Guest Entry; A game world is more than just a collection of teams and FAs

Not my own work this time but something another manager and regular reader of my blog wrote. I like it, so it's getting its own spot on here, because D. doesn't have her own blog.

Well it deserves the name "world". It is full of personalities, has its own economy with booms and recessions, and has its own evolutionary trends. By this I am of course referring to tactics.

A man who started his career as a clerk in a patent office went on to theorize, "For every action, there is an opposite and equal re-action". He later went on to patent Einstein's theory of relativity. I would like to suggest that "For every tactic, there is an opposite and equal counter-tactic". In application of such a theory you will elicit far more benefits than you first imagine. It is about more than simply defeating the latest "super-tactic" or countering the latest corner "exploit". Let me explain what I have been noticing...  

The latest "super-tactic" is the narrow 4-3-3. It is tantamount to what I've heard is known as "Kevin Keegen soccer". You score, 3, we'll score 4. And it works. The working of such a tactic is beyond the scope of this blog, but there are plenty of posts out there explaining how it works. People have been embracing this religion of narrow 4-3-3 and dumping world class wingers onto the market place as they have no need for them, often going for half MV! Whilst pacey strikers (as called for by the use of 4-3-3 narrow) have seen their MVs rocket up!

So, what did I do? I decided to develop a counter tactic for this 4-3-3 narrow formation employing wingers to specifically mark the opposing FBs, and using a single big TM up front and flood the midfield a DM/CM and two supporting AMC's for the TM. And my tactic works. I came from mid table obscurity in my league which I had just been newly promoted to, to winning it in the last third of the season. I made a ton of cash selling a pacey striker, and paid peanuts for a couple of wingers as the MP was flooded with them. And the best bit was, as popularity in narrow 4-3-3 grew, my advantage grew further as I came up against more 4-3-3 narrow teams and turned what might have been draws against higher rep stronger opposition teams into wins and took the title.

Investing time alone into FML by searching out the latest super tactic or corner exploit and applying it correctly will bring you some short term success against teams with managers who are less active and don't keep up with the tactical trends. You're 1 or 2 steps ahead of them and you will bag the points. However, it is not a recipe for long term success. Especially if you end up reshaping your squad each time you change your tactics. You sell your unwanted players at below MV, and pay way over the odds for the required players. Supply and demand. It's simple economics and you don't have to be Adam Smith to work that one out. So you are left with no money to invest in infrastructure which is key to the long term success in FML.

I prefer to take a leaf from Darwin's book. He theorized that "It is not the strongest who survive, but those with the ability to best adapt to change in their environment". Evolution. Our environment is our game world. To be the strongest and survive using narrow 4-3-3 you have to buy the best 3 pacey strikers and best 3 ball playing MCs. In other words, be better than the other 4-3-3 narrow teams out there by having better players! That will not be cheap! You are fighting for the same limited resources everyone else is. Instead, adapt to your environment, don't join the flock in going narrow 4-3-3, find the equal and opposite counter-tactic. Do this by finding a CPU team that plays this way and practicing against them and gradually over the course of maybe 15 - 20 games develop a tactic. Whilst developing it, look at the changing trends in the MP and see what you notice. In the case of narrow 4-3-3, all the wingers going for half MV... could you somehow employ these guys in your counter tactics to your advantage? (remember the specific marking of the opposing 4-3-3 fullbacks whilst running rampage down the wing using "hug the line" instruction?)...

My results speak for themselves. I have been in Miller for three seasons, won three consecutive promotions, two of those as league champions. Cup semi finalist on two occasions where I dumped out much higher rep teams along the way and last week i won the most recent CPU vs Human tournament. I have a very healthy 28 day financial projection, great youthful players with huge potential as well as current ability, and a stadium with 4 two tier Opstilla II stands with exclisiff boxes raking in the money. All in 3 seasons by adapting to my environment.

In conclusion, monitor and adapt to your FML environment, and you will not only win on the pitch, but you will conquer the transfer market, be financially sound as this will allow you to invest in the long term future of your club with infrastructure, and you will have money to pay for higher wages and buy better players. In short, whilst the other clubs that followed the latest super tactic pay over the odds for players in short supply and offer ridiculous wages for them in auctions, and eventually go into administration and start again... you will not only survive, you will grow and prosper in your FML game world. 

Sun Tzu's Art of (Football) War

Twenty-five centuries ago an extraordinary Chinese philosopher and general named Sun Tzu wrote a short work regarding his strategies regarding matters such as tactics, terrain, and manoeuvring. The work was aptly dubbed The Art of War.

Observing the precepts of this great work Sun Tzu and the armies he commanded prevailed for decades over their ancestral enemies. More than two millennia later, another famous general reportedly also used the principles described in the book. Napoleon is reputed to have waged his successful campaigns in Europe with Sun Tzu’s book in hand, only to fall to defeat when he failed to follow the principles of The Art of War.

Even in these modern days, the book remains the object of study by military commanders world-wide. For example, the American general Schwarzkopf may not acknowledge Sun Tzu as the inspiration behind the military operation he led during the First Gulf War; however the tactics he employed, which so emphasized surveillance, communications, mobility, and deception, appear directly drawn from The Art of War.

The Art of War has been applied to many fields well outside of the military. Much of the text is about how to fight wars without actually having to do battle: it gives tips on how to outsmart one's opponent so that physical battle is not necessary. As such, it has found application as a training guide for many competitive endeavors that do not involve actual combat.

