So Arsenal, can they do it again?
Managing Arsenal is full of great opportunities. A young mobile squad, with plenty of hope and ability. Can we recreate the Invincibles days? Let’s see.
This series is a short overview of how I believe you can mange each team in the premier league on FM24. It is not a definitive guide, it is ideas to get you started so you can mange the team and take it further. You will find the team I would pick, a tactic built around it and how to use the club identity to your advantage.
The first team up is Arsenal. They are a team which are very dear to my heart, as I watched them for years under Wenger. The football they played was highly entertaining and they had a fantastic players which turned into legends. Henry, Bergkamp, Viera and even Gilberto Silva.
If you are interested then read on and we’ll take this journey together.
Arsenal key objectives
So the main observations here are, we have the pressure of coming third or above in the Premier League. The board want us to buy players under 18 for the future, which that we will not buy instant stars. This also means that we have to think about the established stars before we sell them.
The supporters have less bearing on the recruitment of the team and are more dominate when it comes to style. They require attacking and entertaining football, which I struggle to differentiate between the two. This means that we will need to play positive, attacking or very attacking football.
This brings it’s own problems as those mentalities have a higher line and limits any defenders to players with high pace and acceleration. As well as that only certain types of football can be played with a high line, such as the Gengen press.
Arsenal First 11
We haven’t got a lot of data when we first start with a team, so the only thing we can do is use the ability stars. These are reported by your staff, so may not be necessarily accurate. Nevertheless they are still a guide to the best players at each club, so we will use them as a guide.
As you can see we have a nice mix of players that we can fit into a formation. Looking at the key players we can play most effective formations like 433, 424, 451 or even a 4141. The next step is to pick players that stand out from the average players with high potential ability. This picks out Havertz and Martinelli, so that adds a centre midfielder and an left winger.
After that, we can use the average players, the three star players in this case to plug the gaps and create the formation. The formation that I developed from this information was a 433 with a flat 3 in midfield. It looks like this:
I don’t normally play with a flat midfield, but because of the nature of the tactic I want to have players in advanced positions and win the ball back as early as possible. If things are not working out, we can pull Rice back and he can screen the defence and intercept the ball.
One of the biggest problems in this Arsenal team, is that there are no DCs after the first team. The next ones in line are just not good enough, so you will have to move on the transfer or loan market.
Arsenal tactics
Straight away we need to build an attacking tactic. I will start with positive as my mentality as it is a risk, but not to the extent of attacking or very attacking. We need to look at the the different styles available to us, Gegen press, wingplay and tiki taka.
Because of the high line, I have opted to go with the Gegenpress. This will hopefully mean we will pin teams in their own half, forcing them to punt the ball out, in which we have pacey defenders to recover the ball. The other alternative is they will use short passes increasing the probability of losing the ball in their own half.
You could always try this weird and wonderful version. It looks like a modern twist on the WM formation. It is a crazy thing to play in this day and age, but I think it has some legs.
Conclusion
So the moment everyone has been waiting for, how we are set up. As a quick disclaimer, this has not been tested yet, it is just a theory as to how I see the team setting up. After looking at the stats of Jesus, he is a pleasure to have at the top. He can finish and head, plus his physical stats are good too, so how we set him up is irrelevant.
Martinelli on the other hand is not a fantastic creator, but he is good at finishing. As a result I will make Jesus drop deep to help Martinelli and Saka. Saka is incredible and is a fantastic scorer and creator. As we have a supporting forward I need Saka in an attacking role to balance the attack.
So this is how we set up Arsenal, if you have enjoyed this blog, please comment and like.
