FM21 - Changes that affect your match day experience

[Rashidi]

There are a lot of changes to the match engine, you will notice some immediately like wide area defending and set piece marking. Other changes are going to be subtle, like how central defenders step up and sweep dangers away. Or how keepers come out of the box to behave like sweeper keepers. Goal keeper positioning and how they react has also been improved. Central attacking play looks a lot better, triangular passing through the middle is a lot better than it was in FM21. Most of these changes will still depend on how you set up your formation.

If you are looking for central attacking patterns and you are coming up against a defensive 4231 with dual defensive midfielders that's defending narrow, then there won't be space in the middle for you to exploit. That is something we need to understand. 

FOCUS PLAY

Focus play instructions now encourage players to drift into the half spaces to support the direction of focus. It also tells your team to play more passes into the focus area. If you intend to focus play down the left then central midfielders will drift to the left to encourage overloads. If you focus play through the middle they will try and move into the central areas more to force overloads. Once again individual roles that stay to the half spaces like the Carrilero and the Mezzala may perform slightly differently, so its worth paying attention to these two roles specifically when playing focus instructions.

SHOUTS

You have the ability to make 8 shouts during the game: Encourage, Calm Down, Focus, Fire Up, No Pressure, Demand More, Praise, Berate.

These shouts do not affect tactical instructions. They affect morale.  When making shouts you will see a visible effect to their morale in the touchline tablet.

You can select any number of players to give shouts to during the course of the game or you can select the whole team.

ACCESS TO MATCH ANALYSIS TOOLS

You only have access to match analysis tools at half time, full time and after the match. Access to these tools during a match has been removed. This is meant to make the manager experience more realistic.

IN MATCH ANALYTICAL TOOLS

The in match analytical tools include Focus Pass indicator, Action Zones indicator and Match Events indicator.  These are collectively found in the Visualiser. You also have access to home and away formations, match stats and other information from a dropdown in the touchline tablet.

Match statistics also include an xG rating score which changes during the course of the match. At half time more detailed xG information will be available. You can xG information to assess how good your shot creation has been during the course of a game. An xG rating for a good chance is around 0.2.  

MATCH ICONS
We have a series of match icons now instead of percentage ratings for conditioning and sharpness.

DID TRAINING CHANGE? No, The guide for FM20 still applies.

 

Basically, if you had a solid tactic that was based on well thought out roles, duties and team instructions and it worked well. Then it should work again in FM21.

 

[Rashidi]

Heads up:

Focus play is quite important to understand on FM21 because it helps us now create overloads. Along with attacking width these two can play prominent roles in build up.

There are some things to consider: Focus play can be changed from time to time in your own tactic. For example: If you are playing against a team stacking its middle with defensive midfielders  you might find yourself struggling to break them down with a focus middle instruction. It's times like this where it pays to understand how this happens.

Focus tells your team to focus its passing in that general direction, it can also affect the positioning of some of your players encouraging them to support the focus. If this happens against a team defending narrow you could end up playing in a very congested area. While no one says this can't be done, you should think of perhaps doing something else. 

You could focus play down the flanks, stretch the defence and use a strong target in the middle to create some problems for the defending team. 

Thinking of how you can shift your overload can sometimes be another effective strategy at unlocking sides. 

[f.zaarour]

Awesome tips, thanks. Id like to put an example and could u tell me if that is the right way to invert it into my tactic. 

Lets say the middle is stacked by the opponent. Myself using 4123, So if i use a Winger att on the right. I have a dlp left mid, on the left an IW su. I use focus down the left. My team start to play and focus more to the left side, will this create overloads on the right at the Winger and could they and in this case the Dlp open up the space on the right where the Winger plays...?