YMMV / Football Manager

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • A simple 442 formation (target man, speedy forward, 2 wingers, central attacking midfielder, central defensive midfielder, left & right fullbacks, 2 central defenders and a shot stopping goalkeeper) has always been good enough to win trophies with a decent squad of players.
  • The 4231 formation that became popular in real life around the turn of the century as a way to counter the 442 has also been a long time effective formation. Playing a formation with one striker allows a three man midfield that is usually a combination of two defensively minded players and one attacking midfielder who is free to roam the pitch looking for space. A common version is the usual goalkeeper and 4 defenders, then two central midfielders with wide attacking forwards and a single striker, with the remaining player either in front or behind the midfielders depending on how defensive or offensive you want to be.
    • The AI has a habit of using a 'narrow' advanced 4231 which is a complete pain for human players to deal with. It's rarely used by any but the best teams in the game, when they do it can be incredibly frustrating to defeat. Instead of having two wide attacking forwards, it brings them into the middle of the pitch. It overloads the central areas with up to 6 attacking players, and often leaves the defenders, fullbacks, and wingers struggling to maintain a position or to mark an opposition player.
  • The 4-1-2-1-2 Diamond formation (Standard back four, one rather destructive defensive midfield, two flying (but slightly recessed) wingers, a goal-scoring attacking midfielder and two strikers was probably the third most used formation, and although its particular glory was its use in CM03-04, was and has always remained a highly respected formation in all forms of the game
  • It's easy to fall into the habit of signing the same players in every new game you start, especially if they're among the Ensemble Darkhorses listed below.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Once SI took over, and all of the brilliant players that would go to Conference clubs were systematically axed, the game obviously got much harder. It still doesn't stop people from taking clubs from said Conference to the Champions League, though...
  • This can naturally happen over the course of a save. In nations such as Spain, the first promotion to top-flight as a minnow can be an unpleasant experience as you have to face extremely powerful opponents with hardly any TV revenues to bolster your team.
  • Spain in general is this compared to other well-known leagues. The Spanish leagues require players to always have a mandatory release clause. Large clubs circumvent this by putting unrealistic prices as release clause, such as hundreds of millions of currencies. Smaller clubs don't have that luxury and will often have much more realistic and affordable clauses. Players at these clubs will not accept high clauses either due to it limiting them in moving to bigger clubs. Expect larger sides from all over Europe (the clauses apply to ALL offers, foreign or domestic) to trigger the clauses of your star players constantly, forcing you to replace them over and over. Of course you can do this to clubs smaller than yours as well.
  • Reaching the Champions League by winning the league in a smaller competition is often this, made even worse if you're in pot 3 or 4. As is Truth in Television, you'll suddenly be facing far superior clubs with your squad of players geared towards the much lower level of your domestic league, often resulting in thrashings at the hands of the likes of Man City and PSG. Over the course of seasons you can build your squad to be more competitive at this level, but the lower reputation of your league means you're likely still limited (at least for a while) in the type of players you can sign to close the gap.
  • The above also applies to playing in domestic cups with a lower division side. Depending on the setup you may face top flight clubs right away or within a few rounds. At the very least boards tend to not expect you to reach beyond the rounds where facing these clubs becomes a possibility.
• Ending Fatigue: In most leagues if a good player stays long enough they can build a perfect football club. They will have a strong scouting network that enables them to find all the best current & future players, a massive stadium that generates gigantic sums of money, the best staff in the game, maximised training & club facilities and billions in cash reserves to pay for it all. Even if the player isn't a tactical genius, the strength of having the best players in the world will make most league & cup matches a formality, rendering the success of a season down to a handful of matches against the few opposition teams that can come close to matching you. The player avatar character does not die, they remain 100 years of age for as long as you wish to keep playing. Most players will eventually abandon a save file once they have reached the objectives they set out to achieve.
  • Then you just go and do it again with another team, for an infinite cycle. For many players, the struggle to build a team into a success is more fun than being the best.
  • Truth in Television since big money clubs like Ajax and Bayern München dominate their leagues with ease with only one or two teams really putting up any resistance.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Arguably invoked due to the game being part reality, part speculative. Some players who have not achieved anything of note in real life football are very popular with fans of the series due to being great in the game. A short list:
  • Taribo West. Freddy Adu. Nicklas Bendtner. Maxim Tsigalko. Fernando Cavenaghi. Freddy Guarin. Billy Jones. Mark Kerr. Cherno Samba. Tonton Zola Moukoko. ^note  Although, to be fair to Taribo West, he was a respected and rugged player in Real Life, just about 10% not quite as good as his Championship Manager equivalent.
  • Others were completely fake players invented as a laugh by researchers in far-flung areas, like the legendary To Madeira.
  • Especially common with younger (21 and under) players. Since it's impossible to know exactly how good a young player will turn out to be, many are much better in the game than in real life. Some examples from the 2010's include Carlos Fierro, Erick Torres, and Vaclav Kadlec.
