There are a few things.
1. Game Prep
Set a focus/pace prediction for your games. If you guess correctly, your players will perform better than they would've otherwise. The downside is that if you guess incorrectly, they'll play worse. However not every manager sets their tactics before every game. By looking through their last 2-4 games, you'll find out what their default, or recently common offense they run. There's a list of the offenses with their focus/pace in the tutorial, which can be found in the help section of the forums.
You can also try countering your opponent's tactics by setting yours to whatever theirs is bad against. A list of the offenses/defenses with their weaknesses/strengths can be found in the tutorial as well. I don't use this strategy anymore, because I didn't have much success with it. That might've been because of my roster at the time.
2. Enthusiasm/Effort
There are three stages of effort you can set for a game. TIE (Take It Easy), Normal, CT (Crunch Time). TIE builds enthusiasm, while CT "spends" it. The higher the enthusiasm and/or effort, the better your players will play. I suggest setting your effort to TIE in the games you are sure to either win or lose. This way you can build enthusiasm and choose to "spend" it on an important game. ( playoffs, to make playoffs, seeding, to avoid relegation, or relegation games)
3. PR Manager
PR managers have abilities that boost your teams performance depending on whether they're home (Crowd Involvement) or away (National Appeal). The level of the manager does not affect the effectiveness of his ability.
4. Game Shape
The better the game shape the better your players play. If you play your players too much, too little or not at all, their game shape will decrease. If you can hit that sweet spot ( around 48-60 minutes a week) , it will increase. Never train game shape. Not only is it a waste of a week of training better spent in another stat, but game shape resets at the beginning of every season.
5. Experience
The higher the stat the better the player performs within the boundaries of his skill set. The only way a player gains experience from what I can tell are regular season games, playoffs and cup games. It increases extremely slowly and is almost a non-factor because of this. Still worth mentioning though.
I think that's all. The rest comes down to the players stats and how well they operate in your offense. BB takes money and training but above all time and patience.
Last edited by ZloppEE at 06/22/2016 15:58:51