Welcome.

Great goalkeepers in Football Manager can be very different. For instance:



or



or



Have you picked your favourites yet? Good, because on today's lesson you'll find out why Friedel is the best man to stand between the posts in your next game.

Goalkeepers are characterised by eleven unique attributes. They can be divided into three groups:

These are not, however, all indispensable attributes a good goalkeeper should have. Apparently, we need to expect a good goalie to have very important non-goalkeeping attributes. And there are two groups thereof:

Even a quick analysis the basic attributes lets us state that Friedel beats the other two in the following fields: command of area, one on ones, anticipation, and positioning. He's the most complete goalkeeper out of the three. Basically, his only weakness is lack of pace and acceleration, these are, however, not essential on his position. Please remember that we do the selection based on attributes only, we do not take into account other factors, such as condition, morale, age, experience, current form, etc. - what, as we know, should also affect our decisions.

Fabianski's main strength is rushing out what would be a key element while using pushing-up defensive line as it would ensure us that with good kicking and decent pace Fabianski would be a successful “last defender”.
Kuszczak's strength is agility what, combined with his great reflexes and jumping, makes him a king on the goal line.

Now let's focus on two very important non-goalkeeping attributes that are indispensable to a good keeper. These are positioning and anticipation.

Positioning ensures us that the keeper will always be at the right spot, and anticipation – that he'll do it in the right time as well. If you see a low level of these attributes (a value of less than 10 is worrying) and eccentricity of more than 10 you can be sure you have a good friend of Fabien Barthez or Jorge Campos. The risk of unpredictability can be turned into a strength by giving them more tactical freedom (since restricting it won't save us from eccentric behaviour) and telling them to pass directly to our midfielder or even forwards (especially if we play defensively and this would give us additional attacking opportunities).

Let's proceed to goalkeeper's individual tactical instructions.



As can be seen the majority of instructions are identical with outfield players. There are, however, two unique ones.

1. distribution



2. distribution to



The way a goalkeeper distributes the ball should depend on his abilities (if he can't throw the ball don't tell him to do so, the same thing with kicking, if he has low communication level telling him to leave the ball to defenders will surely lead to feeding the ball to opponent players).

However, more important than the keeper's abilities while giving him distributing instructions is our team's mentality and selected formation.

If we opt for an attacking formation it's better to leave the ball to defenders with instruction of passing it to one of our full backs (the one who attacks better).



If our mentality is more balanced instruct our keeper to throw the ball to our side midfielder (the one who defends better).



In case of defensive tactics the best solution are long kicks towards out strikers (those playing a little deeper and returning for ball more often).



The remaining individual instructions will be discussed during our next lessons as they will depend on other instructions given to our defensive line, or the selection of the tactical formation.

Finally, it's worthwhile saying that among the goalkeeper's individual instructions there are two that should be ALWAYS set as shown below.

I'll leave it without a comment for the conclusion is obvious . :-)

On next lesson we will deal with central defenders. See you.