A player with higher Accelleration will be able to accellerate to full pace in less time than a player with lower Accelleration, giving him a vital edge when chasing passes, loose balls, attempting interceptions or closing down the opposition.

In FM11, this attribute can be increased in training in two ways:

- As a part of a Training Schedule, using the Aerobic Training slider (Agility, Balance, Jumping and Pace are also trained)

- On the player profile Training tab, by setting the Individual Training Focus to Quickness (Pace is also trained)

Football Manager Training | Football Manager Hints | Football Manager Tips

A player with a high Anticipation attribute will react faster than a player with a low Anticipation attribute to all situations that arise during a match. He will know instinctively when and where his opponents plan to pass the ball, making him more successful at interceptions.  He will be able to anticipate the movement of the opposing players, making him more successful at off-the-ball runs.

In a defender, a high Anticipation attribute will make the player more capable of catching strikers with the offside trap.

In a striker, a high Anticipation attribute will make the player more capable of beating the offside trap.

A high Anticipation  attribute will also allow a player to react more quickly to ricochets and sudden changes in the direction of play, and will help him to judge speed and direction of attempted tackles by the opposing players, giving him more time to attempt to avoid losing the ball by dribbling, passing, clearing or shooting.

If the club needs new training/youth facilities or a stadium expansion in order to move to the next level but the bank account won’t allow it, then it goes without saying that it can be worth setting yourself a lower season target in order to allow yourself to spend less on wages for a year to boost those coffers.

Another solution is to avoid buying players in their peak playing years.

While spending the entire transfer budget on one or two high-profile players at the peak of their careers might be exciting for the fans, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that such deals invariably cost a great deal of money if you don’t manage to poach them on a free at the end of their contract, and even if you do, you’ll still end up paying a fortune in wages for those players due to the high demand for them from other clubs.

Younger players that still have a little developing to do before reaching their potential are often more hard working from being eager to please, but in general will become complacent or nervous more easily than older players.

Veterans nearing the end of their careers generally have the strong mental attributes that the youngsters lack, but at the expense of the physical attributes, and therefore can’t be relied upon for 90 minutes, game in, game out.

At first glance, these might seem like good reasons to avoid these players and go for players that have just reached their peak, but most clubs don’t have an unlimited budget and can’t afford the vastly inflated price tags, wages and signing fees associated with these players and so compromises must be made.  By choosing a mixture of veterans and young prospects, you’re building for the future, while maintaining a good mental balance at the club.

Determination is a key attribute for any player, but is essential for the older players in the team.  It symbolises the mindset of the player, his drive, his will to win, but is unique among all the attributes because it is directly teachable in a mentoring situation.

When you tell a young player to learn from an older one, to adopt the game of the older one, or to use the older one as his role model, you are actually instructing him both to learn the older player’s favoured moves, and to try to emulate that player’s Determination attribute.  If the older player is more determined than the younger one then a successful mentoring period will see the younger player’s determination rise to meet that of their mentor, however if the mentor has lower determination than the prospect, then a “successful” mentoring period will see the prospect’s determination reduce to that of their mentor.

As such, when buying youth players, the Determination attibute can be largely ignored if you plan to give the player a mentor, however it should be one of the most important attributes to consider when choosing which veteran players to buy.

As stated earlier, young prospects and veteran players each have their flaws, but they each have their strengths too, and if you’re looking for long-term success or even just a cost-effective way to reach the next level then a policy of buying youths and veterans rather than peak players will reap great rewards.

By experimenting with this policy, eventually you should be able to develop a cycle in which mainly youth players are bought, mentored and trained into great players, and either sold for a massive profit in their peak years or kept on until they are veterans in order to use them to mentor the next generation.

So, in conclusion, by sacrificing a year or two of short-term success to consolidate while employing this policy, it is possible to take any team to the next level and ensure long-term success within just a few seasons.

Stay tuned for more Football Manager Training, Football Manager Hints and Football Manager Tips.

Have fun!

A wage budget of £10k per week has been given to me to start my next season’s Title Challenge campaign, an increase of £2k per week!

To begin, I let quite a few players go on a free, managed to actually sell a few players (a new experience in this particular career game), and brought in the best players I could find that wanted to come, by filtering my searches as described in the Football Manager Training.com : “Football Manager Tips : Scouting” article.

The season has started strongly again, and armed with a stronger squad, hopefully we can aim for promotion this season.

I’ll be more in-depth with these Career Blog articles in future.  I just wanted to get the ball rolling.  Have fun!

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Paul, via email

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A:  Without more information or watching you play it’s kindof difficult to know “where you’re going wrong” when the “goals dry up for no reason”, because there’s so many things that can cause it to happen, so I’ll use this as an opportunity to discuss some of the most often skimped and overlooked game concepts: morale, jadedness/complacency, and how to avoid them with better man management, teamtalks and media interactions.

