There is nothing as important as player’s morale and happiness towards match results in Football Manager. A squad that is not gelled together or includes several unhappy players will have a huge effect not only on the dressing room atmosphere but also the on-pitch performance as it might negatively affect the performance of your tactics.
If you want your team to produce great results week in and week out, you need to maintain good morale in your squad. Today, Youtuber DemandMoreFM and I, will look closer at how you can improve the team’s morale and manage the players happiness in Football Manager.
This post will be for anyone who wants a few tips and tricks on how to deal with unhappy players, dips in form, or other arising issues within the squad. By understanding what to do in Football Manager when morale drops or team cohesion is poor, dealing with the squad dynamics is one of the important areas within squad management that can help you maintain a winning streak.
Why maintaining good morale?
Any serious issues within a squad can have a devastating effect on your team’s performance and can put your job at the risk. When results are not coming and players are moaning about lack of first team experience or regular game time, it’s easy for them to turn against you – loosing the much important managerial support you need to get success at the club.
Playing the same match with the same tactics against the same opponent with high and low morale and team cohesion will surely let you see its major effect on team and individual players’ performances. A slight decrease in morale can be the difference between a loss, draw or a win against your most fierce rival.
To help you maintain good morale throughout the season we’ll be sharing a few tips on how to increase players morale and happiness to improve the squads team cohesion and club atmosphere in Football Manager.
In this event, we’ll address 8 different topics that will help you control and manage both player’s morale and happiness in Football Manager 2022.
What affects Player’s Morale in Football Manager?
A player’s morale, whether it’s poor or excellent, depends on the player’s overall happiness. A player’s morale can go up and down throughout a season depending on match results and team performances. But it is as likely to be affected by the overall level of training and what’s being done on the training ground, his playing time and expectations towards squad status, your treatment of him and other players within the club or within his social group.
A player with low morale will perform poorly on the pitch which may drag the teammates down with him, as he’s not as committed in training or in competitive matches as he should.
Managing the player’s morale is just one of the secrets behind a successful team. Most often it’s as much about controlling the level of morale by maintaining it, as being hands-on and take care of any potential issues before they turn into more devastating problems that will take weeks or months to un-do.
To maintain good morale over the course of the season, you might have to adopt to micromanagement at times by taking control and observing all the different areas that may affect a player state of mind and general happiness. At least, as long as you know what to do and which buttons to push.
Let’s take a closer look at which areas in Football Manager to look at that affects a players morale positively or negatively.
1. Playing Matches
One of the biggest contributors to the player’s morale is match results and how the team performed. It’s as easy as winning matches will improve the player’s morale, while losing matches, or drawing against a team with lower reputation may see your player’s morale drop.
To quickly increase the players morale right off the start of a new campaign, I set up at least five friendly matches. In the first weeks of the preseason the team will normally play one match per week, whilst in the latter stages I schedule mid-week friendlies so the team will play two matches a week.
What’s important to consider when setting up the friendly fixtures is who your team is going to meet. Yes, it might be beneficial for your club finances to play against a team of higher reputation but for players morale, it will be useful to face teams of lower reputation. These encounters will not only look to build up knowledge of the tactical familiarity relating to in-possession instructions and how you want the team to go about when attacking the opponent but will also increase player’s morale with a win.
Facing a smaller team might let your player’s score some goal, get some assists and fine performances which you can praise in the pre- or pro-match team talks.
While it may sound obvious that wins will increase player’s morale while losses might decrease it, it’s different ways to manage morale between matches or when you want to get out of a streak of bad form.
2. Team Meetings (and Team Talks)
When entering a new club, or at the start of a new season, you’ll be introduced to the new manager meeting. Here you’ll be able to manage expectations and promises before the new campaign. What you say and how you interact with the players with the use of body language will have a great effect on how player’s receive your messages, something that ultimately affects their morale positive or negative.
