Here's a 4-2-3-1 that's giving me decent results and football in lower league

I stumbled almost by accident into a setup that's been working okay for me, whilst also playing some mildly satisfying football, so I wanted to share this. By presenting this setup and the logic behind it I hope to inspire ideas, spark discussion, or help someone with their game.

* How does the setup look like?

That's it. The only thing that isn't pictured is that I tell my goalkeeper to distribute to the full-backs (to not boot the ball up and waste so much possession pointlessly). That's the only player instruction in my whole team. Simple, eh?

I do have one other tweak which is I've changed all of my set pieces. In all my attacking set pieces, I tell 2 players to stay back at all times and 3 others to stay back if needed. In all my defensive set pieces, I tell my AML to stay at the edge of the area, and my ST to keep forward. I strongly recommend doing this regardless of your tactic, as the set pieces to me seem wildly unbalanced by default, committing everyone forward when attacking and keeping everyone back when defending. With this tweak you no longer see the AI creating so much danger from your attacking corners, and you're the one that can counter the AI in their corners.

* Can I download it?

No. It literally takes 1 minute to replicate my exact whole setup. 3 minutes if you want to do the set pieces thing too.

* How did you end up with this? What's the backstory?

I heard that apparently counter-attacking was the new "best way" to play FM16, so I started a lower league career - you can follow my career here - and the first thing I did was to make my own counter-attacking tactic. It failed horribly. Then I read Cleon's counter-attacking thread, and tried to apply his principles to another lower league team, even almost copying his whole setup. Again I failed horribly and got sacked. You can see there's a pattern here, so a word of warning for everyone reading this - perhaps you shouldn't blindly trust the tactical advice of a guy that repeatedly fails horribly.

So I got fed up with the horrendously dull football my teams were producing, and decided to go for something more proactive, more fun. Lots of AI teams that were beating me were playing 4-2-3-1s so that looked like a good place to start. Also, my failed experiences with patient football made me think that at this level, unless you have the right players, perhaps it's easier to play something a little more forceful.

* What are you trying to do? What kind of football is this meant to generate?

The most important question. I want to play a proactive, relatively fast, but not brainless or overly physical, brand of football. I want my players to have clear options available to them all the time, instead of having to patiently pick out opponent teams and wait for the opponents to gift us space. I want to always have bodies in the box available for a cross or a through ball. But most importantly of all, I want different angles of attack. So that we aren't completely predictable and create several different kinds of chances. To do this we need to create movement. I want a number of players whose clear, main job is to run from deep (the AM/A, the IF/A and the WB/S); other players to drop deep (the CF/S); and other players to remain as a static available option all or most of the time (the CM/S, DLP/D and W/S).

To achieve this the balance between roles is absolutely crucial. Every change you make to a role has huge consequences for the players around them.

* How are you trying to defend?

So far all I've said is about how are we trying to attack. That's because that's my main concern, this is an attacking setup and I want to score goals. However all of that is for nothing if we don't have a balanced setup that ensures we don't concede even more.

The first thing I did was to ensure we have two relatively static holding midfielders to constantly cover all the other players that attack all the time. A DLP/D and a CM/S seemed a good start as both are this kind of player - with slightly different mentalities and purposes, remember we want different angles of attack - and I've stuck to them ever since. Another important thing is to keep one full-back behind (the FB/S). So in the worst case scenario when everyone's caught upfield and the opposition launches a counter, we still have 3 defenders, plus the DLP/D always in position, and even if the CM/S has gone upfield a little, he should be quick to go back.

However, since the formation you see on the tactics screen is your defensive formation, this means I have at least 3 advanced players that defend very little - a striker and 2 AMs on attacking roles won't contribute much. This means by design we quite simply have and will always have a sh*t defensive shape, and there's not much of a point waiting for opponents to come at us. This is why I have added "close down more" - fully accepting our poor defensive shape and chasing opponents instead of waiting for them to exploit it. After a few matches, I further increased this to "close down much more" and have not noticed any obvious bad side-effects such as our defence being pulled too much out of position, so I've stuck with that ever since.

* What's with the lopsided formation? Why do you use a MR instead of a AMR?

I wish I had a deep, thought-provoking answer to this. The reality is I just had a good MR in my team and no decent AMR.

I suspect you can get away with moving the MR to AMR, however I'd be wary to make sure this doesn't isolate him, or the MCR and the DR, who need him as a passing option.

* Why do you use "flexible" team shape?

Again there's not much thought behind this. I couldn't decide either way so I started by the default setting and turns out things worked like that.

* Why the lack of team instructions? Why not shorter passing or work ball into box or pass into space or...

