permanentquandary

Another change is Mentoring. FM18 marked the end of the Tutoring era. No longer can one hoover up the world's elder high determination Model Professionals and set them to mould your wonderkids into refined upstanding characters. In those days, the worst that could happen is the tutoring gets cut short because the players fell out with one another. And in those days, you could tutor a kid in the U18s with a first team player. Now, you have to move the U18 player into the first team in order for them to be mentored. In those days, you could sign anyone solely for the purpose of being tutors, with the intention that they never kick a ball for you in matches. As long as they had a higher reputation and squad status and shared positional familiarity, the tutoring was good to go. Now, they won't be able to mentor anyone because their standing in the social hierarchy of the squad will be too low. The Hierarchy system will cause you to sell or release players purely because their personality and social status in the group is too weak or strong. The criteria for transferring personalities in the new mentoring system is much higher and even less well explained. There's a lot of guesswork and it doesn't help that the UI for it is dreadful. The mentoring screen gives no indication of your individual personalities of every player in your team - you have to access the Squad panel and create a custom personality view for that - then flick between the two as you decide who to pick as mentors and who should be mentored by them. It's a disaster. You will be sat there flicking back and forth faffing about with that poxy Add Players drop down box for hours seeing whether or not the mentoring will be predicted to have any effect. If your team is all Balanced personality, good luck seeing any major development in training until you replace the lot of them. FM18 was the last FM where that is not necessary. All of this is why I stuck with FM18 after buying 19, 20, 21 and 22. The match engine for 18 was superior to 19 and 20 and it was also the last FM where you could configure Team Shape between the range of Highly Structured and Very Fluid.

1) Do players in a mentoring group all have to be capable of playing the same position? 2) Do players in a mentoring group have to be from the same training unit? Eg can I take Hugo Loris (Model Citizen) and get him to work on mentoring with Japhet Tanganga? 3) If players are not the same social group, does that mean mentoring will have no effect, or does it mean the effect will be reduced/take longer to actualise?

