TM Ireland - Trophymanager Ireland

One of the most successful managers in the game, Crimson Kings has won the Israeli Cup once and Israeli league 3 times. But he truly reached the heights of the game when his team took the UETA Champions Cup in Season 12.

In Season 13 he ran a very popular Question and Answer session on the forum that provided some very interesting insight into all aspects of the game.

Here’s a summary of that discussion here. You can read the full thread here:

Line-Up

When choosing your line-up try to respond to your opponent’s weaknesses and strengths. Of course, your line-up has to fit your own player strengths as well. So if you don’t have 3 great forwards right now, you should not play 3-4-3 even if it’s theoretically the best line-up against your rival.

However, that being said, I sometimes do not change formations for quite a while. This is because:

• Some rivals are quite weak and need no adjusting to
• I have achieved a balanced line-up and strategy that works against almost any other line-up. So I don’t often I need to change. It’s very hard to have a line-up that works against almost anything, but with Ben-Dor I can afford a very strong defence and possession with 4-1-4-1, without totally sacrificing my attack. Still, adjustments are sometimes made.

Player selection depends on the opponent. For example, a player with shooting and heading 20, str pac sta tec pos 10, would struggle against a good defence and won’t be able to score because he won't get many chances. Against a physically weak defence, he will do very well. So I will say generally get enough shooting and heading for forwards to not miss the goal (Regardless of goalie and defender quality), get enough passing and technique and crossing for midfielders and wingers to be able to deliver a pass to target, regardless of the defenders' qualities.

That's a minimum. Then, try to have both enough positioning, technique and physical qualities to overcome the defenders and shooting and heading good enough to beat the keeper.

Equally in defence: if attackers against me are 13 in all skills, my defenders are 19 in all defensive skills but low passing, I would agree to take 17 in all defensive skills defenders for more passing. But if my defenders were 13 in defensive qualities just like the rival, I would not. It depends by how much my chances to block the rival decline when I get more passing, which is very useful to create chances and to play direct.

Work rate and positioning is important for all. Technique is critical for forwards and midfielders and wingers, although not very important for defenders. However it is somewhat important for wingbacks, especially if you play ‘Attack on Wings’ alot.

Choosing the best tactical formation is one of many keys to victory over your opponent. However there are more important things, such as having a great goalkeeper - the most important player on the field. And strategy is very important as well. If you don’t have enough strikers to play 3-4-3, it won’t help you to realize 3-4-3 is ideal against your opponent. Strategy is having the 3 strikers before you desperately need them.

One or Two Upfront?

If you are considering playing one FC of good quality over one good FC with one mediocre FC, the solo FC may for argument’s sake be better in the sense that he can score with both finishing and heading. One FC will be worse because as the only FC, his skills are penalized. This can be fixed to a degree with mentality adjustments but that punishes your defence. One FC is not going to get all the chances two FC's have together. Some of the chances will move to the midfielders instead, because TM has a system of distributing chances according to who is close to the enemy's goal, not purely by position. It’s not that forwards always get, say, 50% of chances, regardless of how many forwards there are. So if your midfielders, omc, oml, omr don’t have quality finishing and heading as well, playing one forward may not be a good idea - chances will move from the bad heading forward you gave up to the bad heading midfielders.

In most cases, with quality finishing abilities in the midfield, I would go with one forward only instead of using 2 forwards, if one is not effective.

Luck

Luck is important, especially in the national cup. You can neutralize it to some extent. Cards and injuries are very dependent on luck, but if you have a wide selection of players you are less sensitive to cards and injuries, and therefore to luck as well. But in the league and international cups, luck is not too large a factor (although you must have some). Just see who won the CC in the past and think whether they deserved it. Maybe other teams deserved it as much, but I don’t remember a clearly inferior team winning.

Tactics

When considering a change in tactic to exploit a team’s weakness, you will need to decide what effect is likely to be stronger. For example, if your team is performing better using "wings" and your opponent appears to struggle against shortpassing, the upside to moving to shortpassing is that your opponent has difficulties against it. The downside is that your team is more suited to wings.

Shortpassing chances are more common than other chances for most teams. It does not necessarily mean your opponent is weak against it. Especially beware the possibility that the teams who played him last were very well suited to short passing, as opposed to him being badly suited to counter it.

When electing to play ‘Direct’ the players in your half of the field need passing and pace. Others too, to a certain extent. You want to use a formation with many players in your part of the field, simply because they have more chances to start direct attacks. You want your opponent's players to be in your half of the field alot for chances to start direct attacks.

Certain formations tend to create certain types of opportunities. Look at the chart in the manual showing what positions create what attacks. You will see for example that only omr, omr, mr, ml, dmr, dml, dr, dl may create wing attacks at all.

