Newcomer in Premier League

[gandrasch]

Hi there,

I play with Wolverhampton Wanderers and was promoted to the Prem. But now I'm dead last with 12 points around new year and 15(?) losses. 

 

It's not that I play badly most of the time, but my defense doesn't get any grip on the opposing attackers and my offense wont score their chances. I switched from a Pressing 433 (Picture4) , in Championship, to a 4231 (Picture5) and then to 4123 (no Pic) with an HB to strengthen my last line and play it deeper, but even then I get countered fairly easily and against stronger opponents my player will just watch as they score freely. 

-------------GK(D)----------------

WB(S)-DC(D)-DC(D)-WB(S)

------------HB(D)----------------

------AP(A)--BWM(S)---------

---IF(A)-------------IF(A)-------

-------------F9(S)----------------

 

Counter, Flexible, Work Ball into Box, Shorter Passing, Slower, Close Down Standard, Deeper Defense Line;

Keyplayers are Melegoni on AP, Zakaria as HB and Correa as F9.

 

Also after the first goal my team mostly crumble to bits and stop playing football. 

 

It's probably down to having a much weaker team then most of the Prem, but my friend, who I play with, got promoted with Leeds a year earlier is rockin it, sitting comfortable at 6th, with a much smaller wage structure. Do you have any tips on how I could save my season. I really have to stay up, otherwise most of my players will go. Also you read so much success story with teams freshly promoted, I think I have to do something very wrong.

 

Any ideas and help would be appreciated. Sorry for not having game screenshots at hand. But I need general tips on how to survive in a stronger league.

 

[ajsr1982]

I'm a little confused as to what your go-to formation currently is, but I'm going to assume it's the 4-1-2-3 you manually wrote out.

My primary concern would be that you're effectively still playing a 4-3-3 as one of the weakest teams in the league. Can you really afford to defend with only seven men behind the ball? If I was Man City, I'd fancy those odds.

We also need to take a look at the Counter mentality. By default, it does certain things. The ones relevant to you are:

- Lowers tempo (and shortens passing)

- Lowers D-line

- Plays narrower

Lots of your TIs add another layer on to these. Your D-line is even deeper, and your passing is even shorter and slower. To make things worse, you've told your team to close down more.

When you add all of those things up, this is what you'll get. A team with inadequate defensive cover on the flanks that often has only seven men behind the ball. However, those seven don't hold their position; they chase the ball all over the place, which makes them easy to pull around. What's more, the d-line has dropped so far back that there's even more space to operate in.

The only real advantage you may have here - leaving three men out to create a potential 3v2 overload for fast attacks, is crippled by your TIs to slow the play down to a snail's pace.

What's more, your team's morale is probably shot, which is why they crumble after the first goal.

Look at real world examples of managers who are survival experts, and look at how they play in the bottom half of the Premier League. You may want to look at channelling your inner Pulis/Allardyce. They don't do exactly the same thing, actually, but in your shoes, I'd be looking at a low block system with strong, aerially good defenders. Full backs included. Players who can play D LC or D RC are more favourable than D/WB L or D/WB R here. Then you want a CF that can hold the ball up, pacy wide players (you may want one who can deliver the ball right on to the head of your CF), and a hard working central midfield, with a possible allowance for a set-piece expert.

If you have a potentially lethal front two, then by all means go with it, but you want to keep the midfield narrow if you're going with a four, would be my advice. As you consolidate and establish yourself as a top flight team that can attract better players, then you can transition into more specialist systems.

I know it's not particularly pretty, but it's effective. Look at the turnaround Bournemouth had this season when Eddie Howe stopped trying to play pretty football.

[gandrasch]

Yeah, thats the one thing I wanted to avoid, playing anti football  Gotta try to include your suggestions. 4141 again?

[ajsr1982]

I'm a big fan of the 4-1-4-1, but look, if you're trying to achieve a certain style, then make incremental changes and see what the impact is. The first iteration of that might be removing TIs which 'double-up' with the Counter mentality.

After that, I'd look at changing some of the attack duties to support duties, perhaps using FBs instead of WBs. Try a customized CM/S rather than a BWM/S to help keep your shape in the middle of the pitch. Is the HB doing what you want, or is an Anchor okay?

All I would say is that when you change something, make sure you observe and you're happy with the difference it makes, then move on to the next thing. Overall though, you need to make yourself harder to break down.

Maybe you even want to make two systems, which allows you to play more expansive in games you think you can win more easily.

[jorgvandervloed]

You first need to have a think about what kind of style you want to play with your team. At the moment, you're in between something like a counter-possession style. Do you want to soak up pressure and hit teams on the counter? Or do you want to keep the ball?

Either style can work even with the worst teams in the league. It's all about how you setup and what kind of players you have at your disposal. 

[gandrasch]

I did as ajsr said and it looks much more stable now, but I still have two big problems. After I score the opponent level most of the time imminently. Like my defense works for 75 mins, I score, 1 minute later its 1:1. And after the first opposing goal my team starts to stop playing and I lose or hold out for a draw. 

[ajsr1982]

1 hour ago, gandrasch said:

I did as ajsr said and it looks much more stable now, but I still have two big problems. After I score the opponent level most of the time imminently. Like my defense works for 75 mins, I score, 1 minute later its 1:1. And after the first opposing goal my team starts to stop playing and I lose or hold out for a draw. 

This can happen quite often. A few things I use are:

- Make sure you have the opposition formation widget on your screen. It shows you when they change formation. After you score, you'll often see it change to 'Attacking 4-3-3' or something like this.

- If they change to an attacking formation, you need to respond. You don't need to go crazy here, but make sure you have adequate cover in defence, as well as a couple of attacking outlets. A low block system with 2-3 attacking duties typically does okay here in my experience.