It’s important to be vary about what you say and in which tone you say things. In Demandmore’s situation, he tends to avoid them. From his perspective, a bad team meeting could be as worse than having no team meetings at all!
To some extend, I agree on that point of view, but I believe you can come a long way by using common sense when doing these team meetings.
Team meetings can be a valuable way to conduct prior to important cup matches or when reaching the latter matches of the season where you’re looking to avoid relegation, are hunting for promotion or the championship title. It’s one way to stimulate the player’s belief in their abilities in order to try to raise their on-pitch performances for the upcoming events.
Use a positive body language such as ‘Outstretched Arms’ or ‘Pump Fists’ and try to put yourself in their situation. What do they want to hear? What is this squad capable of? Use these team meetings to improve their self-belief and overall squad morale by telling them to believe in themselves or to prove a point. Perhaps you’ll even lower the pressure on them to reduce the nervousness within the squad…
PS. If you’ve given a message that hasn’t been 100% well received, you can always try to convince your squad by waving your hands.
A good team meetings will first and foremost raise the Club Atmosphere bar, but will also affect each individual player’s morale, so make sure you address the first Team Meeting, where you introduce yourself to your squad, in utmost importance.
3. Criticizing & Praising Player’s through Individual Chats
Regardless how busy the fixture list is or how much the manager has to do prior to the upcoming match, a good manager takes time for his players by conducting individual player chats. Alex Ferguson is a prime example of a player who used conversations and brief chats to affect the player’s attitude and self-belief.
Since football is a game where the individual mentality and state of mind is vital for the performance, taking time to talk to your players will be well received.
The ability to talk to your players is available within the player’s profile. Simply find the Discuss menu and These quick chats with your players lets you get advice, criticize or praise your players all through the season.
These chats serves three purposes:
- Improve their morale (and happiness) by praising their recent performances relating to their current form, how well they played in the last match, how well they are doing in training or how well they conduct themselves around the club.
- Encourage the players to correct their behavior by pinpointing or criticizing the players current level of training, conduct or performances the last match or over a period.
- To build relationship with your players by improving your influence over the players. How the player perceives you, their opinion about you and their loyalty towards your decisions, can ultimately affect the overall managerial support.
3.1 Criticizing / Praising Player’s Training Level
Personally, I aim to have a individual chat at least once a month with all my players. At a weekly basis I praise player’s who have trained very well (above 7.9) and criticizing those who have trained badly (below 6.5).
The information about who trains good or bad is fetched either from the weekly training summary email, or via the squad view I use but you can also go to Training – Overview or Individual tab and sort all players by their training rating.
NB! To receive training emails for your Under-21 or youth teams, you need to ask them to be delivered. You can enable it at: Staff > Responsibilities > Training
This ensures me to get direct feedback about my young talents training performance so I can more easily monitor their progress. I’ve experienced that these chats will positively help with their development as they will step up their training level and progress faster.
By criticizing or praising their training level, you tell your players what’s expected of them and how they could become one step closer to a spot in the next starting line-up. Since their training level and on-pitch performance is highly linked, it’s of utmost importance to make sure all player’s train at a satisfying level.
In the events a player has trained fairly average (6.8-7.8 in training rating), I tend to praise his conduct, or recent form.
If a player has trained poorly I tell him that I’m disappointed with his recent training performance.
Criticizing and praising players development is an essential task to improve their progress. Keeping tabs of their development of the last 1-3 months is important. I tend to praise their overall development if I see the progress bar increases or he’s made significant change in attributes. You can get informed about a players development at; Player Profile > Development > Progress
Even though a player might not totally agree with you when you’re criticizing his training level, the player’s will generally appreciate you taking note that they’re not doing very well and trying to help them get better, or the opposite; that you have noticed they have put in extra effort on the training ground.
What you’ll encounter is that player’s who are unhappy will more likely train poorly, so make sure to see if there are other things you need to address besides training alone. The Happiness tab within Dynamics (which I’ll get back to) gives you a great overview.
