Hints, Tips & Tricks
Recommended players
Oliver Kahn (GK)
John Terry (DC)
William Gallas (DC)
Steven Gerrad (DMC)
Xabi Alonso (DMC)
Figo (AML)
Ronaldinho (AMR)
Samual Eto'o (FC)
Fernando Torres (FC)
The best striker
The best striker is Toto Tamuz from jerusalem he's young and scores well.
Macauley Chrisanthus
When Including leagues go to upload all players from and go to nigeria then start the game and go to the search area and type in Macauley and you'll be able to buy him for free.
Easy Big Wins
On match today create a manager and put him in the team you are gonna V.S. When you choose the team and put all the of the players in the Attacking positions and put an arrow on the goalie pointing to one of the far corners and you might just win by 40-0 like I did ;)
Secrets
Tactics - The Basics
Trademark talks us through the deployment of tactics in Football Manager 2008.
When you start a new game, there are three rules that decide what type of tactic you should use. They are:
· How strong is your team?
· What kind of players do you have?
· Variables (i.e. Weather etc.)
Now that you have selected your team we can begin:
· How strong is your team?
First of all, when you start a game there are two branches of thought that dictate what you should do. This will also shape your transfer policy. First there is the Classical school of thought which states that you should look at the team I front of you, locate their strengths and create a tactic that plays to the strengths available to you. You proceed to buy players that will shore up the team and remove the weaknesses that you see. Then there is the Sven school of thought (Named after the immortal Sven-Goran Eriksson) which states that first you find a killer tactic and then proceed to try to fit your current players into the tactic. Or buy new players. This strategy exploded when tried with the England National Team because of the type of players with whom he was dealing. But works phenomenally well with Manchester City because all the players have been bought in to make the tactic work. This contrary to what many people think is not the same as fitting square pegs into round holes. In the first instance with the English National Team it was and hence the failure.
In most big teams in each division or with teams with money, you can go with the Sven school of thought but in the case of smaller teams you cannot simply because you don’t have the resources. I will only deal with the first school now.
So now there are two possibilities:
· You are now a big team
· You are now a small team
(I haven’t gone into midtable teams because with them it’s a matter of personal choice and you can mess around with them.)
If you’re a big team then you go attacking. You can play a passing game with creativity. But if you’re a small team then keep it simple. Don’t try too much. Play a 4-4-2 or a 4-5-1. Always have atleast 4 defenders. If you have a really good striker then you can go for 4-5-1 and rely on him to get you the goals. But this usually doesn’t happen so you might have to go 4-4-2. If you go 4-4-2 you have to decide on whether to go play diamond or normal. Diamond if you have a good AMC. Otherwise stick to the basic 4-4-2. Protect your lead by playing DMs in the last 20 mins and go to Counter-Attack aswell. Use short passing and give creativity only to your best players. Don’t tell your CBs to close down, because you will get raped by good strikers. Instead make everyone else close down. Defend deep. Don’t offside trap. Give your best tacklers hard tackling. Avoid giving people with low marking the tight marking order. There are lots of basic things that you can do but in the end you will still lose games. No tactic can stop you from losing completely and if you’re a small team than it just becomes harder. Most FMers are good at scoring goals because they know the best strikers etc but seem to loose out on the defending aspect so hopefully these tips have helped you.
No matter what kind of team you have a good set-piece routine is always useful. Most people don’t realize how useful this can be. Im FM 07, just putting a targetman on the near post flick on position would get you goals almost every game but this doesn’t work as well in 08. Ill outline some good routines later.
· What type of players do you have?
Lets take the example of Tottenham Hotspurs. As soon as you look at the squad who jumps out at you?
You see the 4 strikers and you see Aaron Lennon. This tells me that we have to play 2 strikers up front and we need to play attacking wingers. So an attacking 4-4-2 comes to mind. Now you’ve got your basic outline. Most of the spurs players go straight into the formation with not much tweaking.
