Raise the cup and then fall off a cliff

I'm in my 2nd year as Leeds manager. After winning promotion in my first year, I followed up with a very successful return to the Premiership. I was in the top 7 most of the year including wins over Liverpool, Man City, Arsenal (Cup) and Man Utd.

Rode a wave of good form from my backline, Frazier Campbell, and Kasper The Friendly Dane to a 10 game unbeaten run in the Premiership and all the way to raising the Carling Cup. After that win James Tomkins went down for the year and the team went into a complete downspiral. All the sudden my team couldn't find the net if their lives depended on it, we weren't a high scoring team in the first place but it just got ridiculous. I went with a more attacking style and that backfired horribly. I went into a shell and the opposition was still able to steal the three points. We ended the season with a 2-0-9 run with a -17 goal differential after winning the Carling Cup. I've tried sympathizing, encouraging, taking pressure off, getting angry, everything! I can't stop the poor performances and morale dropped like a rock. I officially hit bottom after an embarrassing 0-5 loss to Coventry (whom had already been relegated). Ironically my guys got up to face Arsenal in the season finale and went down valiantly 0-1. Thankfully the rest of the Premier League was pretty awful and despite the hilariously awful end of the year we still finished 8th.

I'm boggled by how this happened so swiftly. I know my team really wasn't that good and relied too heavily on the few high quality talents I had but jeeze...is James Tomkins that important to my squad? I can't imagine that losing him was the singular cause for this horrifying run of form. I hope to be serious title contenders in two years, but it won't happen if my team is liable to falling apart like this. Not to mention not wanting to embarrass ourselves in next year's Europa League. Any suggestions on how to stop this from happening again in the future?

Try the individual team talk 'have faith' for every player.

Thanks for the suggestion. Hopefully I'll never have to try it out.

I had the same problem, and so did somebody else, it seems like your morale went sky high and over-confidence crept in, you should start expecting wins, and being more critical of poor performances, now thought it seems like you should start encouraging, and praising just decent performances to try raise morale

Similar happened to me, got promoted, had an average season then had a great one, finished 6th and won Manager of the Year and Overachieving Team.

Next season, started off bad, got worse.. and worse. Eventually started getting a lot of pressure and just resigned.