FMM20: What To Do On Your First Day At A New Club
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The busiest time of any Football Manager Mobile save is when you first take over at a new club. You are faced with a whole new set of players and chances are much of what you find won’t please you. If you are to turn round the fortunes of your club you need to act fast and decisively to make the best of the resources given to you and to improve the club as a whole.
This guide will take you through the five steps I take when I first start a new FMM save or take over at a new club before I press the continue button for the first time
Meet the Staff
Rome wasn’t built in a day and certainly not by one person so you will require your staff to assist you on the way to glory.
They will be the people that will train your players, keep them fit and help you find better ones so it is important you find the best staff you can for the size of club you are managing.
The size of your back room team depends on the facilities at your club, so if you take over at one of the big clubs you can have, 4 coaches, 3 scouts and 3 physios. As you go down the leagues the number of staff you can have reduces and you will need to ask the board to improve the training ground in order to get more.
Staff Search Tip: There are two factors that determine how good a staff member is. What badge he has either gold, silver or bronze and then his aptitude which is rated as natural, normal and poor. So the best member of staff you can get is one with a gold badge and natural aptitude.
Building your Coaching Team
If you have already unlocked the coaching badges you will have set what type of coach you are at the beginning of the save and so it’s important to remember that when setting up your coaches.
Think about what style of football you want to play when picking your coaches so if you are going to play high energy attacking football which will take a lot out of the players physically you will need attacking and fitness coaches but it is always important to have some kind of balance as well so if you have enough slots a defensive coach is handy to. Personally I don’t usually have a GK coach or a youth coach as they are a bit too specialised but if you want to base your save around bringing through young players you will want to either be a youth coach yourself or have one as part of your staff.
It’s important to evaluate the staff you have already at the club as well because it costs money to hire and fire. If you are a big club then that is less of a problem and you can simply keep the staff which work for you and bin the rest for more suitable candidates.
What if you are a small club though?
Sometimes you may inherit a good member of staff at a small club. Take Oxford they have a gold assistant manager and although he is a defensive coach there is little chance of getting another gold coach to sign for the club at the moment so he is well worth keeping. I could also try and get my silver coach to take his gold badge but it is unlikely he would pass this early in the save and he is a youth coach as well so I will need to spend some money and replace him.
At a club like Oxford the best I can hope for at the start is silver staff so keeping any member of staff better than that at the start is vital. As I improve the club I can then look to move him on for someone else but hopefully by then I will have convinced the board to improve the facilities as well and I can have a bigger staff team.
Scouts and Physios
Scouts: I don’t tend to use scouts a lot myself as I prefer to look for players myself and trust my own judgment but they can have a role as they will bring potential signings to your attention.
If you are managing a big team you may want to have youth scout in order to find good regens along with a tactical analyst to give you reports on your opposition and a first team scout to provide you with a list of players that could go straight into your team.
At smaller clubs you will most likely only be allowed two scouts and you may find a bargain hunter scout useful to find some hidden gems. I would also suggest a youth scout over an analyst at a smaller club because finding young players is a good way to build your club up over the seasons as they can perform well, get you up the leagues and be sold for good profits.
Physios: Physios come as either prevention specialists who will remove players from training to prevent injury or rehabilitation specialists who treat players with injuries. If you have two physio spots you can obviously have one of each but if you only have one slot I would suggest a rehab physio is best to have so he can treat injuries that will happen. At a bigger club you will have three slots and I would suggest two rehab and one prevention would be best. This way you have someone to keep an eye on players fitness and then two physios to try and get injured players back on the pitch as quickly as possible.
Manager Options
This screen is found under the manager tab and is where you can delegate responsibilities to your staff in order to make life easier for yourself.
Staff Roles
Assistant Responsibilities
Public Manager Stance
Meet The Players
Now you have built your back room team it is time to take a look at the players you have at your disposal. You need to keep in mind what tactic you would like to play but also you might find that the players you have already in the squad will dictate how you play. As an example if you have two excellent strikers you may want to consider playing two up top to utilise them both.