- Use your subs. Tired players make mistakes. Keep an eye on condition and body language, and replace those players if you can. You might also want to drag off players with low concentration and determination in these instances, or players with low defensive attributes.

[VinceLombardi]

5 hours ago, gandrasch said:

I did as ajsr said and it looks much more stable now, but I still have two big problems. After I score the opponent level most of the time imminently. Like my defense works for 75 mins, I score, 1 minute later its 1:1. And after the first opposing goal my team starts to stop playing and I lose or hold out for a draw. 

Just want to piggyback and add to something ajsr1982 said.

Watch the concentration attribute on your defenders.

I'm not entirely sure of the mechanics, but as I (likely incorrectly) understand it, player's mental attributes degrade as the match progresses, particularly in defense. Concentration (among other things) effects the speed and severity of that degradation. This prolly isn't 100% accurate, but it did help me solve a similar problem I had.

My teams were struggling for seasons to finish out games. We would constantly concede before the half and at the end of games. Although we gave up goals no matter what the score was, not just giving up leads.

Then I read something that decribed the concentration attribute along the lines above. I put significant effort into improving concentration across my team, even at the expense of other defensive attributes and I saw significant improvement in our late game defense.

Not science by any means, but checking out your concentration could definately help. It made a huge difference to my team and what I look for in defenders now.

[craigd84]

11 minutes ago, VinceLombardi said:

Just want to piggyback and add to something ajsr1982 said.

Watch the concentration attribute on your defenders.

I'm not entirely sure of the mechanics, but as I (likely incorrectly) understand it, player's mental attributes degrade as the match progresses, particularly in defense. Concentration (among other things) effects the speed and severity of that degradation. This prolly isn't 100% accurate, but it did help me solve a similar problem I had.

My teams were struggling for seasons to finish out games. We would constantly concede before the half and at the end of games. Although we gave up goals no matter what the score was, not just giving up leads.

Then I read something that decribed the concentration attribute along the lines above. I put significant effort into improving concentration across my team, even at the expense of other defensive attributes and I saw significant improvement in our late game defense.

Not science by any means, but checking out your concentration could definately help. It made a huge difference to my team and what I look for in defenders now.

Concentration is Vital in defensive and attacking aspects!

[Marc.Foster050]

On ‎21‎/‎07‎/‎2017 at 13:45, VinceLombardi said:

Just want to piggyback and add to something ajsr1982 said.

Watch the concentration attribute on your defenders.

I'm not entirely sure of the mechanics, but as I (likely incorrectly) understand it, player's mental attributes degrade as the match progresses, particularly in defense. Concentration (among other things) effects the speed and severity of that degradation. This prolly isn't 100% accurate, but it did help me solve a similar problem I had.

My teams were struggling for seasons to finish out games. We would constantly concede before the half and at the end of games. Although we gave up goals no matter what the score was, not just giving up leads.

Then I read something that decribed the concentration attribute along the lines above. I put significant effort into improving concentration across my team, even at the expense of other defensive attributes and I saw significant improvement in our late game defense.

Not science by any means, but checking out your concentration could definately help. It made a huge difference to my team and what I look for in defenders now.

I also did this for slightly different reasons. My team always switched off after scoring and I got fed up of conceding from the kick off (this happened about 9/10 times in a season) so I looked at the two banks of 4 and improved the concentration across the board and hey presto they stopped conceding straight after scoring. Like Lombardi I don't know if its linked but its all about peace of mind

[alanschu14]

When I got promoted I lost my first several games and had resigned myself to "well lets just try to get some points."

I also used a 4-1-2-3 DM with a halfback in counter.  What I did though was reset my tactics (got rid of all TI), went counter to play a bit narrower and (and this was big from Championship League) I actually changed all of my players to more defensive duties.  Very next game a notched a win against Everton.

Now I had speedy forwards so I could get the counter attack but it effectively played very safe and with default TIs still allowed me a bit of support for my players on offense.

If it were me, I'd give this a try (since it worked before ) and would watch the game on full matches to see how things played out.  It worked pretty well for my side and I feel it was able to decently clog up space and keep shape well enough for me to exploit aggressive teams looking to jump on the weaker side. I ended up moving into 11th or 10th place to finish the season which was a huge success.

Unfortunately I cannot remember my exact roles anymore. I do know by the end I tended to have 1 CM look to move forward and one IF-S, with a W-S on the other side.  I'm finding similar success in FM17 though I'm no where near the EPL in terms of quality atm.

[Crownroyaldaddy]

My save is with Wolverhampton as well. Got promoted after season two and finished 17, 14, and 17th in the prem. During that 5th season, i was given an ultimatum and had to win a couple to keep my job.

I switched to a 3-5-1-1 tactic posted by a member here. Not only kept my job, but after a squad overhaul that got more players for this tactic, I'm now in 6th place near the new year.

[enigmatic]

As a very simple option since you're apparently getting countered a lot, have you tried switching your half-back to a more conventional DM role, so your DCs (who probably aren't the quickest or best readers of the game) don't split so wide in possession and are in position to mark the opposition striker(s) when they win the ball back?

[nextqprmanager]

I feel your pain - got Melegoni & Zakaria

Yes just like IRL, you have to `defend` !!!

I touched upon what works a few Seasons back in Prem -  had a 523 with 3 Complete Forwards which worked pretty well.

I have just started with 2 different Strikerless Tactics 523 & 5212 which are [ thank God ] working.

You need possession - grind out some results - better to draw or win 1-0 than lose.

GL

ps. Ze Gomes should be good?, hopefully get him in Jan