Welcome to the Man City FM26 team guide! I’m expecting Man City to be a popular team to manage on FM26 due to the money and the challenge.
In this Man City FM26 team guide we are looking at who the best players are, tactics innovations, youth prospects and transfer targets.
This guide is here to give you a good start on FM26 with Man City. Let’s do this!
Straight away we are going to look at the board and supporter objectives and how they will dictate our save game. The methodology of the Man City FM26 team guide starts with the information available to help us.
Let’s break this down. The board want:
These requests are all signs of a title challenger. Playing attacking football is the way to win things, as goals win games. Signing high reputation players is another sign as they are signing players who are ready now, at peak.
The board have identified that they feel buying players over 29 is a waste of investment and would rather focus on developing the youth players coming through. This is two fold, as Man City have done in real life, they develop a player and if he is not good enough he gets moved on. There will be sell on percentages etc included, so they are making money whatever the outcome.
The fans have a slightly different take to the board. They want:
It’s pretty easy to combine entertaining football, with possession football and attacking football. The focus needs to be on the possession, creation and shooting metrics. Developing youngsters aligns with the above.
Want to try this with a different team? Check out the Brighton version here.
I must be honest I was looking forward to creating the Man City FM26 team guide after seeing the summer transfer business. They have bought some exciting player which will lead to even better attacking options.
Here we look at the key players that we have, the most notable is Haaland obviously. No wonder Pep has problems picking a team, look at the quality they have, even with 2 AML.
There is definitely a lean towards the attacking players being better and therefore a midfield headache. Most of these guys pick themselves and it looks like a 4231 DM is the most likely to fit all of our key players in.
Now it’s time to look at the young talent we have in the squad. There are so many 5 star potential players, so we need to take advantage of this. What is quite funny is that the key players tend to be on the centre and left, where as the young talent tend to be on the centre and right.
When you map the key players positions and the young player positions you can easily see a 4231. In terms of formations, nothing has been clearer to see.
A quick word on squad depth. When you are using top squads they tend to have a squad that can work into any tactical size or shape, unless you use something radical. This means that if you want to make your stamp on the team you can by buying a few players straight away.
It has been widely reported that Man City have got stockades of wonderkids in their youth teams. The Man City FM26 team guide mentions the known ones and what to do with them. Here is the list:
As you can see it is a decent list of wonderkids at Man City. If you can get a few of these close to their potential then you will be laughing in 3-5 years time as you will be unstoppable. Thanks to fmscout.com for helping me complete the wonderkid list.
This is where the creation of the Man City FM26 team guide gets it’s momentum, the tactics. We will now put together all of the data above and create a tactic that embodies the club culture.
As we spoke about earlier, after mapping out the formation of the young players and key players, it is obvious that 4231 is the one. This is a great formation for the gegenpress which I mentioned earlier. Gegenpress incorporates attacking, entertaining and possession football.
The way this transition works, is the left full back pushes up the wing to give width. The AML then drives into the ST role as a channel striker. The other full back moves into DM to create the screen in front of the two man DC.
This creates a lot of opportunities with two strikers who could score and three creative players feeding balls in.
This shape works even better if you use the FM26 433 transition model.
So there is no serious need to sign anyone really. All position have depth and a young player in the position. I would just focus on buying the very best player you can buy every year. Take a Mourinho approach and buy a top star and a young star every window.
I would look at buying players from Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Inter, Dortmund, PSG. These are the top teams in the world and as a result they will have good players, strength yourself by weakening them.
The elite clubs do not have many options when it comes to custom challenges. As we have discussed before in the Man City FM26 team guide they need to win everything, and do it with style. So the challenges I recommend are:
Man City are a serious team. They have some of the best attacking players in the world, loads of money to spend and a competitive squad. Underestimate them at your peril, because they are really good.
I had a quick half of a season as you can see below. We were top with a game in hand, 40 goals in 16 games and bossing Europe too. I’m still a bit disappointed by one of the games we lost, which was against United. This Man City FM26 team guide will get you up and running.
If you choose to use Man City, enjoy it guys! The attacking options alone are enough to pick them. Next up the Man United FM26 team guide.
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View Comments
A load of these so called wonderkids don’t play for Man City. Monga and Mahovo to name but 2. We sold Wright to Norwich too last season
Hi Tim,
Thanks for pointing this out, I have reviewed and updated the list.
Apologies this was very sloppy from myself and I will be reviewing the guides again.