FM18 Tactical Post – How I beat the 433Narrow Hackz

Welcome back!

Its been a while since I last posted but I have been playing my Kasimpasa save, hopefully you have been following on my slack channel #WelcomeToKasimpasa

If not here’s a brief update since I was last with you,

It’s now September 2025 and we are the dominant force in Turkey. In the last 5 seasons we have won 4 titles and finished 2nd once. We have won 3 Turkish Super cups and 2 Turkish Cups.

But in Europe we haven’t made the same strides, we have only qualified for the Champions League knockouts once going straight out, and similar story in the Europa league, despite making it to the knockout stages 3 times we went out at the first round each time.

This season I really want to progress further in Europe so invested £80m of our £163m transfer budget this was after player sales. I’ve done really well with buying and selling of players and at this moment we have a career profit of £140m through player sales. I’ve now been at the club for 3005 days and managed 397 games.

This year our champions league group reads

Tottenham Hotspur – England

AS Roma – Italy

FK Jabonec – Czech Republic

I think qualifying from second place behind Tottenham would be a good start.

Our first game was against Tottenham so the hardest possible start, Then I see their line up the “overpowered” Narrow 433. I thought this is going to be a write off. We lined up in our normal 4141 formation

You can see from the above image Spurs (white) lining up in their 433narrow and Kasimpasa (blue) in our 4141

44 seconds into the match i could already spot issues. The 2 orange circles are already out of the game, in the defensive formation they aren’t picking anyone up and my Center back has already been overloaded with 2 strikers (yellow circle)
3 minutes later I was 1-0 down.

So I stopped an analysed the formations.
I looked at mine

I looked at the wide areas and decided we were 2v1 against them on both sides so I could afford to gamble here and they weren’t using a DM so I could exploit the hole behind my striker to force their Center back to come out and free up space.

This is what I came up with, As you can see from the REDZONES our weakness was the full back positions but they were playing a narrow 433 so unless their full backs got up enough and our wide men didn’t track then we could afford to give up these areas.
We have now gone man for man at the back so each striker would have someone marking him. we have a midfield 3 to match their 3 in attack the DM would be spare to cover, in defense our AM would be free for options.
Just 5 minutes later the change would bring us level at 1-1

As you can see we have our back 3, one of their strikers has dropped to cover the DM, giving us a 3v2 advantage should they win the ball and break. Our Shadow striker can partnered the Complete Forward causing their Left back to come inside to cover which leaves our Right midfielder and both Center midfielders open and with space.

The cross then went in to the right midfielder at the back post and he finished calmly to score.
I believe this worked by finding their weakness in their tactic and overloading that area to create space to exploit.

Here is an example of the formation working, we have just broken up a Spurs attack. All 3 of their strikers are man marked, their midfield 3 are picked up and our DM is free to cover should one break loose, Our striker has split their two center backs.
As I mentioned earlier we would have to gamble on the full back area as you can see highlighted their right back has got away from our left midfielder but with the ball on the opposite side of the pitch i’m not too worried about this.

Here we scored our 3rd which made it 1-3 after 40 minutes, we played the ball out wide left but our left winger was overloaded so he cut back inside, (if you follow the dotted arrows you can see the pass movement, solid arrows are player movement) he then passed back to the center midfielder who passed to his midfield partner who was in space, this then dragged their left back out of position allowing him to play a through ball to our now unmarked Right winger who squared to our Complete Forward who himself was unmarked after their center back followed our Shadow Strikers run.

It wasn’t all brilliant and as with all tactics we had weaknesses which Spurs exploited to bring the game to 2-4, I’ve highlighted the issues in the next 2 images.

Spurs stopped one of our attacks and played a long ball forward (dotted yellow) its 3 on 3 but it isn’t a massive issue at this point as long as our DM makes the dotted orange run, but he doesn’t he makes the purple one leaving our defense 2v2.

Then it happens, Eggestein turns inside and plays a through pass which their striker beats my defender for pace and scores the one on one. Some might argue I’m being harsh on the DM but the shorter distance is to cover at CB and give us a numeral advantage.
Spurs exploited our weakness but it was avoidable maybe going forward playing the DM on defence rather than support would stop this.

The final score finished 2-5 a great result probably my best in Europe on this stage.
I hope this post gives you an idea of a way to approach the game, Spurs were big favourites to win at home and I spotted in just 44 seconds where they would exploit us, i changed it after 5 minutes and 0-1 down. It could of been a similar story if I had kept the 4141 but I changed it and it worked.
It helped we had nothing to lose that we could switch up and take the game to them.

Thanks for reading guys and feel free to ask any questions.
You can get me on Twitter at @DGear86 or in my Slack channel #WelcomeToKasimpasa
Also I’m now co-hosting a Football Manager podcast @GrassNGear give us a listen you can find us on soundcloud or itunes under GrassNGear