I see team instructions as modifiers to my base plan and something that usually should be added as I progressively build the tactic in order to fix things. Again, it all worked out fairly nicely from the beginning and there was no need to fix things. Also I quite simply never saw the need to deviate much from the base Control mentality setting as it fits me perfectly. Control is pretty attacking but not reckless, sounds exactly like what I'm trying to do. Also by not turning too many TIs on, this fits our game plan to proactively try to create a lot of different types of chances, rather than pigeonhole my team into doing some super specific things. The way the roles interact with each others then takes care of the dynamic of the team by itself.

For example, Control makes my team wide enough by default. I don't feel we're too spread apart or as if we need even more width, why mess with it. My fairly high defensive line (due to Control + Close Down Much More) is fine, we're not conceding too many through balls behind our defenders, again why change the defensive line. The passing range and tempo is fine, we're not overly rushed or agricultural, but by design our players tend to be a little far apart from each other so I don't want to encourage them to play shorter (btw, this means the passing attribute is pretty important, specially from my duo of holding midfielders who play the longest balls, usually to the wings), therefore for now I definitely don't need any of the "possession" team instructions. Etc, etc.

I often see people turn on like 12 team instructions from the beginning and I don't understand what's the point. If you know what you're doing and what's the specific consequences of all of them, sure, it's perfectly fine. But they are modifiers to strategies that are pretty well balanced by default. I think it's probably a psychological thing with the UI that isn't clear enough, and makes people think they need to press ALL THE BUTTONS.

It also isn't clear at all that turning on some things makes players take certain options all the time, disregarding other better options. For example run at defence or pass into space. They always sound like great modifiers to add flair to your tactic. But what they actually do by encouraging dribbling or through balls, is that your players might ignore other better options like a boring side-pass to a player in a better position that then creates a better chance. And if you choose the right roles, that already ensures that your players try an appropriate amount of dribbles or through balls, so you don't need the TI on top of that.

* Why a complete forward? Can you play a complete forward in lower league? My game tells me all my forwards are horrible at this role.

Ignore the game. This is one of the main discussion points I wanted to present: you can, absolutely, play a complete forward role with terrible players. In fact it's a fantastic role for a lone striker. It lets you open up space for other players to attack the area (in this case the AM/A and the IF/A) and still is often in positions to score lots of goals himself.

Of course you still need as good a striker as you can get, and my experience tells me this is one of the positions where a good player makes the most difference to your success in FM. Ideally you want someone that's quick, that can finish, that can jump, that has decent mentals and is technically good as well. I do have a guy that's mildly strong in most areas. But the game still tells me he should be awful at complete forward - not true, he's scored 17 goals this season whilst spending half the year injured.

I feel you can get away with a player that lacks in one or two of these areas. When my top striker Perez was injured, I got away fairly well with Hidalgo who is similar but even worse at jumping/heading, and equally completely inept at some key mentals. So hardly a "complete striker". You might not be able to afford a Benzema or a Lewandowski, but your crap player might well be able to mimic their movement to some extent and that might be good enough for your team.

* Why is your left flank so much more attacking than the right flank? And can I change the roles of the midfielders?

These are 2 completely separate questions I wanted to merge into one, so I can show how connected and intricate things are, why the balance of roles is so crucial.

Initially I had my 2 midfielders the other way around, as well as my 2 fullbacks. The WB/S was behind the winger, the FB/S behind the IF/A. The idea was that the more restrained winger would be overlapped by the wing-back; and the more restrained fullback would cover for the offensive IF. Sensible, right? It worked horribly - the wing-back ran into the same space the winger played in; and on the other wing the full-back played a million miles away from the IF and they couldn't connect.

My initial tactic.

So I swapped my full-backs around. But then that posed a problem - who would cover for my much more offensive left flank? The obvious answer was to swap my midfielders too - my more restrained DLP/D went to the left, and the CM/S to the right. Suddenly it all clicked together like magic. My players on the right (the CM/S, W/S and FB/S) are all close to each other and can link together. Meanwhile the IF/A and AM/A run forward to occupy the opposition defence. This opens up a huge amount of space for my DLP/D to operate in, and to burst through balls for the late runs of my WB/S on the left. It's a thing of beauty sometimes.

This screenshot isn't the exact phase of play I wanted to show (sometimes we have more people upfront like the AMC for example); but notice the world of space my DLP Taborda has to play in, as well as the world of space my DL Espinoza has to run into, as my AML Drummond and the other advanced players occupy their defenders.

