___JaY___

I am conceding so many goals its ridiculous. After 17 games in the league I have conceded 30 goals - the most in the league.

Is there anything I can do to stop this? It is so frustrating especially as my defenders get 7-8 ratings most of the time! It doesn't make sense.

bonta

First of all, check that your keeper has a good command and communication rating, someone needs to organise the defense and although theres some good influencial central defender that can do that as well, I find GK usually does a better job. You know that when your some of your players (usually defenders) "think ... organises the defense well" under the "personal" tab.

Check what kind of people/team is ripping your defense apart, a common mistake is to think defenders with high tackle and marking is good, unfortunately there are alot of high pace strikers/wingers in the game that rips your 20tackle/marking defenders apart, pick ones that have ok-ish pace/accel even if their tackle number is low. Also heading, are they scoring through long balls?

Then onto man mark or zone mark, that depends how good your defense really is, if your defenders have good anticipation and work rate, use zone mark (remember to make sure its set for individual players), if not then you need man mark and its worth specifically tell them to mark a specific player on match day (the danger man).

A common tactic that people use is to employ a Defending Midfield and set it to run back and act like 5th defender when ball is lost (draw arrow downwards between 2 CDefender).

How about posession? The numbers doesn't tell the whole story, watch the highlight and see what happens ESPECIALLY when the GK kicks the ball out. If you have high workrate midfielders set the "closing down" bar to highest (whole pitch), and most of the time its worth using 1 striker only and employ an extra midfield, 4-5-1 unfortunately is a better formation in this game for starters.

Finally you have things like tempo and creativity that may effect how the defender handles situation, slow tempo with some creativity will cause the defender to "hold the ball" when he has posession and risk being nicked, thats something you need to experiement with but in general creativity is generally a bad thing in this game, set it to low and manually give half bar to 1 or 2 playermaking midfielder only.

Well theres more but try this out first lol

___JaY___

'bonta' you are a legend. There is plenty there for me to think about. I'll try what you said and if I have any rpblems I'll give you a shout.

Thanks mate

kolobok

Couple more things.

If possible, make sure that most of your defs and GK speak the same language.

If your defs receive high ratings, and you did not mention you GK is bad, then the problem is most likely midfield. If MCs or wingers loose ball often, AI can set up a fast counter attack and score, but neither defs nor GK are to blame. So make sure that at least a couple your midfielders are hard working horses who would prevent fast attack at the beginning (as bonta said closing down in the middle should help).