3.2 Praising Player’s Conduct
Another option to improve a player’s morale, if they haven’t trained very well, or you simply wants to tie your bonds to the player is to praise a players conduct. It’s often a great choice for influential player and important players within the core social groups.
By greeting the player with putting your arm around him or patting him on the shoulder, you will start off the conversation in a positive way rather than the more formal handshake.
Then you can praise their conduct by telling them that they are promoting the club very well and that he’s a credit to the club, that he has a really positive influence on the player’s he works close with, or that they have helped to contribute to a positive dressing room atmosphere.
Praising the captain’s conduct by telling him you fully appreciate his role in the team can help to establish positive relationships between you. By getting your captain and team leaders behind you, it will aid you when negative issues comes along, such as a bad run of form, players wanting to leave due to offers from bigger clubs or influential player’s not agreeing with your team talks, or poor handling of other concerns.
Most often, you’ll notice that the players will be really happy to see you taking time to praise them and it will be a start to build relationships to your players. Personally, I tend to have private chats more often with key players and influential players at the club. It could be player’s that I want to keep happy due to their potential and significant role within the team.
Why criticizing conduct could be beneficial?
On the contrary, if you got a player who regularly miss training, gone awol, or conduct themselves negatively by being unhappy or in poor morale, it’s wise to criticize their conduct.
There’s nothing wrong to take time to tell them that their behavior are affecting the dressing room atmosphere and that they need to try to change their approach. Most often, the player’s will be happy with the talk and a relationship is starting to grow.
Correcting their behavior by criticizing their conduct is useful when you got a captain or team leader who are moaning about lack of promises being kept or lack of game time.
If you have handled the situation in a good manner, criticizing a player can also lead to improved morale and player happiness.
3.3 Criticizing / Praising Player’s Form
Throughout the season, it’s difficult to avoid fluctuating form. The team and all the individual players will have periods where they perform magnificent and matches they play below par. To improve the player performances and get out of bad streaks, it’s important to praise the player’s performance, once in a while.
Praising player’s shouldn’t be done too often, as they eventually won’t listen to what you say, but if you manage to find the balance between praising and criticizing their performances according to their form and how the team played, you’ll be able to maintain their morale and build relationships to your players.
Identifying a player that deserves your praise after a good performance, or a great run of form is an essential task of squad management. Although I usually try to criticize and praise player’s training level on a weekly basis, I haven’t any regular schedule for criticizing/praising player’s form. It all depends on the match results and the average match ratings.
I have enabled the form tab on the player’s profile and have imported the Last 5 Matches view in my squad view to keep informed about player’s form.
The candidates for praise is often a player who have scored, assisted or produced many chances and received high match ratings over the past 5 matches. I try to balance who gets praise but you can’t shy away the fact that it’s often the same players who performs above average.
In the last match, Sergio Gomez was awarded the player of the match with 1 goal, 1assist, 6 key passes whilst producing one clear cut chance. Meanwhile, my striker (Christian Kouamé) scored 2 goals and my attacking midfielder (Joshua Zirkzee) producing two lovely assists. The last goalscorer Isaac Tshibangu scored the 7th goal in five appearances. All these player’s are warrant a praise. In the case of Zirkzee, he is starting to oppose me because he hasn’t been in the starting line-up, which makes him into a great candidate for praise about his performance in the last match, while Sergio Gomez and Isaac Tshibangu warrants a praise for their form.
In Gomez’s case I told him that he was at his creative best in our last match and that he should keep up the great work. The message maintained his Perfect morale.
On the other end of the scale you got Anouar Ait El Hadj who I haven’t quite managed to get running in the Advanced Playmaker role. With 6.6, 6.3 and 6.7, it’s time to critize his form and tell him to step up.
Most often when criticizing a player he’ll reply that he will do better next time and that he appreciated the talk. El Hadj’s morale then went up from Extremely Good to Superb.
Whenever you come in the situation where players form declines, it could be beneficial to let him get some rest and replace the player with another player for a few matches until his training rating increases.