One extra note about the midfielders: the CM/S runs forward a lot more than I thought he would. I've seen him join the area and making runs into channels several times. So this, together with the threat of an unrushing AM/A, makes it pointless to swap the CM/S for another, even more aggressive runner from deep, like a box-to-box midfielder. I strongly recommend leaving the midfielder roles as it is.

* Do I need a special kind of players, attributes, PPMs for this?

One of the main reasons I went for this setup is to avoid having to have very specialized players with specific needs, as the constraints of lower league management don't allow you to build teams as carefully as you'd like sometimes. This is not one of those possession tactics where you need everyone to have amazing composure, first touch and teamwork; or a defensive tactic where you need amazing concentration etc. If you notice I have mostly generalist roles all the way throughout my team. Therefore I suspect this is a setup that could work at different levels with different players.

That being said, you still need to fit your tactic to your team (or the other way around) and this was built around the players I had. My striker, as I've mentioned earlier, is pretty good and I feel a key part of the system. My quick winger gets lots of assists and my backup winger doesn't, so having a good winger might also be a factor. And I suspect I'd be even better if I had a proper inside forward and not the sh*t one I have, who still scored 9 goals.

One thing I'd strongly consider is not to have slow defenders, we're playing a high pressing game. Also I feel this is a very physically demanding setup on my midfielders who run around a lot. One of my better MCs has low stamina and I constantly have to sub him. And as I've mentioned earlier, I feel passing is important for my midfielders who have to spray around some passes of a considerable range.

* Are there weaknesses in this setup? When do you struggle with this?

Yes there are. This is not necessarily a great tactic for facing teams that are clearly stronger than mine. In that scenario, the AI is able to outpress me, or smother my attempts at attacking, or able to bypass my midfield press more easily and counter us well. These matches usually end up in a very open contest with loads of clear cut chances for both teams, and most of the time the stronger team - the AI - creates more of them and wins. That being said, I have still managed to beat better teams a couple of times over the course of this season.

I'm currently considering building a completely different, alternative game plan for these situations. I've tried a more restrained version of this tactic on "standard" mentality with less pressing, and we're more stable defensively, but then it ends up as a compromise solution that kills our own identity and isn't particularly good at anything.

* Will this work in the next patch? In FM17? FM15? FM11? Championship Manager 97/98?

No. Yes. Maybe.

No, because I belong to the school of thought that you're playing a game, not real life football directly. This tactic was built for this match engine, not any other. For example a lot of our threat comes from crosses and this match engine values crosses greatly. In the past 4-2-3-1s were interpreted by the FM match engine as wildly offensive formations, where you could struggle defensively even with 2 holding roles, as the MCs didn't drop as far back as they do now, and the AM didn't help as much. I can imagine this gameplan crumbling if that was still the case. Also, whilst SI tries to build the most balanced game possible, it still sparks unbalanced situations often; or simply different interpretations of the instructions. Who knows what will happen next. What if in the next version the AI gets really really good at exploiting the space behind my wingback? It might all fall apart.

That being said, I still tried to apply some real life footballing logic to this, and we create a wide enough variety of chances to be confident this gameplan can be applied to most versions of the game, with some tweaks maybe. I'm not trying to break some specific area of the ME. Again, the key is having different angles of attack. Sometimes we score through crosses. Sometimes it's direct balls to the striker. Sometimes it's through balls by the middle to an onrushing AMC, or the AMC feeding the striker. Sometimes the first wave of attack is defended well, and we score through the second wave, as the ball falls to my DLP who unleashes my late running WB. Sometimes we just get a lot of corners and score on them. This variety ensures we're not overreliant on a specific pattern.

For example, the few matches I've played since patch 16.2 was out, I noticed my winger no longer wins the byline so easily, and my forwards no longer are so easily unmarked in the area. But we still have no problem scoring since we have so many different scoring patterns, and the results have stayed largely the same.

* Will this work for me with my team? How good have been your results, and which teams have you tried this with yet?

I've no idea if it'll work for you. Use it at your own risk. Hell I've got no idea if it'll continue to work for me. All I've done is one single season with the super glamorous Municipal Turrialba of the Costa Rica second division. We were predicted 8th, and have finished 4th in the Apertura, 5th in the Clausura, which means we've beaten a couple of better sides.

Hey I said in the title I was having decent results, not spectacular results. But I'm happy enough with this for now and I thought the tactic was interesting enough to share. I know it's hardly anything groundbreaking as I've seen plenty of similar tactics with similar concepts over the years, but detailing the thought process behind it might help someone. Feel free to suggest tweaks that you think can make it better, or your experience with similar setups.