It's the 2022/23 season and Erling Håland is having a fantastic season with Man City. He's scored more goals than he's played games and looks odds on to finish the season that way, breaking various goalscoring records. And yet, in this moment Man City are 2nd and seem to have defensive issues at times. I think we can agree that the injury of Ruben Dias has not helped matters and the rest of their defenders are not quite on his level when it comes to defending. But then again, it seems like defenders in general are getting worse at defending as the years go by because of the increased complexity of their roles as the game develops and changes tactically. We can also say Erling Håland is not doing much at all when his team is not in possession. He is in my opinion a clear cut example of a poacher. Is that one the reasons Man City are not doing as well as they could be - he's not pressing the opposition? I'm not sold on that. I remember thinking about all this heavy "gegenpressing" that has come into the game in recent years, with attacking players being asked to chase down defenders to win the ball back and minimise the time the opposition have on the ball, and I remember thinking this is a double edged sword. On the one hand, this approach means that the opposition may have problems building attacks or keeping the ball. If that's true, our team may not concede as many chances or goals as if they didn't bother. But if our team is too successful at denying the opposition the ball, we might end up pushing them so far back into their own half they can't get out. And then where's the space in behind? What has this got to do with Erling Håland and poachers? I was recently thinking about how to make a lone poacher work and what effect trying to do that has on the team's approach. I think the very first thing to realise is that if you're going to use a lone poacher, you can forget about having a high line of engagement. By putting a poacher up top you're likely conceding some amount of possession of the ball to the opposition defence at least. But that doesn't have to be a problem - as I alluded to in the 2nd paragraph, it could yield a benefit. Let them have the ball a bit, let them come forward a bit, then boom, tackle/interception, transition, counter, and it's probably the poacher who finishes it and gets a goal. This is a way to generate space - which the poacher will then exploit. But this can't work without a properly configured midfield and probably full backs too. Let's think about Man City again. How do they configure their midfield to get the best out of Erling Håland? One thing we can say with certainty is that they play with extreme fluidity. They clearly have players who have set roles and duties which is why Kevin De Bruyne is giving Erling Håland the most assists and people like Gundogan seem to make more forward runs and score more doing that than De Bruyne, but at the same time, Guardiola is telling them to switch with each other depending on the positional situation. I don't think this is achievable in FM. The tactics creator isn't sophisticated enough, particularly because there isn't a module that provides for patterns of play. So at best we can only think of each player's priority role. City use a single, relatively static defensive midfielder, while their two central midfielders are given license to roam, make forward runs, move into channels and create. At the same time, they use two wide midfielders who mostly stay wide. What they are doing is using the wide two to stretch the opposition full backs, creating space for Erling Håland and the two central midfielders. If they can't find joy through the middle, they'll play the ball on the outside, where there will be a lot of space because the opposition have gone narrow. To compensate for the use of a single DM, no specified ball winner and the spatial weakness in the areas either side of the central DM zone, they use inverted wingbacks. By no means is this the only way a solo poacher can work. But it does make sense. Going back to "why City are 'only' 2nd", I think it comes down to a lack of steel in their midfield. For all their fancy footwork, world class passing and silky movement, when City don't have the ball they are asking two central midfield players who are relatively weak at marking, positioning and tackling to win the ball back - or hoping Rodri does his thing. Remember I said something about letting the opposition have the ball a bit, then transitioning and countering? I think teams are finding it a bit too easy to get through that midfield. Guardiola is probably saying that is fine because we'll score more, we have the quality and having two central midfielders who can both cause problems in the channels and get forward or create chances is more unpredictable, more fluid, harder to defend against, and also, importantly, provides an extra source of supply for the poacher. Anyway this is relevant because if you're going to use a solo poacher in FM and concede that you are not pressing high up the pitch as a result, you should be trying to be solid and consistent with those midfield physical battles, breaking up opposition attacks and increasing frequency of transitions. If you don't use a specialist for that role - and let's be clear, we are talking about a ball winning midfielder or someone at least instructed to perform those tasks - then you are going to concede more goals. Your midfield trio should consist of a player who stays deep, holds position, keeps things ticking over (think of Rodri) then either a ball winner or adventurous forward runner who moves into channels (think Gundogan), along with some kind of roaming playmaker (this could be a Trequartista in AMC if you play 4231). Given that a poacher stays central and rarely deviates from his position within the confines of the width of the 18 yard box, it's really important to have one or two players moving into channels. If you want to avoid the defensive issues of doing that, you can instead set your midfield up to play the City way on one flank, but a more traditional way on the other, with the wide midfielder starting wide but coming inside. If you're not going to use an AMC, you will either have to lean towards using both CMs to get forward closer to support the poacher or one of the two roles will have to be very aggressive with an attack duty. For example a DLP(D), MEZ(A), BWM(S) combination could be very effective, but you could swap MEZ for CM(A) with move into channels on, and BWM(S) can become RPM. All food for thought.

Aside from playing more direct or vertical you can consider changing how much your team exerts effort throughout each match, conserving your energy early on. Your pressing opponent will often run out of steam, whereas your team can still have gas in the tank. If you're going to take that approach you can try to recruit and select with "keeping hold of the ball" in mind by targeting players with high balance, first touch and strength, subbing on players with high speed and dribbling later in matches. Then in general you're going to want your team to be good at moving off the ball so they make themselves available for passes. I don't think you necessarily need to play with a high tempo. That would be counterproductive to this idea of conserving energy. I think quick transitions and direct play is often misinterpreted as higher tempo, when tempo should instead be considered as how long each player looks to keep hold of the ball and make decisions about where to play it next. Often, keeping the ball longer is going to make it hard for your team to find passing options but it's also going to draw the opposition away from their positions when they are closing down heavily. If you are playing the ball quickly, the opposition doesn't necessarily have the time to leave their positions and the balls you are playing might not be efficient - they could instead be easy simple passes that don't do anything, or they could be bad choices as a result of the player having poor decision making. So to reach quick direct transitions that are well considered and efficient, you could play with lower tempo but direct passing, and couple that with a structured shape by reducing the number of support duties you have in use. To be very honest I have no evidence that this would work in practice on FM, but it does work in real life.