The book highlights the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. Sun Tzu thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.

If this is all sounded way too abstract for your liking and you do not recognise managerial schemes in the competing plans and the changing environment does not equal a football match for you, maybe the next quote will help. Dutch manager Rinus Michels was once quoted saying something which roughly translates as: “Professional football is something like war. Whoever behaves too properly is lost.”

So if football is a bit like war, the principles of war could apply to it. And if you take a football management simulation, which is supposed to simulate actual football, surely you can use these principles here in two-fold? For starters, because the concepts can apply directly to football and secondly, because these concepts are used by all sorts of managers and generals, so why not a football (simulation) manager?

Creating Your Own Effective Scouting Filters; An Introduction

I recently read a column by Gabriele Marcotti about how statistics are becoming more and more important in sports.

Marcotti mentioned a book called Moneyball in his column. This book focussed on the Oakland A's, an American baseball team, and how this team managed to compete with bigger and more wealthy clubs by means of innovative statistical analysis.

The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed. Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th century view of the game and the statistics that were available at the time. The book argues that the Oakland A's' front office took advantage of more empirical gauges of player performance to field a team that could compete successfully against richer competitors in Major League Baseball.

Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on-base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A's became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. These observations often flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom and the beliefs of many baseball scouts and executives.

By re-evaluating the strategies that produce wins on the field, the 2002 Athletics, with approximately $41 million in salary, are competitive with larger market teams such as the New York Yankees, who spend over $200 million in payroll. Because of the team's smaller revenues, Oakland is forced to find players undervalued by the market, and their system for finding value in undervalued players has proven itself thus far.

Basically, the author claims that teams have finite resources (read: money) and are therefore forever looking for value. Value used to be assessed by evaluating traditional parameters. Most of these parameters were subjective, such as for example pace, strength and character. The author claims that one could identify value more efficiently by analysing certain previously obscure statistics.

According to Marcotti, finding a way to apply these principles to football has been something of a holy grail. The most obvious obstacle is that while baseball has easy-to-measure individual match-ups, football is a free-flowing game.

Fortunately, FM Live makes this measuring aspect a bit easier for us, since the game is all about statistics. The attributes of players are displayed in ratings between one and twenty and the game logs pretty much every statistic you would ever want to know.

This means one could apply the aforementioned principles to FM Live. Re-assessing value is becoming more and more important, since your budget is limited and there will be more teams fighting over the same players.

As a result, setting your scouting filters is getting more and more important if you want to end up with proper value for your money. In this article and several follow-up articles, I am going to describe how I set up my scouting filters. In this article, I will describe the general approach I take.

First off, let me tell you that I know what kind of players I am looking for exactly. The game offers various roles for players, even within positions on the pitch. For example, there are five or so roles you can select for your forward, but I know exactly that I only need Target Men or Trequartista's upfront.

Once you know which role or roles your players should cover, you can start by creating your own search template. The basic templates provided by SI give you a nice start to work with. However, following these templates will mean you end up with very broad and generic search results. Basically, you have to narrow the search results down further.

This can be achieved by adding extra parameters to the search. However, how do you know which parameters to add for your role? This is where a combination of common sense and being smart should be applied by a manager. Either read up on forums which attributes to use for which role or look at successful players within the GameWorld and look for common attributes in all of them.

Once you have added these parameters, you will have narrowed down the amount of players you are getting. Now look at the financial means at your disposal. If the listed players are all outside your reach, lower the standards a bit in the search parameters. Ideally, you want to end up with four or five candidates.

Now you can examine these candidates further. How have they performed in the past? What are their statistics like for pass completion or crucial errors? Look at those statistics that are crucial for the role the player should fulfill in your team.

Basically, this is a very generic approach to setting up your scouting filters. In the next few days, I will provide a number of examples of how I scout exactly for players within a specific role.

A Change In Strategy

We discussed the hyper inflation within the GameWorld before in an earlier post. To summarize it, wages will explode even further, leading to even more inflation. Your money becomes worthless. The few remaining players on normal wages will be highly sought after because now everyone will try to slash their wages.

This means that the end-of-contract wage auctions are even more critical these days. Players with normal wages will be attracting lots of interest and the desperate managers after them are willing to pay a high wage to get them because of their normal wages. You have to admire the absurdity of that. They are willing to pay a wage five times higher than the current one, because it would still be lower than the wages of some of the players in their team.

Either way, since you can only protect five players with senior contract locks, this means there's roughly six to ten others running around you cannot protect. So basically anyone outside your 5 senior locks and your youth locks goes to a wage auction 24 hours before the end of their contract. This means the highest bidder wins the player, and as compensation you receive their Acquisition Fee (AF) - which is somewhat below the market rate you could get for the player by selling him.

Wage auctions are a thing you want to prevent. You don't want your player to go into a wage auction, because this will most likely drive his price up. To prevent this from happening, you forge an alliance to circumvent this whole problem. There are other managers out there with a similar problem to your own. Their squads might get ravaged by the wage auctions as well. Use that knowledge.

Offer these managers a sort of partnership. Swap players. For example, you could swap your centre-back with an expiring contract for theirs, who is in a similar situation, possibly with some money to make up for the difference in Market Value. This way, both of you keep a good defender on decent wages, without the hassle of a wage auction.