Strikerless
Latest Posts
Some Reactive Strategies; Shout Clusters
One of the key ingredients to success is being able to adapt to changing circumstances. Every manager does it in real life, you have to do it in your game. The addition of the Tactics Creator made changing things around far more intuitive. More often than not, I would have a friend ask me on Facebook […]
The Running Regista Applied To A Strikerless Formation; Turning A Back Three Into A Back Four (Occasionally)
From a tactical viewpoint, the successful implementation of a Running Regista hinges on building a balanced team, a cohesive unit. As I quickly discovered when I started my experiments, you cannot have your defensive midfielder running all over the place without being exposed in defence a few times by opposing attacking midfielders. In order to […]
The Running Regista Or Withdrawn Central Winger
My friend Jonathon Aspey (@JLAspey) has written about the Central Winger before, whereas I have written about the intricacies regarding the implementation of the role in a Strikerless formation. The next idea is pushing the idea a bit further and withdrawing the Central Winger from his central midfield position, de facto creating a sort of hybrid […]
The Narrow 4-1-2-2-1 – Expanding Upon Defensive Football in FM14
Those of you that follow me on Twitter (@JLAspey) or have read any of my recent articles will know that I’ve started to become very interested in defensive football in Football Manager. I wrote an article a few months back, trying to create a side that was uber defensive, and designed to be impossible to […]
.PKM Files; What Are They And Why Would I Even Use Them?
A rather common reaction when I try to send people a .pkm file so they can view a match. To help prevent future misunderstandings, a short guide on .pkm files, what do they do and how can you use them? To tell you more about these files and their function, I’ll simply answer the various […]
An In-Depth Analysis Of The Unsung Hero; The Half-Back
One of the unsung heroes of my by now (in)famous strikerless formation is the Half-Back. He doesn’t excel offensively, he’s not the one making the Hollywood-passes, nor is the one to score a heap of goals or rack up assists like it’s nothing. He isn’t a proficient force defensively, normally he’s not the one with […]
Value For Money; Where To Scout?
Value for money; a brief introduction In order to navigate and exploit the transfer market, you need to know the products available to said market. This is where your scouting network comes in, constantly scouring various leagues and nations for talent that you can bring into your side. An ideal scenario would consist of talent that you can bring […]
Downloads; Chrissy’s Remix
Let me start off by saying this is NOT my own tactical work, but work by Chriss Ross, who uses the forum-handle Chrissy and whom you can follow on Twitter @Chrissy_Ross_. Chrissy has gratiously revamped my tactic and turned it into a more defensively stable formation, which looks like this. Change-list; – Box-to-box midfielders’s for […]
A Brief Interlude
Dear loyal readers, by now you will have noticed I have not updated in a while. Whilst I am by no means obliged to explain myself, I feel compelled to do so regardless. In my experience, a well-chosen picture is worth a thousand words. You’re about to receive a thousand words in a single picture. […]
The Big Dick; Another Strikerless Abomination
What’s in a name? The Immortal Bard asked us this. Since I’m not a pretentious poet, I have opted for a name which aptly describes the visual shape of the formation. It looks like a big dick. The raison d’être for this abomination of a formation is twofold and not at all related to the […]
Work In Progress
I know I haven’t updated in a while, but that does not mean I am not working on stuff. Just to share some of my drafts with you…
Making Even More Money In Pre-Season
In an earlier article I described how you could turn your pre-season friendlies into a way to make some serious money. As I mentioned in the closing paragraph of that article, I was experimenting with earning some serious money. Over the past few seasons in FM14, I have experimented with two tours in various countries, […]
‘The Great Wall of Italia’ – Parking the Bus in Football Manager
The legendary Italian sports journalist Gianni Brera once stated that the perfect game of football would end 0-0. That is perhaps a strange thing to say, but if you look at it from a certain (defensivist) point of view, then you can begin to understand it. In theory, both teams have attacked very well, but […]
Tactical Fouling; A Side-Effect To Counter-Pressing
One of the downsides of the strikerless style is the amount of space you give away. Because I want the team to play compact, I want them to push forward. Naturally, this means you tend to concede the odd goal when a cross or direct pass finds space behind the defensive line for a forward […]
An In-Depth Analysis Of The Enganche In A Strikerless Formation
A twitter conversation a few days back re-sparked my interest in the enganche role within a strikerless formation. The actual conversation focussed on player roles we wanted in FM15. I opted for the Withdrawn Targetman, which is basically the role I want my Targetganche to fill right now. Basically, we wanted a cross-pollination of the […]
Strikerless Sexy Football
I generally don’t offer download-links for my tactics, mostly because I feel they have little or no added value when you don’t understand the reasoning behind the ideas and choices the creator has made. This also means that you will not only get a download-link, but a bit of a background story as well. I […]
Why My Strikerless Tactics Work; Overloading
With a distinct lack of strikers in any strikerless formation, by default you are going to rely on the movement of your midfield players to score goals. Earlier, I mentioned the importance of Verticality in this regard. Today, I want to focus on the importance of overloading the opposition in certain areas. Please keep in […]