When you first look at your squad and are presented with a list of 20-30 names it can be quite daunting to know where to start but it is important that you familiarise yourself with the squad in order to get the best results with them and know where to strengthen.
The game does give you a selection of views and filters that can help sort through the players.
Initially I like to tick the Hide Ineligible box. This will remove from the view any players who are out on loan and therefore will be unavailable to you in the first season. I will then select the age view as that let’s me identify any young players who would be best put into the reserves or offered for loan or any older players who may be beyond there best but can often be on big money and can be sold to free up wages.
You may notice you have a number of players with a star next to there name. These are the players the game considers to be your star players and you could have 1,2 or 3 in the squad at anyone time. These are likely to be the players you can build the team around or that you could sell and use the money for a big squad rebuild.
Now you have identified the players out on loan, who are too young or old and the star players you can start to look through the squad and see who will do a job and who might need to go. You can use the attribute views to good effect here as they will show you a selection of attributes that you can then see which players are best at what aspect of the game.
I like to work through my team in order so I will start with my GK’s then defenders, midfielders and finally strikers.
The quality of players you need depends of course on the division you are in but a good start is to look for players that have good numbers in vital attributes for there position as they have the basic tools required to do the job you need.
You can find out more about which attributes are needed for which position and role in this guide by @PriZeand although it was written for FMM19 it is still relevant now.
This guide will tell you more on what each attribute does in the game.
In the lower leagues you won’t find a player that can do everything but look for those key attributes. As an example you may have a striker that is very quick but his shooting isn’t the best, you may find his pace will enable him to do a good job simply because other teams defenders can’t handle him. The higher up the leagues you go the more likely you will find players that can do more than just one thing so you can be a bit more selective.
One way of getting a good over view of your teams as a whole is to use the team report which is found in the first team squad menu. This gives you a list of positives and negatives about the squad as a whole.
It is important to remember that every team in the game however good will have negatives in the team report so don’t panic when you see them. Many of the negatives will be based on the hidden attributes of the players and this is where scouts and players coach reports can be important because they give you a clue to a players personality. So in the screenshot above it says that Watford lack professionalism so it might pay to look for a couple of new signings that have a professional personality.
Many of the negatives can be addressed by either signing players to address the balance or with your tactic so Watford have poor passers who can’t spot a killer pass. That means you will want some players with better passing and creativity but it also might mean you are better to play a more direct passing game as your current team may struggle with a short passing style.
The positives will show what you do have within the squad so we can see we have a good numbers of midfielders and attackers in the squad. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are good enough as we know the squad lacks good passers but it does mean you have good depth in the squad and perhaps you could sell a couple to buy the better passers you might need.
In the same section you can find your recommended starting 11 based on the current tactic but also the squad depth page is very handy.
This tells you simply where you have a good amount of players in certain positions and where you are lacking with dark green being the best down to red meaning you have no players to play that position. If you have a certain tactic in mind this will show you if you need to look to add a few players in a certain position. The star ratings give you some idea of how good the players you have are but they are based on the quality of the squad and not the league you are in so they are only a rough guide to quality and no substitute to actually looking at the attributes of the players you have.
Tactic
Now you have evaluated the squad you can start to choose a tactic that you will play. You may have a tactic in mind or you may have picked up on some strengths in the squad such as good wingers, strikers or maybe you have an abundance of good defenders. If that is the case you might want to build the tactic around that strength so if you have three good centre backs that may be the basis of your tactic.
I could go into great detail here but it has already been covered in this guide from @Nucleus so I suggest you take a look at this if you are unsure how to go about building a tactic from scratch.
You may not be confident in your ability to build a tactic and want something more off the shelf. In that case we have an index of tactics that have been posted on the site for FMM20 and that can be found here.
