Over the past few years, I have been an avid follower of the Strikerless blog. In a way, you could consider me a disciple of the strikerless path to darkness. Initially, that meant that I downloaded the tactics available on the blog and slightly altered them to suit my specific needs. Although I have had some measure of moderate success in the past with developing my own strikerless tactics, this is the first one I have actually felt any pride in. This my strikerless tactic; the Three Amigos.

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Whenever we hear the word “Kampfgeist” the mind almost instinctively wanders back to the days of the German national football team of the 1990s, before the now-famous reboot. Players like Oliver Kahn, Jürgen Kohler, Jens Jeremies, and Stefan Effenberg were not known for their silky technique or tiki-taka play. No, they were primarily known for one thing: Kampfgeist (fighting spirit). One of the best showings of this almost mythical quality came during the Euro 96 final against the Czech Republic when they called upon Kampfgeist to come back from going 1-0 behind to win it 1-2 in the last fifteen minutes of the game and sudden death. This was but one example of a game the Germans managed to turn around based on their fighting spirit. Another famous and fitting quote here belongs, one that can be attributed to Gary Lineker.

Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.

Even though the German national football team has transformed immensely since these days and has indeed become the hipsters’ favourite for the 2018 World Cup, not every team can put Mesut Özil, Leroy Sané, and Toni Kroos on the pitch. There are quite a few times where you will manage a club on FM which cannot call upon the immense qualities of a hugely talented pool of players. In such situations, Kampfgeist could be your ticket to success. @LeonTrotsema of RouteOneFM and @MerryGuido of Strikerless investigate this fascinating, intriguing concept and look at how you can apply it within the confines of the FM18 match engine.

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Over the past years, people have asked me why I play the way that I play. Besides the obvious answer that it works, there are actually some valid reasons, some actual benefits to losing your forwards and replacing them with attacking midfielders. I never gave this any real thought as it just felt right on an instinctive level. Lately, something Cleon said got me thinking about this very subject, which ultimately led to this article.

Nothing really, I just wondered if you’d ever considered doing a piece on why you prefer strikerless over strikers and what they offer you better in comparison. I guess a bit like I’ll be doing with the DMC vs MC’s in the 4231

I always relish the challenge to delve into my own mind in an effort to try and grasp and phrase concepts that have become somewhat of a second nature to me, almost instinctive in a way. So this is my effort to explore the dark depths of my depraved mind and shed some light on why I do what I do, besides the obvious reason that I am a deranged madman.

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In Greek mythology, Cerberus was often called the “hound of Hades”. Cerberus is the monstrous multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the Underworld to prevent the dead from leaving. Cerberus is my first FM18 tactic to be released and like the three-headed beast, it revolves around three deadly forwards carving a path of mayhem and destruction through opposing defences.

As a pragmatic football manager, I found myself struggling during beta, torn between trying to make individual stars shine and maintaining a tight and cohesive system. The fanboy in me wanted to make the stars shine as they do in real life, wanted to emulate the insane records set by the likes of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, whereas the dogmatic strikerless zealot in me did not want to compromise the ideas that made strikerless as good as it was in previous iterations of the game.

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