I could've started fresh, elbowed my way into a new team to fuck up in more interesting ways, but I decided I needed penance. The job market is tough for an ex-Sunday league footballer with six months of management and an unceremonious sacking on his CV. With morale for my entire team 'very poor', I went on a sixgame losing streak, the longest in Leicester's history. I started lashing out wildly, fining players for getting yellow cards and screaming at them in the dressing room. With so many variables, I got disheartened and flitted between concepts faster than my players could adapt to them. The only direct feedback is victory, a very specific event that – if read wrong – could cement a bad tactic. Against narrow teams, I flipped my game to play wider and still lost against high tempo gangs I went for a containing philosophy, to frustrate opponents into knackering themselves. The natural reaction is to head into the team instructions tab and jiggle the gauges.

Prior to and during a match, you're offered single-sentence snippets of advice: “Cardiff don't do well against 4-5-1 formations,” or “Aston Villa do well against high tempo teams”. Adding these agents adds a touch of realism to proceedings, but the general overhaul of the transfer system is a bigger update, managers now getting responses from prodded players with comforting speed and believable pay demands.įM 2011 doesn't do a good job of explaining how a problem can be fixed. My few successes came in the transfer market – FM 2011's new agents are set up with their own traits, but all those I dealt with seemed to be easily bypassed by the simple act of asking what they wanted for their client's services, knocking the wage slider down a few notches, then pressuring for a deal.

I started losing, and morale slipped as I sent my assistant to deal with the press. Bruno had identified an endemic problem, and my next few weeks were spotted with players complaining about discipline issues. It was the beginning of the end for my Leicester squad.

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