How to cheat in Football Manager Live

Cheating in Football Manager live! What’s that you say it must be a definitive guide to the players in Football Manager Live. Actually it’s neither it’s a simple hot tip but I bet it got your attention!

I’ll start with a quick tip that might encourage you to read through this. Captains, what makes a decent captain, influence, determination, aggression, ability, all are important but one of the most important stats is hidden away in FM and that’s player reputation.

To view reputation click your squad then customise view and tick the box reputation. Ok so back to your captain say you have Messi and a few top names but their not captain material their world famous players and you can and pick a low reputation captain, well their not going to follow him are they?

So you need a captain that has all the classic stats and a reputation that’s in line with the rest of your squad. If you make your first star player the captain type then your pretty safe.

Reputation Reputation Reputation

The first, and often the last, mistake many make when approaching FM Live is that their going to Wenger it. So what their going to do is to find the players that offer tremendous value, everyone knows Rooney is awesome but he’s going to cost a lot of money to get and cost a lot in wages. I’ll find a player who’s undervalued and achieve pretty much the same thing the thinking goes.

The rank of a team in a Gameworld is always consistent with the reputation of the players that it has. I have looked a lot and the only slight variations in this are teams with very old squads.

You may argue that’s the way it should be, but then that dispels the Wenger approach. I mean come on despite thousands of Football Manager addicts playing the game no one is able to successfully Wenger it.

No one has come up with the tactic, no one has formed a team from unknowns or put together a stunning youth team that gets around this ranking system. Initially I thought this was a fair deal but when you take stock for a while this is actually quite odd.

How this is done is quite surprising but I’ve done a few experiments over the six months I was in GW6 and had this theory and with it every result didn’t surprise me anymore. I stopped pulling my hair out (I’m pretty bald enough as is!) and it did make the game a lot less frustrating if a little less satisfying.

The tool used is form

Form in football is an important commodity Barnsley’s run in the FA Cup is a typical example of a team overachieving. With there being no way of interacting with the team it’s hard to see how SI could have coded this feature into the game. Random? Not likely.

The best way to describe this is an example. In Season 5 in GW6 I sold four or five players with reputations of High Profile through to World Famous. I put them in auction for seven days but immediately moved them out of the first team to try and establish where I would need to strengthen.

The answer was none, how odd, maybe the defence and although we were marginally worse playing kids the difference wasn’t that great. Eventually the players went and things carried on, a few days later though form took a dive.

The run of results was horrific we went from being ranked 40th to being ranked 180th, how odd though was it that actually according to player reputation that’s where we should have been ranked. After that the team played as it had and maybe we lost a little more but generally we played as I think we should have played.

A few days later I signed a few high profile players (World Famous etc) and oddly I had a great run of form to see us ranked in the top 50 again. After that things settled and we stayed around there.

I’m not having a go at the game; I mean how the heck were SI supposed to do it. The purist might argue it should be eleven men verses eleven men etc and it does kill the scouts dream or the tacticians dream. That’s not strictly true though in between the runs of form then the game is ‘pure’.

It’s at these times that your tactics or scouting ability gets a good test. To my taste it does favour the trader too much but its early days for FM Live and SI will put a lot into the game I’m sure.

The result though if you’ve done a good job in these areas is that you’ll tend to bounce. As your form will be neutral at times you scouting ability and / or tactics will drive you up the rankings and eventually you’ll over achieve and a bad run will kick in.

The conclusion you may draw is that you’ll consider the game totally erratic and maybe throw the towel in but as long you understand the dynamics of it all sanity can return.

It does puzzle me that the reputation variable is hidden away on the player pages and you have to customise a view to see it. Still there is a hot tip and why it’s so important.