Majick

Hey knap, I've been using your ME23.2BEOWULFKnapC42314IFVBBMP104CC 4231 tactic with great success for several months now - looking in my tactics folder, I downloaded it in April! My team is the multi-time PL and CL champions with a load of cups won as well. However, my team's form has become a bit patchy over the last season or so - I'm scoring fewer goals, and my goalkeeper is letting in a high percentage of shots on target - 8 from 19 shots in our last 5 matches, for example. We came second out in the PL for the first time in years, and this season we're 6th after 14 games with 27 points - albeit only 4 points off top. I think part of it may be player turnover. We've moved on several established/veteran players in the last 18 months, replacing them with younger players, and the veterans we've kept around to mentor the youngsters have performed more poorly than I'd have hoped. However, could you recommend another 4231 that I could try to see if that changes our fortunes, please? Having used your tactic for so long, my squad is entirely built around it - I have one natural DM so a tactic based around 2 CMs would be ideal, but a DM/CM combination could work at a push. Thanks in advance!

Are you sure they're not assigned to handling transfer targets anyway? It might be in a different part of the Responsibilities section. Unfortunately I do all my own purchases and almost all of my sales so I've never come across this before.

At present we can hide players in our squad by certain categories - it would be great if these were expanded. Some obvious ones are inverting current categories, so being able to hide players on short-term deals as well as those on long-term deals (or who only have contracts expiring within a certain range), and hiding those who do need to be registered, as well as those who don't. Some others might be excluding only players who're suspended, or injured, or only red injured, or only inside/outside a certain age range. It would also be great to be able to create filters - to add tags to players and be able to filter by those tags. For example, I'm entering a summer transfer window and have over 20 players I'm looking to sell. It would be great if I could add tags to those players and only have them in view - rather than scrolling back and forth through the 80 players I have across the first team and youth squads.

I'm at the end of the season, and looking ahead to the summer transfer window. I've had some success in previous windows with offering players at a low price and negotiating up, but I've not been able to clear everyone out, and now I have quite an accumulation of talent coming back from loan who aren't part of my plans. Between the loan army, first team players and reserves who have limited potential I have around 25 players I'd be willing to sell. I do get that selling so many in one window is going to be tricky! So, before starting the window, I wanted to check on if I was missing anything obvious - I have a week until the English window opens, and a month until the European window opens. Should I be offering players out now, or wait until the window(s) open? If I offer a player out too many times, will their value drop - I've noticed that in previous windows, but I'm not sure if it's related? If I offer out too many players at once, would that effectively flood the market, or does the game not take that into account?

Quick update: Playing as Middlesbrough, reigning PL/CL champions but a bit of a shaky start to the follow season, including losing 7-1 to City in the league! Swapped to this tactic and after 18 matches we've 17 wins and 1 draw where we outshot the opponent 23-10. Our aggregate score for those 18 matches is 66-10. The first match using it saw us beat City 4-0, which was definitely a convincing argument to stick with it! It definitely seems like a great tactic to use for teams with strong attacks, and my defence seems a bit tighter, having come from a Beowulf 442 with two box-to-box midfielders. Fantastic work, as always!

I came in to see if there was a 4231 for me to experiment with, and here you are with one that fits my squad almost perfectly. Cheers!

I signed a young midfielder a couple of seasons ago. He's not developed as well as I'd hoped, and is now no better than a backup... but PSG wanted to sign him, so come the summer I offered him for sale. They didn't bid for him. He wasn't happy I was touting him out for sale. Now I've had to promise him that he won't be sold - a promise I have to keep until next summer's transfer window close. From past experience, he may change his mind if the right club comes in for him, or he may not. But my issue is that there was no way for me to know if he'd get upset about my trying to sell him to PSG. In hindsight, I could have targeted them specifically with the offer, but it didn't occur to me at the time. What would be nice is if there was an option to broach the subject of transfers with a player/players before a transfer window opens. Maybe at the end of the season team meeting have an option to say "I know that some of you are attracting interest from other clubs. If you'd be interested in a move, or don't want to leave, please let me know." Otherwise, an option to speak directly to the player (or their agent) and say "PSG, Barcelona and Real Madrid are interested in buying you. Would you be open to moving?" Maybe have context-sensitive options so you can say "I know this would be a great opportunity for you/I know this could be your last change for a big move/You're an incredibly valuable player and we need the money etc." We do get a skeletal form of this with the agent's opinion when you go into the transfer offer screen, but it's not always reliable - especially as the player can change their mind depending on the clubs who bid and what the bidding teams offer them.

TL;DR Middlesbrough FC - Double winners! All hail ME23.1BEOWULFKnapBALTIGD424IFBBMP101ECCC! Thanks, knap! This one was just what the doctor ordered for my side, once I had the courage to try a tactic for a PA160 side rather than keep thinking that we were underdogs even after qualifying for the CL 4 seasons in a row...

