Stepping out of Your Comfort Zone

Editorials · By: Melmmer · Jan 22 2010 12:55 AM

The standard for most people when they start a new game is to load up a variety of nations and leagues that they are comfortable with - often the standard leagues loaded are England, Spain and Italy. However maybe its time to step outside your comfort zone; don’t load those leagues, go on a journey and see where it takes you.

Having played Football Manager a fair bit, it is fair to say that I am fairly knowledgeable about different football players within England, I can say that I know a few of the rising stars coming through the ranks and whenever I hear their name I can say “Yep, I knew he was going to be good 4 or 5 years ago”. I am sure many of you know what I am talking about and examples of this are Dani Alves, Sergio Aguero and maybe Lionel Messi. We Football Manager players knew all about them a while ago, but the only way to find these new gems is to step out of your comfort zone and move into some different leagues that you are perhaps not accustomed to; be it in Eastern Europe or you could possibly venture into South and North America.

So by now you have committed to doing something new, exploring a new frontier. The cardinal sin you can make is to load England, that means the temptation is always there to go back and that is where the problem begins. So when starting one of these new games, don’t put any nations you feel comfortable in, as you will run there for cover when things may get tough.

Doing this also gives you the perspective of a real life football manager, not many of the managers managing in the depths of the Romanian Second Division have a realistic goal of managing Real Madrid or Manchester United - for those managers their goals or what they'd consider an achievement is to move to a higher division. Granted, sometimes if they're lucky they can secure that big move to a different country - which really confirms the success that they have had in their current job.

If you have a spy around forums you can often see that people are stuck on who to play with.They have exhausted all their options in England; they have managed mid range clubs, Championship clubs and conference clubs and they are sick of it. However they keep going back because they don’t want to step out of their comfort zone, the moment you leave this zone it is the beginning of a whole new aspect of FM for you.

When packing your bags to go to a foreign country, you won’t know any of the players there - this means you will begin to appreciate how good your scouts can be. You will also learn how to use your scouts more effectively as you're forced into using them and will pick up tips along the way. Training is another area you can improve on. It is more then likely that your players will not be up to the standard that you desire, so maybe training them so that their attributes are better and more suited to your game style will be of benefit to you. Your tactical skills will also come under question here. Your players may not fit into the systems you like to play, so you may have to design new systems to make the team click or look into tactical options much more than normal.

All of these things are good things, no matter how scary they may sound as you read them now, when you put them into place will give you a greater love for the game. I used to be in the situation where I couldn’t find a game to start but I took the bold step of leaving England and now I love the game for all it is worth and I hope that you can follow suit as well.

There is much you can learn about yourself if you take the opportunity to step outside of the norm, not only is it a learning process but it's a more in-depth and rewarding game too.

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