Attacking
Wingers are given little creativity (so that they don’t try anything else) and have forward runs and dribble the ball and cross. Also put their crossing to byeline so that they get as high as possible. With Bent and Berbatov in the box you’ll have people who though not brilliant in the air have good intelligence and will get at the end of the crosses. If you look at Spur’s style of play in real life you see that Berbatov holds up the ball so make him do that. Give him through passes and high creativity. Give Bent forward runs and play the ball in front of him. This will make Berbatov hold up the ball and then play through passes to Bent, or the Wingers whoever is making a run. Now your attacking is taken care of.
Defending
With Spurs’ team you have two options: you can go defensive central midfielders with Zokora and Huddlestone or play Jenas for some attacking qualities. I’d prefer going for a defensive pairing as Tottenham’s defense is quite poor. So give them closing down and short passing. Your back four is something of an enigma. You can play Dawson and King or Kaboul whichever seems the best. Check if they have pace, if they don’t you might want to defend deep against really pacey strikers. Fullbacks come in two flavours: the attacking and the defensive. Gareth Bale is an attacking full-back so you might want to give him “swap position” with your winger Malbranque but I wouldn’t recommend it. Bu it is something to remember. Give your attacking fullbacks crossing while giving your defensive fullbacks tackling and closing down. If you give your CMs and WBs closing down then most probably the other team will keep booting the ball up the pitch or crossing from deep and since your CBs are good in the air this should suit you nicely. I’ve not delved into GK tactic much but I heard that if you have a pacey GK with rushing out high then you use him as a sort of sweeper but then you must have pacey CBs who hold a high line with the offside trap.
· Variables (i.e. Weather etc.)
Have you ever wondered why your team is playing really well but then they cant seem to hit the target the next game and then they go on to playing well? It just might be one of the Variables that keep cropping up in the game. One of which is the weather: When its raining or snowing, it isn’t very good for short-passing, quick tempo teams. Long-ball teams tend to do better. Does that explain the surprise loss to Walsall? If the weather says heavy rain lower the tempo of your play and play long passes from your defenders and mixed passes from your midfielders. You might also want to lower the closing down as players will get tired very fast. Don’t do this if you are a big team as with your depth you can afford it. There are other variables aswell which I will experiment with and get back to you on.
wouldn’t be embarrassed to say that since the FM series began its journey I didn’t put any of my special quality time into researching the new training system. Well, that’s if you can call it “new” after two-three games in which it remained the same. The reasons, or excuses of why people such as myself neglect such a crucial part of the game is partly because the latter offers easy solutions such as the default training schedules and the automatically assigning coaches. I would have called it laziness, but it is always better to blame the game.
You see, training is important because it gives players an opportunity to trial with actions they usually perform in match. The Italian training approach, for example, is widely-known for its repetitive nature of Italian key elements and moves – bringing the best out of their players.
Clicking on the your ‘Training’ menu will open two optional screens, the first is the main area which we will perform our dirty actions – setting players’ schedules, play with sliders and generally feel important.
There are few approaches to training schedules: 1. Put on default, then complain your players aren’t improving. 2. Download someone’ else training, then complain his schedules don’t work. 3. Read a guide about training, set it up like a parrot, then complain it doesn’t work for you. 4. Read this, then complain about the number of complaints written in this paragraph; Then, complain some more.
Now, seriously, there are two main approaches to training: Positional & Individual. The first focuses on player’s positions and generally based on the assumption that each position require similar group of attributes, thus each group of players playing at the same position can be trained at the same session. The second approach is time-consuming and complicated, and focuses on each player’s strengths, weakness and other variables discussed later on.
Part 1: Positional Training
+ Step 1: Deciding the most important attributes for a certain position; Prioritize them.
The level of each category workload varies depending on the current level the team plays, tactics, and even country. E.g. While we’re used to a high level of typical English central-backs’ aerial ability (jumping – aerobic; heading – ball control;), on more technical countries such as Argentina or even Spain – the most important attributes for a centre-backs will be speed (pace/acceleration-aerobic) and tackling (defending).
Attributes fall into these training categories:
Strength: Natural Fitness, Stamina, Strength and Work Rate.