It’s also important to understand that a player’s performance might be the result of using him in a position or player role that he’s not suitable for, or familiar with. It could even be that the opposition managed to counter his strength in a great manner and that he’ll play better against another opponent.
4. Manage Player’s Playing Time Expectations
To keep your players happy, you need to keep your promises and ensure they receive the playing time as expected when agreeing upon contracts. The player’s squad status or agreed playing time, will describe the expected game time and amount of appearances a player expects to receive from you.
An important part of setting playing pathways and planning your squad for the future is to set the playing pathways up correctly. This is most important in order to maintain the player’s happiness level at a positive level.
There are 11 different playing time expectations plus specific playing time statuses for goalkeeper . These are;
Star Player – Expects to play as many matches as possible. Give this status to key players that’s first on the team sheet. These players are often the heart of the team, such as captains, vice captains or players with significant abilities and reputation.
PS! This agreed playing time should only be given to 1 to 2 players within your squad. Think of him as the Harry Kane of the Tottenham squad, or Lionel Messi at Barcelona.
Important Player – Expects to play as many matches as possible but will consider himself amongst the most noteworthy players at the club. This means that you can have several important players (3 to 5). For instance, you can give this playing time expectation to the best players within each position (e.g. a defender, a midfielder, a winger and/ or a striker).
Regular Starter – These players will expect to start the majority of the matches but won’t expect to play every single match as a star player would do. They won’t get unhappy if they doesn’t play over 90% of the matches. A team will most often persist of mostly ‘Regular Starters’. The equivalent for goalkeepers is First-Choice Goalkeeper.
Squad Player – These players expects to provide competition for a place in the starting line up. If we believe Important players will feature in 85% of all matches a season, squad players expects to feature in 50-75% of the matches. They could be used as a rotation option when your important players needs rest and their injury risk are high, or take the field as substitutes. This means that they will be in or around the first-team’s starting line-up and be a useful asset to you. Think of Phil Foden at Man City or Diogo Jota at Liverpool.
Impact Sub – could be players that got great abilities to change the course of the match perhaps due to your tendency to alter your tactics in the latter stages of the match. These players will sit on the bench and wait on their opportunity and then make an impact as a substitute. Most often, these player’s might lack the experience, current abilities or stamina to play the full 90 minutes every single match, but instead got incredible strength within one area of the game – quickness, strength or aerial abilities to make an impact within a shorter period of the game. It could be a useful way to introduce your young talents and Under-21 players to the first team. They will improve their experience about the tempo of the game and the playing level within the league.
Fringe Player – these players wont expect to have an important role within the team but instead get occasional opportunity to come in and impress you.
Emergency Backup Player – expects to provide cover for the first team and receive game time when injuries occur or in heavy fixture list periods. Most often, these players are third goalkeepers, the fifth strikers or players reaching their latter stages of their career as they are in decline physically.
Breakthrough Prospects – are Under-21 players who expects to be in and around the first-team in the coming months. These player’s expects opportunities in order to realize his potential. Most often these players got significant abilities and potential for their age and could breakthrough in the first-team as their abilities isn’t far from first team level.
Future Prospects – These players understands they still got a long way to go before expecting matches in the first team right away. Instead, they understand that their time will come in the coming years. These players are great Under-18 talents and are happy by getting match experience at youth level.
Youngsters – Expects to be given chance to develop at a slower rate due to lower abilities and potential (silver star CA). They could potentially earn first-team opportunities a few years into the future, but needs to be patient.
Surplus to Requirements – They are unlikely to get first-team appearances and are set to leave the club since you can’t find a place for them in your squad. These players will most likely want to leave the club as quickly as possible.
NB! You can tick the option to transfer list the player and set his playing time status to Surplus to Requirements when you’re offering the player out to other clubs.
