Finners

Who are we talking about here, Rashford? If so yeah but I mean, to be perfectly blunt, you really either want him involved in the build up or finishing. It's not impossible to build a system where he does both but it isn't really likely. Not in the sense that he does much more than maybe lay the ball off to someone before legging it in to the box. When you think about the kind of goals Rashford scores for United, what springs to mind the most? For me it's him running in to open space getting on to a ball in behind. Sancho has superb vision and passing and good crossing, Fernandes even more so, both are right footed. You want them teaming up down the right hand side, ideally overlapping off one-another to be able to put crosses and cross-field passes over to Rashford. This is a tactic I use a lot, it's largely borrowed from something I found Cleon posted a couple of years ago when I was trying to make my Mezzala the MVP of my side. Now this is a tiny bit different to what you're asking for because in the above, the Poacher is the main target not the left winger but the core fundamentals of the build up are similar. Goals come ultimately from one of two places. Either the Mezzala, RW and FB(A) all combine taking it in turns to overlap and overload with one another down the right before crossing / through-balling, lofted passing the striker in on goal OR they switch the play to LW who is nearly always in miles of space and he crosses for the striker to score. In either instance, MOST of the build is done either in the middle of the park or out on the right. LW got 12 goals and 16 assists last season, the Mezzala 11 and 18, the RW 15 and 16. Striker got 53 & 7. It's important that both the Mezzala and Winger are right footed. Where you want to tweak this is in having a striker that's going to drop in towards the midfield when the team comes forward that leaves space for the IF(A) on the left to cut in behind him and be the target for either the Mez (A) to thread a through ball or the winger to hit him with a cross. In my experience, DLF's tend to like to sit a bit deeper, receive the ball but then look to get back in the box themselves and score. What you probably want is more of a False 9 which would probably do wonders for your Mezzala (Bruno?) as well who will thrive in getting forward in to the space he leaves. I'd imagine with those tweaks a good AML would fairly easily be your primary goal scorer. What I would say though is that in current iterations of the Match Engine, you're always going to struggle to make a wide player outscore a top central one. Getting a proper Salah / Mane style threat going in FM is not impossible but it is very challenging.

In my experience, the best way to get a wide player scoring goals is to build up as much as possible on the opposite side of the pitch. You want to overload the right so that you drag the opposition that way and then when the ball is crossed or switched he's in space. You kinda have the opposite. You've got your play maker on the left, you've got a wing back on the left, you've got an inverted right back on the right cutting towards the left, an inverted winger on the right cutting towards the left. Your whole team is drifting towards the left side of the park so everyone's going to be bunching up around Rashford and closing the space. You want to flip it and stretch the game the other way. I'd have maybe Fernandes as a mezzala on an attack duty on the right side coupled with a right footer like Sancho as a winger over there on a support duty, back it up with Dalot maybe also as a full back on an attack duty over there. Really make your right hand side quite aggressive and attacking. On the left I'd probably just have a vanilla CM and full back both on support duties. I'd definitely move someone out of the AMC position and really encourage your central striker to properly drop in. Be careful of the DLF. Remember that despite it's name, it has Moves In To Channels as part of it's hard coded instructions and that it'll often be looking to move in to the same spaces as Rashford, just from deeper. If you swap it out for a False 9 that'll typically look to do the opposite, it'll start higher up and move deeper away from the centre backs hopefully bringing them with. All of this is about trying to get Rashford in to as much space as possible on his own out on that side. A good guide for you, although it's a few years old now, might be the Hammer & Anvil guide that I think is floating around that might actually, if memory serves, have been about Rashford. https://dictatethegame.com/young-devils-creating-overloads-2-0/ I always found the Enganche to be a waste of time in that system and always ended up making my own adjustments but the fundamentals it talks about in terms of creating overloads one side to switch to the other look like they'd be important to you. TLDR: Instead of focusing on the left to feed the left - focus on the RIGHT to feed the left.

