Football Manager Lower League Management Guide

Hello dear friends, I have a special post for you today, a rather long one too! Since I started the blog I managed Chester City and the Blyth Spartans in FM 2009, then Notts County and now Dorchester Town in FM 2010. It appears that I succeeded in driving those clubs from the lower divisions to the top of European football and that’s probably why many of you constantly ask me for advice. Some of you suggested that I should put together my experiences in lower league management and compile some sort of a guide for further reference and use. Well, that’s what I’m trying now! I wouldn’t call it a guide though, I’m just going to share my approach to particular aspects of the game hoping that my experiences will help you. I have put together some of the most important aspects that you should consider when managing a team in Football Manager 2010 and most of the tips surely apply not only to lower league clubs. Let’s see…

1. Read the manual!

I have noticed that many people forget about this very important step. Let me put it like this: if you buy a new microwave oven and you don’t read the manual you might not cause an explosion but your meals most probably might not be cooked correctly. It’s the same thing with Football Manager, not reading the manual won’t destroy your computer but you might miss very important knowledge that could help you succeed in the game. The online manual is available here in many languages, my advice is to read it!

If my plea is not convincing enough I will give you just a small excerpt from the manual, I’m sure you will find it useful:

The ratings for reflexes, handling, communication, jumping and positioning are generally a good indicator for how good a goalkeeper is.

If you’re looking for a good wing-back pay special attention to an individual’s positioning, tackling, stamina, pace and acceleration.

Positioning, tackling, pace and anticipation are just some of the important characteristics that make for a good full-back.

A good centre-back will usually have high ratings for tackling, jumping, positioning, heading, strength, marking, bravery and team work.

Pace, dribbling, passing, off the ball, creativity, stamina and crossing are just some of the important characteristics that make for a good winger.

Passing, off the ball, creativity, technique, dribbling and stamina are just some of the important characteristics that make for a good attacking midfielder.

A good defensive midfielder will most likely have high ratings for tackling, work rate, stamina and positioning.

Pace, acceleration, dribbling, technique, finishing and off the ball are just some of the important characteristics that make for a good pacey striker.

Jumping, heading, strength and off the ball are just some of the important characteristics that make for a good target man.

2. Finances

Lower league clubs don’t have a lot of money, that’s a fact that all of you are aware about. And that’s the most tricky part of the challenge because building a serious club surely requires money. The first thing that I do when I take charge of a small club is releasing useless players. I don’t release them on free transfers right away, the first thing to do is trying to offer them to clubs for a hefty fee of zero pounds and zero pennies. If no clubs are interested then you can proceed and release those players on free transfers to free some of your wage budget. You will have to pay compensation but I feel that it’s a good move to make on the long run.

Of course you should always check the finances screen now and then and see what’s happening with the club’s money. However, any club’s biggest expenditure is with wages so that’s what you should focus on. Another important move that I make after taking charge of a semi-professional club is moving every player and staff from part-time contracts to full time contracts. I can tell you from my experience that it won’t affect your wage budget too much but the benefits could be quite rewarding on the long run. Basically I offer full time contracts to everybody at the club, a professional club can not be built with part-timers! A player with a full time contract will spend more time in training and that can only improve his as a footballer, that’s the bottom line.

Last but not least you should ask your board to find a parent club. The benefits are quite important as you will have the chance to bring in good players on loan from the parent club, they will be more inclined to accept loan offers that way. You will also have the chance to play pre-season friendly games with that club and if it’s a big one you could be quite satisfied with the gate receipts.

And a few tips from our friend Mariano:

— When I offer players for free I put a 50% clause for a future transfer

— When buying players I always offer to pay the fee in 48 months, this way i can buy way beyond my budget.

And another interesting tip from our friend Jolicobbler:

One thing I like to do as a LLM is offer trials to foreign players who have hidden stats and also those that are transfer listed. Most clubs are happy to see the back of their no-hopers even if it is for a week. And you get to run the rule over them. I sometimes have about ten players on trial in pre-season and the odd few during the season too. I like to think it keeps my own players on their toes!