How To Prepare For A World Cup In FM
International management in FM is one of those subjects not many people write about. To be fair, I have always considered it a welcome distraction to get through the summer months in FM, when I was unable to organise friendlies and I had completed my transfer market antics. At best, it was a good way […]
The Perfect Game
I am not a perfectionist, but I like to feel that things are done well. More important than that, I feel an endless need to learn, to improve, to evolve, mostly to feel satisfied with myself. It is my conviction that here are no limits to learning, and that it can never stop, no matter what […]
Downloads and such
Okay, this is mostly to update the previous download-topic. I’ve come a long way since the last time I uploaded a few tactics and I felt the need to share them with you. The last downloads are almost exclusively wide formations, I have since moved on to a formation with 3 AMC’s. These are the […]
Tactical Review; Arsenal Kyiv 3-4-1-2-0
I haven’t done these reviews in a while, so I may a bit rusty, but per special request, I have dug out my scalpel to dissect a tactic, see what makes it tick, see what works and see what needs improving. I’m not sure if this is going to be a regular feature for my […]
Total Defending; Why A Very Fluid Style Actually Benefits LLM Sides
When people talk about Total Football, they are usually referring to the attacking phase of play. The positional switching and movement off the ball it delivers has always captivated managers around the world and it’s always been an ideal people are trying to replicate in FM. The whole concept is based on fluidity of positions, rotations and […]
Employing A More Direct Style – Verticality
When it talks like a hipster and does things a hipster does, it must be a hipster. Lord, I know can sound like a hipster cunt at times so just brace yourselves for some more name-dropping and throwing around fashionable phrases like it’s nothing. This article will focuss on verticality or as non-hipsters would call […]
How To Turn Your Pre-Season Into A Money-making Scheme
Pre-season is good for a great many things. It can help you raise tactical familiarity, you get the chance to assess your squad and new signings, raise the overall fitness level of your players, boost morale in time for the new league campaign and there’s the opportunity to make some serious cash during pre-season. Whilst […]
Why Wing-Backs Are Hardly Ideal To Start The Build-Up Play
Part of the aggressive style of pressing I love to use, is the way I make the forward line take to the field. Positioning properly is half the battle after all. What I want to achieve is that the opposition either hoofs the ball forward or plays it out to the wings, to make the […]
Layering Attacks; Implementing The Central Winger Role Into My Strikerless Formation
My comrade Jonathon Aspey has been raving about the central winger role lately. In a nutshell, the central winger is a “new” type of midfielder. Much like the False 9, his distinguishable features lie in the fact that, unlike a traditional playmaker who stays behind the striker in the centre of the pitch, his goal is to drift out […]
Utilising the Central Winger
Those of you that follow me on Twitter (@JLAspey) will know how much I’ve banged on about the ‘Central Winger’ these past couple of months. It’s something I originally said whilst watching Angel Di Maria’s early performances in central midfield for Real Madrid, saying that he was playing almost like a central winger. It’s also […]
The Importance Of Cohesion And Familiarity; Or Why Strikerless Can Work For LLM Teams
A frequently returning discussion with some of my gaming friends features the question how exactly I achieve my success. Some argued, and quite rightfully so in a way, that any formation would work with the world class players I have amassed at Fortuna. Whilst I agree with this sentiment, I also felt that they were […]
The Quest for 129: Creating the Gegenpress in FM
Originally posted on The Coffeehouse: FM Discussion: It’s been a while. I’m still with Wolves. It’s 2036. I guess a good place to start would be to give you the end results on the guys who ‘made it’, from my youth development series. If you haven’t been following it then I recommend you skip the next…
The Inner Workings; Achieving Counter-Pressing In The FM14 ME
In response to my previous article on aggressive pressing being a prerequisite to a strikerless formation, people were wondering how I actually achieved such pressing in the current ME of FM14. I promised an answer and I will try to deliver on that promise by explaining what I did, why I did it, showing the […]
Aggressive Pressing; An Absolute Prerequisite
The next bit is going to make me sound like an absolute cunt of a football hipster, but I do feel it’s necessary to create a sort of framework and explain some of the definitions I intend to use. What I want to discuss is the concept of “counter-pressing,” because it’s an absolute prerequisite of […]
Advanced Sign-To-Sell; Polish That Gem
In an earlier post, I mentioned the patented sign-to-sell idea, which roughly means you sign players you have no intention of ever fielding purely for the intention of selling them for profit. Simply identifying and signing said players really isn’t enough though. Just having them sit in your reserves is not going to make it […]
Weaponised Set Pieces
Set piece plays are an essential aspect of the game. If you are unable to break down a particularly sturdy defence, a set piece may be all you need to pry open the defence. Hell, you can win games by making sure your offensive set pieces are good. Just look at Rehhagel’s Greece, in the […]
They Fixed The Exploit; Well Done!
