Tips

The English Football League (EFL) is one of the UK’s best breeding grounds for talented young footballers. EFL clubs are typically keen to give academy prospects first-team opportunities earlier than those in the top-flight, allowing them to gain valuable experience and accelerate their development. 

Many of those EFL young stars will be popular transfer targets in Football Manager 2023. Here, we’ve worked with our Research team to produce a definitive list of the best.

In the current climate, it seems like debt and football go hand in hand. Whether it’s top-flight teams splashing the cash or a lower-league team desperate to stay afloat, many clubs are in a difficult place financially.

If you take over a team in debt in Football Manager 2023, don’t panic or throw the save aside and pick another club. Tackling that debt creates another fun challenge, one faced by many real-life clubs. 

Matthew Hallsworth provides eight top tips on how to manage a club in debt without having to sell all your best players.

When a Football Manager career isn’t going well, it’s natural to want something or someone to blame. From suggestions that the game is scripted to theories that the AI always gets better cup draws, we’ve seen pretty much everything over the years on our forums and social media.

While we appreciate your feelings, these beliefs are invariably just misconceptions about the way the game works. Football Manager is, and has always been, a complex game where thousands of decisions take place in every game and individual results, or a run of bad injuries, are almost never caused by a single factor. Here, we aim to dispel 10 of the most common Football Manager misconceptions.
 

The Target Forward is one of FM22’s most specific roles. Almost like no other role in the game, a player’s suitability for it is largely determined by their Physical Attributes. This can make building tactics around the role a bit hit and miss but if you find a well-suited player and a system that gets the most out of their unique skillset, playing with a good Target Forward feels almost like using a cheat code. Ihor Crusadertsar explains how you can create a tactic to maximise Target Forwards in FM22.

Promotion is one of the biggest highs you can experience when playing Football Manager. We’ve all been there, though, when you think a season is going swimmingly and you’re dreaming of challenging the clubs in the division above before your team’s results suddenly fall off and you’re left thinking about what might have been. Here are five tips to help you convert a good start into a successful, promotion-winning campaign.

Attacking transitions are a core element of most styles of play but particularly counter-attacking football. Arguably, any successful tactic needs to have potent, well-thought-out attacking transitions. Ihor Crusadertsar explains how you can create more effective transitions in FM22.

Imagine the following scenario. You’ve started a new FM22 career. During pre-season things went well, and now you’re looking to build on that for the season ahead. You’ve got to know the players, you know who you can count on and who needs a bit of help, you made your new signings, you’ve worked to get them settled and… it all starts going terribly wrong. Results are bad, but that’s not the worst part. The problem is you’re playing horribly; you can hardly keep goals out and your players seem to have lost all their footballing ability. At this rate, you’re going to get the sack rather than any Manager of the Month awards.

Sound familiar? I’m sure it does because we’ve all been there. Worry not, for help is at hand. You’re probably in need of a tactical overhaul and Rock’s End FM is on hand to show you how it’s done.

We’ve all faced that moment in a Football Manager career when it seems that everything is against you. If you’ve tried all you can think of and there still seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel, you might need to make some tactical adjustments. It’s never too late to salvage the remainder of your season and Rock’s End FM explores some of the tools at your disposal.

In two previous pieces, we touched upon the attacking and defensive insights you can take from Football Manager 2022’s brand-new Data Hub.

As Football Manager players, we usually put a lot of thought into our tactical approach. Not just the formation, player roles and instructions, but also how and when to press the opponent (enhanced by FM22’s overhauled pressing system), if we should pass short or long and if certain roles should principally Defend, Support or Attack. It’s a beautiful thing when you are winning but it can be a nightmarish puzzle to solve when results aren’t going your way. 

The rapid rise in popularity of analytics in football is now reflected in-game through a variety of useful visualisations in the Hub. You can maximise this feature to give you deeper insight into how your team are playing in every phase of play and part of the pitch. This insight can help you not only identify gaps in your team’s performances, but subsequently identify who might be a good transfer target to come in and fill those gaps in your squad.

In this third part of his series, FM Stag explores how you can leverage the Data Hub to identify appropriate scouting targets from within your division to address potential tactical problems.

The Central Midfielder (Attack) has been getting a lot of love from our community this year and that’s no surprise. It’s an industrious, versatile midfield role that adds another strong goalscoring threat to your starting lineup. Here we’ll show you how to build a successful team around that specific role in FM22. 

There's arguably no position more important in football than central midfield. It's extremely tough to win matches without controlling the middle of the pitch; therefore, it's imperative that your midfielders perform the correct duties to suit your tactic and dominate the opposition. 

A common way to do that is with the 'double pivot', a term used to describe two central players who sit at the base of the midfield to offer protection for the defence. Choosing the right roles to use in your double pivot will depend on what you want them to achieve, but there are several ways to use them successfully. On The Break FM explains how to get the most from a double pivot in FM22. 

When Football Manager’s "In The Studio" feature showcase was released, something ‘Mr Transfer Deadline Day’ himself, Fabrizio Romano, said was quite striking: "Sometimes players are untouchable in June and on Deadline Day they're available on loan". 

Until now, common Football Manager wisdom said that you do your business early. Sign pre-contracts in January, make some smart deals that look like bargains in June and watch the world go crazy as the window draws to a close. That’s all changed now though, with Football Manager 2022's new Deadline Day feature opening up new possibilities. 

Whilst there are still benefits to be gained from moving quickly in the market, Rock’s End FM explains the advantages of getting your last business done as the final hours tick down.