User Guide

So, if you play 3-5-2 with only 2 players on the wing, you will have much less wing attacks than when playing 3-3-3-1 with 6 players on the wing, other things equal. Playing "on wings" won’t help much because all it does is increase the % of wing attacks (as opposed to other attacks) created by players who CAN create wing attacks at all. So, count the number of players on your wings and the enemy wings, it is very important. The same principles with somewhat lesser import apply to the other types of attacks.

Zone Defence?

Whether there is a zonal defence concept in TM is open to conjecture. If only man to man marking matters, as seems to be hinted by the manual, then adding a dmr to a dr will simply reduce the number of chances the dr has to block and transfer the reduced chances to the dmr. If the dmr is weaker than the dr defensively, then you will be worse off, not better off, all other things (like mentality) equal. TM really emphasizes the one to one match-up in the manual.

However, there is inconsistency with some other things. For example when choosing formation. In the 3-3-3-1 formation it is said that attacking on wings against a 3-3-3-1 is "suicide". This strongly suggests a zonal defence element: many defenders on the wing reinforce each other.

This is really a question for the developers I have myself. If there is a zonal element, it should be in the manual. If not, then why is it suicide to attack on wings against a 3-3-3-1? It's not consistent and not clear to me.

Mentality

A more attacking mentality increases the chance to score and the chance to allow goals. While the developers have not yet stated how it works exactly, my assumption is that it works using a penalty to defenders and bonus to attackers.

This means that you need to compare your attack to the opponent defence and your defence to his attack (and don’t neglect the midfield either). I'll give a couple illustrative examples:

1. Your defenders have 20 in defensive skills, attackers have 12 in attacking skills. his defenders have 14 in defensive skills, his attackers have 5 in attacking skills. In such a case, he is not likely to score even if you play very offensively. Offensive mentality will help you score, and win, instead of good chance of drawing 0-0 otherwise.

2. You need a win. A draw won’t do, a win will make you champion: play offensively. The probability for both a win and a loss will probably increase, but you only care about the probability to win.

Do not forget defensive skills in the midfield contribute to possession. Playing offensively may hurt your possession.

Match Engine

Possession determines the number of "potential chances". Once a "potential chance" is assigned to a team, the skill of the chance creator (usually winger or midfielder), skill of the defender (when applicable) and skill of the player trying to receive the ball is then used to determine whether the pass gets to another player. Then, the skill of the receiving player (if he received the ball) and the skill of the defender (when applicable) is used to see if he manages to shoot. If I remember correctly from my experience, there is only one defender - a player will be challenged only once. If there is a shot, the quality of the finishing skill and the quality of the chance are used to check whether it is on target. If it's on target, the quality of shot and the quality of keeper are compared to check whether it's a goal.

The quality of the chance is based on his "getting into position" skills, like positioning, pace, strength, etc and also on the quality of the defensive effort that just occured as well as keeper position and the pressure he puts on the player.

In my opinion, positioning is key. Although there's no simple formula, as the "get into a good spot" skills are compared to defender skills.

Do not forget mentality, as it’s an important factor in how many shots are on goal.

Captaincy

Select your captain based on his professionalism, experience and leadership. I admit I don’t know the order of importance. I know how to find it by doing systematic research, but I never needed to because Siwiak has high marks in all three.

If you play a friend many times with the same line-ups, but changing captains you could isolate what's important. Personally I think that's too time consuming, and that the manual should be more detailed about what's required for a captain. Why, and how does it help the team.

Youths

To find a hidden gem, the key is to scout a player less likely to be scouted by many others but still likely to be talented.

If a player has 10,000 ASI at age 18, he will be scouted by many. If he has 300 ASI but you have other indications he may be talented then scouting it may result in you finding a hidden gem.

Example for an indication of talent: Player owner has level 10 youth squad and is in bad financial situation (otherwise it’s less likely he would sell a real talent).

Another example: player with low grades in his main stats which you think will still develop correctly. I bought Siwiak for only 140k because his marking was 6 at the time of the purchase. But I had reasons to believe I could get it to a satisfactory level - he had a lot of tactical talent left in him according to the scout, and little physical and technical talent left. So it was clear most of his remaining training (which was considerable) would go to defensive stats.

There are a number of strategies in developing youth:

Train players you buy: high academy level, no youth squad. The higher academy level the better, especially if you have money to buy great trainees - you don’t want to waste their talent.

Train your own players: high academy and training ground. High academy essential to have talent, high training ground essential to not waste your talents - as many will bloom before 18, and by the time they are 18 and can be sold, they will be ruined if you have a low training ground level. Sophisticated buyers will find about this waste of talent and will pay much less for your players.

Train your own players and some foreign talent: need both high academy and high training ground as in above. Better choice in my opinion, because training is profitable, and training only your own talents will leave you with many empty training slots out of the 60 you actually have - a waste of potential earnings.