Playing Pathways & Expected Playing Time will fluctuate throughout the season
As you’ll notice, it’s a fine line between the different playing time pathways. It’s easy to experience that the actual playing time and agreed playing time differs slightly. The reason could be that a player performs above expectations or got a great run of form, that makes you favor him for the starting XI instead of a player that performs inconsistently or have troubles understanding your tactics and the role he’s asked to do. Perhaps his attributes or traits doesn’t suit your football philosophy that makes him perform below average.
To keep your players happy, you need to manage their playing time expectations throughout the season. It’s important to be on-hands and deal with it before it becomes a major issue.
By setting the appropriate playing time expectations you will avoid unhappiness and complaints about not playing enough matches. A good approach is to frequently check and control if there are differences between agreed and actual playing time and change the playing pathway to an appropriate level.
How to manage playing time expectations?
To change the playing time expectations, simply click on the player profile. Hover the mouse over the Overview menu and click on Happiness. Click the change button and select the appropriate playing time according to your plans for the player.
You need to be careful when changing the playing time expectations. If you make huge changed to the expectations, for instance by decreasing the status from Important to Fringe, the player might become unhappy and turn against you. Doing this to one of the influential players within the club can have significant negative consequences to the club atmosphere and managerial support. If the player’s within his social group takes his side, you’ll suddenly have more problems than one to deal with.
On the contrary, if you got a player that’s wanted by other (bigger) clubs you could take the opportunity to change his playing time expectations to try to keep him at the club.
5. Keep Your Promises!
It’s not only playing time expectations and training that can affect a player’s happiness. The initial Team Meeting ahead of the season let you set some promises about what the players can expect from you for the coming season. You might want to give youth an opportunity in the first-team squad, or trim your squad of ageing players on high salaries.
Then, if you’ve dipped your toes in the transfer market, you might try to convince the player to join your club by making a promise. It could be that you promise the new signing that you’ll improve your coaching staff, that you’ll improve your squad within a position or the club’s training facilities. It might even be that you’ve promised a player on loan to play him in a specific position and role.
Whichever promises you give, it’s important to try to keep those promises to ensure it doesn’t lead to unhappiness and complaints. If you break any promises, the player could potentially start to considering his options, ask to be transfer-listed or be reluctant to renew his contract.
Any promises made to Influential players at the club should be treated with utmost importance. do your best to and try to keep those promises. When you break any promises, it could take a long time before the players will trust you and that the issue is solved.
To get a full overview of the promises you’ve given, you can discover it at: Home – Promises.
The overview of promises also lets you see how long it takes before the promises exceeds. Some promises will have a shorter duration, while some will last until the season ends.
If there are any essential promises made to key players, a great tip is to use your notebook to deliver reminders about what you need to do to keep your promise to him. You can create reminders that are delivered to your inbox by clicking: Home - Notebook - Create Note.
6. Monitor Player Happiness
Within the Happiness tab of Squad Dynamics, you’ll get an overview of how satisfied your players are with you and your management, any arising issues and promises you’ve given.
The overview of the squad’s happiness will give you a graphical overview of how satisfied the player’s are with your treatment of each individual, the current playing time, the current situation at the club and the training.
It will be highly beneficial to monitor the player happiness in this overview. It lets you get aware of any potential arising issues at an early stage and help to pinpoint what you need to address on a man-management or squad management level.
6.1 Training Happiness
We’ve earlier talked about how to improve morale by criticizing and praising training level according to the player’s training performance. To ensure the players are enjoying themselves on the training ground and maintains a high training rating it’s important to maintain their training happiness.
The player’s will have certain expectations for training sessions to conduct in specific periods of the season. Before the season starts, player’s are expected to do more physical training sessions that improves their quickness and strengths.
A player might become concerned with training if he’s unhappy with the overall level of training or the intensity of training is too high. It might be that the player feels he should do more training in a specific area, other types of training sessions or feels the extra focus he’s been asked to increases the workload to much, or isn’t beneficial for him.
