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The following conversation between Myself and Jordan Cooper is a transcript from Part 7 of the audio compliment for Communication and Psychological Warfare ’10. Both of us sit down to discuss the finer points of Media and manager interaction and how it can help in long-term success at any level.
Jordan Cooper: Right now I’m joined with Thomas Levin, contributing writer for CPW ‘10, and the owner of fmpundit.com—one of the top Football Manager blogs in the community now. As part of being a contributing writer, what was your primary role? You handled most of the warfare section that we’re going to be talking about right now. What exactly behind the scenes in order to do the research on the press conferences and the mind games and player interactions as far as convincing players to come to your club? What did you do behind the scenes in order to get this section written and ready?
Thomas Levin: A lot of the things I did was playing the game as much as I could, and just concentrating on what happens when I talk to another manager, if I talk to another player, another club, and what I would need to do to convince them to like me or what I do if I told Alex Ferguson that he was going to lose the next game or that he was rubbish, and seeing what my players and how they react and the morale boosting of negative effects in some cases could be.
I’d run the game through the holiday mode so that I could see the game go and how it progressed through the years, and how my reputation as a manager would affect what I am saying as well. Most of all, I was trying to get people to like me; I was trying to make friends in Football Manager.
Jordan Cooper: And were you successful for the most part as we discussed before with Millie, that a lot of times honesty ends up earning you more than trying to deceive people? Have you found that when it comes to press conferences and mind games?
Thomas Levin: Yeah, definitely. I think if you’re going to tell the media one thing because there’s no sort of interaction outside at the media with your players, what you say in the media is basically what they think of you. So, telling them one thing and then doing another often has negative effects on your team and being honest on what sort of team you are; if you Chesterfield and you’re coming up against Manchester United, you wouldn’t say that you were going to beat them or you’re going to wipe the floor with them because you’re putting so much pressure on your own players to meet your expectations, that they’ll often crumble under that pressure because they‘re not as ambitious and professional.
Jordan Cooper: Now when we come to press conferences, a lot of Football Manager players out in the community have kind of looked down at this feature in the game, a lot of people call it the boring feature that they added in last year’s version. Do you find that press conferences make a significant difference or enough of a difference that maybe people should pay attention to them just a little bit more than they do? Because I myself sometimes get tired of getting asked the same questions over and over again, so what are your thoughts on how robotic the nature of press conferences are in Football Manager 2010?
Thomas Levin: It is true that the game, the press conferences day-after-day can get quite tedious, and Miles Jacobson will tell you himself; he’s done many press conferences that press conferences by the very nature are tedious and you’ll get asked the same questions. But one of the things I used to send my assistant quite often to the press conferences looking for people with high, man management and high media handling skills to take them. I still found that they went doing the most optimum jobs in getting my players to play the way I wanted them to, and what I found press conferences are really helpful when I was playing lower league football and found I really couldn’t get my team out of a bad run of form. So using the communication trying to encourage my players and being able to have the control myself to do that instead of relying on somebody else really had so much of an effect that I’d swear by doing these sort of press conferences as regularly as you can just to keep consistency within the game which I think a lot of people can have problems with.
Jordan Cooper: Well I know that a lot of people out there enjoy playing that lower league style of football. I know I do myself even though I do play the big clubs as well, and one of the things when you do start the game and you start your career, you get a new job.
What are the aspects of that first press conference when you get that new job that people should take into account to basically set up their overall kind of strategy from at least the first month or two of their career there?
Thomas Levin: It’s all about honesty. There’s no point promising the players or the teams anything that you’re not able to deliver. So, sort of talk about your new job, always be positive. Obviously, you don’t want to go into a new job and say, “Really, I didn’t want to be here” because it’s not going to send the right message out to your employers. It’s not going to send out the right message to your players if you want them to play positive football; sort of tactical approaches you want them to play, more sort of attacking football then say so.
Basically, there’s no sort of way of getting anything good out of being negative and so in terms of press conferences. And using it to set out what you’re going to do and maybe point out which of your star players that you might want to keep on at the club, you might want to get a boost of morale early on in the game for these players to get them higher morale. Once they’re at higher morale it’s easy to sustain that throughout the first couple of months of the game.
And I think when you start a new job you obviously want your team to settle quickly. Get into a good sort of start at the start of the season to make sure that it goes into the next part—the middle season and to the end of season—so that you have a consistent run and hopefully, meet the goals you want to get.