Turns out I did, in fact, have the squad depth: Sticking with ME23.1BEOWULFKnap424IFVOLHDMUP102EC and come season's end we finished 2nd in the Premier League! And that's with a side predicted to finish midtable in the Championship 3 seasons ago, with a net spend since then of less than 50 million pounds, and still starting some decidedly ropey players! My budget for the upcoming window is 70 million pounds - although how I'm supposed to improve on my team when a bogstandard defender like Marc Guehi costs 48 million is something that's going to take a lot of scouting... My last post was after the last match of 2024, a 2-2 draw with Chelsea where they equalised in stoppage time. We drew our next two as well and lost the following match for a run of 4 without a win, but after that our form improved again with just 2 losses (away at Man United where we came back from 3-0 down to 3-2, and at home to runaway champions Liverpool where we had a player sent off at 2-0 and still pulled it back to 2-1). We didn't exactly dominate teams, but did record 9 wins with a winning margin of 3 or more goals. Of our 7 defeats, only 2 (champions Liverpool and 4th placed Arsenal, both away) were by more than a single goal. What we did tend to be was clinical, hitting at or above our xG in most matches. One of my best players being up front helped there (21 goals/8 assists in 41 matches) but the other two strikers had 13/2 in 33 and 18/6 in 38 and they're both Championship level players, according to the coach reports. For context, my coach reports for my squad are as follows: Good/Decent Premier League player - 5/2; Leading/Good/Decent Championship player - 2/8/3; Good/Decent League One player - 2/2; Leading League Two player - 1 70 million won't turn all those sub-PL players into Champions League players... but with a few of the weakest players being out of contract this summer and Real Madrid tracking an expendable midfielder who might add 30 million to the coffers, we might just be in a position to pick up some points in the CL next season. One note that I know has been discussed on here is the rate at which players pick up bookings. This seems to be a match engine issue which SI are looking into, without very much likelihood of resolution. My team had the top 3 spots for most yellow cards (20, 14, 13) across the season, plus another 3 players on 10 each. Small wonder, then, that we had 139 yellows in total - Wolves were second with just 86. But we only got 2 red cards all season, less than 8 other teams. With 793 fouls we were more than 100 ahead of West Brom in second, who had the most red cards (9) but only 77 yellows. Our tackle success rate was 72%, in line with the 70-78% range of the league as a whole, and our total of 859 tackles was second in the league overall to Brentford - who had the best success %age and 2nd fewest yellow cards. Perhaps I just need to sign/train better defenders so their tackles are cleaner! I did try adding the 'stay on feet' instruction for a couple of matches, but we still attracted multiple yellows and it coincided with the 4 match winless run so I dropped it. Perhaps if I do bring in a couple of better defenders I'll consider trying it again.

Still using ME23.1BEOWULFKnap424IFVOLHDMUP102EC and I'm pleased to say that, not only did we survive comfortably, we've started the following season on a flyer. After 21 matches we're in 3rd place on 41 points compared to 16th with 44 at the end of last season. Partly that's down to better players (we signed a better DM and GK in the summer window + improving depth at ST and AML, after bringing in better defenders in January) but also having this tactic in play the whole season long means that we've scored big wins over weaker sides and haven't been outclassed against anyone bar Liverpool - and they have 60 points from 22 matches so they're outclassing almost everyone this season. Data analysis confirms that this tactic is great for getting the ball in close to the opposition goal - either crosses/passes to the edge of the 6 yard box for a forward to finish off, or fast balls forward from the DMs/FBs to break the defensive line and send the strikers clear on goal, with about 30% of our assists coming from through balls. My 3 strikers have 29 in 62 appearances between them - not exactly Haaland figures, but there's another 24 goals from the rest of the team, including 8 goals from the wingers with them also often getting in on the act of poaching goals from close in. We're averaging 2.1 goals per game - 0.76 higher than the league average, and that gives us the second best attack in the league (Liverpool have 60 goals to our 44 and Arsenal's 43). Having been unexpectedly promoted in season 1 thanks to one your tactics, knap, I now might unexpectedly be in Europe in season 4. I don't think I quite have the squad depth to sustain a CL push, but with United, Chelsea and Newcastle all between 8th and 11th there are spaces open and it's not beyond the realms of possibility that we might be facing continental opposition next season. Quite how the board will react given that that I was given a three year target to finish midtable, I can only imagine!

Early days, but this is working very well for my newly promoted side in the PL - we struggled for the first 15 matches or so using a couple of 4231 variants (ME23V1BEOWULFKnap4231IFVOLP106FACC, which got us promoted, and ME23.1BEOWULFKnap4231IFVOLP103FACC). We tried ME23V1BEOWULFKnap424IFVOLP104ECFA which got us a few wins over the next 10 matches or so, but also had some late losses including a collapse in injury time from 3-2 to lose to Spurs. Our first match with this tactic saw us lose 3-1 to Liverpool - no shame in that, and we did seem a bit more engaged. Since then we've played 7 times, including 5-2, 5-1, 5-1 and 5-0 wins, the last of those over Man Utd, who are struggling, but still have a fantastic squad. We lost 2-1 away at Chelsea, again no shame there, plus we had a red card and match sharpness issues (FM23 seems brutal for this - player sharpness nosedives if they go more than a week without a match, and we had almost 2 weeks before Chelsea; I should have put a friendly or two in there) but rebounded to beat Wolves 3-0. We followed that with a 2-1 loss at Southampton where we were by far the better side, but gave away two cheap goals at the start of the match and couldn't pull it back. Next up is Man City, so probably nothing from that... but we're in 14th with a 14 point gap over Norwich in 18th, and we only need 2 points from our last 5 matches to be absolutely certain of safety. That's more than enough to build a platform for doing even better next season. Mid-table, here we come (hopefully!)