Aerobic: Acceleration, Pace, Agility, Balance and Jumping.
Goalkeeping: Aerial Ability, Handling, Kicking, One On Ones and Throwing.
Tactics: Decisions, Off The Ball, Positioning, Teamwork and Anticipation.
Ball Control: Dribbling, First Touch, Heading, Technique and Flair.
Defending: Tackling, Marking and Concentration.
Attacking: Passing and Creativity.
Shooting: Finishing, Long Shots and Composure.
Set-Pieces: Corners, Crossing, Free Kicks, Long Throws and Penalty Taking.
+ Step 2: Create 4-9 (depends on how thorough you are) positional schedules. Name them according to positions. (Tip: don’t use long names, GK standing for Goalkeeper will do)
* Suggestion I: Keeper, Defense, Midfield, Attack.
* Suggestion II: GK (Goalkeeper), FB (Full-Back), WB (Wing-Back), CB (Centre-Back), DM (Defensive Midfielder), AM (Attacking Midfielder), WRL (Wingers), FS (Fast Striker), ST (Strong Striker).
After you created the schedules and got yourself a priority list for each position, it’s time to move some sliders. There are 3 different types of slider categories: Physical, Technical and Set-Pieces. One differ from another in its impact on the workload slider* –
Physical (Strength, Aerobic); 1 notch (refers to a click on a slider) on training category is equal to 1 notch on workload
Technical (The rest of categories but set-pieces and physical); 2 notches on training category is equal to 1 notch on workload
Set-Pieces; 3 notches on training category is equal to 1 notch on workload
The sliders themselves have a similar range from 0 to 25.
Training Slider – 0-25 (0 = None, 1-8 = Light, 9-15 = Medium, 16-22 = High, 23-25 = Intensive)
Workload Slider - 0-131 (0 = None, 1-24 = Very Light, 25-69 = Light, 70-109 = Medium, 110-119 = Heavy, 120-131 = Very Heavy)
Now you have all the information you need to create your position schedule. Let’s set-up one for example?Creating a new training schedule...
Position: Goalkeeper
Prioritizing Attributes: (Hint: It’s easier to use the ‘elimination method’, i.e. deciding which attributes aren’t needed)
Attacking, Shooting, Set-Pieces and Ball Control seem to be useless for a goalkeeper, although one may argue that a keeper should train on passing because his distribution is set to ‘Ask Defender to Collect’ – this should not be the focus of his training schedule, however.
Strength: Natural Fitness, Stamina, Strength and Work Rate.
Aerobic: Acceleration, Pace, Agility, Balance and Jumping.
Goalkeeping: Aerial Ability, Handling, Kicking, One On Ones and Throwing.
Tactics: Decisions, Off The Ball, Positioning, Teamwork and Anticipation.
Defending: Tackling, Marking and Concentration.
As you can probably see, it seems Goalkeeping (duh), Strength, and Tactics are the main aspects that a keeper should be focused upon. So, I push these sliders to the very right of medium – 15, while Aerobic and Defending will be on 9 (the very low of medium). Example for Keeper Schedule
The general consensus is that a player training session should never be on intensive, and his workload should never exceed the medium level – UNLESS you’re looking for a drastic change within short time.
As a rule of thumb, make sure your schedules have about a similar workload slider as the default ones – this way you’ll avoid picking up too many injuries and I’ll avoid nasty comments to this article (if any).
* I was trying to analyze the training sliders in reference to the workload slider by clicking on the various slider and watching the effect they had on the workload, this however wasn’t consistent enough for one value. Sometimes a notch on the technical categories increased workload by one, sometimes it took three notches to see any change; I suspect the workload slider wide range (0-131) doesn’t allow to watch any progress through the slider movement, although a progress has been made. I’d be happy to accept any alternative explanations or corrections about this subject.
Secrets
Real players
Due to licensing some National Teams don't have proper players (Germany for example)
To get rid of this go to "C:/Program Files/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2008/data/db/800/lnc/all" once there copy the file entitled "fake.lnc" (You may wish to put it in a safe place as backup if needed) then delete the file "fake.lnc" and when you start a new game the countries effected will have the proper squad.