Jordan Cooper: Well some of the questions you do get asked in a new job are like, “How you will run the club” “How will you use the transfer marketing” “Will you be clearing out the staff?” Do you think you could hang onto your star player? And things of that nature, I would assume that it’s probably best to kind of determine these things before you hit that press conference, kind of, “Okay, this is what I’m going to do and outline it,” so that when you get to the press conference you’re at least giving answers that that’s actually what you’re going to do instead of playing kind of fly by night and whatever happened has happened, and that will help you set yourself up for that first season.
Thomas Levin: Oh, definitely. You’ve got to make sure that you know what you’re doing before then; make sure you know the general personality of some of the players within your squad so if you’ve got a player that might be mentioned within the press conference that is quite egotistical, ambitious, you want to reflect that in the press conferences and gee them up.
If you’re a struggling club and you’ve got no money and you’ve got to balance the books, then be positive and say, “We might not sell everybody, but we might have to sell the odd person,” but you’re going to keep hold of your star players. You want to see and utilize whether the star player is likely to stay at the club in the first place because you want to keep them happy because happy players, if you’re going to sell them on, you’re going to sell them for more money.
Jordan Cooper: Just with the tabloid journalists in real life, a lot of the press conferences revolve around player signings. You know, “Are you looking to sign this player?” “What are you thinking about your new signing?” “Are you looking at offload this player?” And it does tend to get very tedious after awhile when the journalists keep on asking you about the same things over and over again, or switch the player and kind of like, “Are you going to sign this guy are you going to sign that guy?
Does the honesty approach necessarily work in that regard? Do you really always want to feed the journalists exactly what you’re thinking?
Thomas Levin: You’ve got to consider the personality of your own squad. Hopefully, as the game goes on that you sort of learn the personalities of your squad. If their squad of nervous players, then saying that you’re going to buy this player, that player, or the other player, might make them unsettled and not play as well. So, saying that you’re not going to buy these players might make the players feel less threatened because at the end of the day you might not get those players. So I think it’s a lot about being positive and the main thing, considering the personality of your side and using trial and error; don’t be afraid of getting anything wrong because at the end of the day as long as you’re able to rectify the problems, you learn from that they’ll help you later on in the game.
Jordan Cooper: Now for a lot of people that are looking to, you know they started with that lower league side, and they’re looking to move up; move up to a bigger club, how should people handle when you get linked to a potential new job? Obviously, that’s going to affect the morale of your squad. If you’re looking to leave, obviously your players may not want to play particularly hard for you. So how do you balance between looking for a new job while you’re still being employed at your current job?
Thomas Levin: You want to consider whether you’re going to be able to get that job in the first place because if you’re crux in the season where you need your players to win and if you’re fighting for a promotion or you’re fighting to get out of relegation, you don’t want to unsettle the players. So unless you really, really want that job or you really think that you could get that job, there’s no point in saying, “I want this job.” Otherwise, the players will just think that you’re not there for them and you’re not there for the cause. So you don’t want to unsettle the rest of your team.
You can apply for it and I’ve never really seen much of a negative response in applying for a job and then replying saying you’re not interested in the job itself. If the people who were going to offer you the job think you’re good enough, they’ll offer it to you anyway even if you reject it.
I think if you really want it, showing that you do want it can work in your favor. You just got to weigh up how realistic the job offer is.
Jordan Cooper: A lot of the fun in Football Manager 2010 for most people is kind of the buying and selling the players; bringing in new people into your squad and selling them on. Now when you’re a big club obviously persuading players to join you, to sign for you, is fairly easy. I found them in most of my big club saves that pretty much if you want the guy it doesn’t take that much convincing to bring him over.
Now for the slightly lower level sides, it does take a lot of persuasion and it’s not the type of thing where one click like, “Oh, I think you’re perfect for this place,” and you get them. So can you guide through the steps of persuading a player that may not necessarily be interested in joining your club and kind of getting them onto your side so that when you put in that transfer bid that they’re down for a contract?
Thomas Levin: So for players, if you’re a lower league team obviously your reputation of your club might be acting against you. You basically want that player; you want to be their favorite staff member even if you’re at another club because if you’re the favorite staff member then they want to come and play for you. And doing that is basically by massaging their ego. You don’t want to be repeating yourself every week that this player is brilliant or fantastic and you want him to sign for your club because by doing that you’ve devalue your actual comments in the media, and they’ll just think that you’re just throwing these comments all over the place.
