How To Dominate Set Pieces?/Aerial Everywhere Experiment
Meow 18 replies 29,175 Views
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What This Guide Is About
This guide is about what you can do to give your team the edge in set-pieces, which includes assessing the squad, having certain types of players in certain positions and the conclusion to a little experiment I have been running in my FMM save.
I should mention that this will not cover exploitative set-piece routines specific to a game engine of any version or edition of FMM, there is no guarantee that those methods will last and I am seeking to write something that can be somewhat ageless.
Set Piece Taker
The set piece taker is incredibly important, probably as important as all 10 other players on the field. If there is any position to strengthen first, it is this one. Set Piece taking is fairly easy to assess, you can see your best set-piece takers in the Tactics screen.
In general, you will be hoping to amass maybe 2-3 players who are at least 4-5 stars in set pieces.
Corners
Now for the exciting part, and I believe corners are one of those parts of the game that people get really excited about (even in real life) despite the relatively low conversion rate. Hopefully after reading this though, this will change completely for your FMM team.
Attacking Corners
I will cover in particular what I believe to be the absolute essentials of successfully attacking a corner.
Distribution
These are the areas where you can distribute towards
My experience is that as long as you have a good set-piece taker and at least 2 potential scorers, a neutral distribution tends to be what gets the most goals for the entire team. Perhaps in a goal challenge save, distributing to the designated goal scorer might make sense, but spreading the ball leads to the best result.
Instructions
These are the instructions that can be set for player
The instructions I will highlight in particular are Attack Far/Near Post, Mark Keeper, Attack Ball from Edge of Area and Lurk Outside Area
Attack Far/Near Post
I think this area in particular is a good location to attack, often the ones covering here will be fullbacks and you can often get very good matchups in aerial and strength against them.
If you do run out of aerial players, you can opt for a good finisher without the aerial at the far post.
Mark Keeper
If the posts are being occupied, this area here can often turn into a very serious threat.
Essentially the corner exploit, except the other players are actually distracted from legitimate tactics and not some magic.I do like to put my strongest finisher here, often it will be the striker.
Attack Ball From Edge of Area
A very good avenue of attack as well, with a good amount of space to work with. Often the type of player that goes here will be a box-to-box midfielder or an offensive midfielder of any sort.
Lurk Outside Area
Ah... Lurk Outside Area, a position where legends are born. It is too bad that Long Shot is an attribute that you can't see directly in FMM. You can however get a hint from the player traits screen
"Shoots From Distance", which means 15 or above long shots. Obviously you'd want someone with 20 long shots, but there will be no indicators. I guarantee you though, if you find someone with 20 long shots, you'll know it by gut feel.
Defending Corners
Oooh defending corners. Much easier in my opinion
I'll talk about Defend Left/Right Post, Close Down and Stay Forward.
Defend Left/Right Post
I generally recommend not keeping 2 men at each post, just one fullback at the near post.
Close Down
Optional to have, but when I do have it I tend to put a short winger there.
Stay Forward
I usually keep the player on the same wing as the corner and the most attacking midfielder forward, so if we get a 2nd ball it's an avenue for counter. You can consider the striker if your striker is more of the speedy and not-so-aerial type.
Free Kicks
Another great source of goals, and arguably simpler than corners. I think most else has been covered within corners itself, so I'll cover the stuff that is different.
Attacking Freekicks
Distribution
These are the areas where you can distribute towards
As with corners, as long as you have a good set-piece taker and at least 2 potential scorers, once again a neutral distribution tends to be what gets the most goals for the entire team.
Instructions
Stand With Taker is interesting, I don't use it personally but if you have multiple free-kick takers it could net you a little more from the unpredictability.
Disrupting Wall can at times net you the advantage if you prefer the freekick taker to shoot. Often you can put players here who don't contribute much else in terms of aerial prowess or penetration here, but in the ideal world the only such players I have will be the ones with good freekick taking.
Defending Freekicks
As for forming the wall, I tend to put those with above-average aerials and defending ability here. I do keep reserve a few of the best defenders to be on man-marking.
Rebuilding a Squad Around Set-Pieces/Aerial
Now it's not really me if I don't talk about squad management and taking any idea to absurdity with regens to experiment with some theory. So let's ask you this, what attributes would you associate with set-pieces? Strength and aerial.
Now what position would you associate such attributes? GK, CB, some CM positions and ST presumably, with players in those positions usually having more aerial and strength.
Introducing Off-Attribute Meta!
The idea where the best area to gain a competitive advantage in any attribute is to have them in areas where you don't usually expect.
Aerial Inside Forward
The way to play a Wide Target Forward in FMM
Nothing could be scarier, until you realise he is often merely making the decoy run for the 50-60 goals a season ST with 18-19 aerial
Aerial no. 10
Three's a crowd. There's nothing really shadow about him as Shadow Striker and nothing unusual to see him fire with his great long shots even as an Advanced Playmaker.
He was deadly upfront, but a lot of that sting remains even as he was pulled into AMC.
Aerial Fullback
Not the first one in this save popping up where I went "This guy looks more like a CB".
Well at the very least 13 aerial is high for a fullback who is often up against wingers. It's harder to quantify in 1 screenshot the advantage of an extremely high aerial high strength backline because the fullbacks are also aerial monsters.
What is also hard to quantify is just how dominant in set pieces this absurdity of a squad ended up being. The move from FMM22 to FMM23 really hit this point hard, usually there is a drop-off from your long-term team to a fresh real-life squad again. The evaporation of that overwhelming set piece confidence from this squad was on another level.
Applying This Theory More Generally
My guess is this can probably apply to other attributes other than aerial and strength. Dribbling, Technique, Creativity, Movement, Teamwork, and Pace comes to mind as somewhat universal attributes that some positions might lack. Of course even then, something plausible in theory could just not work in the match engine.
I would love to test all of this someday, but I am more of the sort of FMM player that looks for naturally generated players. Experiments like this are often something I stumble into by accident, though I do know some people who do theoretical testing using editing so I leave this theory to you.
What is confirmed here is that cramming a disproportionate amount of aerial players does work. I do wish I could get such players again for FMM23, but I am running a new little experiment there now which is stumbled into by accident again hehe
Edited by MeowLink to comment
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