of play to get involved in. This way a support duty is not stationary at all, they are utilised both defensively and attacking.
• Do not lose heart if your system is broken, you may be one role correction away from success. Keep tweaking and testing
• As above, role interaction is so, so important. In the 4-1-3-2 for instance, we have two pressing forwards stretching the pitch, with one MC on attack duty and no AM’s. This gives so much space for the MC to raid and by applying a high line of engagement this is only exaggerated.
• Be creative; to get defensive stability in a 4-4-2 this system drops one MC back to DMC. This leave us light in the middle, so we tell the MR/ML to sit narrow and utilise inverted wing backs who plug the midfield gap when the ball is out wide.
• Just because a role sounds defensive, does not mean it is. We use defensive wingers, but they are two of our most attacking players, despite the support duty! We use this role and duty to ensure they cover their defensive duties as well. But be sure to have enough players staying forward, we use the two pressing forwards to stretch the pitch and open up play.