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Morale is very important if you want to get the best possible performances out of your team, and you have a number of tools at your disposal with which you can manage your players’ mindsets.  In general you must look to keep the team’s morale up and make them feel appreciated in order to get the best out of them, but you must always be aware of how much effort your individual players are putting in compared with the effort you know they are capable of putting in, and be ready to pounce when complacency or jadedness start to set in.

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What are complacency and jadedness?

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Complacency is the feeling that an individual player gets when he believes that your team are unbeatable and that he thinks you can win without putting in so much effort.  The result is that more motivated teams that aren’t even as skilled as yours will start picking points up against you through sheer hard work, as your complacent players sit back and expect someone else to do the work to win the game.

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Jadedness is when a player is just sick of playing football.  This can happen a number of ways, but not giving them enough praise and encouragement whilst playing them week in, week out and training them hard is a sure-fire way to cause them to start to lose their love of the game.

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So, on one hand, you need to praise the players enough to motivate them and stop them becoming jaded, but on the other hand you have to be careful not to cause them to become complacent.  They’re the two ends of the mindset scale, and to keep your team properly motivated you need to stay in control of this balancing act between the two.

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So, how do you go about it?

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Well, essentially it’s a combination of common sense, compassion, vigilance, leadership and a little bit of trial-and-error.  Don’t be scared, I’ll explain.

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When your players play well, praise them, both in your teamtalks and in the media interactions, and if they’re not playing well then give them a rollicking instead, but pay attention to everyone’s individual performances and if everyone plays badly apart from say, 1 player who plays reasonably well, make sure you give the decent performer the praise he deserves, even if you’re giving the rest of the side the hairdrier treatment.  If you ignore his performance and express your anger or disappointment at him along with the rest of the team, it will make him more jaded and therefore less likely to perform “against the flow” again in the near future.

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Similarly, if most of the team play well but one player underperforms through complacency, it is usually the right thing to do to praise the rest of the team but express your disappointment or anger at the individual for his poor performance.

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They’re the general common-sense rules, but there are other several other factors that need to be taken into consideration that are often overlooked.

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It is very important to keep an eye on each player’s morale when deciding how to speak to them, both in teamtalks and in the media.  If your team just got beaten by an opponent that you feel you should be winning against, your natural reaction might be to express your anger at the team, but this is only the right thing to do if the reason you got beaten was through complacency.  Getting angry at your team in this situation is only the right thing to do if morale is high and your players were underperforming through complacency.  If morale is low and you get beaten by a team you should be winning against because of jadedness, then it’s time for compassion, putting an arm around the players, sympathising and essentially saying “it’s ok, never mind lads, we’ll get them next time”.

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For this reason, you should always keep an eye on morale when giving teamtalks.  It is very important if you want to get the best out of your players.

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You should also be aware of the determination of your players, as more determined players tend to prefer a more professional hardline approach in all manager-player or manager-team interactions, whereas less determined players, known in the real football world as “confidence players”, tend to prefer an arm around them and less pressure to be put on them in general.

It is important to keep in mind whether you’re playing at home or away, how big a crowd is expected, how important a game it is, as different personality types react in different ways to each different situation.

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Personality types react differently?  A resounding “YES!”

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But how can you possibly manage all the different personality types at once?  Well, this is one of the key areas most managers need to improve on if they want to be successful.  If you’re managing one of the world’s bigger teams, it’s easier to assemble a team of people with the same or similar types of personality (more determined players being better than less-determined ones), but in the lower leagues, you’ll more often than not have to make do with players of all types, so it becomes more important to get to know your players individually.

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If you have a large number of players in your squad, this might seem like an impossible task, but luckily the players all have “Notes” pages, in which you can leave yourself messages about the individual players and how they react to different situations, and all the relevant media items to do with your players have a “Save to notes” button that saves the media item to the relevant player’s notes page, which is very helpful indeed.  But more about that later.

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If you’re constantly scoring lots of goals and winning, and morale is very high across the team, complacency can start to set in, particularly if you give the same teamtalk before/during/after every match and say the same things in the pre-match interviews, so it is a good idea to throw in a few curveballs occasionally to keep your players focussed.

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That is not to say that you should say the complete opposite of what you believe to be true, but to just play down your chances a little in order to keep the players’ minds on the job and keep them working hard while avoiding complacency, but remember to mix it up a little, because if you always say the same thing in your teamtalks, it becomes gradually less and less effective until eventually your players won’t be listening to you at all.

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If you’re playing a much lower team and you’re on form, it’s easy to fall into the trap of skimping on the pre-match interview or teamtalk, which can have the effect of making your players take a win for granted, especially if you’ve said the same thing in your previous few interviews/teamtalks.  By mixing it up a little and slightly playing down your chances, then it can have the effect of giving your players just a touch of extra focus.