3. Scouting and Transfers

After releasing a whole bunch of useless players you will need to bring in better ones. That’s a pretty difficult task, here’s how I do it. First of all, you will need scouts. My advice is to hire as many as you can but not anybody. The scouts should have high attributes for judging player ability and judging player potential, those two factors are essential. As a bonus you could try to look for scouts with good knowledge of nations and territories outside the area your club is located in. That will expand the club’s knowledge and you will get to see more players in your searches.

After hiring the scouts you have to give them assignments. A poor club will not allow you to send scouts all over the world, you will probably have the possibility to send them withing the home nation and maybe the neighboring countries. The thing that I always do when managing a lower league club in England is assigning scouts to the English Under 18s and English Reserves competitions, that’s where I get most of my players from.

Then the scouts will hopefully come back with reports about several players. The obvious place to look is at the current ability and potential ability but I always try to check also the personality box along with strengths and weaknesses.

The tricky part comes when you find a player outside your scouting area, you won’t get any reports on him. You have two options in that case: either evaluate the player yourself and decide if he’s good enough or, if he is available for free, you can use «the assistant manager trick». It’s pretty simple, offer that player a contract and you will see that in the contract offer screen your assistant will give you his opinion about that particular player. This approach is pretty good but your assistant should have decent attributes for judging player ability and judging player potential.

The next thing you can do is search for the players yourself. The best way to do that is by using filters, otherwise it could take you weeks to find the right players. There are a few essential attributes for each player role and those can be found in the manual. If you haven’t read the manual by now, return to step 1! :) Obviously you won’t find world class players willing to come to League Two, so you should also tick the «Ask assistant to filter out unrealistic targets» box. The screen shot below is just an example of a filter that I used when searching for a goalkeeper. Handling and reflexes are key attributes for a good goalkeeper but I also need a goalie that can act as a sweeper keeper because of my high up the pitch defensive line, so rushing out is another attribute that I had to consider.

There’s another small trick that you can do if your transfer budget is close to zero. There are several players that have a transfer value of zero or around that figure (up to 5,000 pounds) and you can try to get them for no money at all. First try to make a transfer offer with a zero fee and if that doesn’t work and you really want the player try adding an additional 50% of the next transfer. That worked for me on a few occasions, about one out of 20 offers.

Another place where you can dig for talented players is the Under 21 and Under 19 national teams. It’s a pretty long and tedious process but the reward might be very good, you could find some real gems for virtually no money at all. That works pretty well if you’re at least in League Two and the places to look are the good footballing nations in Europe like Holland or the Eastern European countries and also South America.

Remember, the players that you bring in should be capable of doing well in your tactical system. So don’t look only at the stars in the scout report! For instance I never sign a defender with less than 10 pace even if my scout gives him 5 stars, he might be useless to me since I use a high defensive line that plays the offside trap. You should also consider the mental attributes, determination is very important but I also want players with high work rate and team work attributes. Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

4. Coaches and Training

Training is a very important part of building a successful club. The first factor that you have to take care is the coaching staff and since you won’t be allowed to have to many coaches at a lower league club you have to make sure you pick good ones. There are three attributes that are essential for a good coach: determination, level of discipline and motivating. When I search for a new coach I always filter by those attributes, you will see why a bit later.

A good training schedule is also important and since I don’t really know how to create one I always use ready made schedules by people that I trust like Tug or Darkstarr. You can find those training schedules here or in the downloads page.

Then you have to assign your coaches and as you can see there are stars that indicate a coach’s ability to perform a specific type of training. The final goal would be to have at most stars as possible for each type of training and you will need the right coaches for that. There is a list of abilities for each type of training, it was made for FM 2009 but things are unchanged in FM 2010. Have a look at it here.

Backroom advice is probably one of the best new features in Football Manager 2010, so don’t overlook it. Your coaches will recommend specific extra training for your players, I like that a lot and I almost always follow their advice on that.

By now you have transferred good players, trained them well, now it’s time to put them together as a team. Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

5. Tactics

There are two main approaches when it comes to choosing tactics when taking control of a club: making a tactic to suit the players that you have or buying the right players to suit your tactic. If you ask me I always choose the second option but I can’t say that it’s the best way. It just makes more sense to me if I want to build something on the long run. That’s the overall look but I always keep the opponent in mind when tweaking the tactical approach for a specific game. I always assign one of my scouts (usually the one with the best tactical knowledge) to scout the next opposition. It’s a good way of finding out important things about your opponent and an essential tool for the next step…

… opposition instructions! I won’t go into too much detail about those but if you are in doubt about which instructions to choose you can always click on «ask assistant» and the assistant manager will take care of that. If you want to get more detailed knowledge about this aspect I warmly recommend reading FM Britain’s Tactical Theorems, I can say that this book is as important as the game manual. It can be downloaded for free from here.

