If you really wish to be one of the great managers in ManagerLeague, then read on, as this guide will take you through the individual training of the players that takes place in a match, and how training and learning from matches are closely related.
Individual training through matches
If you ask one of the top managers in ML about their best idea, a lot of them will tell you to "Let yours players play as many matches as possible!". Letting players, and specially the young ones, gather experience, is paramount to how they will develop. Even though one session of training has more effect than playing one match, you can play a lot more matches than you can have training-sessions during a season.
Custom Cups and Friendlies
As all teams play the normal 30 league-matches per season, the key is to play more than this to get the upper hand.
In some divisions there are Department-Cups and others have League-Cups, but the average team might not get too many matches in these before they are knocked out. But there are still 2 sources of extra matches; Custom Cups and Friendlies.
Custom Cups are played during weekends and you can join or create a cup every Saturday and Sunday. These cups are great training for your players and should be taken advantage of.
Friendlies can be played whenever you want to, as long as you find someone who wants to play against you. This is usually not a problem. You can actually play up to 250 friendlies per season and there is no doubt this will greatly affect the development of your players.
Mind you, playing custom cups and friendlies usually cost credits, depending on the cup or the friendly.
The method
The way to make this method a success is to do as follows:
- Try to play 6-7 friendlies per league-round.
- Play your friendlies after the league-round, before training.
- Make sure all players with fitness lower than 95 are set to Rest on their individual training.
- Allocate at least one team-training slot to Rest.
- Play custom cups every Saturday and Sunday
The drawback
When players train like this, you have only indirect influence over which attributes they might improve, as they will most likely increase in an attribute they succeed in using during the game. So a player playing defence is more likely to increase one of the 4 main attributes for a defender and so on. But you do not know which one, if one of those four at all.
When players learn through Individual Training instead, you decide what he should focus on and what he might get better at. But sure enough, especially for players with limited quality, they have a lot to gain from "learning by playing".
Be careful
Watch the players fitness as it can have a great effect on how they perform in the next league-match.
Understand that the method described above is a method to increase the attributes of your players quickly, not a method to win the league!
Next chapter..
The next chapter will be about how to get the most from your hired staff, like coaches and physios.
We hope you learnt a thing or two here and wish you good luck with your team.