Training
Once you have your tactic you can start to train your players in the roles that you will want them to play. This will ensure that the players will be training in the attributes that are important to the role they will play. It is also handy to train some players in different positions on the pitch as that gives you more options although for the retraining to be effective they need some kind of ability in that position to start with.
Training has been covered in great detail in this guide by @Nucleus and again it is very relevant to this years game.
Hit the Transfer Market
This is probably my favourite part of the game.
I leave this as the final job as I like to be familiar with my squad and have my training sorted before I think about plugging gaps in the squad and improving the overall quality.
Selling Players
It can be tempting to keep everyone but some players just won’t be good enough or even better could be sold and really boost your transfer funds. Never be afraid to sell a player if you think it is for the best of the overall team as it can be short term pain for long term gain. This year how much the squad respects you has quite a big impact so if you start selling star players it can have a negative effect on squad morale but if you then go out and replace that player with some quality additions the impact can be much reduced.
As I go through the squad I will identify players I don’t want and I will offer them out to other clubs straight away. To tempt clubs to make a bid I will often reduce the price a bit as the game will always try and screw you on the price they will pay for your players. Sometimes you can reduce the amount a good amount and then have multiple clubs get into a bidding war for him.
If you get a message to say clubs are put off by the players wages then you will need to reduce the asking price even further if you really want rid of him. Alternatively if a player is refusing to leave you might need to get nasty with him so make sure you put him on the transfer list and demote him to the reserves which will hopefully give him the message that it’s time to move on.
Buying Players
Time to fill those gaps in the squad.
It can be very easy to blow your budget very quickly once you start buying players in so it’s important you know exactly what you have to spend and how many players you actually need. If money is limited then you can also try and make good use of the loan market or look for free transfers.
@Stam has created a list of the best free transfers in this years game.
You can use the player search to filter the players that are available to you. This allows you to filter by numerous different factors with position and attributes being probably the most important but also age, value and transfer status can play a big part in which players you go for.
The easiest players to sign will always be those that have been transfer listed at the clubs they are with now want rid of them so will probably accept bids somewhere near there current value but often when you are a top team you won’t find many transfer listed players that will get into your team. If a club doesn’t want to sell a player you will always have to pay over the odds to get him which is less of a problem if your club is rich but in lower leagues you may need to look elsewhere.
My preferred way to find players is using the attributes search page as I can home in on the key attributes for the player I am looking for.
The above screenshot shows a search I have done for a poacher and has yielded me 4 pages of players.
Most of these players won’t be good enough for my team so I can either sort the players by value as the best players will usually have a higher value and I have a good budget to spend but just looking at high value players doesn’t necessarily mean you will find the best player for you.
What I would rather do though is reduce the number of players being shown. What I can do is up the values of the attributes or add a couple more attributes to pick out the most suitable players.
This time I have upped the current attributes by one to 16 and I have added Aerial albeit at a lower value because although not essential for the player I am looking for it is a good attribute for any striker to have. Stamina is also a good attribute to add as it ensures your player is fit enough to play more often.
This search has yielded a much more manageable list of five players.
There is of course a chance I have missed the odd gem in these searches but as I am looking for a very specific player for my team that list of 5 will give me a player I should be able to afford and will do the job I want.
I personally like to keep my player attributes search very specific so I will only use a couple of key attributes to search by as I can then go through the players myself and look for the one that I specifically want to try and buy. This way I won’t accidentally miss any players who might not come up on the search but the players I do see will have the minimum attributes I want from that position.
Finances Tip: If you have budget to spare you can move money between your wages and transfer budget so that you can be more flexible in the transfer market. This can be done by going to the finances tab in the club menu but you do need excess budget either in your transfer or wages to be able to do it. In the lower leagues you might find that putting most of your budget into wages is useful for bringing in good loans or free transfers but at big clubs you might have excess wage budget that can allow you to sign another player.
Once I have been through these five steps I am finally ready to press continue for the first time.
This is my own routine but what steps do you take at the very beginning of a save to set you up for success?
Thanks you for reading and all comments are appreciated.
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