How to arrange friendly matches? | Questions and Answers Football Manager 2016 Guide

Your calendar displays all of the dates on which you can play friendly matches - for a reason, during tournaments, they are scanty

During intervals between seasons and rounds, you will surely want to arrange some friendly matches to test your new players, test your tactic and increase experience level of your players. Friendly matches also are the opportunity to try out those of the players who normally do not make it into the first line-up. To arrange a friendly match, access Calendar, and then select Arrange Friendly Competition. Pick the team, date and type (e.g. league) and send invitation. You just need to remember that not every team that you pick accepts your invitation and the Board also will not accept every tour (especially if you are managing a club with low financial liquidity, or there is not enough money for that). Before you send the invitation, you can also check out the expected revenue - arranging friendlies is a quite reliable source of additional income, in case of playing as a team with strictly limited finances.

Note: Arrangement of friendly matches, and even managing the team during such matches can be entrusted to another staff member. Then, it is him that arranges the date and manages the team during the match. You will lose then the option to experiment, but if you do not want to be bothered with that too much, your assistant will deal with it quite efficiently. You only need to provide him with the authority , by going Staff -> Duties.

In itself, arranging a friendly match is very easy. So, why is it a good idea get involved into that? The key to success here is to view friendlies as an important element of preparations before tournaments. You will be usually playing friendly matches before the beginning of the season and during the winter break. This is when your players go on vacation and do not train. This generates a number of problems: drop in attributes, lower expertise in tactic and worse teamwork (especially if you have finalized several transfers), as well as drop in morale. To remedy all of this, apart from training sessions, you also arrange for friendly matches.

During post-season preparations, try to play 2 friendlies a week. Thanks to this, not only will you gain time for pre-game training, but it also leaves 1-2 spare days for a regular training session. With that many meetings, you should be able to "tune" the entire team (allow all of the players to play), increases players' familiarity with tactic and the improves on teamwork. Pick your sparring partners in accordance with your expectations: you can focus on obtaining financial profits (which is the thing in the case of the poorer clubs), or on maxing out you players' morale. If you want to earn money, pick opponents that are better than you, so that expected revenue is higher. In you want to raise players' morale, pick weaker teams that are easier to defeat (players' condition similar to the one presented in the screenshot will have negative effects on the team).

To sum up: proper arranging of friendly matches is an important element of pre-season preparations and preparations between individual cups. You can raise familiarity of players with tactic, this way, their teamwork, morale and condition. This will allow you to start division matches properly and avoid false starts. In the case of the less affluent teams, this is the only way to test your team before matches for score.