All this file does it put a "mask" on the national teams effected and once you remove it will get rid of the mask.
Easter Eggs
If your computer's clock is at April 1st and the in-game clock is at April 1st (i.e. 2009/2010 season at April 1st) then you will receive a message stating your board is willing to offer you £500 million in transfer funds and a new season. Depressingly, when accepted it's revealed to be a little April Fools joke from Sports Interative.
To get rid of this go to "C:/Program Files/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2008/data/db/800/lnc/all" once there copy the file entitled "fake.lnc" (You may wish to put it in a safe place as backup if needed) then delete the file "fake.lnc" and when you start a new game the countries effected will have the proper squad.
All this file does it put a "mask" on the national teams effected and once you remove it will get rid of the mask.
Easter Eggs
If your computer's clock is at April 1st and the in-game clock is at April 1st (i.e. 2009/2010 season at April 1st) then you will receive a message stating your board is willing to offer you £500 million in transfer funds and a new season. Depressingly, when accepted it's revealed to be a little April Fools joke from Sports Interative.
Tactics - The Basics
Trademark talks us through the deployment of tactics in Football Manager 2008.
When you start a new game, there are three rules that decide what type of tactic you should use. They are:
· How strong is your team?
· What kind of players do you have?
· Variables (i.e. Weather etc.)
Now that you have selected your team we can begin:
· How strong is your team?
First of all, when you start a game there are two branches of thought that dictate what you should do. This will also shape your transfer policy. First there is the Classical school of thought which states that you should look at the team I front of you, locate their strengths and create a tactic that plays to the strengths available to you. You proceed to buy players that will shore up the team and remove the weaknesses that you see. Then there is the Sven school of thought (Named after the immortal Sven-Goran Eriksson) which states that first you find a killer tactic and then proceed to try to fit your current players into the tactic. Or buy new players. This strategy exploded when tried with the England National Team because of the type of players with whom he was dealing. But works phenomenally well with Manchester City because all the players have been bought in to make the tactic work. This contrary to what many people think is not the same as fitting square pegs into round holes. In the first instance with the English National Team it was and hence the failure.
In most big teams in each division or with teams with money, you can go with the Sven school of thought but in the case of smaller teams you cannot simply because you don’t have the resources. I will only deal with the first school now.
So now there are two possibilities:
· You are now a big team
· You are now a small team
(I haven’t gone into midtable teams because with them it’s a matter of personal choice and you can mess around with them.)
If you’re a big team then you go attacking. You can play a passing game with creativity. But if you’re a small team then keep it simple. Don’t try too much. Play a 4-4-2 or a 4-5-1. Always have atleast 4 defenders. If you have a really good striker then you can go for 4-5-1 and rely on him to get you the goals. But this usually doesn’t happen so you might have to go 4-4-2. If you go 4-4-2 you have to decide on whether to go play diamond or normal. Diamond if you have a good AMC. Otherwise stick to the basic 4-4-2. Protect your lead by playing DMs in the last 20 mins and go to Counter-Attack aswell. Use short passing and give creativity only to your best players. Don’t tell your CBs to close down, because you will get raped by good strikers. Instead make everyone else close down. Defend deep. Don’t offside trap. Give your best tacklers hard tackling. Avoid giving people with low marking the tight marking order. There are lots of basic things that you can do but in the end you will still lose games. No tactic can stop you from losing completely and if you’re a small team than it just becomes harder. Most FMers are good at scoring goals because they know the best strikers etc but seem to loose out on the defending aspect so hopefully these tips have helped you.
No matter what kind of team you have a good set-piece routine is always useful. Most people don’t realize how useful this can be. Im FM 07, just putting a targetman on the near post flick on position would get you goals almost every game but this doesn’t work as well in 08. Ill outline some good routines later.
· What type of players do you have?
Lets take the example of Tottenham Hotspurs. As soon as you look at the squad who jumps out at you?
