How Broken is Football Manager’s Most Broken Formation?

Every Football Manager cycle ends up with that formation. The one everyone whispers about, the one that tops testing tables, the one you swear you won’t use… until you’re ten games in and bottom of the league. In Football Manager 26, that honour currently belongs to a strikerless system sitting top of the rankings on FM Arena. One Reddit user decided to put the most broken tactic to the test and the results were… revealing.

 

The Setup

The idea was to remove as many human advantages as possible and see what happened. A deliberately awful manager was created. Testy McTestTest. Ninety-four years old, no badges, no playing career, no ability to manage top players, and barely able to communicate with his squad. If anything was going to derail a “broken” tactic, it should have been this.

Each test followed the same simple rules:

• Take over the club
• Apply the tactic
• Go on holiday for the entire season
• No signings
• No squad building
• No clever FM tricks

The aim is to see how much work the tactic could do on its own.

 

The Tactic

The system used was Kickback (Strikerless) V7, currently the top-rated tactic on FM Arena for the latest patch. There’s no striker in sight. Instead, the shape overloads central areas, pulls defenders out of position, and relies on midfield runners arriving late into space. It’s not interested in dominating possession or playing pretty football it’s about exploiting the new FM26 match engine.

 

Test 1 – Manchester City

The first stop was Manchester City. The thinking was straightforward: even if the tactic was strong, surely an incompetent manager would cause problems.

That didn’t happen.

City won the league comfortably. No drama, no bottling in the last 10 games, just a steady march to the title, achieved while averaging 41% possession across the season. For a City side, that’s hilarious.

In the cups:

Carabao Cup: Won, including a 6–1 final
FA Cup: Knocked out in the fourth round by Spurs
In Europe, City reached the Champions League final, losing 5–4 to Real Madrid.

Strong, but not outrageous. A good human player could probably match that. At this point, the tactic looked powerful, but not game-breaking.

 

Test 2 – Burnley

This is where things stopped feeling normal. Burnley were predicted 20th by the media. Same manager. Same tactic. Same hands-off approach. They finished 3rd.

Not “survived comfortably”. Not “snuck into mid-table”. Third. Champions League football. Six points off the title.

They also averaged 38% possession, reinforcing the same pattern seen at City. This tactic doesn’t want the ball and it certainly doesn’t need the ball.

Burnley went on to win the Carabao Cup as well, beating Spurs in the final, and made a respectable FA Cup run. For a team expected to be relegated, this is ridiculous. It makes Sunderland this year look like a terrible achievement. This is the point where the tactic looks officially broken.

 

Test Three: Tier 10 England (Berks County)

For the final test, things dropped all the way down the English pyramid.

Berks County, predicted 23rd out of 23 in the Combined Counties League Division One. No signings allowed. A squad padded out with grey players.

Season one ended with automatic promotion, finishing third in a league where a large chunk of teams go up. Cup runs were unremarkable, which actually made it feel more believable, but promotion at that level with no recruitment is still doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Season two went exactly how every FM player expects. Promotion triggered a mass player exodus, the board demanded another promotion anyway, and the manager was sacked despite taking the club higher than it had ever been before. Pure Football Manager.

 

So… is it actually broken?

This wasn’t a perfectly controlled test, but the pattern is hard to ignore. Across elite squads, relegation candidates, and non-league sides, the same strikerless system consistently punched above its weight, sometimes wildly so. Burnley finishing third without human input is the standout moment.

 

A few things stand out:

• Strikerless overloads are still brutally effective
• Possession is far less important than it should be
• Midfield runners remain a nightmare for the AI to handle
• Tactical shape often matters more than squad quality

 

Final thoughts

Considering this is the most broken tactic in the game apparently, I would have expected it to do better. If the best tactic in the game doesn’t guarantee three points every game with Manchester City then I’m confused. The results it achieved with Burnley are more in line with what I’d expect. Do you have a broken tactic you’re using? Let me know in the comment section. I’d love to try it out.

 

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