But if you take a long-term stance on the player that you really want and need much persuasion; having it on a monthly basis sort of interacting with that player, saying how good he is, you will become a favorite personnel of theirs.
Basically you’ve got the free options in the ranking terms of how much you think they’re good or not, and I’ve never really seen much of anything in the difference between them as if only if you think that the player is going to take more persuasion then stick more praise on them. I’ve never seen any negative response in using a different tact or different comment. It would be just mainly about building up your own reputation by winning games for your own team, and then also trying to get them on your side and make them happy and make them see that you really want them.
Jordan Cooper: And different players react differently to different people, that’s kind of the variables that are put into Football Manager 2010 and the key is to judge the reaction to the comments on how you should continue to pursue the situation. I’m assuming that if you praise someone the first time and they kind of just blow you off, I don’t know how much– If you try doing that five times in a row five separate weeks, you probably are not going to get anywhere. You kind of want that in first like, “Oh, really?” from the player, and then build from there.
Thomas Levin: Obviously, the targets that you’re going to look for—you want them to be realistic targets. So if you have managed in Southport, you never are going to be able to sign Didier Drogba. He’s never really going to take any consideration of what you think.
But one of the experiences that I had when I was managing Chelsea, a massive club, and I was looking for players that would reasonably Chelsea could buy, that your reputation does have a lot to do with whether they’re going to take your praise or not. So I play a lot of my games as a reputation as a Sunday League manager. And it’s not until I actually win something with Chelsea or do much better that these players will start taking my praise into consideration. That makes it much harder to get these targets.
At the time, if you’re building up your reputation and they are realistic targets, then they should start to take notice. But what I found, giving them more praise and flattering them more than they think would slowly get them more into your favor, and then you can sort of unsettle them as the seasons go on or as the months go on depending on how hard the player is sort of resisting against your comments or not.
Jordan Cooper: So are there any pitfalls on trying to tap up and unsettle players as far as obviously you’re going to run into the opposing manager of that club going, “Hey stop trying to tap up our players.” So what type of down side is there? Even if you do get the target that you’re looking for and declaring your interest, are there any ramifications on doing so afterwards?
Thomas Levin: I think the major problems that you’d come into to contact with is not what the managers of the opposition team really thinks because at the end of the day you’re tapping them up because you want them at your club and major player’s, managers won’t want to see them leave anyway, but you don’t want to unsettle your own squad. So sometimes if you’re putting the media comments on another player, some of your own players might not take too kindly to that and morale might drop; nervous players might think that their position in the squad becomes unsettled because you’ll start getting linked with that player more and more as you interact with them.
So I’d consider the pitfalls more of your own squad and see how your key players react and then obviously, if your key players are reacting in a negative manner you want to work on player’s interaction with your own players, giving them support, showing them that you want them at the club as well.
Jordan Cooper: Well another aspect of Football Manager 2010 that emulates real life is the ability to play mind games with other managers. And we always see that all the time in the premier league and you never could really tell whether or not a manager is saying a certain thing and has like reverse psychology involved with it. So you address this in CPW ‘10 as the “Friends and Enemies of the Battlefield.”
And you’ve already admitted that you’re looking to make friends with everyone, so have you been able to actually do that? Or even sometimes when you try to make friends, you still make enemies?
Thomas Levin: Obviously, when you’re a certain team or if you’re Liverpool then you’re going to have close rivals with Manchester United; if you Leeds again, Manchester United will be your rivals. So that can mean that naturally, Alex Ferguson is not going to like you. So as much as you praise him, he’ll still not want to be friends with you; he’ll still have a poor opinion of you.
But I think with other managers, I’ve tried to befriend Jose Mourinho, ‘The Special One’ when I was Chelsea manager with a Sunday league reputation with good responses. So quite often, he wanted to be my friend; he got favored personnel, that meant I could buy players from Inter Milan much easier, which all the teams might not be able to sign because Inter Milan would reject lower bids. I could get a bargain from them. So I’ve got more response and a better response from being friends with managers, and it’s mainly the rivals that you want to be enemies with and during match day, you want to fire your team up against them to get an advantage within the game.
