A bit of FM rant

[ulaire]

There is one thing that we completely lack in Football Manager with all it abundance of tactics and that's a defensive role for central attacking midfielder position. I know that this idea sound stupid, but think about it - central defensive midfielder and central midfielders have all roles that can be. Segundo volante for example is a pretty narrow role, that makes you play two or three defensive midfielders, but it's an attacking role. You also have regista, ball winning midfielder on support, roaming playmaker if you want your defensive midfielders to take part in attack and be more universal. Even center back position has libero, than can go on attack duties. Forward position has pressing forward with defense duties. But attacking midfielder roles are all either support and attack and half of them do next to nothing on defense, like trequartista or enganche. A role for harrasing central and defensive midfielders, putting more pressure on them, dropping deeper to get the ball and recycling possession would do just fine. You can say that we have central midfielders for that, but why not, Football Manager has a ton of roles that overlap and duplicate each other. Will it be a narrow role? Probably, but we have raumdeuter or whatever it's called, and I'm still not sure what it does. Adding a bit more tactical depth will always be fine for me.

[Sermokala]

I get what you're saying and believe me I do want that role of an advanced ball-winning midfielder or a withdrawn pressing forward. But I don't think it would acomplish what we want it to do.

The best thing about double AMC formations is how clogged it makes the other teams area as it attempts to mantain posession and find ways to break the press. Then it inherently delivers bodies into the box when a cross comes in.

I think what we want with that forward presser is a pressing forward though. You don't press sucsessfully by making those sexy pickpockets that lead to goals you press sucsessfully by disrupting posession and forcing turnovers. Putting pressure on the ball holder to where they cannot just pass the ball off to another team mate on the ground but isntead boots it up into the air over the people pressing them to someone else. I don't think this should be seen as a failure. there will be times that you will lose that aieral ball but the fact that you have such a valuable opertunity to transision or to just gain posession is great.

I've been looking at passing heatmaps in fm recently (the new update has changed a lot but not the fundementals) and I keep seeing just a ton of posession by centerbacks and fullbacks and not nearly as much from any sort of midfielders. I think #teampressing needs to realize that we should be looking to the brenden arronson types for our pressing needs instead of adding another nogolo kante wanabe and thinking that its going to turn into goals.

My next player in SSL is going to be a pressing forward. I'm going to try and retrain a workrate monster in FM23 to a striker and see if it works the way we both I think want an defensive AMC to look like.