AI clubs finally choose their tactics

The 15,000-match experiment showed that the most important tactical decision in ManageFC is your playing style relative to the opponent's. That raised an awkward question: what styles were the AI clubs actually playing?

The answer, when we looked in September 2026, was: almost all of them the same one.

Two reasons, both quiet

The first reason was the trade-off we made in July. To keep time skips fast, we had switched off the routine that lets AI clubs choose their tactics. Since then, AI clubs had played on default settings.

The second reason was older and more surprising. Even before July, the routine described styles in a vocabulary that the match engine did not fully understand. When we checked, almost nine in ten of the styles it chose were not recognised by the engine, which quietly fell back to a single middle-of-the-road style. The variety looked fine in the data and never reached the pitch.

Neither problem caused an error. Matches played normally. That is exactly why they lasted so long.

The rebuild

We made two changes:

1. One shared vocabulary. The styles AI managers choose from are now exactly the styles the match engine plays: counter-attacking, possession, medium pressing, high pressing and low block. Nothing can fall back to a default by accident.
2. Choosing per world. Instead of scanning every league in every world at once — the reason it had been too slow — AI clubs now choose their tactics inside your own world only, as part of your time skips. In a typical world this takes a couple of seconds.

What the AI chooses

After the change we looked at the spread of styles across a sample of AI clubs. Counter-attacking football was the most common, followed by possession and the two pressing styles, with the low block used sparingly by clubs expecting to defend. It is the mix you would expect from a pyramid of clubs with different squads and ambitions — and it means the rock-paper-scissors of styles actually happens in your matches.

Seeing it before kick-off

There is a related gap we are still closing. Today, an opponent's style is shown on the match page before kick-off and on their club page, but not yet on the tactics screen where you make your own choice. Bringing the two together is on our list, so you can set your style with your opponent in front of you.

The lesson

Variety that nobody sees might as well not exist. Since September, whenever we add a choice to the game — for players or for the AI — we check that it actually reaches the match, not just the data.

Next in the diary: why you start in division 3.