    • Human players can get a major attachment to real-life teams simply because they played a game with them in Football Manager. There are many cases of people in Europe going to see their adopted club live in person and Football Manager being the reason why players in countries without much European football deciding to follow certain big-name teams.
• Game-Breaker: Apart from the real world inspirations of world class players such as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the game can be picked at by the human to expose the AI coding.
  • In certain versions and with certain tactics it is possible to abuse the set piece routines and ability to set a target zone at corner kicks to score far more regularly from them than was realistic. Such tactics are even called "fraud corners" in Korea. These tactics are generally one of the following two:
    • Setting up a player who has good long range shooting ability standing outside the edge of the penalty area while stacking the penalty area with players. If you put enough people in the box the AI would often forget to mark the guy standing outside the area. Set corners to go to them and they would blast goals with high regularity. Freddy Guarin was one of the best examples of this as he was cheap enough at the start of the game that lower valued teams could buy him and he would develop into a world class player.
    • Exploiting the way that the AI marks at corners by stacking one part of the penalty area with several of your highest jumping players then picking a player who cannot jump as high, but has good heading & speed in the opposite area, which you then target with the corner zone. The best defenders all crowd around your tallest players, leaving your smaller, quicker player up against a smaller player like a winger or midfielder who isn't as good at marking as the others.
  • Most versions of the game have tactics that will completely break the defensive AI. Championship Manager 03/04 had arguably the best known version of this, with the "Diablo" tactic which was setup with two strikers that tied up the opposition central defenders, with a central midfielder who would usually be a forward out of position, was instructed to make runs in-between those defenders. The AI would leave him unmarked resulted in numerous one-on-one situations with the opposing goalkeeper.
  • Teaching players "Preferred Moves" can be combined to make good players even better, such as giving fast strikers a preference to break offside traps & place shots while having a creative midfielder who tries "killer balls" and long range passing, or defensive midfielders the ability to take extremely strong, long-range shots.
  • The 2020 edition mimicked real life with the Jurgen Klopp "gegenpress", using high defensive lines, heavy pressing of the opposition in an attempt to force mistakes & quickly attack after gaining the ball that worked so well at Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool also working phenomenally well in-game. ^note  Weirdly enough, a simple variant of the modern day gegenpress (Just putting as much pressure as you can as soon as you lose the ball) can also work wonders in CM03-04. Try it, you might be pleasantly surprised!
  • Newgen players can be this once the player is a few seasons in. While elite real life players are undoubtedly good, the game appears to stat them rather conservatively compared to elite fake players that will usually pop up at clubs with good youth facilities. Said clubs can produce a staggering number of such players over the course of several seasons. Since these players enter the game as youth players, the game also does not assign them insanely high market values until they've had their proper breakthrough and increase their reputation. Once the player has good scouting facilities and resources in place, it becomes simple enough to poach extremely potential newgens at low prices from smaller clubs.
• Growing the Beard: While Championship Manager and Football Manager were already good games, Football Manager 2007 was a big step forward. The core of the current game is still derived from this version of the game, decades later. 2012 was also widely considered a massive improvement and for much of the fandom, 2012 is still their preferred version of the game even a decade later.
• Hype Backlash: Wonderkids rarely attain the heights that they are predicted to in this game. Maxim Tsigalko, Cherno Samba, Mark Kerr, Tonton Zola Moukoko, Antonio Cerrajero, Sherman Cardenas, Nicolas Millan... the list goes on and on. Some of them fade into obscurity while others become Ensemble Darkhorses or real life "cult heroes".
• Memetic Mutation: Pretty much every line from the News section has been subjected to this. Those are often used in Fantasy Football games. A common meme in the social media era is using the manager's lines from player discussions in real life situations with parents, partners or work-mates who have no idea what the person is saying to them.
• Moment of Awesome: Again like in the real world of Football, the game is designed so you can amass several personal Moments of Awesome over the course of it. Things like coming back from defeat to win a Cup Final with seconds to go or scoring seven or eight goals in a match for example.
• Obvious Beta: The release version of Championship Manager 4 was such a disaster that many people have wondered if Sports Interactive already knew they were going to split from Eidos, and deliberately released a piece of crap in an effort to damage the Championship Manager brand and make things difficult for the succeeding development team.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Club chairmen are particularly obstructive. "Oh, you took our club from the Conference to the Champions League, and made us the richest club in the world? Good for you. We're not expanding the stadium, though."
  • The 25 (formerly 20) year hard locked requirement to stay in a stadium before it can be replaced has never been popular. In certain situations, like bringing a lower league team with a new but small stadium up the league pyramid can cripple the team's ability to make money. York City FC in England is one specific team that has suffered from this issue as they had been planning on a new stadium from as early as 2007, which was often put into the game as a ~8,000 seat capacity ground for a team that, with a good player, might end up in the Premier League in 5 seasons.
    • Players taking clubs from very low tiers to the top leagues would almost inevitably run into the issue because their tiny local park "stadiums" would get replaced once they were fully professional clubs but before they would be big enough to justify a capacity big enough to support a top tier supporter base.
