Profile
As a manager, you have a profile in the same way as all players and staff have a profile. Your managerial attributes are displayed on the ‘Profile’ panel from the ‘My Profile’ tab.
Your profile is directly impacted by the decisions you make as manager. It also features eight characteristics, in addition to the coaching attributes found on every non-player. Those characteristics are as follows:
Reputation
A nice and simple one; the higher the rating, the more you’re known in the footballing world. A higher reputation has a huge effect on your career. It attracts interest in your services from bigger teams, it attracts better players to your club, players already at the club are more inclined to work harder and more professionally for a manager of greater repute, and many, many more situations you’ll encounter as you progress.
Media Handling
This attribute is representative of your dealings with the media: how you interact with journalists, how often you attend press conferences, and whether or not you keep your players happy with your responses to public questions. Attending press conferences will certainly boost the attribute, while delegating them to a member of your backroom staff or storming out of them altogether will see it quickly drop.
Tactical Consistency
If you’re the sort of manager who plays with one tactic no matter what, you’ll have a high Tactical Consistency rating. If you change between tactics on a regular basis, that bar will drop. Changes are mostly determined by whether the team’s formation is different from one tactic to the next, rather than subtler changes within a formation that remains the same over a number of matches.
Hands On Approach
This number is mostly reflective of three key areas of the club and whether you retain control over them yourself or delegate them out to your backroom staff: team talks, scouting and training. If you take control of these, and maintain an active role – particularly with regards to the number of scouting reports requested and the frequency of changes made to the training schedule – your Hands On Approach rating will increase considerably.
Managing Finances
This is mostly reflective of the club’s financial state and the relative health of the wage budget under your stewardship of the club. If both of those are trending upwards, so will the attribute. Any concerns in these areas reduce it accordingly.
Handling Team Discipline
This number is plainly reflective of the number of unhappy players at the club at any given time. A tally of unhappy players results in a lower number, while keeping a squad full of players with no cause for complaint sees the number increase. The attribute remains static for the first ninety days of your tenure at any club to ensure that any situations you inherit are not judged against you.
The way you handle fines and individual player discipline will also impact this. Before each season, a formal code of conduct can be implemented, outlining punishments for different transgressions. You can either implement this and have it automatically trigger when players fall foul of the code, or you can deal with each incident on its own merit.
Loyalty to Players
This number is governed primarily by the average length of time each of your players have spent at the club under your management. If the average tenure of all players exceeds four seasons, the number increases, but if you tend to move players on within two seasons, the number decreases.
Domestic Player Bias
This number reflects the balance of domestic players in your squad against the total number of foreign players. The number is considerably higher if the squad is mainly comprised of domestic players.
Your profile also covers your interaction with the press and your players, and analyses your managerial style to summarise what you are Known For. For example, you might have a strong preference for signing young players for the future and, if so, that is shown here.
Promises
Throughout the course of your career you will find yourself making promises to both your players and to the Board regarding your intentions of handling things. The Promises screen provides an ongoing look at how things are progressing on each and every one, including those added as part of contract negotiations.
What are the consequences of a broken or failed promise?
Keeping a promise is relatively simple; do what’s been asked of you, and everyone’s happy. Breaking or failing to keep a promise, on the other hand, can eventually have severe ramifications. It won’t happen initially; you will have the chance to make amends for your mistakes at least once, if not twice. Whether it’s an unhappy player or the Board questioning your long-term future as their manager, the damage can be repaired at several intervals before the entire process reaches its conclusion.
If things do go that far down the line, however, then be warned. An unhappy player who has given you every chance to fulfil his requests will eventually distance himself from the club and force his way out. A poor relationship with the Board can produce even worse results; fail them enough times and they’ll look for a new manager.
Visions and Objectives
At the very heart of every job you’ll have over the course of your career are the visions and objectives outlined by your employers. Most teams have a long-term vision they want to realise; it could be as simple as winning a particular competition, or it could be as grandiose as wanting to achieve several promotions to reach the top flight by a particular date. Clubs can operate with five-year plans at most, with the overall vision underpinned by several seasonal objectives.
It is your job, as manager, to ensure the club remains on course to make the vision a reality by ensuring steady progression towards those objectives as a bare minimum requirement. You will be judged on all facets of the blueprint; if the Board think you’re not making sufficient progress, for example, they might change the short-term objectives to be more challenging in order to make up for lost time, or in extreme cases they might well decide to cut ties with you altogether in favour of someone new who can take them to where they want to be.
