West Ham complete first season guide

Welcome back to another guide on how to manage a Premier League team in the first season. The way this guide works is that we take control of each Premier League team and run them through the season. The first guide will be until the mid point in January and then we will follow up with another guide at the end of the season.

This time around we are using the mighty Hammers, West Ham United. I have always enjoyed using West Ham on Football Manager 24, they have a good team to start with. Last year the achieved a massive feat of winning a European title, and they are looking to achieve the next step of winning the Europa league this time. Our previous guide to setting West Ham up on Day one is here.

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 are interested in what West Ham can do for you!

West Ham Results

This is where we review the results from the season so far. This can make for interesting reading as you can see trends appear like the sort of teams you win/loss to, how many goals you score compared to others. These are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of helpful data.

So this one has been an interesting game, we started badly and ended up in January really well. This just shows that team are growing either in their ability or their understanding of the tactic. To be fair it was a rough start, but we lost our first three games, I thought this might be a slog from there.

September and October were unbeaten months for us, going unbeaten in 7 until Tottenham upset us. We then won 5 out of 6 on the run up to Christmas, this left us in a great position.

Looking at the league we are doing a little better than the media predicted which was 10th and we are 9th. The top 7 are running away with it some how, so we do really need to get our act together against the top teams.

The good news is that we are having it off up top, our strikers and midfielders are scoring 2 a game nearly. While this is impressive, we are struggling at the back, conceding 31 goals. This means the defence needs a tweaking, but we will look at that in the tactics section.

Another concern is the number of losses. Some of these were picked up at the start of the season against better teams, while our team was gelling. I hope we can slow the bleeding on this front.

Individual Performance

This is the section where we look into individual performances. This is a great area to intervene in any general problems in the team or to avoid some coming down the road. These small changes can change the overall result of our strategy.

So straight away we can see that we have 3 key players, and if I’m honest I am pretty shocked by one of them. Aguerd has been great at the back, look at the tackles he has manged. Danny Ings while he is an amazing finisher I didn’t think he would score 11 league goals by this point. Fornals is an interesting player, he plays like an attacking defender, chipping in with goals and assists.

We have a few more players that are just behind them in Paqueta, Antonio and Mavropanos. Again it is a nice spread of positions showing how balanced the formation and team are. I have a lot of fair in this team now it has gained a certain amount of competence.

When looking at the expected goals, only a couple of players actually fall short of the mark in Benrahma and Soucek. The passing on the other hand in this team is immense, the only two players that fail the 85% are the strikers. This does not worry me in the slightest.

West Ham Tactics

In this section we speak about the tactics we used so far. We also look at how the tactics can be improved and any potential ideas going forward. I think with most tactics it will be a matter of tweaking if there are any problems.

So this tactic is used for a number of the teams in the Premier League with slight changes. This tactic is designed to set the strike up and score goals. I am please to announce that in this team it works very well, so much so that Ings has 11 league goals. The midfield has been brilliant, especially Fornals and Paqueta, but we need to get Bowen going. I think he needs an inside forward role to test.

The backline has been very leaky, so we need to be looking into this. The pace of the defence is quite good, other than Ogbonna, who is unfortunately getting on. The other thing we could look at brining back the MCs to DMs to shield the defence. The problem with that it may take away from the attack and create a gap.

Conclusion

West Ham are a fun team going forward, they have actually surprised and impressed me on football manager 24. They have some wonderful players that are playing really well as well as having the resources to hand to change the squad. Unfortunately, we had to sell Kurt Zouma as he was forcing a move away to the Saudi Arabia league.

The strength of this team is the wonderful attack. The strikers and midfield have played brilliantly together creating and scoring at a high rate. The weakness to the team is obvious, we are conceding goals all too often. This means we will need to tweak the defence without losing the strategy we have currently.

The opportunity for this team is that now they are competent in the tactic they can go on and push further up the table and challenge in the cups. There is plenty of success to have with this team when managed right. The threat is that other teams could come knocking to buy the players and West Ham turn into a selling club.

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.