How to get out of a slump and find your form again!

It’s a place nobody wants to go to but where every player ends up eventually: a slump. You are losing games, nothing seems to work, you can’t find your flow, every opponent seems to be better than you. It’s extremely frustrating and a phase we want to get out of as quickly as possible. So let’s take a look at what we can do in order to find our form again asap!

Take a break! This is probably the most boring advice, yet it is the most effective one. When things aren’t going well for us, we try to play our way out of there. But this rarely works. Typically, we tense up and play even worse, hence increasing our frustration and tilt more and more.

In moments like these you have to control yourself and take a step back. Taking a break only feels bad in the first moment, because your brain wants that reward from a clean win. As soon as you get your head away from the game and do something else, you’ll forget about the frustrations.

Breaks are extremely important in order to get a free head again and avoid tilt. You should only return to your console once you have reset your mindset fully and are positively excited to play again. Typically this is after a couple of days.

Reflect on your own game What you can do during these breaks is take a look at what’s going on with your gameplay. Record your matches and rewatch them in an analysis.

When you’re going through a slump, these are the things you want to look out for:

• Which tools am I overusing? (e.g. certain skill moves, the driven pass or a shooting technique)
• Am I repeating certain patterns that are easy to read for the opponent?
• Am I making certain mistakes repetitively and getting punished?

You should challenge your habits because most of the time these are the cause of your slump. In similar situations you are always going for similar solutions and they’re not working out. This could be building-up wide through the wing and then always trying to cut inside with a skill move and trying to find a pass. Why not try to push through to the goal line and find a pass/cross from there as an alternative?

Inspiration from others This is where inspiration from others is very valuable. You might be able to identify your patterns but then you are missing creative ideas for other solutions. Have a look at some pro players and their game styles. Chances are that they are going to solve situations totally different than you would. And this is great because then you can go ahead and try that in your own games.

The entire goal is breaking up that game style of yours and finding your creativity again. Because when things aren’t going our way, we tend to fall back into what we know and “play it safe”. This is exactly the opposite of what good FIFA looks like and so your goal should be to find that inspiration and confidence again when playing. Watching pro players, especially competitive matches is great, because it also gets you excited to play!

Keep your flow Now these are all tips outside of the game. But what about when you actually start playing again? The secret from my experience is to not force anything. Let your Self 2 find its own flow.

You don’t want to head into a game with fixed ideas on what to do in which situation. Instead you want to experiment. Do random things you usually wouldn’t do on purpose.

What happens when you let the ball bounce between players 2, 3 or 4 times? How do opponents react when you just stop the ball and stand still for 2 seconds? What do they do when you slow down on the wing but don’t actually do a skill move?

Play with your habits, break them for fun and see what happens. Play with your opponents, see how they react to unusual stuff. This is a great way to have fun again and naturally find new options to play the game.

Formation and tactics changes Something that can assist you very well with that inspiration and creativity is changing your formation and/or tactics. This doesn’t mean you should go ahead and switch them every day as soon as one or two games don’t go your way. But when you’re really trying to get out of a slump, this is a valuable tool.

Ideally you want to switch to something completely different. You played a wide formation? Try out a 41212 narrow. You played Possession style in attack? Try out direct passing. This will force you to play differently and break your patterns.

All these tips combined should allow you to get out of slumps relatively quickly in the future. But even if one continues to go on after taking a break etc., don’t forget: patience is everything. The more you are getting angry at yourself, the more you are going to tense up and the worse you are going to play. Stay calm, you’re going to play better soon.

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About the author Georg "CruZzAve" Raffelt is creating tutorials since 2013 around which time he also started his competitive journey in the game. He was able to qualify for the Grand Final of the German National Championship "Virtuelle Bundesliga" twice in 2014 and 2015. Online he managed to reach the weekly and monthly Top100 in the Weekend League numerous times.

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