You see the 4 strikers and you see Aaron Lennon. This tells me that we have to play 2 strikers up front and we need to play attacking wingers. So an attacking 4-4-2 comes to mind. Now you’ve got your basic outline. Most of the spurs players go straight into the formation with not much tweaking.
Attacking
Wingers are given little creativity (so that they don’t try anything else) and have forward runs and dribble the ball and cross. Also put their crossing to byeline so that they get as high as possible. With Bent and Berbatov in the box you’ll have people who though not brilliant in the air have good intelligence and will get at the end of the crosses. If you look at Spur’s style of play in real life you see that Berbatov holds up the ball so make him do that. Give him through passes and high creativity. Give Bent forward runs and play the ball in front of him. This will make Berbatov hold up the ball and then play through passes to Bent, or the Wingers whoever is making a run. Now your attacking is taken care of.
Defending
With Spurs’ team you have two options: you can go defensive central midfielders with Zokora and Huddlestone or play Jenas for some attacking qualities. I’d prefer going for a defensive pairing as Tottenham’s defense is quite poor. So give them closing down and short passing. Your back four is something of an enigma. You can play Dawson and King or Kaboul whichever seems the best. Check if they have pace, if they don’t you might want to defend deep against really pacey strikers. Fullbacks come in two flavours: the attacking and the defensive. Gareth Bale is an attacking full-back so you might want to give him “swap position” with your winger Malbranque but I wouldn’t recommend it. Bu it is something to remember. Give your attacking fullbacks crossing while giving your defensive fullbacks tackling and closing down. If you give your CMs and WBs closing down then most probably the other team will keep booting the ball up the pitch or crossing from deep and since your CBs are good in the air this should suit you nicely. I’ve not delved into GK tactic much but I heard that if you have a pacey GK with rushing out high then you use him as a sort of sweeper but then you must have pacey CBs who hold a high line with the offside trap.
· Variables (i.e. Weather etc.)
Have you ever wondered why your team is playing really well but then they cant seem to hit the target the next game and then they go on to playing well? It just might be one of the Variables that keep cropping up in the game. One of which is the weather: When its raining or snowing, it isn’t very good for short-passing, quick tempo teams. Long-ball teams tend to do better. Does that explain the surprise loss to Walsall? If the weather says heavy rain lower the tempo of your play and play long passes from your defenders and mixed passes from your midfielders. You might also want to lower the closing down as players will get tired very fast. Don’t do this if you are a big team as with your depth you can afford it. There are other variables aswell which I will experiment with and get back to you on.
wouldn’t be embarrassed to say that since the FM series began its journey I didn’t put any of my special quality time into researching the new training system. Well, that’s if you can call it “new” after two-three games in which it remained the same. The reasons, or excuses of why people such as myself neglect such a crucial part of the game is partly because the latter offers easy solutions such as the default training schedules and the automatically assigning coaches. I would have called it laziness, but it is always better to blame the game.
You see, training is important because it gives players an opportunity to trial with actions they usually perform in match. The Italian training approach, for example, is widely-known for its repetitive nature of Italian key elements and moves – bringing the best out of their players.
Clicking on the your ‘Training’ menu will open two optional screens, the first is the main area which we will perform our dirty actions – setting players’ schedules, play with sliders and generally feel important.
There are few approaches to training schedules: 1. Put on default, then complain your players aren’t improving. 2. Download someone’ else training, then complain his schedules don’t work. 3. Read a guide about training, set it up like a parrot, then complain it doesn’t work for you. 4. Read this, then complain about the number of complaints written in this paragraph; Then, complain some more.
Now, seriously, there are two main approaches to training: Positional & Individual. The first focuses on player’s positions and generally based on the assumption that each position require similar group of attributes, thus each group of players playing at the same position can be trained at the same session. The second approach is time-consuming and complicated, and focuses on each player’s strengths, weakness and other variables discussed later on.
Part 1: Positional Training
+ Step 1: Deciding the most important attributes for a certain position; Prioritize them.
The level of each category workload varies depending on the current level the team plays, tactics, and even country. E.g. While we’re used to a high level of typical English central-backs’ aerial ability (jumping – aerobic; heading – ball control;), on more technical countries such as Argentina or even Spain – the most important attributes for a centre-backs will be speed (pace/acceleration-aerobic) and tackling (defending).
