Football Manager 2016 How to Play - Introductory Guide - In this Guide we explain how to play at your best in Football Manager 2016 : for newbies or for those who want a quick review, here are the steps to do as soon as the game is on: on what to concentrate and how to proceed in managing the team to get the most out of it.
Introduction
Football Manager 2016 is a complex game, understanding all the mechanisms requires time and patience and, as it is logical that it is, beginners can be surprised by the amount of things to do. This guide is aimed precisely at these aspiring coaches, our aim is to help you get started by explaining some basic concepts that will be useful not only in your first weeks as a manager, but throughout your career.
The first steps
After creating your profile, selecting your database settings and choosing your team you will find yourself in a screen called "Game Style" where you can assign various skill points and define the past of your virtual alter ego. You will have great freedom and you can create a manager who shares one hundred percent your football creed. Points can be awarded in various categories grouped into two main sets:
- Quality: attack, defense, fitness, goalkeepers, tactics, psychology, youth work and technique
- Mental qualities: adaptability, determination, player knowledge, youth knowledge, locker room management, discipline level and motivation.
As mentioned above you will also have the opportunity to define the past of your manager choosing whether to control a former amateur or, perhaps, a former footballer of international renown. You can also determine your level of technical preparation by choosing which license you have achieved: by selecting a manager with a high level license or a great player experience you can award many more skill points. There will also be a convenient option that will allow you to automatically assign points so you don't have problems with the selected team and our advice, for your first game, is to leave it to artificial intelligence.
At this point you will be in the main game screen, from here you can manage practically every aspect of your team. Initially you will receive a message from your club in which you will be invited to meet president and assistant coach, we recommend you to accept because these conversations will allow you to understand more about the club and possibly delegate some tasks.
On the left side of your screen you will find a useful bar that will allow you to consult some extremely useful tabs. As said the first thing to do is to talk to the president and the coach in second, the latter will propose a report on the team that you should read carefully. Here, in fact, you will find a lot of useful information about the value of the players, the recommended tactics and you can get a first idea of what are the basic elements of the team and what are the redundancies.
We recommend you also accept the proposals for meetings with the staff (every two weeks, at least initially) and the training match: it will be a great way to get on the field and understand how to move around the game.
The meetings with the staff are very useful, your men will give you suggestions of various kinds and, for an inexperienced player, they will be a real lifeline.
At this point, after talking to the president, the assistant coach and listening to the advice of the staff, we recommend that you select the tactics item from the bar on the left and set your first basic training. All you have to do is drag the players to the position you want them to occupy on the pitch or, alternatively, you can also select them from a convenient drop-down menu. We advise you to do this as soon as possible, choosing a basic formation immediately (perhaps listening to the advice of the staff and reading the team report) you will understand which men to bet on and you will be able to have a clearer picture of your weaknesses to act, later, in the market.
Training and Staff
Once this is done it will be a great time to enter the training screen (always through the bar on the left): here, after selecting the "team" item, you will be able to set the general training goals or those for a few weeks and determine the intensity with which the players will train. FM 16 also allows you to work with each individual player by assigning a personalized program, to do this you simply select the "individual" item.
Choosing the staff item from the bar on the left you will reach a useful screen where you will find all the information about your assistants that, for the occasion, will be divided into three main groups: trainers, observers and medical team. Initially we advise you to take into account the advice of management, the data here will be very useful to understand whether it is appropriate to hire or fire staff.
Through the item "responsibility" you will have the possibility to delegate tasks to other staff members, but let's make things clear: nothing prevents a beginner to manage training sessions, youth teams, contracts, transfers ... Of course, controlling everything will be much more difficult but, after all, that's the beauty of Football Manager. The choice of tasks to be performed or delegated is therefore absolutely personal and depends only on you.
Selecting "staff search", instead, you can hire a new employee but, at least initially, we do not recommend you to do too many operations in this sense.
Observers are very important in FM 16 and, by selecting the item dedicated to them in the bar on the left, reach a very useful screen through which you can search for players for your team. The database of the game is immense and we strongly recommend you to use the filters to narrow the field: to do so you will have to select the arrow next to the item "quick search". Filter after filter (you will have many filters available) you will find the perfect player for you, it will not be an easy operation but we assure you that it will be worth it.
Conclusion
This is the basic information to start from but it will take a long time to really get familiar with all the tools: FM 16 is a game full of things to do, choices to make and details to take care of. At this point we just have to wish you good luck with your career as a manager!