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When giving your pre-match teamtalk, always check your assistant’s advice page to see if he’s got any info for you about the team’s mindset… often if you’re on a winning streak you’ll notice your Assistant points out if certain players are looking complacent or nervous before the match, which is your cue that you should take specific action on those players in the teamtalk.   As stated before, certain players react better to praise and an arm around them, whereas others react better to the pressure of expectations.  In general it is the more determined players that prefer to be told that you expect a performance from them, and the less determined players that prefer to be mollycoddled, but get to know your squad and leave yourself messages on their Notes pages to give yourself a progressively better idea of how to handle each individual player.

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By using this information wisely, you can more effectively use the prematch teamtalks to your advantage by using the “I have faith in your ability” and “I expect a performance” options for certain players when they’re not looking focussed.

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The same is applicable for half-time teamtalks.

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So, how do the player Media Interactions work?

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Directly after “getting back to the office” after each match, check your first team page. Use “Views” > “Selection” and sort the players by “Last 5 Games” to see who’s been performing best and worst recently. If best has a particularly high average rating for Last 5 Games, then praise his performances in the media. If worst has a particularly low average rating over his last 5 games then go tot he media and tell them how disappointed you are with the player.

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There’s a number of different reactions a player can have in media situations, depending on how highly you praise them and how well they’ve been playing.

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Praise them too highly and they’ll stop putting in the effort, praise them in too meagre a fashion and you’ll seriously deflate them, and again they’ll stop putting in the effort, but find their personal thresholds for recent-form-v-praise-type and with a little trial and error, you’ll find their “golden zones” in which they’ll react in a positive manner.

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The types of praise and possible reactions are:

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Delighted:

Is pleased following recent praise and hopes to play even better in future. [Raises morale, reduces jadedness]

Feels he doesn’t have to do much to please his current boss. [player becomes more complacent]

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Pleased:

Is pleased following recent praise and hopes to play even better in future. [Raises morale, reduces jadedness]

Feels he doesn’t have to do much to please his current boss. [player becomes more complacent]

Is determined to continue his good form in order that you lavish more extravagant praise upon him. [Raises morale, reduces jadedness]

Feels let down by your meagre praise. [Negatively affects morale, player becomes more jaded]

Angry you praised him despite not playing well. [Negatively affects morale, player becomes more jaded]

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Satisfactory:

Feels let down by your meagre praise. [Negatively affects morale, player becomes more jaded]

Pleased you acknowledged his recent form, hopes to pay even better soon. [Raises morale, reduces jadedness]

Angry you praised him despite not playing well. [Negatively affects morale, player becomes more jaded]

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Under par / Disappointed / Deeply Upset:

Determined to improve his performances despite your harsh criticism. [Reduces complacency]

Feels your criticism was justified, hopes to improve his performances soon. [Reduces complacency]

Unhappy to be criticised despite playing quite well. [reduces complacency but negatively affects morale and player becomes more jaded]

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There may be one or two I’ve missed out but you get the idea.

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Whenever you interact with a player in the media, wait for his reaction and then click on the button on the media item for his reaction to “save as a note” – this adds the media item to the player’s “Notes” page, which you can then edit manually so that it includes the player’s “Last 5 Games” average rating in the title for future reference – then the next time you need to praise or criticise that same player, you’ve got more information than the previous time on how to handle that player, i.e. where his “media praise/criticism thresholds” are in relation to his “recent form”.

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A professional approach to man-management like this can seem a little daunting at first, but I hope these hints and tips have gone some way to lifting the fog and has given you an insight into how to keep your players focussed on the task at hand and avoid complacency and jadedness in your game of Football Manager 10.

I started a new game of Football Manager 2010 with the English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portugese leagues active, chose “Sunday League Footballer” as my personal playing experience setting, and chose to take over Stafford Rangers, languishing in the English Blue Square North division.

With no transfer budget and very limited wages, I had a lot of work to do, and I started by letting go most of the players and all of the staff, and set about replacing them with free players, loan signings, and free undiscovered coaching and scouting “talent”.

Getting promoted from the Blue Square North was a breeze, but the Blue Square Premier division proved a more difficult pan of salmon, and it took three sesons to do enough to gain automatic promotion to League 2 in the “real” Football League, having just missed out on the playoffs in season 2.

My first season in League 2 went a bit better than my first season in the BSP, finishing in a respectable position, albeit a little short of the playoffs.

So here I am, in my second season in League 2 with Stafford Rangers, currently in 3rd place after 6 games.

I’ll be giving actual Football Manager Hints and Tips in the future installments of this first Football Manager’s Career Blog, but for now I wanted to set the scene.

