Changing Formation

[Charles Lington]

Hi!

When designing the tactics I always keep one formation and only change the mentality of the roles for my players and team instructions. Rarely, during the match I change formation, mostly when my player receives red card or I defend against much better team in last minutes of the match or try to score desperate goal. Logic behind it is that it takes time for players to learn their role and keeping a sub for specific position seems like waste of player slot.

Is there a merit in designing different formations for different use cases? If I want to play more micromanaging save would there by any reason to do it?

[Captain_Narol]

Usually, I try to have an offensive formation AND a counter-offensive formation, using the second one against teams which are theorically superior (or egal if they receive).

[DeathStroke]

there are pros and cons of both ways of thinking . . . it really depends on what your main formation actually is . Some are balanced enough that a change of mentality, passing , tempo and lines ect is enough to have a solid defensive and offensive tactic without changing the formation , but some arent really suited to doing both. something like a 4-3-3 or 4-5-1 with wingers/ inside forwards ect generally wont be great for a defensive formation as the players in the attacking third are never going to get back enough to be useful in that tactic so youd really need to move them from LW/RW to LM/RM for example. Having a couple formations with slightly different positions means you can more easily change the formation without causing much disruption to the team , but it does take longer for the players to learn and adapt to as they are splitting their focus over a wider range.

personally if my club allows it and im not being forced into a barca/arsenal esq tiki taka style of football i prefer to go with a more balanced formation like a 4-4-2 and just have 3 identical formations but with different instructions and mentalities

[Centipede]

If you don't bother that much with tactics and just fit players in (aka 'system manager') then it's less important.

If you enjoy creating tactics that work around certain key players, say you want to sub your enganche out and bring a wide target man in, you will want to have specially tailored tactics for them. Or if you want to switch from ' asymmetric overload attack on the right so I isolate my left winger' to 'attack on the left to isolate my right winger' depending on your subs then again, different tactics.