Tactics, tactics, everywhere! Tactics form a staple, indeed central, topic in FM content.
In this blog, I’ve pursued an alternative. My aim has been, not to avoid tactics altogether, but to downplay the topic and shift the emphasis onto other aspects of FM.
Three reasons lie behind this stance:
- for readers who wish to focus on tactics, there’s no shortage of content on the subject
- I can’t claim to possess tactical expertise
- I prefer to focus on those aspects that account most for whatever success I enjoy on FM.
Alternative approach
In playing FM, I seek to compensate for lack of expertise on tactics with things I do know something about IRL – for example, enterprise and project management.
This approach, which I call 360-degree management, has led to an emphasis on stakeholder management (here and here), business aspects such as contracts, and squad development, including fitness and injury management.
Review
Now that 2020 has drawn to a close, I thought I’d review the blog’s statistics in order to see what people have been reading (though, strictly speaking, numbers of page views don’t tell you that: they merely tell you what people have clicked on).
That review yields a very clear message: the content that readers access most is — hey presto! — tactical. Even here, tactics predominate.
The most accessed posts were those in my series on how to adapt the tactics of Arrigo Sacchi to FM, followed by those on (a) the benefits of using a wide target man, (b) WM, and (c) catenaccio.
Implications
What am I going to change, in the light of these findings?
Not much, since I approach FM content creation as a hobby, not as a professional activity. I’d rather enjoy myself creatively than follow the numbers. But the numbers make me think I might pursue an idea I’ve been toying with for months now, namely a series on total football.
We’ll see. In the meantime, I wish you well for 2021.
Image credit: Latvia Best Squad — Day 2 by 7th Army Training Command, generously made available under a CC BY 2.0 licence.