You will get to have a say on the vision and the individual objectives during contract negotiations. The longer you stay at a club and the better you do, the more likely you are to have your voice heard, but there is scope early on in your time at a club for a bit of give and take. Some clubs appreciate a more optimistic outlook – certainly, during the interview stage, it might be worth your while setting the bar high if you want to see off your competition for the job – while others adopt a more patient approach and find the best fit rather than the boldest candidate.
The road ahead is clearly mapped out for you in any case. You will, like never before in Football Manager™, have the tools at your disposal to not just know where you’re going, but how you’re going to get there, and the opportunity to leave your own mark on proceedings too.
Career Options: Coaching Courses, Interaction, Relationships, History
Coaching courses
Should you want to improve your managerial and coaching attributes, you can request that the Board sanction you to go on a coaching course by clicking the appropriate option. During the time spent on the course, your overall effectiveness as a part of the training programme is reduced. The option disappears once you have reached the maximum attainable Continental Pro Licence.
You will always be successful in passing each course, but any members of your backroom team are not assured of the same approval if you decide to send them on a course to further develop their skills. They will, however, pass more often than not, and the deciding factors in whether that happens mostly involves their Ambition and Professionalism.
Relationships
You will also develop relationships, both good and bad, with people in the footballing world as your career develops.
Positive relationships show up in a number of places. For example, in your dealings with the media, they’ll be kinder when talking about you, and transfer market negotiations for players at your respective clubs will likely be somewhat smoother than normal. Naturally, negative relationships exist in the same circles; someone you don’t get on well with will be more likely to take aim at you in the press, and negotiations between the two of you in the transfer market will be much harder.
History
The ‘History’ section keeps a record of your key information and achievements throughout your career, while also covering your managerial movements and activity in both conversations and in press conferences, as outlined below:
Conversations, Media and Interaction with the Game World
Due to your enviable position as manager of a football club, the media will want their say on your performance. Managing the biggest clubs will see your actions come under constant scrutiny as the pressure on you builds from day one. Even managing smaller clubs is only just a little less forgiving – in short, you’re going to face the good and the bad sides of the media.
You are able to hold private discussions with any of your players from their Interaction sub-tab, but be aware that upsetting them could impact your squad, particularly if the disgruntled player decides to go public with his grievances. You can also discuss things with your entire squad should you deem it necessary, by calling a ‘Team Meeting’ from the squad screen.
Interactions in Football Manager™ 2021 are fuller, richer and more comprehensive than ever. From a quick chat in the corridor to a full-on Board meeting, while being able to reach those outside of the club with a quick message, you’ll never be more prepared for dealing with the trials and tribulations of day-to-day management. An array of new context-specific options are well-defined and easily recognised to make it simpler than ever to find a way to say exactly what you want to say.
Gestures
Gestures allow you to add emphasis to your point and bring a sense of human emotion to interactions.
Press Conferences
As manager of a football club, you are prone to attention from the media. Journalists want to gather as much information as they can, and at times won’t care how they go about obtaining it. The best source for them to piece together their stories is Press Conferences. Before and after every match you play, as well as at other select times (including the signing of a key new player), you will be invited to attend a Press Conference and answer a number of questions about everything pertaining to your stewardship of the club and your relationship with others in the football world, especially opposing managers.
Your Press Officer introduces you to each Press Conference with a heads-up of who is attending and what the likely talking points might be. Each question is presented to you with information on the source and the journalist asking the question, with a number of responses available to you, in well-defined categories to allow you to fully and properly convey your message. There is also the option to make additional comments in your reply.
Over the course of your career, you may build up relationships with certain journalists. Some may become more trusted, and some you might simply refuse to answer directly because of the spin placed on the resulting story. Equally, a more trusted writer might be a useful tool for you to get a point across to one of your players.
You can of course leave a Press Conference after a certain number of questions have been asked before moving on with your day. A more abrupt end to proceedings can happen should you ‘Storm out’ of the press room, although this also has consequences, and will negatively affect your Media Handling attribute.
If, at times, you do not wish to attend the Press Conference, you can send a member of your backroom staff. This can be done on a per-case basis, or it can be permanently assigned via Staff Responsibilities.
Every manager in the game has a ‘Press Conference’ section in their History tab, from which you can see what was said in any press conference and any particular reactions that stemmed from it.
From time to time, you will find yourself fielding an individual question straight into your Inbox, rather than in the Press Conference screen (In Football Manager™ Touch, this is the only form of question you will receive). This works in the exact same manner, simply on a smaller scale.
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