For a new player in the game, training players you buy may be practical. Never do high academy without high training grounds, its useless.

According to the Devs, pre draft bloom is done with maximum efficiency, as if you had a 10 training ground. You get much more asi with better training ground, because asi is strongly convex in skills. 10% more skill = double asi or so. And you definitely can get 10% more skill with better training ground.

Scouts

I search for scouts all the time. I go for youth as I buy many young trainees, for development, and for psychology. I ask them all to be 15+ in my search. The tactical / technical / physical scouting is also useful but it comes second after the above, in my opinion.

I regard high senior skill on scouts as a waste. With seniors, you pretty much know what you're buying. Psychology is the only skill needed for them unless you are in the habit of buying late bloomer trainees who are blooming at 22-23 or so. Then a senior skill would be useful. But I think that’s not that common and I wouldn't plan to buy many trainees of this sort. People who stuck to late bloomers and kept them in the team until 21-22 or so aren't very likely to suddenly sell them then, after they’ve waited so long. So supply should be very limited. Of course, it doesn't hurt to try. I prefer 18 year olds, simply because I want to train them my way and shape them the way I want to.

Training

It’s important to adjust the training to what's happening with player development. And I believe in balanced training. So I'll never train, say, a striker in heading and when its 20 switch to finishing. Instead, I'll switch all the time and keep the important skills approximately equal.

Balanced training is good because it allows you to make changes to accommodate surprises. Example: you have a striker with 10 finishing and 10 heading. He has 2 seasons of bloom left. You want to divide training 50% shooting and 50% headers. You train headers for a season then shooting for a season.

Result: you cannot increase the shooting training time to more than 50% if needed. By the time you see finishing isn’t going up as quickly as expected (it can happen because of the 75% random factor in training) it's too late to do anything.

On the other hand, if you train 2 weeks headers then 2 weeks finishing for the two seasons, it’s much easier for you to change your mix to emphasize more one of the skills.

In addition, training to level 15 is much faster than training after 15. Since skills like heading and finishing have almost the same importance to forwards, it’s a waste to train above 15 in one main skill when you don’t even know yet that you could bring the other one to 15. You may end up with 16 finishing and 12 heading when you could have 15 and 14 instead, as after 15, the training penalty is 50%.

An extremely important tip: when developing forwards, train heading before finishing (but not up to 20, keep it balanced to a degree like I discussed before).

Between 16 and 18 you get a lot of physical training even if you don’t want it, it’s automatic and in ADDITION to the physical training you will get as part of the 75% random part of training. If you don’t train heading then, there's a good chance by age 19 the player physical talent will be exhausted = no good heading = dead striker.

I've made many good strikers, and I’ve seen scores of useless ones without heading, because of that mistake a lot of people make. Some great managers do it as well.

If training a winger, you may choose to train pace first, for the same reason I train heading first for forwards. For a forward I wouldn’t train pace first unless heading is already quite high naturally or if he was pulled with poor pace - because he will get alot of pace training automatically.

Buying Players to Train

Who should you buy for training if your team does not have any preference based on a position you need urgently?

DC

DC/DL

DMC/MC

DR/DMR

FC/OML

I would go for the fc/oml. The reason I would do so is because the skills used by an FC and an OML are quite different. Why does it help me? Because I only control 25% of training.

When you buy an fc/oml, you know your chance of getting a quality player is doubled. If he develops mostly in midfield skills - great! If he develops mostly in finishing skills - great too!

Such strategy greatly reduces the number of good talents bought, only to be sold at a loss later, after they didn’t develop the way they should have.

Training Players for Sale

When training players for later sale, you need to recognize search criteria and thresholds. Many people will look for an mc with 15+ passing and 15+ technique. No one will look for a 14+.

The price of such an mc can be MUCH more than the price of an mc with 15 passing and 14 technique, because it will not be searched by many people. These are just examples, 10 works as well.

Try to train to 15+ in the main skills, 10+ in useful secondaries. The more thresholds you hit the better for you.

Suppose you have 5 players. They are very young. They seem to have the same talent. All have 7 in all their skills. They will sell for the same price.

Coaches

I have 5 coaches, and you cannot keep more as far as I know. My coaches can handle well any training type in the game. However, there are ways to save money on coaches. For example, you could focus on training keepers and have a great keeper coach, then 1 great field coach for your youths that can train a skill each player needs. Or you could sell your youths at 18 and only buy mature field players instead. They only need 3 high skills each.

But know that the very top players are very hard to come by, they don’t get sold often. So if you can afford it you better have 5 coaches if you want to be at the very top. Otherwise, you can definitely save on coaches. I see no reason why you can’t have 2 limited coaches and still train well and get to the first division.

TM is a very rich game. You should think about everything you do. Everything.

Crimson Kings