This reminds me of how United used to lineup under Fergie at one stage! Ronaldo would play high on the left with Evra bombing forward to support him.. Carrick was very much a DLPd on that side whilst on the other they were much more conservative - Wes Brown often played right back with a much more defensive minded right midfielder like Park or Hargreaves. Rooney would play behind Tevez and it would look like 4231/442/451 in different phases. Looks like a simple, well thought out system!

So since the changes in 16.2 to the dlp to no longer have more risky passes on, have you seen a change in the performance of both the dlp and the tactic and have you tried turning that pi on again? I'm curious how that change is playing out for others more experienced at tactics than me.

This reminds me of how United used to lineup under Fergie at one stage! Ronaldo would play high on the left with Evra bombing forward to support him.. Carrick was very much a DLPd on that side whilst on the other they were much more conservative - Wes Brown often played right back with a much more defensive minded right midfielder like Park or Hargreaves. Rooney would play behind Tevez and it would look like 4231/442/451 in different phases. Looks like a simple, well thought out system!

That does sound similar. Utd of that era were starting to get influenced by the continental possession type of football but still with some DNA of the old attacking English 4-4-2 so that's pretty much the same kind of football as what I'm trying to play. I think Fergie was occasionally a lot more careful though, specially in the difficult or European matches. Park was more of a defensive winger, Hargreaves on the right must've been more of a wide midfielder. My winger on support still plays like an active, primary attacking threat. Also Tevez/Rooney was probably more like a DLF/S-SS/A type of combo, so a slightly more refined type of duo. And having Cristiano Ronaldo instead of a guy that has 5 for finishing and composure probably helped.

So since the changes in 16.2 to the dlp to no longer have more risky passes on, have you seen a change in the performance of both the dlp and the tactic and have you tried turning that pi on again? I'm curious how that change is playing out for others more experienced at tactics than me.

First thing I did after reading about that change, before playing any match, was to look at the passing patterns of my DLP/D prior to the patch and try to figure out whether his through balls were being a key part of my system. I'm not great at reading that Prozone area but the conclusion I reached was that it wasn't a regular pattern of our style of play. My DLP mostly just sprays passes out to the wing. So I decided to leave it as it is now, as on "mixed" he still has that option available if he wants to, and that seems to go more along my philosophy of giving players different options instead of telling them exactly what to do. And I haven't noticed any great difference since.

Great thread. I'd be interested in seeing some of your match results and stats if you don't mind sharing them.

Interesting, I play the same shape but with different roles in a few positions. My results are pretty inconsistent, and my defence is an absolute shambles so that doesn't help

Will take a few of your thoughts into mind, the set piece defending especially.

Great thread. I'd be interested in seeing some of your match results and stats if you don't mind sharing them.

It's all in my career thread, the part from the move to Costa Rica onwards.

This is what we did in Apertura:

And in Clausura:

I know it seems average/unimpressive but I'll explain a bit this wacky edited league: there's a pretty massive split, both in reputation and ability of players, between the bigger teams - Limón, Cariari Pocosi, Puma, and Escazu (although Escazu underperformed all year) - and the smaller teams - ourselves (Municipal Turrialba), Real Pocosi, Cartagena-Cañas, Cofutpa and Generacion Saprissa (although Generacion Saprissa seriously upped their game in Clausura). Notice in both Apertura and Clausura we managed to make ourselves clearly part of the leading pack, but in terms of ability we should be with the relegation scrappers. So that's why I'm pretty happy with the results.

Here's my current team comparison screens, they should make it clear that we're not good. And they should also make it clear the MASSIVE difference in attributes between the bigger and smaller sides in this division. Notice these are ranked from a pack of 18 teams and not 9, as the league is split in 2 groups, and the team comparison feature seems to consider both of them:

(as a sidenote I'm really annoyed Universidad de Costa Rica got relegated and into our group, they seem incredibly superior to everyone else)

Also, if you carefully analyse our results you'll notice an almost perfect split - against the smaller sides we won almost every single match. But against the big sides we lost most matches and scrapped some points here and there. This is why I said in the opening post I think my tactic isn't well suited to facing bigger teams. You turn the game into a very open contest and inevitably that seems to favour whoever's got most ability. However this should still make it a viable long term strategy if I can get my squad management right and improve my team over the years.

I've meanwhile started to play the first few friendlies of the following season and I'm slightly concerned with the results. We lost heavily to teams from a bigger division (but that was to be expected), but in the matches against similar teams to ourselves, or really smaller lower league sides, we've won all but always with underwhelming 1-0s. That may or may not indicate something wrong, I've been quickly simulating these friendlies without paying much attention so can't know for sure.