Firstly, I'm aware questions get asked frequently about consistency. I've had a good google and it's a common topic of conversation. But most posts I can find are about how to improve it, does it improve, by how much, is it important, etc. Do we have anywhere an actual firm explanation of how it actually works? I'm talking mechanically. I see a LOT of anecdotal posts, lots of screenshots of players with low consistency who have performed well or poorly, lots of "oh my player gets 6.2, 6.2, 6.3, 9.0, 7.5, 6.2" and other such stuff, lots of confirmation bias and so on. I'd like to know what it's actually doing? Is it effectively rolling a dice before every game and adjusting technical and mental stats down accordingly on bad days? Do they ever get adjusted up? Can it be off-set by good man-management (again, asking technically not anecdotally.) Or is the answer to all of this just "we don't really know, let the mystery be"?

As a follow up to this, can we not also agree that if you make a small tactical adjustment in-game in reaction to a situation (moving a player to a more defensive role for five minutes to close out a match for example) that it really isn't worthy of being asked repeatedly in the press conference afterwards if I think I was "throwing mud at a wall to see what would stick" by giving him a new role. Honestly, the obsession with this line of questioning is so over-done and is really tanking whatever immersion was in press conferences anyway. I appreciate it's got to be really difficult to make that part of the game interesting when you've got players racking up hundreds of hours of Football Manager ever year and the press conferences are before and after almost every match they play but this feels so horrendously forced.

Please, please, please can you "adjust" the frequency of the "OH MY GOSH, A NEW POSITION!?!" line of questioning during press conferences. It feels like you've fallen in to that classic game designer trap of "we've thought of a new idea, lets use it a lot!" It's nice to have some new questions to freshen up press conferences but I feel like it's being used out of context in a way that's forced. If I put a player in a new and unusual position, particularly one he's not familiar with at all, then I understand. But it seems to spam me with the question after every single match just because I'm playing a player in any position other than their natural one. In my current save I'm getting asked after almost every match at the moment about my Trequartista and Mezzala (both Accomplished at CAM and CM respectively) and we're 18 games in to the season and they've played 17 and 16 games solidly in those roles in exactly the same formation. I feel like the sentiment you were going for isn't exactly what's being communicated.

You've got some good advice here already but just to chime in with one obvious observation: I see a LOT of people with "work ball in to box" ticked who I'm never really sure if they actually appreciate what it does and if they want it. Work Ball Into Box is an instruction that essentially tells your players to wait for the right moment to play an optimal pass in to the box and to be patient if necessary. I personally think that a lot of Football Manager players tick it because they expect it to mean "take less long shots and only shoot when you're in the box" but that's not really all it does. It's going to promote the kind of play reminiscent of a classic Guardiola side where your wingers and attacking midfielders are probing around a set defence looking to break it down. You have three other team instructions selected which, to my mind, partially or fully contradict WBIB: 1. High Tempo. Generally speaking, High Tempo doesn't just mean your players acting and moving with more energy, it means they'll make faster decisions that typically lead to more direct movement towards goal. 2. Pass Into Space. Whilst a very popular and often very successful team instruction, it can quite radically change build up play and typically favours counter attacking. It's literally playing longer balls out in front of fast players for them to run on to. Even if you play with "shorter passing" and don't have counter attacking selected, if you have Higher Tempo and Pass In To Space on you'll probably still find your centre mids and centre backs playing long balls in to the channels for your forwards to chase. 3. Run At Defence. I'd say this one is less directly contradictory to WBIB. Think Riyad Mahrez it Raheem Sterling running at full backs in the box perhaps for Man City. But I'd still say its an instruction that favours quite direct, assertive action as opposed to patience and I'm not sure it marries up well. All in all, as with a lot of people, it feels like your tactic is mostly about attacking with speed and using fast running and fast dribbling players to give the opposition a nightmare. But then you sort of contradict that with WBIB and having all these playmakers in the middle of the pitch. Try swapping out the playmaker roles for more generic ones, maybe a CMs next to a Mez A instead and taking WBIB off for a while. I also think you could probably tone down some of your defensive instructions. I don't think the offside trap or the blocking crossed are that necessary tbh. I'd personally keep it simple, set your line and your pressing intensity and that's about it. Edit: one final note, there's no shame in finishing second and your tactic alone might not be the issue. Remember there's other facets to the game, squad management, squad building, managing pressure, morale, expectation, etc could all be issues. The Premier League is the toughest league in FM to win this year. Liverpool, Man City and Man Utd will all probably run up massive points totals and not lose many games. So you age going to need to be consistent and your tactic alone won't carry you if you're bad at managing a squad.