How the Overall Training load can affect General Happiness
Whenever you set up an additional focus, ask a player to learn new traits or improves his weaker foot, or increases the intensity level to double, the player might complain and become unhappy.
To avoid any issues, it’s recommended to add/ remove any individual training the player is asked to do and correct the training workload to an appropriate level. Football Manager will give you clues about what the player complaints about and what’s wrong with your approach.
For instance, if a player complaints about lack of quickness training I tend to select it for Additional Focus for some weeks. If he should complain about the level of training, I’ll check his training intensity and decrease or increase it to one notch up, or down depending on what the current training load is set at.
Vacant coaching staff positions can lead to unhappiness with training!
Another cause of complaint is often the lack of coaches in charge of specific training assignments. If you don’t got any coaches in charge of running defending – tactical training, quickness or possession – technical, player’s might complain with the poor training quality. It’s important to manage the coach responsibilities at training and ensure you improve the coaching staff with enough coaches.
If you don’t got the finances to improve the backroom staff with additional coaches, it’s useful to let a coach be in charge of numerous training categories. You can learn more about this in our guide to setting up the coaching assignments.
You will receive information about this in the staff meetings by the backroom staff in charge of providing advises about Coaching. You can decide who shall be in charge of delivering this information to you in Staff Responsibilities > Advises and Reports > Misc.
How to improve Team Cohesion?
To ensure the team performance and understanding of your tactics is as good as possible, it’s important to ensure the team cohesion is superb within the club. Since the player’s familiarity with tactics and understanding of each others positioning, movements and reactions will be hampered by a poor team cohesion, it’s vital that you use the preseason to try to improve team cohesion.
How great the players are gelled together can often be a reason for poor performances and poor run of form. Here’s a few tips to get your team out of a bad run of form, or to develop better understanding amongst the players on the pitch.
While some managers are eager to get the preseason over with as quickly as possible, I treat the weeks leading up to the first consecutive match with utmost importance. Perhaps these manager’s don’t understand the importance of the preseason and why the team needs one.
Utilizing the preseason most effectively
The preseason is the time to prepare the players for the coming season. Not only to see them work on building up their match sharpness and lower the overall chance of getting jaded as the season reaches its latter stages, but also working on improving the team cohesion and player’s understanding of each others positioning and movements. By gelling the squad together you will see the players positioning both in possession, out of possession and in transition improves.
The team cohesion (and club atmosphere) bar will naturally increase the longer the players spend time together both on the pitch and on the training ground. This means that any matches (cup ties, friendlies or league matches) will aid the level of understanding between the players.
Similarly, can training and specific training sessions aid the club’s team cohesion.
Which training sessions improves team cohesion?
The Teamwork training schedule providing in our FM22 training schedules megapack is specifically designed to increase the players team cohesion and happiness. It’s normally used in the week leading up to the first match of the season, but can also be used whenever you have made multiple signings and needs to quickly raise the team cohesion and teamwork abilities.
The schedule incorporates Match Preparations sessions like Teamwork that greatly increases the squads team cohesion. Then, it includes the Extra-Curricular Team Bonding that also increases the player’s training happiness to a great extend. The team bonding will also give a boost to the player’s teamwork abilities for the upcoming match, something that will aid the team’s understanding of each other and their ability to follow tactical instructions.
Below is a brief overview of training sessions to use to improve the team cohesion:
Greatly increased:
Match Practice (Match Preparation)
Teamwork (Match Preparation)
Increased:
Match Tactics (Match Preparation)
Defensive Shape (Match Preparation)
Attacking Movement (Match Preparation)
Match Preview (Match Preparation)
This shows the importance of selecting the match preparations and team bonding sessions on a weekly basis to maintain happiness and team cohesion. In fact, all my training schedules incorporates match preparation sessions the day before the upcoming match.
Which factor(s) can decrease the team cohesion?
The team cohesion can decrease when you make multiple signings in a short time. How many new signings you make to impact the team cohesion is something I haven’t experimented with, but a handful of new signings in the last week before deadline day will surely have a negative impact, both on how gelled the squad is and for the player’s morale in those positions you’ve signed new players for.
