3 Initial Steps You Absolutely Must Take to Be A Successful Lower-League Manager

So you’ve selected a lower-league club to manage and you’re wondering what next? There’s so much you could do. You could go with the flow, advance game time, and take actions as things arrive in your inbox. But is that really the best approach? Today I share my opinion on the three most important steps you should take once you join a small team (you might know some or all of these, but hopefully you still find some valuable tips in the discussion).

With all that said, let’s jump in:

1. Get familiar with your staff 👨‍💼

When you arrive in a new team, a good step to take is to familiarize yourself with your staff. You will be working with these individuals indefinitely so it is important that they are as quality as you are!

In this step, I like to carry out what I call ‘the cleansing.’ This typically occurs a day or two after I join the club and it essentially means clearing out staff that are not up to scratch (this is most especially the case in small teams) after evaluating the staff at hand.

Following the termination of incompetents’ contract, you want to hire quality staff to fill those roles. I tend to carry out these processes simultaneously: Find out who is available for hire as a coach, offer the individual a contract and mutually terminate the current lower quality staff’s contract.

Given the limited budget in a small team, when hiring, I would prioritize (in order):

• Scouts (chief scout & one or two scouts)
• General manager/director of football (possibly) to assist with transfers
• Coaches
• Assistant coach.

If your budget is adequate, I advise a complete reformation (trust me, it will be worth it).

Note: If the contract of the staff you intend to terminate has a short duration left, it might be a good idea to wait out the rest of their contract to avoid compensation fees.

To help in this process, I recommend this video by Youtuber, Aussie Villain:

A few (potentially obvious) things to add to his brilliant video:

• You want all relevant stats for the coach (those highlighted for the staff role) to be as high as possible.
• Another crucial aspect is the personality of the staff, however, I tend to prioritize this lower than the actual stat number. If I have two potential staff members that are roughly as good as each other, I use personality as the deal-breaker.
• For chief scout, check their preferences and preferred formation before signing, you want one that matches your intended tactical system.
• Try to fill up all empty staff slots

If you’d love a video walkthrough on my process for this step, comment down below!

2. Finances 💵

The finances section determines the flexibility you have in altering your staff and squad. Thus you should accurately gauge the financial state of your team.

• What’s your transfer budget and payroll budget?
• Is there enough room to make signings based on these?
• Check the ‘Make Budget Adjustment’ section to determine the amount of flexibility you have with the current budget and the amount of room you have for spending
• If you see a huge amount of your budget is going to wages, check the Summary tab under Salary. I’ve had cases where my U23s were earning as much or even more than my starting players (!!) and they weren’t even wonderkids.
• If there is a player that is earning significantly more than your other players, think deeply if you really need that. Especially if you can probably get like 2 or 3 good players with the wage. I tend to sell such players (but that doesn’t have to be the case!)
• I also like to look at my summary financial state under Club Info > Profile

3. Team Report & Tactics ⚽️

• Look at your squad depth (Team Report > Team Depth Chart) as well as your assistant’s report (Team Report > Assistant Report) so you know areas of the squad you must improve (e.g. areas under ‘Weaknesses’ in Assistant’s report like in the image above). Note here, the better quality your assistant the more likely the report will be valuable.
• Do you have a preferred tactical system? Set your preferred formation and assess your squad based on that using the Squad depth chart: Get a general feel for the team and all the players. Which ones do you think you’d absolutely want to get rid of? Are there clearly positions that need strengthening that your assistant failed to point out?

Side note: Regarding formations, I really like 4–2–3–1 Wide and if a more defensive mentality is needed: 4–1–2–2–1 Wide. These formations tend to balance attacking and defending very well in my experience.

Well, that’s it from me! My top 3 actionable tips for what to do once you start managing a small team. Do you have any other thoughts on what should be done? Comment down below!

P.S. If you’d like me to address a particular aspect in detail, comment down below and I will try to cover your request based on popular demand in future posts.

But until then,

See you soon legends.

This is the 1st post in my Ultimate Guide to Lower League Management Series. Go to the end of this document for all released posts in this series.