If you saw the latest issue of Latte Quarterly, you'll know that FM Adventure partook in an exciting new fitness
I'll continue my update on KuPS progress next time, but for now I'd like to share some thoughts and key learnings that I've experienced in FM over the past few weeks. Consider this an ode to some brilliant content creators, along with some interpretation from me for good measure.
I've been inspired by reading some superb blog posts recently, including @JLAspey's updates from his Moneyball save, @accordingtofm's piece on Implementing a Recruitment and Squad Evaluating Method and the FM19 Training Module - How it Functions guide from Cleon,
Daljit and Herne79, which isn't new, but i missed when it got posted last year. I should also credit @FMSamo who has written his own piece on training, and is what originally inspired me to find out more about it, which is how i got to Cleon et al's post in the first place. I thoroughly recommend giving them all a read if you haven't already, I learnt a lot from each of them.
Cleon's (see the article for other credits) in-depth assessment of training has been a revelation, not least because it starts off by telling you to forget everything you know about training, the best advice you can give anyone on this topic! FM19 was a Christmas present for me so I'm a bit later to the table this year and with the changes to training being so overwhelming to me, I've steered clear of it so far. @FMSamo admitted a similar reaction before taking the plunge and now I'm doing the same. I'm not sure how it will work out but my initial fear that i would screw it all up has been dispelled by the fact that changes take much longer to take affect anyway, which means you will soon spot anything that's going wrong, well before it becomes a big issue for you. That's the hope anyway! I'm also excited by the prospect of having more of a direct impact on a players development, assuming it goes well anyway.
As for player assessment, the more I've read of @accordingftofm's TBPCM approach and then @JLAspey's focus on player ratings, the more I've realised that somewhere along the road I forgot how to play the game. Before the days of star ratings from your scouts or coaches, you based your assessment of a player on their attributes, their stats and their form rating. Without ever meaning to, I've inadvertently replaced this process with an initial glance to the star rating, which when good enough, I follow up with a detailed view of their attributes to give me a holistic assessment of the player's credentials. Needless to say, this approach will see some success but truthfully I'm not sure of the "why" some things work and some don't, namely because it's missing that key component - actual performance rather than what they're theoretically capable of.
In real life I might ask a scout or coach for their opinion of a player and they'd tell me what they thought of them. I could also rank my players from 1-20 in certain key skills or attributes and both of these things would assist with assessing how good a player is, but none are more telling than rating a players actual performance in a game. Going forward i'll be putting much more emphasis on player ratings and key stats before deciding who to drop, or who i should sign.
Finally, a note on tactics. I read a lot of blogs on this topic, particularly as it seems to be something I've never quite got my head around. There's some great content out there but to be honest, i find most of it overwhelming and too intricately detailed. Most guides on tactic creation begin with
"how do you want the the team to play?". I realised this week that actually, most of the time, I haven't a clue how i want the team to play, other than the obvious of scoring more goals than the opposition while simultaneously stopping them from scoring themselves.
I often think back to first time I ever realised my ineptitude for tactics, and my subsequent discovery of wwfan's 12 Steps to Play FM. It's a great article, and I find it tremendously helpful, even now 5 years on, along with numerous other blog posts and articles written over the years. What I've really come to realise more recently is that I just don't have the real world knowledge and understanding of tactics. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing. In fact, if you create a template tactic and you win more games than you lose with it then you can call that success, at least I do anyway. I know this is obvious for most people but it's taken me a long time to get to that understanding, always frustrated that other manager's seem to have grasped this area of the game much better than me.
I'm a lifelong West Ham fan and we talk a lot about the West Ham Way as a desired playing style that we're aspiring to. I know a lot of fans from other clubs don't really get what we're on about and i think if you asked 100 Irons fans what they think it is, you'd probably get 100 different answers. I mention this because it makes me realise that FM is exactly the same in that we all play it differently, and no one person has the right way to do it.
My interpretation of the West Ham Way is best epitomised by a handful of West Ham players we've had playing for us in recent years - Matty Etherington, Carlos Tevez, Scott Parker and currently Mark Noble and Declan Rice to name a few. These players gave their heart and soul in (almost) every game - tirelessly running around the field, chasing the ball and genuinely trying their absolute hardest to succeed. I would happily watch West Ham lose week in week out if every player on the field was visibly giving everything they had, and that for me is the West Ham way.
Bringing this segway back to FM tactics, I interpret these traits as a combination of Work Rate and Teamwork, and rate these along with pace and first touch as the most desirable attributes for all of my players, wherever they are on the field. This is a much more stripped down version of what @accrdingtofm was talking about, but it lends itself to my very basic understanding of "how i want my team to play" which is 1. try your absolute hardest, 2. run faster than your opponents (I am FMathlete after all!) and, 3. use good ball control to stay out of trouble.
That's enough of a guiding principle for me. I'm sure it's no where near detailed enough for most people but as I've realised this week, there's a lot of detail in the game if you want to look for it, but there's also a lot of noise which can be distracting. For me, I want to get back to basics - get involved in training, put more emphasis on player performances and accept my tactical shortcomings, we all have strengths and weaknesses and this is definitely the latter for me - and I'm ok with that! Cheers for reading this far!