The villains of the piece
Aston Villa are on the up. Since Unai Emery took over he has made Villa a team that is very hard to beat. They see the importance in defending the goal.
Welcome to another instalment of how to manage a EPL team in the first season on FM24. What we do is take over and manage each Premier League club. The reason we do this is to provide you with insight so you can hit the ground running. We use the day one guides that we developed earlier on as a base.
This guide is based around the mighty Aston Villa, who have become a force to be reckoned with. As many of you know they were struggling under the old manager, then along came Emery. He transformed the team and went on a number of unbeaten streaks since. What a managerial appointment that was!
In this guide we are going to:
- Look at the league performance and individual performances.
- We will look at the tactics which have been used in Football Manager 24.
- Potential transfers and areas of improvement.
Read on if you want to push on with Aston Villa!
Aston Villa results
In this section we discuss the team results so far this season. This data is very general, but is useful to see where your end result is heading. This means that if you are not achieving your goals these results would be a good starting measure. You can also see the types of teams you beat and also if you are better at home or away.
As you can see, we started the season with a 9 game winning streak. Not a without loss streak, not 9 draws, it was 9 wins. Then we had two losses in three games and went back to our winning streak for 5 games. This team knows how to win and coincidentally the games we lost were against lower teams.
We smashed all the top teams in the league like Man City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Man United and Liverpool. I cannot believe how effective this team are at winning games, the other teams were begging for January. As you can see in the table we are clearly top and running away with it, with three games in hand thanks to Europa.
Looking at the win stats you can see we deserve to be top, winning the majority of our games and only losing two. We are the top scorers in the league with Man United and have conceded the third lowest in the league. There are really good indicators that we are doing the right thing and have the right players.
Individual Performance
In this section we speak about the individual performances of our players on FM24. Just as with straight line theory, if we like or don’t like the outcome we are heading towards then we change it, with little decisions. Using individual performance data highlights both positive and negative trends which you can act on.
First things first, we can see that the whole team are pretty much playing over an average rating of 7. This is an incredible feat as ever and shows that we do not have any weaknesses in the first team. This blog is a fairly easy one to write as Aston Villa have been so successful. January will be fun trying to strengthen as we already have a top squad on course to win the league.
Now let’s look at the basic data, the Xg and passing completion. Starting with the Xg the whole team is achieving and exceeding their targets, a nod to the quality in the squad. The only player that is underperforming is Leon Bailey, which ironic as he is really good in real life.
Unfortunately while looking at passing data most of the team are hitting the criteria of 85% apart from Bailey, Watkins, Zaniolo, Traore and Diaby. Bad news is that Bailey is failing on the KPIs of the team and could find himself sold for a replacement. The common trend here is that all the players are forwards, which means their passing is in dangerous positions. I will need to deep dive this data at the end of the season.
Aston Villa tactics
In this section, we are going to discuss the tactics that we have used so far this season on FM24. We always start with the tactic that we build in the day one series. Most the time these theory tactics on FM24 work pretty well with minor modifications.
This FM24 tactic has been unbelievable, just look at the results that we have achieved so far this season. We are on course to win the league in the first season with Aston Villa which is fairly impressive in itself. It’s great to see all the prep work come to life and work so well. The biggest problem we faced was that our AMC was injured at the start of the season so I had to use makeshift.
The whole tactic is based around attacking and passing, putting pressure on the opposition and swarming the backline. Watkins luckily can score from anywhere through any means, but we are using the AMC, AML and AMR to provide different creation. This will overcome each team in one form of another as we have a number of different opportunities.
The box to box and ball winning midfielders are trying to recycle the ball and turnovers to supply the forwards. The defence are running a high line to contain the opposition so they have to fly long balls straight back to us. Any that go over the top are swept by the keeper or tracked by the fast defenders.
Conclusion
Aston Villa have been unreal to manage on FM24, such an easy team to use and mould. I mean, everything just works so well, and I love making successful teams. The proof is in the pudding, we have ended the first half of the season on top with games to spare.
Strength of this team is the talent in attacking positions, a lot of them are young and coming into their peak years. You can tell by the sheer amount of Xg data that we create loads of opportunities and have the quality to put it in the net. Additionally the weakness of this team is that there is only one real striker in the team. This needs investment in the future as Watkins is good striker, but there are better and the depth.
The opportunity in this team is that it is a fairly young squad which is performing well. This means that there could be a era of dominance for Aston Villa on FM24, just like Ferguson at United. The threat to the team is if the team fail to live up to expectations, they want to play at the top level in the Champions League. Failure to achieve this means that bigger clubs will pick the team apart.
Time for you to start a football manager 24 save game with West Ham and get the success they deserve. Please like and comment what you think on this series.
