Understanding Mentality in Football Manager 2024
Mentality is easily the most misunderstood concept in the Football Manager 2024 tactics creator, and understanding mentality properly is a precursor to creating balanced and functional tactics.
What is Mentality?
Mentality describes on-field player behaviour such as risk-reward decision making, movement, and positioning on the field relative to teammates.
More attacking mentalities encourage players to emphasize attacking play; taking more risks to progress, create chances, and score goals, making more forward runs, and playing in a more advanced on-field position, relative to teammates.
Taken to an extreme, an overly attacking mentality can encourage players to take high-risk, low-probability actions in order
Mentality Framework
Based on my personal experience - and readers are welcome and indeed encouraged to form their own - Mentality can ensure balance, promote a collective style of attacking football, create compactness, and prevent attacking players from being isolated from the rest of the team.
Mentality is a balance: too high, and teams try to force high-risk, low-probability attacks when they are not on; too low, and teams fail to take advantage when goal-scoring opportunities present.
If one piece of advice has served me well over my Football Manager journey, it is to avoid extremes. My systems avoid “Very Attacking” or “Very Defensive” mentalities, and generally “much higher” or “much lower” anything, without good reason.
The most common tactical complaints in Football Manager - players cannot construct attacks, cannot string passes together, shoot too much, etc, etc. - often relate to an excessively aggressive individual mentality structure.
This is the reason I use Support duties when playing a Positive or Attacking team mentality, or a Balanced team mentality when I want to use Attack duties.Prioritising Attack and Positive mentalities (≠ duties) across your team promotes a collective style of attacking football.
The example above shows a Balanced team mentality with mostly Support duties and one Attack duty, and is a good example that Individual Mentalities are often higher than people might expect.
Balancing the Individual Mentalities of your centre backs and holding midfielder, and wide players ensures compactness in key areas in front of your defence and on the flanks.
This creates units within your team and encourages players to play together, rather than traditional logic of one attacking whilst the other defends.
Creating Individual Mentality “chains” or “connections” - where players are linked by Mentality or strata - prevents attacking players from becoming isolated.
As a Shadow Striker (Attack) with an Attack mentality, Endrick ensures Vitor Roque - the most advanced attacking player - is not isolated in attack. Estêvão and Vini Jr. play alongside Endrick in the Attacking Midfield strata and share a Positive Mentality with Lanza and Couto, ensuring the whole team is connected.
Mentality in the Tactics Creator
The challenge with mentality is that we are unable to directly set Individual Mentality in the Football Manager tactics creator; instead, Individual Mentality is a function of Team Mentality and Player Duty.
Mentality is broken down into 3 components in the Football Manager 2024 tactics creator.
Individual Mentality
Team Mentality
Player Duty
Individual Mentality
Player mentality - tucked away in the Player Instructions tab - is a major determinant of on-field player behaviour in your system.
Individual Mentality is - in my opinion - the foundation of your tactic; the most significant determinant of how your team will collectively play.
Individual Mentality is not visible on the Tactics Creator interface, so I manually include it when talking about tactics.
Team Mentality
Team Mentality determines the baseline mentality toward risk at a collective team level and playing style, which includes pressing, defensive line, width, tempo, and passing directness, etc.
Player Duty ≠ Individual Mentality
The most common misconception is to equate Player Duty with Individual Mentality; Player Duty is a modifier to Team Mentality, not a standalone instruction.
Player duty determines Individual Mentality for each player relative to the team mentality.
➖ Defend duty decreases individual mentality from the Team Mentality baseline
🟰 Support duty remains at the Team Mentality baseline
➕ Attack duty increases individual mentality from the Team Mentality baseline
Team vs Player Mentality
The graph below demonstrates Individual Mentality as a function of Team Mentality and player Duty.
Team Mentalities progress along the horizontal axis
Player Mentalities progress up the vertical axis
Orange line charts the Individual Mentality of a Centre Midfielder (Support) in each Team Mentality
Dotted white lines chart Individual Mentality for a Centre Midfielder (Attack / Defend) on each mentality.
The chart shows how Team Mentality combined with Player Duty determines Individual Mentality; Individual Mentalities generally increase as Team Mentality increases, and Player Duty determines Individual Mentality in relation to the team.
Modern Football META
Collectivist possession and pressing-oriented systems have proliferated across European football and can predominantly be characterised - in Football Manager 2024 - as a Positive or Attacking team mentality.
Note that when playing a Positive or Attacking team mentality, players with an Attack duty will have a Very Attacking individual mentality; as mentioned earlier, this is the reason I avoid attack duties when playing a higher team mentality.
Finding Balance
My personal preference for designing and executing a beautiful style of football with elite clubs generally means managing squads already capable of pressing, building attacks from the back, controlling possession, etc.
Many readers prefer the challenge of developing lower clubs with squads that are not necessarily capable of this style of play, in which case I suggest a Balanced team mentality in my 10 tips to improve at Football Manager 2024 post.
A Balanced mentality simplifies the relationship between Player Duty and Individual Mentality dramatically as:
Players with a Defend duty have a Defensive individual mentality
Players with a Support duty have a Balanced individual mentality
Players with an Attack duty have an Attacking individual mentality
A balanced mentality gives a more neutral style of play, which you can expand incrementally as the squad develops and allows you to platform a more individually attacking player without impacting the balance of the team.
The ‘Mentality’ Problem
Mentality - in Football Manager - is unintuitive and fails to accurately represent the relationship between individual players and collective team dynamics in real football.
Our perception of real football teams is a bottom-up accumulation of on-field player behaviours; a team with overlapping fullbacks, an abundance of creative, attacking players is likely to be considered an “attacking” team, whereas a back five with three holding midfielders might be considered a “defensive” team.
Football Manager essentially has the relationship between individual players and the team collective back-to-front; Team Mentality determines whether a team is “Attacking” or “Defensive”, regardless of whether on-field player behaviour is actually attacking or defensive.
Rather than the team being an aggregation of individual player behaviours, individual player behaviours are a function of the team and duty.
Simple Solution
In case anyone from Sports Interactive reads this, the solution is simply to invert the process, in line with real-life football:
Merge Individual Mentality & Player Duty
Allow players to directly set Individual Mentality as we currently set Player Duty
Team Mentality becomes a label description based on an aggregation of Individual Mentalities
This would:
Remove confusion about Player Duty and Individual Mentality
Clearly display Individual Mentality in the Tactics Creator interface
Increased flexibility without constraining Individual Mentality to Team Mentality
Ensure Team Mentality accurately describes actual team behaviour
Thank you
Thank you very much - as always - for reading and supporting my writing; I hope you enjoy reading and find something useful to apply to your own saves.