The Trick To Football Manager?

To be honest i am struggling with the game, i cant properly get into it,

this has got me thinking that i am not taking certain aspects of the game seriously.

For example press conferences, team talks and tactics.

I am looking for advise on these and other important topics in Fm so i can fully enjoy the game,

also i understand that some people may tell me to use the correct fourum for tactics and team talks,

but i am looking for general quides hints and tips (no cheats) to help me get back into the game i love.

Thanks people.

To be honest......your on the wrong forum this one is for Football Manager Live

Right, he's been moved to the correct forum, lets give him the proper help.

I send my assistant to the press conferences.

I use Darkstarr's Training, youth and full squad, and Tyler's Forward training for strikers - you can download them from the tactics section.

I use Tyler's V6 Piranha tactic and haven't tweaked anything or changed anything - just make sure you follow all the advice - find it in the tactic's section.

The only thing where I seem to have to do a bit of work is getting the right coaches in - search for stuff about 9.3 coaches and you'll find the formula to check stats to get the best coaches.

So far I'm on my longest ever FM career save - have been at a few clubs and have won loads of trophies, including the league and champion's league titles in England, Italy and Spain. I've now just begun season 2028/29.

I am described as a legendary manager in the game (I've just moved to the German 2nd division for a new challenge) and am loving every minute of it!

My first thought is, if you're not talking Press Conferences and Team Talks seriously, you're going to get very very inconsistent performances from your squad, which I wold find discouraging enough to quit in frustration.

I do think SI have done a good job of making an interesting little psychology game out of that realm - an answer (or a team-talk) that works for one personality type may not work at all for another. For example, going into a match against a bottom-feeder team, one that you expect to win, some personalities are going to respond to a pre-match press conference "I expect a win" and a team-talk of "I expect a win" by trying to impress you with their hard work ... while other personalities may look at that and think "Well, we ought to be able to win without much effort" - those latter will come out looking very complacent, especially so if the previous match was a relatively easy win as well.

My advice to start grokking that aspect of the game is:

Start paying attention to the "Personality" description of your players.

Start mapping out which personality types respond well to what kind of motivation.

Start bringing in personality types which respond well to the motivation you like to give.

Check out the "TV View" of a match, "Match Day Info", "<my-team> Motivation". It'll stay blank for the first 6-8 minutes of a match, but assuming that there isn't an early goal, when it does fill in you'll be seeing the direct result of your team-talk. Who is motivated? Who is overconfident? Who is fired up? Who looks nervous? Those are the players for whom your team-talk either worked particularly well, or worked particularly poorly.

Don't think of "Team Talks" as a stand-alone item: they very much stand in the context of the last couple of games. In my opinion, a team needs a different pre-match team-talk after a pair of easy 4-0 wins than it does after a pair of 0-1 defeats .. even against the same opponent and same pre-match odds.

There's a very rich, interesting sub-game in that area .. and I think a lot of people aren't really seeing that.

. . .

For tactics, I'd say just read wwfan's "Tactical Theorems and Frameworks" over in the Tactics forum - it got me thinking about tactics in a whole different light when I first read it ('05?). Its long enough that, if you do it with FM shut down, and don't play right away, and don't download the saved tactics, you'll forget chunks of it and you won't have "specifics" that might spoil your game, but you will have acquired a different way of thinking about tactics, tactical adjustments during a match, and building a tactic that I think will help you out as well.