In Football Manager, we can identify 4 attributes that define a good Captain: Influence, Determination, Work Rate and Team Work.

Influence

Influence is the player’s ability to affect events or other players without any intentional effort. Players with high influence will be leaders on the pitch and team-mates will tend to rally around these players.

In my opinion, this is the most important of those 4 attributes. A player with high influence (18 or more) can be considered a natural leader, an example for his teammates.

Determination

High determination can be understood as a commitment to succeed. A determined player will give everything in order to win. As you can see, any good captain needs determination.

Work Rate

This reflects the player’s mental drive to work hard. A high rating will ensure a player wants to work his socks off from start to finish, but he will need the necessary physical attributes to actually be able to pull it off. Nonetheless, it is an admirable trait to have in your team.

Team Work

How well the player follows tactical instructions and works for and alongside his team-mates. A team full of players with a high rating here will work better as a unit. Players with lower ratings will slack off and not ‘buy in’ to the team ethos. You can guess that your captain needs to work well with his partners, so high team work is a requisite.

Examples of great Captains

In both Football Manager and real world soccer, you can identify John Terry, Steven Gerrard and Fabio Cannavaro as top class captains.

This was a guest article written by Ruderic To read more of Ruderic’s Football Manager stuff checkout Football Manager Debot.

The main use I give to my scouts is the search for young promising players, also known as wonderkids. That is what I need several scouts with different areas of knowledge. I usually have 4 or 5 of them traveling around the globe looking for hot prospects.

Also, I usually get report cards from them before signing a new player. That way, I can read more things about the players, like their personality and if they are likely to adapt fast to my team.

Scout Attributes

When it comes to hire new scouts, you have to pay special attention to 2 key attributes, Judging Player Potential and Judging Player Ability. As you can guess, they indicate how good he is to judge player’s ability and potential.

However, those 2 attributes are not the only ones you have to pay attention to. A good scout also needs high mental ones, like Determination and Adaptability. A scout with good adaptability will aquire faster knowledge about an unknown country.

Recommended Scouts

The scouts I am posting here can be signed for free. If you are managing a small club, maybe they will not accept a contract from you. Feel free to leave a comment indicating wich scout has done a good job in your game.

• Oliver Bierhoff
• Andrea Pastorello
• Paolo Berrettini
• Txema Noriega
• Ed van Stijn
• Vlada Stosic
• Horst-Dietter Hottges
• Joop Lensen

This was a guest article written by Ruderic To read more of Ruderic’s Football Manager stuff checkout Football Manager Debot.

Use this schedule and you can be pretty sure you’ll see an increase in a number of stats for your squad even after just the one season.

There are individual schedules for:

• Goalkeepers
• Full Backs
• Centre Backs
• Defensive Midfielders
• Wingers
• Attack Midfielders
• Strikers

As always I’d love to know your thoughts and how it has worked out for you.

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Football Manager - Ultimate Training Schedule (19081)
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It essentially revolves around a short quick passing game and pressing the opposition to force errors.

The basic formation is a 4-2-3-1 like this:

Player Attributes

FB – Normal full back stats. Bonus attributes are first touch & passing
CB – Normal centre back stats. Bonus acceleration & pace
DMC – These are the main boys in the team so make sure you have some good players. You really want for these boys good passing, first touch, stamina, teamwork & tackling. Bonus would be concentration & positioning.
WG – What you’d expect dribbling, pace & crossing.
AC – Key really but think creativity, pace, passing & finishing.
ST – He will be your lone big dog up front so think heading, finishing, team work, acceleration & composure.

Team Instructions

So that’s about it. Feel free to ask questions and let me know how you get on.

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I just thought I’d share share a couple of the things that I do that get some decent results.

• Set though balls to often for all players.
• Increase the amount of players making forward runs.
• Set team mentality to ‘all out attack’.
• Up all mentalities by a few clicks.
• Move creativity three quarters of the way to the top NOT right to the top. That gets too messy.
• Set tempo to fast.

If you get the goal you are after make sure you revert back to your original tactics because you’ll leave yourself way open at the back.

Starting with the member of your coaching team I find most important, is the assistant manager. Your assistant manager will know the squad better than any other member of the coaching team and is also vital for finding out important information. Requesting a team report early on (after the one automatically given to you), will find out areas of the team that need cover, improvement and strengthening. You assistant can also offer advice on who they believe you should sign to improve certain areas of your squad. For example, early on in my campaign as Q.P.R boss, my assistant Tim Flowers advised I sign Kevin Doyle from Reading, and he went on to be my leading goalscorer for three seasons in a row (including my first in the Premiership). Try and keep the assistant you start with, but if for some reason you lose them (Tim Flowers was mine for two seasons before being offered the Managers job at Leicester), then make sure you sign the right man for the job. You have to look for an assistant who has attributes that match yourself. For example, if you like to play attacking football, make sure your assistant has a good attacking attribute. Remember, in most cases, people will ask their assistant to give team talks and occasionally pick the team, so they have know what they’re doing. High attributes in ‘Judging Player Ability’, ‘Motivating’ and ‘Tactical Knowledge’ will make sure your assistant can step in for you when needed and do a good job. As the game goes on, your assistant will most likely become a favorite amongst fans and players quicker than you will, which is a good thing because whenever you need to call on them to help, you know they’ll do a stand up job. In past games, my assistant has been liked so much that he usually gets offered my old job when I leave for another team, but they usually always end up joining me again as my assistant at the new club.

