

The more support duties you have, the closer your team will stick together – this can be useful if you’re trying to sit compact or to move in a pack to support a pressing or possession game. There’s a reason I haven’t yet said how many of each duty to use – the spread of duties affects your team shape. The middle and both flanks all have an element of penetration as well.
#Football manager 2020 inverted winger how to
This is a much better example of how to use duties, with different areas of the team dropping off and pushing forward, creating different angles of attack. This is a bad example of using duties, it will create large gaps between each area of the field the defenders all stay back, the midfielders are isolated with the forwards all staying up front. If you have all your attack duties too high up the pitch it creates a disconnect between defence, midfield and attack – if you have all your attack duties over on a single flank, it can see you leave massive spaces on the break, whilst robbing you of penetration in other areas of the pitch. This will determine in large part how aggressive your team behaves, in terms of forward runs, take-ons and risky passes.ĭuties should be spread both vertically and laterally in your team – this means, not having all your attack duties at the top end of the pitch and not all down a single flank. In terms of duties, this means the number of defend, support & attack duties and how they are spread throughout the team. Simple really, it’s about using your roles and duties to spread your team well, create different types of chances and to have a coherent defensive strategy. What I mean by balance is having a team that can maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses, this is achieved by covering as much of the pitch as possible and fulfilling all the key functions that a team needs to be able to use. I hope this makes you a better manager and I hope you share what you’ve learned and carry on contributing to the FM community.įirstly, let’s define what we’re talking about here, because it is central to what I do as a manager. Everyone who has had something useful to share has helped make me a better manager. I’m focusing on what comes more naturally to me – getting a balance setup together. This guide is going to have some useful things in it for you, but there are so many brilliant writers, bloggers, vloggers and contributors to discussions for this reason I have scrapped the sections on in-game management and team instructions – a lot of people do that a lot better than I do.

Football Manager has got smarter it’s tougher to break sides down, you get punished on the break for leaving gaps and you can’t just press play and expect to win every game. I’ve generally stuck to a consistent playing style, with a balanced system. I’m not talking about just tactical styles, but how you adapt to challenges, how you create variation and how you turn defeats into draws and draws into wins. Sure there are ways which are making it tougher for yourself and ways of making it easier for yourself, but there are many ways to play the game. Some of what you read in this guide is the same as last time (hence it’s an update), but there is a lot of new information for everyone to get stuck into.įirstly, most importantly, there is no “right” or “wrong” way to play FM. I hadn’t particularly thought about doing any updates to my previous guide, but before you know it, it’s been 5 years since I last wrote a guide and it is probably time to pick up the proverbial pen again. I can’t even remember when I wrote my first guide, but it was several years after I first started playing Football Manager. This is the 5th version of the Pairs and Combinations guide, rewritten for FM20. Created by llama3 on the official Sports Interactive forums and republished here with his kind permission. This is the ultimate guide into the pairings and combinations that make up your team and tactics on Football Manager.
