5 Tactics Guides You should Read

Football Manager is much more enjoyable when you feel inspired, one way to inspire is to read what others are doing within the game. Hopefully thats one of the reasons you are reading this. These are a few of the posts that I have read before and after the 2012 release that have given me a little more vigour for a game I started to become jaded with.

Is 4-4-2 Still a Winning Tactic – Paine has a fantastic blog following his first FM2012 career game with cult German side St. Pauli. But if you have ever read any of Paine’s blogs he is also something of a tactical mastermind.

Here he takes us through the 4-4-2 which has taken his St Pauli side to a promotion and straight into the Europa league with a 7th place finish back in the Bundesliga.

Paine shows how the 4-4-2 can still work in this day an age of the 3 man central midfield, able to control games by slowly passing the ball about and winning the midfield battle with two deep-lying MC’s who protect the defence. The 4-4-2 is far from a dead formation.

I have adopted his 4-4-2 myself to combat my poor form against the bigger sides and away from home, giving me something more defensive in my armour. Protecting my wings too with a wide midfielder and implementing wing-back Lukasz Piszczek as the wide midfielder when I come up against those sides like Munich with pacey wingers.

Barcelona: My Interpretation – From the tactical genius brain of Richard Clayton (wwfan), many people have flatly said that the Match Engine in FM2011/12 has been incapable of reproducing the passing tika-taka that Barcelona show off. Richard moves to dispel this concept.

Although you won’t create a carbon copy of it as the football is much more deep-rooted and reliant on the emergence of one of the worlds greatest players at this particular time, wwfan believes he has come up something close to the perfect recreation.

The Art of Defending – ZdlR goes through a masterclass of defending, presenting the good and bad aspects of defending seen in the game. It is an interesting read which will help in the through process of how you can read a game in view of your own defending. With examples annotated from the matches. It will at least give you something to think about.

The Midfielder as Centerback – Going back to the Barcelona tactical guide, trying to implement the Barcelona style of football has been a major trend in what type of football gamers are looking to implement either at the virtual Barcelona or just at Stoke.

One major development as teams look for good passers is converting the MC’s into DC’s most notable example of this has been Sergio Basquets and Javier Mascherano.

I thought I would include this as it was something that provoked a post that you will see further this week and it be interesting to know how many other people have tried adapting players to suit their footballing philosophy.

The Santos Experience & The Project – Cleon could probably include himself up with SFraser and WWFan as the best tactical guide writers within the community. These two threads include much more then just his time at Santos, but tactics at Spurs and Sheffield United that make for interesting reading.

But it is his interpretation of attributes and the match engine that is the really useful part. Cleon breaks things done in easy chunks easy to stay focused and entertained.

I will be interested to know if you have read any guides that have inspired your. If so share them in the comments below.