Complacency Issues

I'm having some serious complacency issues at the moment. I'm playing as Liverpool and have a world class team in all positions with quality youth players breaking into my first team every year. My team seems to be constantly complacement against mediocre opposition and recently even against Barcelona in the Champions League final which I went on to lose 4-0

I'm always on the look out for complacent players with the help of my assistant manager and often use the 'Expect a peformance' for specific players and the overall team talk 'I expect a win' if alot of the team are complacent but this seems to be a double edged sword as my team either get the much needed kick up the a*se and go onto win convincenly or more oftenly just turn into nervous wrecks and wither on the pitch. I sometimes try to ignore the complacency and just use my normal team talk 'for the fans' or another team talk and the team will play well, miss chances, conceced equalizer etc. I've even tried using the I expect a win team talk for around 10 games or more in a row and still the complacency exists. It's not a problem with my tactics as I create alot of chances and with the same tactic have blitzed all opposition in the past and won numerous trophies and have also been to 3 CL finals in a row. Any help or advice would be much appreaciated

Have you tried "Wish Luck" or no pre-match team talk at all?

If your players have Superb or Very Good morale, trying to give them team talk bonuses on top of that may not be worth the risk of nervousness/complacency.

I was having the same problems.

My solution:

Get an ass.man with high motivation (and good other stats ofc) and have him take over press conferences.

It's the press that have great influence on complacency and i really cant be bothered with that part of the game since it's too repetitive.

Pre-Match Team-Talks i ask the ass-man as well. If i see him saying specific lines to certain players, i keep that. Otherwise/the rest i reset everything to none. Half/Fulltime talks the obvious depending on performance.

Hope that helps, did it for me

First of all, get the morale up high. Do this by having a pop at everyone for not working hard enough in training. It works 99.9% of the time. Only doesn't work on people like Balotelli. But it's very rare. Obviously praise a few people that get above 8.0 at the end of the game too. If you do this, everyone with have good morale and have you in their favoured personnel.

As the other guy says, a good Assistant Manager is imperitaive really. It's too hard to guess what sort of reaction your comments have. I have Mauro Tassotti, and he is brilliant. We are never looking complacent and no one ever gets angry with what he says.

As for the team talks, I only ever say "Pick up where you left off", "For the fans", or "I have faith"