In my nonstop quest to score a reasonable percentage of my shots I have largely focused on trying to reduce long shots because my squad rarely scores from these. After examining the stats of my squad and watching them play a season and a half on the same tactic now, only my centrally located players take long shots with absurd frequency. Furthermore, my wingers had much better sot to goal ratios than my AMC or ST.I play a 4-2-3-1 with two center backs, 2 full backs, 2 defensive mids, 2 wingers an attacking mid and a striker. The obvious solution is to thus not play any central players. Of course this would result in my team getting slaughtered. So for testing purposes I decided to employ a ridiculous formation as seen here:
The point was to get my DM's, AMC, and ST assigned to outside positions while still getting them to play centrally with the hope that they would take up some of the mentality of wingers, or more so, to be more judicious with the ball. The first result was astounding.
Essien's shots were from headers on corners, and joe cole took a couple free kicks I believe. Unfortunately we couldn't keep up this pace, with the exception of a 7-0 domination of AC Milan (Though we had 120 minutes to score those 7 goals). However, after looking at Drogba's sot to goals before and after the change they saw a noticeable improvement.
Before the change: 10 Goals in 55 Shots on, 18% conversion rate
After the change: 16 goals in 44 Shots on, 36.4% conversion rate.
After the change discounting the Tottenham game as a fluke: 12 goals in 40 shots on, or 30% conversion rate.
My DM's also seemed to be taking less long range shots, though I would have to watch the games in full rather than highlights to show this conclusively.
This obviously requires further testing because this whole test was conducted within one season. However, holiday is even less accurate than normal because my assistant puts in weird subs for my DM's and AMC because he thinks that they are wingbacks and Wingers. I didn't notice any negative affects when making this change to my central players. So, give it a go and see how it works. I'll be sticking with this style for a while so I can hopefully deduce whether it makes any difference or if this is an awesome case of statistical clustering.