You now have 11 players ready for combat. Is this enough?

Well no, is not enough. You told them where to stay on the field and that's about it. Now you must consider your team as a squad and tell them how to glue together because otherwise there will be only 11 players on the field and not a team as you would like.

To do this you must go to the squad tab and there you can set orders for each player individually or for the whole team. You can set the mentality, creative freedom, the passing style, the tempo that will be used by your squad and much more allowing your team to understand what do you want from them. You must issue this orders taking into account your players because if you have slow players, making them addopt a quick tempo will only exhaust them and this will mean that after 60 minutes your players will be finished. Also, you can issue orders for each player and here comes the beauty of the game. So many options are available that you can get lost and not know what to choose. After you looked at that player attributes you can say to him if you want him to be creative, run a lot, tackle hard or not, and so forth, allowing your team to give the best it can.

After the team has been formed and you gave them your orders is time for the tactics time. Each opponent has its own tactic and you need to bend your team to outcome your opponents. Let's say that the opponents have a quick attacker. You can't let him run wild in your defense. You must make sure that the defender is marking him well and he can intercept the balls as well as tackle when he has the ball. Each game has a unique tactics that you must find and only after this you will be able to win games easy.

To the game

When you are ready to start a game, you can talk to your team, let them know what do you want from them, even sympatize with them you think they need that. When you are playing home or when you are clear favorite, you must make sure that the team knows that you want them to win this game. Or if they are playing well, you can congratulate the team or the player who has a high rating meaning that he played well and is giving everything he has for the game. Each teamtalk can have positive or negative effect, depending on what you tell them. This way you can boost your team or make them angry which can decide the game. Several times after at the break your squad was playing well but the opponents were just a little better, an encouragement or a sympathize with the team allowed them to relax and win the game.

One problem for some, a good thing for others is that the matches are presented in a top-down perspective with players being just circles with numbers on them. If PES does a better job at displaying the game in a 3D version, here you will be able to see better the workflow of your team, where are problems, which tactics you should addapt and much more. More, you have the match commented, allowing you to see which player failes to do his task, which player is better, if the opposition is changing the tactics, things that are not easy to see in other games. If you need to make changes in your team, you can do it quick, just yelling at your squad what you want them to do or you can chose a more detailed version. A screen will pop up, alowing you to change the players, make substitutions, change the tactics and watch the opponents tactics.

You can create your own training schedule or let the coaches train them. It is better to create your own training schedule and force the players to train as much as you want. Want the defenders to train until they are exhausted? You can set the defending sliders to the max and they will rise in defending very much. But training only defende isn't the best choise. They won't be good at ball control, strength and the opposing attackers might rush through them and score. All this mean that you have to create a training that will allow them to train what is needed for each player. The attackers won't need to train in defense but a little training is necessary in case that your team is pounded and you need them in defense. Each player will act differently at training, some may get injured during training and keeping an eye on this injuries will allow you to change the training for that player so he will benefit from a lighter training. If you patch the game you will also see the benefit of the training. You will see which player grow his attributes, which are not, giving you an idea how they train and what to change in order to make your team better.