Football Manager 2021 Tips To Score Goals And Win Matches

As much as it may try to help out new players with plenty of tutorials and guides tours, Football Manager 2021 is not going to tell you exactly how to score goals and win things. That would take away some of the fun, the consistently painful lessons that it likes to dish out to newcomers — as well as experienced players sometimes.

If you want a slight leg-up with Football Manager 2021 tips that will help you grind out tricky matches, score plenty of goals, and ultimately win some trophies, we have a few pointers. None of these will immediately turn you into prime Nigel Clough, but as long as you follow some of these tips, keep plugging away and just accept that sometimes it won’t be your day, you should be able to look forward to glory.

 

Gegenpress Still Rules

Just as was the case last year, the gegenpress style still rules in Football Manager 2021. It wouldn’t make sense for Sports Interactive to make it less effective when Liverpool won the Premier League at a canter last year using it, so it is still a very good tactical style to adopt this year.

But you can’t just slap the tactic on and expect it to start working. Your squad needs to grow familiar with it over time and also have enough stamina to carry off such a high intensity style. It also helps if you have a high back line with fast defenders so you don’t get caught out on the counter, as well as players with high work rate and teamwork.

To adopt gegenpressing, go to Tactics > Tactical Style and then select it from that list. Make any changes to it you need; try to avoid using “out of the box” tactical styles in FM.

 

Loan To Buy

When you first start off in Football Manager 2021, you will probably notice that you don’t have a lot of transfer budget to spend. This is to reflect the real-life state of football clubs right now, who have been struggling almost all year long for obvious reasons. It stabilises over time and returns to normality within a few seasons.

So, how do you get around this and really start to push ahead in Football Manager 2021 in your first season? Well, you can stock up on the installments and threaten financial ruin down the line, or you can instead loan in players with future fees attached, mandatory or optional.

Clubs are more likely to accept loan deals for top players if there are big potential fees attached and it’s a method that can be very useful to help you get a leg up without any financial power behind you. We recommend optional fees as they give you the ability to change your mind if a player isn’t as great as you’d thought.

 

Sell Your Squad Bloat

This might be a little tricky due to just how financially poor everyone is at the start of the game, but you really don’t need more than two players for every position in Football Manager 2021. If you do, it is absolutely worth trying to move them on or loaning them out to free up the wage bill and add some money to your transfer budget.

Say, for instance, that you have five wingers. Do you need that fifth winger, could you not save some money in the long run by instead blooding youth? Barring some huge injury, there’s also little reason why your second-choice players will be getting many games a season, so could you move them on and depend on youth a bit more instead?

While you may not win everything with kids, sometimes it’s worth chucking them in at the deep end. You never know — they may just turn into regulars, even after the world has settled down.

 

Train Multiple Tactics

A lot of Football Manager players make the mistake of finding a tactic that works for them and then just sticking with it without any backup options. This is obviously not a great idea in the long run as teams will eventually wise up to how you play and find ways to counteract even the best of tactics.

To not be so obvious, have multiple tactics in your tactics builder and then swap to those depending on the upcoming match — away at Liverpool probably needs its very own tactic, for instance. It’s also handy to be able to swap to a tactic with a click, say if you’re trying to hold out and stay strong defensively in a big match.

If you need your players to get more acclimated with new tactics, don’t forget to change their primary trained tactic under training. While your other tactics will also be trained, this will give precedent to one in particular.

 

Figure Out Your Corner Routines

So many players feel that corners just aren’t very good in Football Manager, that players are more likely to waste the opportunity than do anything with them. Well, that’s because they’re realistic — you can very rarely get a reliable amount of goals from corners in the real-life equivalent either. Even the best setpiece teams in the world don’t score from them every match.

But there are some things you can do to up your chances of scoring from corners in Football Manager 2021, which includes making sure your routines make the most of your best headers of the ball. As a general rule, attacking the near or fast post is a really strong method of scoring from corners in the game, as has been the case for a couple of years now.

Of course, all success from corners is determined by the heading prowess of attackers as well as how good your corner taker is. Be sure to have a couple of routines saved and make sure you update them if you make any tactical changes.

 

Reduce Contract Fees

There are few things more frustrating in Football Manager than getting through a complex transfer negotiation then a player’s wage demands just being too ridiculous. If a player wants a high wage as well as a million different fees, it might be better to look elsewhere, especially in the cash-strapped start of your save.

Appearance fees, signing-on fees, unused sub fees; they all add up over time to frankly absurd amounts of money, potentially much more than the player is worth as your club balance keeps taking a hit. As important as a signing may be, try to exclude all the extra clauses and feeds that you can with as flat a contract as possible.

This prevents a lot of unexpected fees in the long run, helping you to keep on top of your finances. Even if you’re just reducing the amount of money per fee that you pay out, that’s at least a start.

 

Understand Roles and Positions

Generally speaking, people really don’t seem to understand roles all that well in Football Manager. So many players feel that switching someone from a Raumdeuter to a wide target man will drastically change how they play and transform them into world beaters, but that’s just not accurate.

Beyond all the increasingly European-sounding names, the different roles that your player takes up in Football Manager 2021 are just instruction changes. That’s it. There’s no magic cheat code with roles in Football Manager, they just change instructions.

What this means is that you could technically have a central midfielder and then just tell them to get further forward and try riskier balls and they would, technically, become more of an advanced playmaker. Don’t sweat roles, they’re really just quicker ways of changing instructions.

 

Wing-Backs Over Full-Backs

The modern game is obsessed with wing-backs, players who bomb out of defence at every opportunity and basically act as secondary wingers who overlap and know how to get a ball in the box. TAA and Robertson of Liverpool are the dictionary definitions of wing-backs.

What this entails in Football Manager 2021 is nudging your wing-backs to get slightly further up the field, then making your central midfielders more keen on chasing and winning the ball to make up for the attacking focus.

Of course, depending on your squad depth and ability, deploying wing-backs may be a bit of a hard task, but if you don’t mind shipping a few more goals a season, you should notice your xG creep up. Speaking of:

 

Don’t Overlook xG

xG is a new addition to Football Manager 2021 and an increasingly trendy metric in the real life sport as well. But what does it mean? Basically, xG means how many goals you are expected to score from the opportunities you’ve had in a game. The bigger the chance, such as a penalty, the higher the xG will be.

So how do you translate xG to your very own managerial career? Well, if things are going badly but you have a lot of the ball and a tonne of shots, what does your xG suggest? If you have a low xG, it typically means you are being wasteful with the chances you have and that you aren’t doing enough when in possession.

xG is brilliant at helping you figure out if the tiki-taka is working or if you need to be more direct. It should be the main stat you look at going forward in Football Manager — it will almost definitely be here for years to come.

 

Stop Tinkering A Million Times A Game

This is something that Football Manager directly warns you about in Football Manager, but it bears repeating: stop tinkering so much whenever things don’t exactly work out. Players take a while to adjust to new tactics, so if you’re constantly switching things up then they will get pretty confused and end up doing nothing right.

You get a lot of options in Football Manager 2021 when it comes to overall team tactics, individual instructions, opposition instructions, game plans, and much more. However, as tempting as it may be to toggle every option available, you really don’t need to. By doing so, you make your team far too rigidly set out and may make negate what they are so good at it in their traits.

Instead, choose a few select tactics and work from there, adding or removing stuff as the season progresses, not every game and not as a kneejerk reaction. The best possible Football Manager 2021 tip there is? Stop expecting to win every match in a landslide.

Football Manager 2021 is available now for PC.

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