Football Manager Training

Every season, a Football Manager needs to have 2 types of success in mind when it comes to transfers and contracts.  Firstly, short-term success – success in the current/coming season.  Secondly, he/she needs to keep in mind the long-term development of the club as a whole.

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!

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