Football Manager 2024 – Best Default Tactic Guide

This is a test of all the default tactic presets with recommended formations that you can choose when creating a new tactic for your team. I will be testing how well the different tactics work compared to each other, and updating the list with the data as the testing progresses. If you don’t enjoy building your own tactic, or maybe you’re just a new player that want to learn the game without getting fired too quickly, you can check here to see if you find a tactic you want to use.

How am I testing?

I am manually creating the saves, choosing the tactic to be tested, and going on holiday until the season is over. The assistant manager is told to use only the chosen tactic and not to allow any players being sold.

I also set the staff to make players with bad match sharpness available for the reserve team, and to set up reserve team friendly matches if no regular matches are played.

The focus is the the top leagues in England, Scotland, Norway, Finland and Wales. This way, a wide variety of team and player quality will be tested, and hopefully the data we get will be a representative average of how well a tactic will work for any club you want to play with.

First post:
I’ve started with the results for the worst predicted teams in the top leagues of England and Scotland. The dataset is still too small to be anything but an indicator of how well a tactic works. It will get better as I get time to add more teams, but for now these numbers cannot really be trusted too much.

All tactics have been tested through 71 matches over 2 seasons with the lowest predicted teams in the English and Scottish top tiers.

By “Prediction” I mean the difference in where the game predicted that a team would end up, compared to where it actually did. A positive number means the team ended up in a better spot, a negative means that it ended up worse than the prediction.

If you would like to test out the best tactic type that wasn’t covered by the top five, take a look at:

Vertical Tiki-taka – 4-3-3 DM Wide

Even though it had a respectable 1,00 points per match, it didn’t get into the top 5. It is so far looking like a decent tactic if you just want to mix up things a bit without the club catching fire.

Do you want to build a winning team with a tactic that is far from optimal, just for the added difficulty? Try to win the Champions League with:

Direct Counter-attack – 4-4-2

You will be able to do some damage with this suboptimal tactic if your entire team has great anticipation and off the ball. Bring back the glory of the classic 4-4-2!

A quick runthrough of all the best and worst in each category.

Points

Goals Scored Per Match

Goals Against Per Match

Goal Difference Per Match

Prediction

Position

Matches Won Per Season

Matches Drawn Per Season

Matches Lost Per Season

If you would like to take a look at the data for all 30 tactics, I’ve uploaded a beautiful snip from my spread sheet for you here, sorted by average points per match.