In a previous post, I described an exploit that allowed you to spawn top newgens. With the release of the new patch, I wanted to see if the exploit was still in place or if they had actually bothered to fix it. The method still works, the players that are produced are just crap nowadays. […]
The Withdrawn Targetman Saga; The Rise Of The Targetganche™
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was in dire need of a Plan B for my strikerless formations. The idea I had was to mix up Stoke City under Pulis, an aggressive, direct style of play, with the fluid motions of the strikerless style I normally play. With opposing teams ceding their wings to […]
The Withdrawn Targetman Saga; Before Success Comes Some Sort Of Failure Apparently
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was in dire need of a Plan B for my strikerless formations. The idea I had was to mix up Stoke City under Pulis, an aggressive, direct style of play, with the fluid motions of the strikerless style I normally play. With opposing teams ceding their wings […]
Creating A Plan B; The Withdrawn Targetman Saga
Having the strikerless style pretty much tailored to suit the strengths of my team, I have dominated the Dutch league and Europe over the past decade or so. More and more teams are changing their style to try and combat my strikerless formation. On the one hand, that’s a huge compliment to my effective style […]
Moneyball meets FM
I’ll be honest, the title is misleading, because whilst over the course of the last few versions of FM, I’ve been trying to implement the principles of Moneyball into FM, I actually failed to do it properly. True, it makes sense in a way, sabermetrics could work really well in FM, which is mostly about […]
Per Request; Download-links & Style Pictures
I don’t intend to make a habit out of this, but people have been asking me for downloads of my tactics or at the very least a screenshot of the style and settings I use. I’ll oblige, but I’d rather have a discussion on how to achieve a good strikerless style, rather than people just […]
Just some match clips; because I love the way we can play at times
Because sometimes, a picture (or movie) is worth a thousand words. This is what we want to achieve. The clips just display what I want to see. Aggressive pressing, excellent runs off the ball to create space for others, creating overloads in midfield and on the wings, a cohesive team which operates as a block […]
Going through the strikerless motions; stretching a defence
The concept of an absolute formation does not exist. It’s a myth, crammed into our heads by analysts and newspapers, oversimplifying things. There’s no such thing as playing 4-4-2, no 4-4-2 is the same in the way they actually take to the field and move around on the pitch. Every team has at least an […]
Strikers Are Overrated; Why Use Them At All?
It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s true nonetheless. Strikers are overvalued. Just look at the top 20 of most expensive transfer fees. It’s pretty much self-explanatory. Whilst Bale is not an out-and-0ut forward, Ronaldo has developed into one the last few years. Four players in the top 10 are not actual forwards, whereas […]
What the hell is wrong with half-backs?
The term “half-back” fell out of use by the early 1970s and “midfield” was used in naming the positions that play around the middle third as in centre midfield and wide midfield. The centre midfield position has evolved further with the attacking midfield and defensive midfield variants being recognised in their own right. How-ever, the […]
A nice new exploit; getting sure-fire top star newgens spawned
I have to admit I am always open to new ways to exploit the game. Not because I like to cheat, but because I like to stretch the limits of the game and see what happens if I come up with something SI haven’t. It’s a challenge, nothing more and nothing less. To this extent, […]
Newgen faces
Plain and simple, they are boring as hell. They all look the same, region-wise anyway, like carbon copies of each other. So in an effort to boost the longevity of my game by adding more interesting faces, I decided to try installing a facepack. Man, was that ever a good idea. Come intake-day, I’m in […]
Strikerless; my Magnum Opus
Have any of you perhaps played FM Live? Probably not and the game, despite all of its brilliant potential, is now as dead as Joey Barton’s career prospects for England. During its existence however, I was introduced to the dreaded 4-6-0 tactic, or as it was known in many GameWorlds, “a fucking cheat” or “an […]
Negotiating a good deal
Another important part of wheeling and dealing is the pure and simple negotiating a deal. Several factors come into play here. First of all, you have to know what a player is actually worth. I’m not talking about the value displayed in-game, I’m talking about actual value in terms of the market. Is this is […]
Sign-to-sell
If you have the system in place, you can start to make a profit by using what I call “sign-to-sell”. This basically means that certain players you sign should be players with either high potential or a high reputation, who are undervalued at the moment you sign them. If your team is successful, this rubs […]
Setting up the basics
After taking over a club, one of the first things you need to sort out is the backroom staff. After all, what use is it to sign talented youngsters if their progression halts after they sign for your club. Ideally, you want a good setup for both first team and the youth squad, something a […]