When Tactics Stop Working?

In my game with Barca I was walking everything really, won the league easily first season and everything else apart from the champions league, was happy with that, started the second even better but now for some reason my tactic has just stopped working? Why does this happen? Everything is going really well and all of a sudden it just seems to go awful. This is the one thing that puts me off FM, every career I seem to start the same thing happens! Any advice?

You'll probably find that teams are being even more conservative when they play you than they previously were, towards the end of my decade of dominance in Germany I was sending my team out with either a contain or defensive strategy, anything else would see everyone pile forward & the opposition kill us on the break.

It sounds counter-intuitive but even with a contain strategy we would dominate possession, have a 7 to 1 or better attempts at goal ratio & the match would primarily be played in our opponents defensive third of the pitch.

Make you tactic more attacking because if teams are just defending against you, you don't need to defend as much.

Do not listen to our Jedi friend, going for a more attacking approach will only lead to pain & misery.

Make you tactic more attacking because if teams are just defending against you, you don't need to defend as much.

This will just make you more vulnerable on the counterattack which is exactly the reaction that defensive tactics are supposed to provoke.

Learning to counter defensive tactics is very tricky as you need to lure your opponent out of their area and create space for your attackers to move into without compromising your defense. If you've "turned off" long shots as many players do, you will also want to look at having one long shot specialist constantly drifting outside the box on low-to-mid "normal" mentality looking for opportunities.

You can try also stick with control strategy or even offensive but play with shouts drop deeper, play out of defense, play wider and stand off. First of all by droping deeper and playing wider you will creat additional space, standing off will force opposite team to play a bit more risky, play out of defence combinated with take a breath will lead to stupid amount of passing beetwen defensive players, but this may help couse oppositte team may try to retain possesion and will try to play higher. That's what i do and i can't complain about results.

Set pieces!!!

Just be a little more conservative, play on the counter yourself, try to get that first goal, and tweak your tactics slightly, a bit more width, a bit deeper line, a slight change in tempo, and then decide if you want to change the role or even position of one player.

Tweaks will get you a long way if you already have a powerful and successful base tactic. No need to scrap everything, but realize that teams have 'caught on' to your attacking style, and are now weary to attack you, rather sitting back and defending.

Teams play a lot of 4-4-1-1 or 4-1-4-1 against my side, and the trick to shutting down this particular tactical variation is to play a DMC yourself (either at the expense of a RM or ST) to prevent the ball from DMC going straight to the lone striker.