To maintain a good dressing room atmosphere it’s important to consider the players age, nationality, spoken languages and personality when signing new players. With a huge squad of different nationalities, languages and of different age, it will make it difficult to create a strong unity. The scout reports will include a section about how he will fit into the social groups and how hard it may be to incorporate the player into the squad or make him adapt to living in your country.
Another reason the team cohesion can decrease is vacations and periods where you give your players rest from training for a longer period than a week. You will notice that the team cohesion bar drops between season end and when the players report back to training, ahead of preseason.
Keep in mind!
PS. Whenever you make a new transfer, the player will take some time to adjust into the squad regardless of his adaptability or language spoken. What’s great is that the social groups are made up of player’s who have been at the club for a similar length of time, meaning it’s easier to integrate the players into the club and create a strong unity down the line if you sign multiple players of similar age, from same region/nation and or who got a similar personality.
What can demoralize the players?
To summarize how to improve the player’s morale and happiness, it’s important to understand what can negatively affect the player’s morale. A player can be demoralized by;
- Placing the player on the transfer list, loan list or offer him out to clubs
- Selling a player that’s influential to the squad. For instance if the player is either part of the core social group, is higher up in the hierarchy and/or got great support from his teammates.
- Criticizing a player publicly in press conferences
- Criticizing the squad or demanding better performances despite they have played fairly good, time and time again, can affect the team spirit and overall morale. This means you have to be careful about praising the players in press conferences and team talks in order to avoid complacency.
- criticizing a player’s training level and the player disagrees with you.
- Sign a player in the same position as him and give him an equal or better playing time expectation.
- Bad team talks and team meetings where you have slammed the team or criticize their performances
- Lack of game time and match experience. A player might decrease his morale if he regularly doesn’t make it into the starting XI or you haven’t found a place for him on the bench, in registration to tournaments or leagues.
- Long -term injuries which keeps him out of the team for a long time that could potentially hamper his career
- Not entering in contract talks when the player wants an improved contract.
- Not letting player’s enter contract talks with other clubs when they wants to move to a bigger club.
- removing the armband, or warn the captains about you’re thinking about removing them for their captaincy role.
- players finding it hard to get incorporated into the Core Social group or is unsettled. It may be that the player have a hard time adapting to living in the nation, playing for the club, or integrate himself into the squad which results in unhappiness and poor morale.
Finally, it’s important to pay attention to hints and tips coming from your backroom staff, either at staff meetings or in the Happiness overview of the Dynamics section. Advises about what you can do or feedback from the staff about the players will be available on their player profile. Simply locate the Staff Icon at the top right, beneath the Continue button, to get recommendations of actions to take.
Staff Meetings about Individual Players
By having a staff meeting about the individual player, you will receive analysis about the suggested actions. In the case of Sergio Gómez we see that our Assistant Manager feels he’s impressed enough lately to warrant a praise for his superb form. The player might be motivated by the praise, but might also disagree with the praise. You can use this knowledge to make better decisions. This time, I won’t need to praise him, since his morale is already Perfect.
NB! The staff’s feedback and advises will depend on his level Knowledge level about the player and the club. A newly signed staff will have less knowledge of the player’s strength and weaknesses, so take their advises with a pinch of salt.
Outro
With these tips about how you can improve player’s morale in Football Manager, I hope you will be better prepared to keep your players happy. You’ll received a better insight to how to create strong unity at the club and improve your player’s performances by praising players training, form and conduct.
What do you do to keep your players happy in Football Manager 2022? Do you got some personal experiences where Team Cohesion, Managerial Support or Dressing Room Atmosphere is awful? What did you do to change it? Help a fellow Football Manager fan by sharing your approach to managing morale in Football Manager by adding a comment.
That’s it for now, thanks for reading! Stay tune for more Football Manager 2022 guides coming your way soon!