Stay tuned to Football Manager Training for the best Football Manager hints and Football Manager Tips

———- Football Manager Training .com ———-

I notice some people on Football Manager forums saying that at the end of a season after being promoted, they release tons of players and bring loads of unnatached players in who are bargains and great players for the next league they’ll be playing in.

So, do you use the  “unnattached” filter or any other filters in your Player Search for these players?  Or do you just scan through for ages looking for that ‘gem’ or a really good player?

Thanks,

Ant via email

———- Football Manager Training .com ———-

Thanks for your question, Ant.

I’ve got a range of filters, and I mess around with them a lot to find the right players for the right positions.

The problem with using Player Search filters is that if you specify an attribute must be above “X” (whatever number), then your filter will filter out all the players that you haven’t scouted yet, whose attributes you can’t see, so at first I like to use a very broad “catch-(almost)-all” filter, to allow me to find out more about players that I have at least a little of their attribute information already.

Take my current game, I’m in the English League 2 with no transfer budget, so I’m looking for freebies…

[ ] Value | is at most | 0
[or] Asking Price | is at most | 0
[and] position | is | striker
[and] pace | is at least | 12
[or] finishing | is at least | 12
[or] jumping | is at least | 12
[or] off the ball | is at least | 12
[or] anticipation | is at least | 12
[or] first touch | is at least | 12
[or] composure | is at least | 12
[or] heading | is at least | 12
[or] determination | is at least | 12
[or] work rate | is at least | 12

…and make sure “Ask assistant to filter out unrealistic targets” is ticked (to save you time offering contracts to players that won’t come), and see how many players appear in the list.

———- Football Manager Training .com ———-

If there’s a lot of players in the list (say, more than about 40 on average, more if you have lots of scouts, less if you have fewer scouts), then I’ll go back to the filter and click the “all attributes +1″ button (or whatever it’s called) so that all the 12′s turn to 13′s, and then OK it and have another look. Repeat until there’s about 30 players in the list, and then scout them all (“report card only”).

This way, any players that you haven’t fully scouted, (i.e. can only see a few attributes on their profile page instead of all attributes being visible), that have at least one attribute that would put them amongst the top players in the division for that particular skill will show up in the list, even if you can’t see the rest of their attributes.

You will still miss some, but if you need to get a player in quickly, it’s a decent way to go about it.

———- Football Manager Training .com ———-

Once the scouts have scouted them all, I then change the filter so that it is more specific to my needs…

e.g…

[  ] Value | is at most | 0
[or] Asking Price | is at most | 0
[and] position | is | striker

[and] pace | is at least | 12
[AND] finishing | is at least | 12
[or] jumping | is at least | 12
[AND] off the ball | is at least | 12
[or] anticipation | is at least | 12
[or] first touch | is at least | 12
[AND] composure | is at least | 12
[or] heading | is at least | 12
[AND] determination | is at least | 12
[or] work rate | is at least | 12

So all I’ve done is selectively changed some of the “OR” statements to “AND” statements.

———- Football Manager Training .com ———-

Once you’ve done this, you might find that it filters out ALL of the players and you’re left with none in your list. If this happens, go back to the filter and press the “all attributes down 1″ button (or whatever it’s called that makes all the 12′s go down to 11′s) once, and check again. Repeat until you’ve got a handful of players in the list with a suitable “star rating” from your scouts, then look at each of them manually to see what their strengths and weaknesses are and whether they’re the sort of player you’re looking for.

In higher divisions, when it’s not so necessary to find free players but you want to find talented youths in the lower divisions, I use the same sort of system, but instead of “Value | is at most | 0″ I’ll have “Value | is at least | £100,000″ or similar.

———- Football Manager Training .com ———-

I spend a LOT of time scouting, though… I set my scouts to each scout different countries or regions, but then I tell them manually to scout huge numbers of players that I’ve picked out myself.

Youth players are one of my main target areas for scouting… I’ll filter the player search with something like:

[    ] Age | is at most | 18
[and] based | in | EU (or “UK” if you’re in the lower divisions and not allowed to scout outside the UK)

…and then I’ll use my scouts to give me report cards on every single player that appears in the list.

It means that you get pages and pages of extra inbox items, but you can multi-select them all and “mark as read”, because you don’t actually need to read all the individual reports, you just need to know that their attributes are visible to you, and that you have a vague idea of how good a player they are by their star rating from your scouts when you eventually start using the filters on the Player Search screen in a more specific manner.

———- Football Manager Training .com ———-

Look no further!

Our resident Football Manager experts provide Football Manager hints, Football Manager tips, Football Manager training schedules, Football Manager scouting filters, and are ready to answer all your Football Manager questions.

In addition, we will have Football Manager Career blogs, showing these Football Manager hints, Football manager tips, football manager training schedules, and football manager scouting filters in action.