FM Gaffer

This guide was written and the copyright is owned by Sports Interactive.

Coaches

No player is perfect. Even the world's greatest stars with bags of experience can learn something. The trouble is, the greater the player, the greater the coach needs to be to improve the star.

This screen enables you to manage the activities of your coaches and assess their ability to effect improvements in your squad. It's split into three segments to make it easier to navigate: coaching attributes, assignments and summary.

Coaching Attributes
The panel in the upper centre of your screen lists all of the coaches at your disposal along with their attributes rating out of 20. Each of these ratings corresponds to a coaching discipline, so it pays to match up your trainers to coaching activities that suit their skills. The better a coach is, the more a player is likely to improve under his tutelage.

Also in this panel is the 'Assigned' (Asg.) category which shows the number of coaching disciplines each coach is assigned to. Details of their assignment are given in the Assignments panel to the right.

To simplify your options here you can click the 'Auto Assign All' button which will select your coaches for each training category according to their greatest strengths. 'Clear Assignments' enables you to start from scratch and re-assign coaches either automatically or by using the Assignments panel.

Once you have your coaches assigned you can click 'Show Filters', which opens up a new panel on the right enabling you to sort your list of coaches and display them according to the activities they are active in.

Assignments
The Assignments panel not only enables you to see who is taking which elements of your training, but it also gives a simple overview of the ability of your coach in that discipline.

Once again the categories of coaching skills are shown, with the disciplines the highlighted coach is active in shown with a tick. To ask your coach to take part in every coaching discipline you can tick All, otherwise you can select and de-select which assignments you give your coaches by clicking to the left of the skill set name.

For whichever disciplines the coach is active in, a star rating appears to the right of the skillset name. This indicates an overview of a coach's ability. If you feel you need more effective coaches you can either approach them through the Search: staff screen or put up a job advert on the Job Centre screen.

Summary
This panel enables you to judge the effectiveness and workload of your coaches and ensure you are neither spreading your coaches too thin by asking them to do too much nor under-using them by asking them to do too little. Note that by retaining too many coaches you may be wasting money that could either be better spent elsewhere or saved to enhance your chairman's confidence.

The categories are clear enough, listing the training skillset along with how many players are assigned to regimes that cover each set and the number of coaches working in each area.

The two key factors here are the last ones: workload and rating. Workload, clearly, shows how much your coaches are being worked. If the workload is light for a given category, you can afford to have fewer coaches taking part in the activity. You may be better off reassigning them to another task where you have less coaches assigned. You can do this in the assignments panel on the top right of the screen.

Of course the quality, not just quantity of coaches' work, is crucial too. The rating shows the overall ability of the coaches assigned in each discipline. To improve this rating you should reshuffle your coaches to assign those best equipped to get more out of your players.

If you simply haven't got enough quality coaches in certain disciplines then there are two key options open to you. Either you should modify the training schedules you are giving to you players, which may have a profound effect on the way your players play, or you should draft in new coaches. If you decide, for instance, that you haven't enough quality defensive coaches, but you have better attacking ones, you may want to assign more players to attacking training and look at adjusting your tactics to suit the developing skills of your players. You can use the Tactics screen to make these changes.

The other option is to draft in new coaches. Again, this can be done by either approaching them through the Search: staff screen or by putting up a job advert on the Job Centre screen.

It's worth spending time to put an effective backroom team in place so you don't have to concern yourself with the ins and outs of your players' training. This will not only give you more time to spend on more important issues, it will also mean your players are in good shape come match day.

Players

Each of your players is capable of improving, provided they are trained correctly. Similarly, if you neglect your players or train them excessively or in a counter-productive manner, they'll become less effective.

This training screen enables you to quickly assess the effects of training on your players and to modify their workouts, either to counter weaknesses or enhance their strong points. To simplify your management of training, the screen is split into three segments: the main schedules option in the top left, schedule details in the top right and, below them, the training effects screen. You can also see the effects of training on a player's training overview which displays a simple graph of how a player has responded to your tutelage.

You'll find that your youth and senior team are separated into different sections for training. This is due to youth players needing quite different schedule to help them develop, and because of this coaches exist entirely to develop your club's youngsters in the game. So, although your assistant manager and first team coaches will take both first team training and overview youth development, you'll need specific youth team coaches to focus on your academy development.