Attributes fall into these training categories:
Strength: Natural Fitness, Stamina, Strength and Work Rate.
Aerobic: Acceleration, Pace, Agility, Balance and Jumping.
Goalkeeping: Aerial Ability, Handling, Kicking, One On Ones and Throwing.
Tactics: Decisions, Off The Ball, Positioning, Teamwork and Anticipation.
Ball Control: Dribbling, First Touch, Heading, Technique and Flair.
Defending: Tackling, Marking and Concentration.
Attacking: Passing and Creativity.
Shooting: Finishing, Long Shots and Composure.
Set-Pieces: Corners, Crossing, Free Kicks, Long Throws and Penalty Taking.
+ Step 2: Create 4-9 (depends on how thorough you are) positional schedules. Name them according to positions. (Tip: don’t use long names, GK standing for Goalkeeper will do)
* Suggestion I: Keeper, Defense, Midfield, Attack.
* Suggestion II: GK (Goalkeeper), FB (Full-Back), WB (Wing-Back), CB (Centre-Back), DM (Defensive Midfielder), AM (Attacking Midfielder), WRL (Wingers), FS (Fast Striker), ST (Strong Striker).
After you created the schedules and got yourself a priority list for each position, it’s time to move some sliders. There are 3 different types of slider categories: Physical, Technical and Set-Pieces. One differ from another in its impact on the workload slider* –
Physical (Strength, Aerobic); 1 notch (refers to a click on a slider) on training category is equal to 1 notch on workload
Technical (The rest of categories but set-pieces and physical); 2 notches on training category is equal to 1 notch on workload
Set-Pieces; 3 notches on training category is equal to 1 notch on workload
The sliders themselves have a similar range from 0 to 25.
Training Slider – 0-25 (0 = None, 1-8 = Light, 9-15 = Medium, 16-22 = High, 23-25 = Intensive)
Workload Slider - 0-131 (0 = None, 1-24 = Very Light, 25-69 = Light, 70-109 = Medium, 110-119 = Heavy, 120-131 = Very Heavy)
Now you have all the information you need to create your position schedule. Let’s set-up one for example?Creating a new training schedule...
Position: Goalkeeper
Prioritizing Attributes: (Hint: It’s easier to use the ‘elimination method’, i.e. deciding which attributes aren’t needed)
Attacking, Shooting, Set-Pieces and Ball Control seem to be useless for a goalkeeper, although one may argue that a keeper should train on passing because his distribution is set to ‘Ask Defender to Collect’ – this should not be the focus of his training schedule, however.
Strength: Natural Fitness, Stamina, Strength and Work Rate.
Aerobic: Acceleration, Pace, Agility, Balance and Jumping.
Goalkeeping: Aerial Ability, Handling, Kicking, One On Ones and Throwing.
Tactics: Decisions, Off The Ball, Positioning, Teamwork and Anticipation.
Defending: Tackling, Marking and Concentration.
As you can probably see, it seems Goalkeeping (duh), Strength, and Tactics are the main aspects that a keeper should be focused upon. So, I push these sliders to the very right of medium – 15, while Aerobic and Defending will be on 9 (the very low of medium). Example for Keeper Schedule
The general consensus is that a player training session should never be on intensive, and his workload should never exceed the medium level – UNLESS you’re looking for a drastic change within short time.
As a rule of thumb, make sure your schedules have about a similar workload slider as the default ones – this way you’ll avoid picking up too many injuries and I’ll avoid nasty comments to this article (if any).
* I was trying to analyze the training sliders in reference to the workload slider by clicking on the various slider and watching the effect they had on the workload, this however wasn’t consistent enough for one value. Sometimes a notch on the technical categories increased workload by one, sometimes it took three notches to see any change; I suspect the workload slider wide range (0-131) doesn’t allow to watch any progress through the slider movement, although a progress has been made. I’d be happy to accept any alternative explanations or corrections about this subject.