But I found that as a professional team, a team at the higher-ended leagues, rivalry may seem unprofessional to a lot of the players so they don’t often react as much as you think; and they would do, unless they’re of a different personality, the more sort of looking for rivalry or unprofessional like in the lower leagues, then you get a better response from making negative comments about certain managers. But making friends, I think has helped me much more than making enemies within the game.
Jordan Cooper: Well then let’s get to the fun part; how could you make enemies? A lot of times I do this just for fun; you know you storm out of press conferences just for the sake of doing so. Are there any benefits into telling the media to go bugger off and telling managers that they’re garbage? It’s fun, you always like clicking that little check box, but are you gaining any benefit other than maybe one or two of your players kind of being fired up because of that one thing? You’re obviously not going to make friends with the manager in order to get potential transfers in and all you could do is kind of make the players on the other side perform better to prove you wrong. So what exactly would making enemies do for you? Is there any benefit?
Thomas Levin: I think the main benefit is sort of in the lower leagues especially when you’ve got players that aren’t as professional, it does fire them up against rivals; and it could backfire at some point if the opposition is more fired up, but it could also make your team more fired up and that’s the risk you take going into those games on how it’s going to react. And then basically sort of going through what’s happening within the game to sort of combat any negative response or to encourage the positive that you get from being unfriendly with another manager.
Storming out of press conferences—I’ve never really seen much positive responses out of that, just it can be fun as you said. So when you storm out, you can do a few choice words. I’m sure there’s a few Easter eggs for people to discover when to use words when storming out. So you’ve got the fun aspect of it and the great thing with Football Manager is you can play it however you want, and you’ve got plenty of control to do different things and just have fun.
Jordan Cooper: From an overall stand point, you advocate a straight forward approach. It seems so simple, but it’s kind of common sense, like when it comes to the mind games aspect, a lot of players out there that are playing FM 2010 are looking for the cheat code like, “Oh, if I just do this,” and you find that there really isn’t any type of secret formula in order to get like managers to do exactly what you want.
Thomas Levin: No, I think there’s so many different situational aspects of the game that to have one certain formula. There could be a formula there, but it takes so much testing and have so many situational variables that the game just wouldn’t be fun if you could learn them anyway. Instead, you want to use trial and error and learn the personalities of your squad to figure out how they would react to certain things and certain situations and then when you get it wrong realizing out how you could rectify that.
Jordan Cooper: So when you go from club to club everything kind of changes. Your approach to making friends at one club may be different to your approach to making friends in another club.
Thomas Levin: Definitely because you have a new, different reputation as a manager itself. The club that you’re at that time has got a different reputation and that all feeds into the perception of the other managers to you as well. So that’s the fun aspect is that there’s so many variables that you can be doing endless things, but you can also tailor a team around your own personality if your ambitious; make sure you bring a lot of ambitious players in following you so that you can play the way you want to play; use the comments that you want to use within the game to get the best response.
Jordan Cooper: Well being that we’re talking about press conferences and making friends, to finalize this section why don’t you tell everyone that’s reading the book and everyone out there at FM Pundit, that’s your primary blog, but you’re a contributing writer at FM Britain. And tell us a little bit about what you do over there; and hopefully, we could send people your way because you do put out very good content over there as well.
Thomas Levin: Football Manager Pundit is basically about using the content that we produce as the centerpiece to all the discussions around the website. A lot of the time, at the moment we’re mainly looking at player development and different ways that you can look at the game or play the game to improve yourself as well. Not just the tactical aspects of it, but the player development, the sort of personalities as well involved at Football Manager Pundit.
But using it as sort of, a few pointers because it’s a blog what I learn from the game, I learn with everybody else and I’ll post about it and then people can sort of interact. I may not always be right, so the discussions help improve everybody, I hope at Football Manager Pundit.
Jordan Cooper: That’s fmpundit.com and you’re on Twitter just like me, almost every day @fmpundit so feel free to follow Thomas there or Levo as you’re known mostly on all the forums. And at this point, basically, we would storm out of the press conference because that would be fun.
Thomas Levin: Yeah, and what choice words would we use?
Jordan Cooper: Ah, go on to the next section.
You can download Communication and Psychological Warfare, the ultimate guide to squad management HERE. Including the 2.5 hours of audio and transcripts.
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