For a start, isn't a Mez (A) and a SS going to fill kinda a similar role in your system? I would expect both of them to want to make runs beyond your TF and even your PF when the latter is in the left channel making space in the middle. I really like both SS and Mez A and I've built tactics around both but I don't think I'd use both together and I'm not sure you NEED both together. So personally I'd probably just drop the SS in favour of a DM and then change up your left CM to something on a support duty. While we're at it, can I ask about your use of "work ball in to box?" You seem to have quite a fast, direct tactic here. The use of a target man, the fast distribution, the attacking mentality, it looks like you want to hit people pretty quickly and directly. I'd have thought you'd get more joy then if you take work ball in to box off. It's pretty much an instruction that helps facilitate more patient play. Think the Spanish national team probing around the box before a nice through ball gets put in. Not only does that instruction seem contradictory to your style, it seems contradictory to your roles as well. You don't really have the personnel in the final third to be probing the box, you just have a bunch of guys that want to get in it and then deeper lying players that want to punt the ball at it. It feels like you want to hybridise two very different approaches that aren't going to blend very well. I think if you took that instruction off but lowered your mentality to positive you might find the approach play you're possibly looking for a bit more organically.

I think you've just answered your own question to be honest. I mean, that's real life, right? Teams that play out from the back occasionally get caught in possession in uncompromising areas. I'm a Leicester season ticket holder and I've lost count of the amount of times I've torn my hair out watching the ball get fired in to Wilfred Ndidi's feet and seeing him get caught in possession because he's crap on the ball. Obviously the lower down the league structure you are and the less technically gifted your players are, you're going to run in to this occasionally. But, yes, the Half Back does largely what you're asking for. I've used it a lot this version (I know people have moaned about it in the ME in previous years but it seems fine now?) and gotten some good success with it.

Holy wow that midfield. Forget your wingers for a minute, how are you not getting murdered every game on the break? Haha. As Johnny says, that's an extremely aggressive midfield to be covering those two poor centre backs and with such a high line. You can get away with two wing backs on attack duties, I do it myself, but you'd really benefit from an Anchor or a Half Back shielding to help out when they get forward. As for the original question, I play a similar-ish shape to you (albeit with different build-up) and my wide players do what you're claiming yours don't to be honest. AML has 13 goals and 4 assists in 18(4). - (For context, ST has 22 and 4 in 15(7) and AMR has 8 and 6 in 17(4)) Assists come from, in order, RB, LB, AMR, Mez. AML, who I guess you're most interested in, scores mostly two types of goals, either dibbling in off the left to score with his right (he has the Cuts In Off Left Wing ppm) or cutting in off the ball in to space to finish crosses from the right. Space is a big part of it. The Mezzala, CWB and AMR dominate a lot of my build up down the right which pulls in defenders and creates an overload, they've all got More Direct Passing enabled as individual instructions and all of them like a big switch to the AML who finds himself with a lot of space both to start in and also to run in to. The PF often helps this because he'll frequently be running in to the right hand channel between the opposition LB and LCB to further free up space for the AML. Obviously I'm focusing on the AML a lot but the AMR carries the ball a lot as well. Now granted, it's Gabigol and he has dribble often and cuts in from both wings but yeah he dribbles inside a lot and then plays a lot of through balls between the lines for the ST.

"Forget your damn science, I know what I can see! The Earth is FLAT I tell you!"

They weren't cut open slowly, though, they were cut open extremely quickly. It's a bit harsh to characterise Spain as death by a thousand passes in the traditional Del Bosque sense. It wasn't passing for the sakes of it, it was passing with purpose. Some exceptional, vertical play. I'd be really interested to see anyone successfully recreate how they played in Football Manager and I don't mean drawing up tactics on paper - I mean seeing actual in game footage of them consistently doing it because as much as I love this game, I'm not entirely convinced it's possible. The off the ball movement was so fast and so good from Spain I genuinely don't think you can actually achieve that to that level with the ME. As bad as Costa Rica were, Spain played some of the best pass-and-move football anyone's played since Pep managed Barca.