Delegating for success in Football Manager 26

To be the most effective boss in FM, you need to be a great delegator. You realistically can’t and won’t want to do everything, so you need to make sure you’ve got the right people around you pick up additional tasks and do them to the best of their abilities. 

You can access your Responsibilities menu in FM26 in a few different ways. You can find it via the Club area of the top navbar, or you can dive in via the new FMPedia tool. Either way, you’ll see which tasks start out under your responsibility and can reassign them based on what you prefer to handle. If you’re happy for your Assistant Manager to take charge of your pre-season friendlies, you can pass it over to them. Likewise, if you’d rather someone else handled the press conferences, you can make sure that happens. 

To delegate effectively, you still need to be aware of what staff roles you need for these tasks and to make sure that you fill all the needed staff positions with the candidates who have the most relevant Attributes.

In some cases, such as when first starting your save and your club's reputation is low, you might not have that many great options. Here, filling the staff positions becomes a long-term project where you upgrade and expand your backroom team over a period of multiple seasons. 

One useful tip here is to check out the available staff at the end of your season, as it’s at this point that many staff contracts expire and a wider pool of candidates is available. The staff search tool is great for this as it really allows you to edit your search parameters for the exact staff you are looking for, including their nationality and tactical preferences.

For example, before delegating all of your scouting to your scouting team, you will need to make sure that you have hired effective Scouts and a Chief Scout to manage them. The Chief Scout is an important role in this because they can be tasked with virtually everything scouting related - from creating scouting assignments to providing opposition analysis reports. Both the Chief Scout and your regular Scouts will need the best ratings in their Judging Potential Ability and Judging Current Ability Attributes.

An alternative to the Chief Scout is your Director of Football, who can be one of your most useful resources when it comes to delegating tasks. 

A good Director of Football can turn negotiating tough contracts for your players into a breeze. Just make sure that their Judging Player Ability and Judging Potential Ability Attributes are matched by equally good Negotiating.

Your Director of Football can tackle staff contract negotiation as well, but if you’ve got the budget available to you, a strong Technical Director can be a great help here. They are experts in staff recruitment, so with good Negotiating and Judging Staff Ability relations, they can ensure that your first team and youth sides are always backed by the strongest backroom teams.

When it comes to delegating your responsibilities though, you can go in whatever direction you choose and sometimes the options available to you may surprise you. 

For example, it might well be that one of your coaches or Assistant Manager has the strongest Set Pieces and Tactical Knowledge Attributes, which means they’re best set to manage your Set Piece routines. 

FM26 presents all of your delegation options in clear straightforward manner to ensure it's as easy to understand as possible.

And why don't you let us know which staff helped you manage your club the most by posting on our social channels @FootballManager. Happy managing!