  • The new training module in FM 2013 was widely panned by long term players as it replaced an in-depth system that the manager had complete control over what players trained and how hard, into a paint by numbers drop down preset system that wasn't at all able to be modified by the player.
  • Media interviews have been widely complained about ever since they appeared. The main problem is that no matter how much time is spent on them, these interviews constantly tread the same ground that they do in real life but someone playing the game might go through a dozen of them in a single session.
  • The half-time Team Talk feature has never really been embraced by the community. The biggest reason there isn't as much of a backlash as interviews is because it's so easily worked out to maximise the chances of your team-talk having a positive impact. This sometimes means the AI does the exact same thing to defeat your team.
  • The player happiness feature. This is often tied to their agreed playing time, but even players relatively low on the ladder will complain relatively quickly if not played regularly. Other factors, such as wanting an improved contract, can also affect their happiness. You'll often be able to talk to a player and convince (or threaten) them to go along with your choices, but it's rarely apparent which text options will appease your player (aside from giving them what they want), more often than not angering them futher. Unhappy players will have a noticeable drop in performances, may hand in a transfer request or worse; complain to teammates and press. If they're an influential character in the dressing room this may set other players or even the entire squad up against you.
  • In line with the above: promises. Players (and sometimes staff) occasionally want you to make them certain promises that must be fulfilled in a certain timeframe. Promises usually pop up during contract negotations, but may also result from certain dialogue options during team/player conversations. Promises can range from playing a player in their preferred position and role to investing in a certain part of the squad (for example: improve the quality of your forwards). Although the game will keep track of whether you're currently on course to fulfill or fail your promises, it's often not clear how much you have left to do to fulfill them. You may be playing a player in their favourite position, only for them to end up complaining anyway, because you were one game short of meeting the number of starts required for the promise to kept. Failing promises results in the same vague and difficult to navigate player talks as described above, often leading to very unhappy players who will either request a transfer or proceed to complain to the press/other players.
• So Bad, It's Good: Just like Championship Manager 4, as explained above, its successor, Championship Manager 03/04 is extremely buggy, but this also leads to unbelievably hilarious situations, which gave the game a pretty good reputation among fans of the series.
• That One Achievement:
  • The various "bottom to top" challenges, known as Country Hero achievements on Steam (England, Scotland, France, Italy, Spain & Brazil each have their own achievement). The hardest is "English Hero" where your goal is to take a team from the lowest playable league, the Blue Square North/South league, all the way to the English Premier League, 6 divisions above the start. These have a sub 1% completion rate on Steam. From the 2017 edition of the game these individual national challenge achievements were replaced by a much easier challenge that can be done in any nation with at least two tiers.
  • Another unofficial challenge much-loved by players is the Pentagon Challenge^note i.e win the UEFA Champions League, AFC Champions League, CONCACAF Champions Cup, the Copa Libertadores and the CAF Champions League, which can also suck up hundreds of hours of gameplay. With a custom database including New Zealand, it can be extended to a Hexagon.
  • The Youth Academy Challenges^note basically Country Hero with the added caveat that you cannot sign any players, but must instead work your way up the ranks using only products of your club's Youth Academy. are also powerfully popular and powerfully hard, many attempts replicate the Country Hero challenges, which are even more difficult than usual due to the woeful level of the youth team players involved when starting at the lowest tiers of the game.
  • Since Sir Alex Ferguson retired, trying to duplicate his career in FM has had a spike in attempts.
  • The Country Hero is taken up to eleven by the long running unofficial "Dafuge" ^note so named after the username who created it and latter become the head moderator of the "Challenges" section Challenge. Not only do you have to take a team from the bottom league to the English Premier League, you have to take a team who got promoted to that bottom league. This often means a completely blank team, with no staff, non-existent training and club facilities and a tiny stadium with no seats. You then have to win the English Premier league and the Champions League to complete it. The vast majority of players give up or fail. It takes the best players hundreds of hours to complete it at a minimum. Some constantly reload the game until they get one of the weaker teams being promoted to make it just a bit more challenging.
  • The San Marino challenge involves taking San Marino Calcio to the top of Italian football and the San Marino national football team to win the World Cup, which while probably not as difficult as other popular challenges, it takes a very long time. A variation of this challenge is using a team from the Sammarinese league instead of San Marino Calcio, due to the league's much lower reputation.
  • "Double Hat-Trick" requires a player scoring six goals in a single competitive match. Much easier said than done without deliberately cheating. Often a striker would get five goals early into the match, then do nothing else, adding salt into the wound.
  • The most difficult achievement proper in the series would be the "number of consecutive matches without conceding a goal" series, the last of which (Immovable Object) requires thirty matches in a row. There's a good reason it's among the least obtained achievements ever since it was introduced. It's hard enough to go 30 games unbeaten, going 30 games without conceding is damn near impossible for all but the absolute top tier teams.