Reading that book can help you a lot if you want to transpose a real life tactic that you like into Football Manager. I did that myself although it’s not a particular tactical approach, it’s more of a combination between Guus Hiddink‘s aggressive approach and the Spanish creative possession football. You can download my tactic from here and give it a try if you want, it has his good and bad sides but it has served me well until now. I am just going to give you a couple of examples to see what I was looking for when I created this tactic. First, when we don’t have the ball the players are instructed to press and get the ball back as soon as possible. In the screen shot below my lads are the ones wearing white shirts and as you can see most of them are trying to close down their opponents. The result? We got the ball back!

Then when we have the ball in attack I gave the players some freedom to move and think and that often surprises the opposition defense. As you can see from the screen shot below my central midfielder had quite a few options to pass the ball but he noticed the left winger’s good move off the ball and played the ball to him through the defense. The result? No, we didn’t score but we created a pretty good chance. Again, there is no tactic that works for all teams and my advice is to watch a few games in «full match» mode just to see how the tactic works. That can be mostly used during the pre-season friendlies, the results don’t really matter and there is still time to make the necessary adjustments before the beginning of the season.

When it comes to watching the matches you can’t be just a spectator, you have to be constantly alert. I choose to always have the opposition formation on screen during a match so that I can react quickly if they make any tactical changes.

The most common change is switching the strategy to counter if the opponent changes his formation to a very attacking one but there are more things that you can use from the touchline instructions.

The so-called shouts can make the difference in some games but honestly I don’t use them very often. My advice is to read FM Britain’s Tactical Theorems to know all there is to know about the shouts.

Set pieces are a very important part of modern football and my advice is to take special care of those situations. The first thing that you should do is picking the right corner kick and free kick takers, that is the first thing that I do before the first match of any season. When it comes to corner kicks there are quite a few «magic» recipes to score goals. The one that I use allows my centre backs to score quite a few goals every season provided we have a good set piece taker to bend the cross into the box. Here’s how my players are set up for the attacking corners:

RB — back

LB -back

CB1 -challenge goalkeeper

CB2 — attack far post

RM — attack near post

LM -attack ball from deep

CM1 — back if needed

CM2 -lurk outside area

ST1 -near post flick on

ST2 — attack ball from deep

Then I set the corner kick to be sent at the far post and if the set piece taker does well the centre back that attacks the far post can find himself with a good chance of scoring. The good thing is that if the corner is not well taken then there is a chance for the other centre back to score or even for one of the strikers to flick the ball on from the near post.

After the match you can take some time to have a look at the match analysis, that could provide some important information. For instance, if your central midfielder loses most tackles then you have a problem that you should deal with. Sometimes we have subjective impressions after watching a match and the cold numbers can give us a better idea of what worked and what didn’t. Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

Go to the next page to read the rest of the story.

6. Motivating

When it comes to motivating the team I admit that my approach is not a very «hands on» one. I never attend press conferences, my assistant takes care of those. I also set him to be responsible of the team talks but sometimes I change his team talks when I think they won’t be effective for a particular game. If you want to adopt the same approach then you should have an assistant manager with good motivating, determination, level of discipline and man handling attributes.

If you want to get in depth about how to properly motivate your team my suggestion is to check out FM Britain’s newest e-book, Communication and Psychological Warfare, click here to view more details. This book is not free but it surely is worth the 8 pounds that you have to pay for it.

7. Don’t give up!

If, despite your best efforts, the team keeps on losing games… Don’t give up! You can always come here for advice and moral support, Football Manager is the best game in the whole world even when things get frustrating. :)

Thank you for reading this extremely long post, I hope you will find some useful pieces of advice in it. I am also looking forward to reading your suggestions as I want to keep this post updated and add any other useful tips from you or, of course, from me. I hope I didn’t forget anything but as I said, if anything else crosses my mind I will add new things to this article.