Changing the football landscape

[Bracken]

So one of the great recent developments in FM has been dynamic league reputation, enabling you to really change the landscape of world football in terms of who the big teams and leagues really are (though it takes a while).

However, in my current save, I've noted a different kind of change. It could be coincidental, or it's a feature I just didn't know about before, but either way it's great. It appears that I've changed the tactical landscape of world football.

I'm in the year 2028, in a journeyman career in which I've taken in Chelmsford City, Southend United, Rangers, Olympique Lyonnais, Chelsea, England and Argentina.

Since taking charge of Rangers I've played basically the same formation, a 4-1-2-1-2, or narrow 4-4-2 diamond with 2 CM's. It's brought me a lot of success, 3 league titles with Rangers, 1 with Lyon and a CL win, and 6 leagues and 3 champions leagues with Chelsea, alongside a World Cup win for England.

I started noticing that a lot of the teams I was playing against were also lining up with a 4-4-2 diamond. I assumed it was just the AI using a tactic they expected would match up well against my own. Things went on like this for a couple of years, until I started looking a bit more closely. I took a look at a few games between the other big boys, and noticed they were still using the 4-4-2 diamond. It merited a closer examination.

Turns out, 12 of the 20 teams in the Premier League now use a 4-4-2 diamond (either wide or narrow), with 9 of them employing a narrow diamond. Seeing as 4-2-3-1 was the dominant formation I was up against when I arrived in England, that's a pretty big change.

In Spain, 10 of the 20 La Liga teams appear to be employing the diamond. The ratio is the same in France. In Germany, it's the most common formation but not used by the majority, 6 of the top division teams using the narrow diamond. Italy are the only top country which seem to be bucking the trend, with the back 3 still reigning supreme.

So, is it a coincidence? Is it just that more great attacking midfielders and defensive midfielders have been produced by the game, making this formation seem like the obvious choice? Or is the AI acknowledging that the most successful team in the world is using a particular formation, and they're trying to mirror it? Whatever it is, I'm not sure, but it's pretty fun to think that all that tinkering that I did to get to where I am now has been successful enough to actually tactically influence the rest of the footballing world.

So, has anyone else got any great stories of how they've reshaped the landscape?

[zenzen]

I've been using one (unique) formation for 20 years, I'm now arguably the best club in the world, I haven't seen anyone else use my formation. Maybe it's not in their predefined formations ;-)