A recent discussion on the Football Manager subreddit has put a spotlight on something many players feel when building tactics in Football Manager 26, but don’t always fully understand: team mentality isn’t about vibes or style. It’s actually the foundation upon which everything is built.
The thread — posted by user u/TheBassCave — breaks down how mentality quietly governs player behavior long before individual instructions like tempo, passing, or pressing ever come into play. And once you start looking at tactics through that lens, a lot of common FM frustrations suddenly make more sense.
Mentality Sets The Baseline
The core point raised by BassCave is that many players treat instructions as fixed commands, when in reality they’re contextual.
“Lots of people, including content creators, talk about their instructions as if they are on/off switches and describe them in objective terms,” BassCave says in the post. What this approach misses is that each mentality already carries its own built-in tendencies, effectively acting as a tactical preset. Before you’ve added a single instruction, your team already has an identity in terms of risk, urgency, and positioning.
That framing alone helps explain why two tactics with identical instructions can behave differently depending on mentality.
Risk And Urgency Aren’t Abstract Concepts
The game doesn’t do a good job at explaining what “risk” actually means, something BassCove calls out directly. “The concept of risk is poorly defined in FM,” the user said. “The easiest way to think about it is anything that increases the likelihood of losing possession.”
In practical terms, higher-risk mentalities encourage players to leave their positions more often, attempt through balls more frequently, and act decisively rather than conservatively. Urgency works alongside that risk, with BassCove saying that urgency itself is a combination of tempo, passing directness, and dribbling frequency.
As urgency increases, players spend less time on the ball, assess fewer options, and prioritize actions that move play up the pitch. These tendencies exist long before instruction sliders have been touched. And once those sliders have been adjusted, they simply push those tendencies forward.
In Possession: Same Shape, Different Behavior
To isolate the impact of mentality on player behavior, BassCave set up a simple test: a generic 4-3-3 with every team and player instruction left blank. The only variable he changed was the team mentality, allowing the underlying differences to reveal themselves without any additional tactical input.
When in possession, the contrast was immediately clear.
On lower mentalities, players behaved cautiously. Center backs held onto the ball longer, passing options were assessed carefully, and possession was prioritized over progression. When safe options weren’t available, players were more inclined to clear their lines rather than risk a turnover in dangerous areas.
As mentality increased, that restraint gradually disappeared. Players began carrying the ball more often, passes were played earlier and with greater intent, and off-the-ball movement became noticeably more aggressive. The team’s focus shifted from control to forward momentum, with attacks developing more quickly and directly toward goal.
Balanced emerged as the closest thing to a neutral setting. On this mentality, player roles, attributes, and individual traits had the greatest influence on behavior, with fewer hard-coded tendencies pushing the team in one direction or another.
Out Of Possession: Shape, Line, And Engagement
BassCave applied the same controlled approach when analyzing his team’s behavior without the ball. Using identical shapes and roles, and again leaving all instructions untouched, he observed how mentality alone reshaped defensive structure and engagement.
On lower mentalities, the team adopted a deeper and more compact defensive block. The back line dropped noticeably, full-backs tucked in closer to the center-backs, and midfielders held their positions rather than stepping out to press. Defending was reactive, with players prioritizing space and shape over immediate pressure on the ball.
As mentality increased, the team’s defensive behavior changed. The back line pushed higher up the pitch, players were quicker to leave their positions to engage the ball, and the overall shape stretched both vertically and horizontally. Full backs positioned themselves wider to cut off passing lanes, while midfielders and forwards stepped up to disrupt the buildup earlier.
These differences were especially visible during opposition goal kicks. On higher mentalities, the team naturally compressed space higher up the pitch, closing down wide outlets and central options without any pressing instructions applied. The press became more proactive rather than positional, driven entirely by the mentality setting.
The takeaway was consistent with BassCave’s in-possession findings: mentality alone determines how aggressively a team defends, how high it holds its line, and how willing players are to step out of their shape, all before any tactical instructions are added.
What This Means For Your Own Tactic
The biggest lesson from BassCave’s breakdown is that mentality should be treated as the starting point of any tactic, not a finishing touch.
Many struggling setups stack instructions on top of an already aggressive mentality. Positive or Attacking is selected, then tempo is pushed higher, pressing is intensified, and defensive lines are raised further. On paper, it looks coherent. But in practice, it often produces chaotic, inconsistent football that places unrealistic demands on player decision-making and technical execution.
BassCave’s examples help explain why. Offensive mentalities already increase urgency and risk by default. Adding more intensity on top of that doesn’t just refine the approach, but amplifies it as well. Unless your squad is filled with elite decision-makers who can consistently execute at speed, mistakes are inevitable.
The same principle applies in reverse. Dropping to a calmer mentality doesn’t mean abandoning attacking intent or creativity. It simply lowers the baseline level of urgency, giving players more time on the ball and more room to make better choices. From there, instructions can be used to gently push behavior in specific directions rather than forcing it.
Viewed this way, tactical instructions become tools for fine-tuning rather than brute-force solutions. When something isn’t working, the answer is often to reassess the mentality first, then decide whether instructions are truly necessary as opposed to adding more of them.
BassCave’s analysis reinforces a simple but powerful idea: effective tactics are built by choosing the right foundation, then making small, deliberate adjustments on top of it, rather than trying to overpower the system.