1st Team coaches are also important, and I usually find that most teams you take over will either have no 1st team coaches, or just the one. What I like to do is look through my clubs favorite staff/icons/legends and see if any of them are now coaches so I can bring them in as my 1st team coach. This works well as players and fans alike are happy that a club favorite has returned. If you already have a club favorite in your coaching staff, then try offering them a new contract with a promotion to 1st team coach. Good attributes for a first team coach include the style of play you like to play i.e. attacking or defending and ‘Technical’, as they will be working with the team that you will be judged on.

Coaches should already be in place at your team and shouldn’t be worried about too much until further in the game. Having a good coaching team will help your training and a good balance across your first team/youth team and goalkeepers is essential. I always try and sign club favorites and former players of mine as coaches as the game goes on. This is usually because I still have players and staff members at the club who are listed as favored personnel so can be good for moral. This is exactly the same for youth coaches, goalkeeping coaches, physio’s and scouts.

All the previous information was for when you are starting off at a new club at the very beginning of the game. If during the game, you move to a new club, then depending on your status on the game and how long you were at your previous club should determine what you do next.

If you have a world class reputation and won many honors with your previous club, then when you join your new club, always try and take across your old staff. As you may have seen throughout the game via tips, staff at clubs you take over will always agree to a mutual termination of contract, so take advantage of this and save some money, whilst also bringing your old team in. I recommend keeping one or two of the old staff at the new club, as they may be a favorite for some players so them leaving could have a negative effect. Check this out before you start releasing staff from contracts.

If you were fired, or don’t have a high reputation, then the best idea would be keeping all the staff at your new job, as they will be able to give you the same help/guidance/information as you get when you start off at the beginning of the game. Only when you are quite well respected, will you be bigger than the staff at a squad and be able to bring over all your own without having too much of negative response from players.

What do you think?

This was a guest article written by James Mertz so be sure to let him know what you think!

I’ll get things started for us:

Name: Samuel Pietre
Position: AMR
Club: None
Age: 24
Value: Free

Name: Denes Rosa
Position: AMLC
Club: Wolves
Age: 31
Value: 24k

Name: Michael Gray
Position: D/WBL
Club: Wolves
Age: 34
Value: 100k

Name: Marvin Andrews
Position: CB
Club: None
Age: 32
Value: Free

Name: Jean-Joel Perrier Doumbe
Position: Right/Left Wing Back
Club: Celtic
Age:29
Value:10k to 100k

Name:Pena
Position: D/WBL
Club: Albacete
Age: 24
Value: Free

Have you got any to add? Lets see them!

Once again it’s a simple comment to win competition which gives everybody who isn’t as gifted with words as good a chance as somebody who is to win.  Although I want this one to provide worthwhile information to the thousands of daily visitors to thefootymanager.com so it will take just a little thought.

So what do I do

All you have to do to have a chance of winning is tell us who you think the most underrated players in Football Manager 2009 are in the comment box at the bottom of the page. The more information the better because it helps people looking for potential bargain buys although if you just want to drop a name in then that works just as well.

What can I win?

Well the lovely people at Sports Interactive (SI) have provided us with 3 packs of Limited Edition Football Manager Top Trumps so that is one pack for three lucky people.

I’m not a user of Top Trumps myself but I have flicked through a pack of them and they look very cool and I have looked on Google and can’t see where you can buy them so they do indeed look very limited.

When Can I enter?

Now, get posting in the comments below and I look forward to seeing what you guys have to say.

Participants can post comments until the 17th of January 2009. The comments will be closed on the 18th of January at 00:01 GMT.

In FM08 I choose to manage  England, Chelsea and Newcastle. I like many others I love signing English wonderkids (which is crucial if you’re managing England as a country) however it seems like most of the good wonderkids in FM09 are from other countries so here is a list of some of the player who have impressed me so far on FM09 and were great on FM08;

Players who are top four Premier League standard

• Billy Sharp – Sheffield United
• Ryan Taylor – Wigan
• Steven Taylor -Newcastle
• Curtis Davies – Aston Villa
• Scott Flinders- Crystal Palace
• Leighton Baines – Everton
• Giles Barnes – Derby
• Nedum Onuoha – Man City

Players who I would consider good enough to play for England

• Joe Mattock – Leicester
• Michael woods – Chelsea
• Michael Johnson – Man City
• Adam Johnson – Middlesbrough
• Victor Moses- Crystal Palace
• Paul Anderson – Nottingham City
• Scott Sinclair – Chelsea
• Matt Derbyshire -Blackburn
• Chris Taylor – Oldham

These are all of the players that I have found and would consider as wonderkids if you have any other suggestions excluding all of the obvious ones  then please comment .

There are two different versions of the demo available for PC and MAC, a ‘strawberry’ and ‘vanilla’ version, with both providing half a season of gameplay. The saved games from the demo will be compatible with the full release of the game.

Vanilla Version

The vanilla version of the demo is English language only, and features the English and Scottish leagues, with no player photos or logos in order to reduce the size of the download.

Strawberry Version