Main Schedules
The main schedules window shows how many people are undertaking each schedule. To begin with, your players are working to preset routines which may not get the most out of their abilities. If you highlight one of the schedules a breakdown of that programme appears in the top right window, while the players on that programme are shown in the bottom window. To create a new schedule click the Schedules drop-down and select a Full-time or Youth option. What you ask your players to do in this routine is entirely your call, but you should make sure you give them a rounded experience to keep them developing in a positive way in overall terms, even if you want to emphasise, say, strength training to improve a players' stamina and strength.

Note that hovering over a training discipline name will show which player stats that exercise is likely to improve.

Schedule Details
Once you've created a new schedule you can use the schedule details (top right window) to alter the program in one of two ways.

Firstly, you can alter the intensity of each of the training disciplines undertaken with the slider bars. For outfield players the goalkeeping slider should be set to zero at the far left of the slider. You can fine-tune these sliders as much as you wish, but when you reach a point when it would be physically impossible to do any more (as indicated by the workload slider) you will not to be able to increase any of the disciplines.

The second way to alter the intensity of training is to simply adjust the workload slider alone - this will keep the same proportionate training regime but will save you having to tweak every slider down.

If you wish to fine-tune the training for individual players you can also use the Player Training option accessed through the player's own screen.

Note: A very heavy workload with lots of high intensity activities is sure to leave your squad vulnerable to injuries. It may have the short-term benefit of boosting stats more quickly, but in the long run you will not be able to avoid having to deal with players on the treatment table. Keep an eye on your players' conditioning as low fitness can often be the result of over exertion on the training pitch.

Training Effects
All players are unique and respond differently to each training schedule, so it's important to use this screen to carefully monitor the progress of your squad. It may sometimes pay to have a specific training schedule for individual players, though it's possible to tweak player regimes in terms of intensity to try to get the most out of them.

One of the key advantages of managing a club with good resources is that you can afford to bring in plenty of coaches to take control of various training schedules. You can use them to give your players the benefit of small group tuition with trainers specialising in the field you are dealing with.

Overview

This is a slightly deceptive screen as it not only deals with your player's overall training performance, but also gives crucial insight, from the point of view of your coaches, into the quality and future worth of your squad members.

You can use each of the four panels (info, schedule, training level and training progress) to not only see how you can improve a player, but also to analyse his worth to you and the wisdom of your selection and tactics.

Info
This is your absolutely key panel. It breaks down what schedule your player is on and tells you how fit your player is and how happy he feels about his training programme. These latter snippets should help you to judge whether you are pushing your player too hard, in which case you can modify the intensity of his training in the schedule panel. If a player is unhappy with his schedule it may pay to switch him to another programme or modify his regime on the training screen.

The New Position drop-down is a superb tool for developing your player within the framework of the squad, or for focusing a utility player on a specific position. It enables you to train a player to play in a new or specific position, but will inevitably damage his ability to play elsewhere.

Turning a left-back into a right-winger might take many years, and never fully succeed, so such dramatic changes should not be attempted. However, a DL/C could be trained into becoming an out-and-out centre-back with relatively little difficulty and could prove to be a far more useful member of your squad, uninhibited by his conflicting talents.

Without doubt the most useful aspect of this panel is the Coach report breakdown. Use the Coach drop-down menu to alternate between your coaching staff and you'll get an overall picture of your player.

This report will be split into up to three main chunks: an analysis of the player's role in the team, an overview of the player's performance and a look ahead to how the player should fit into your future plans. Take heed of the advice here, which will often hint that the player is not being utilised correctly, and therefore may be playing out of position.

Crucially, the coach reports will give an indication of the player's attitude, suggesting that he may be giving less than 100% effort for the club or that he is not as committed to your cause as he should be. Such information should be taken into account alongside a player's character before the successful football manager tackles the issue head-on, rather than avoids it.

Schedule
This information corresponds with the data on the training screens and enables you to choose the intensity of your player's training. You'll not be able to modify the balance of his training here, however, only his workload and, in the info panel, his assigned schedule.

You can use this information in conjunction with the training level and progress boxes to analyse the effectiveness of the player's scheduled regime.

Training Level and Training Progress
These two graphs are closely connected. Training level shows the progress made this month in all of the training disciplines. Click on one of the bars and the training progress graph on the right will show a historical break down of the player's performance in the highlighted discipline over recent months.

This is a slightly time consuming, although extremely accurate, way of measuring the effects of a change in a training regime. If you set a player to train in a certain pattern one month and another the next, this direct comparison will enable you to see which is the most effective method for improving each individual.

For a more detailed breakdown of the statistical effects of your training you can examine the attributes chart.