How you arrange your match lineup can be the key to either clinching the league title or languishing at its lowest ranks. You're equipped with players whose placement across the pitch can significantly impact the game. Each player's unique attributes and their locations on the field will influence various aspects of the game's dynamics. Adapting your approach for each opponent is vital to success.

Tactical Options

Mentality. Mentality, sets the general effort for attacking or defensive duties. Your players can have following mentalities:
- Attacking, your players will push more in the front as a team, giving all attacking efforts a bonus while attacking. There is a drawback when defending and the team wont be as effective.
- Balanced gives no advantage or disadvantage while attacking or defending.
- Defending, your players will focus more on defense duties, staying back and holding the lines, they will have a bonus while defending. The drawback is they wont be as strong while attacking.

Tempo.Tempo affects the speed of the game and your team's formation stability. Your players can have following tempo orders:
- Fast (Increased tempo) means your players will avoid wasting time and will try to be productive on the pitch.
- Balanced (Balanced tempo) has no change to how you set your formation;
- Slow (Decreased tempo) means your players will slow down play and lose time.

Marking. Your team's defensive focus. Try to focus your formation and marking options to neutralize your opponent's most powerful areas of play.

• Zonal marking is the standard that focuses to cover all approaches equally.
• Man marking will focus on intercepting crosses.
• Dropping deep focuses on intercepting through balls.
• Closing down will focus to block long shots.

Except for zonal marking, each option shifts some defensive strength towards the selected focus - either intercepting crosses, through balls, or blocking long shots - slightly reducing effectiveness in other areas

Tackling. Impacts not only how aggressively your players engage in challenges but also influences the risk of committing fouls and possibly incurring cards.

• Soft encourages players to approach confrontations more cautiously. This reduces the chance of fouls and cards but might allow opponents more space and time with the ball, potentially making it easier for them to maintain possession and build attacks.
  
• Normal represents a balanced approach, where players engage in challenges with a standard level of intensity. This setting aims to effectively dispossess opponents without significantly increasing the risk of fouls compared to more aggressive tactics.
  
• Hard signals your players to commit more forcefully in challenges, increasing the likelihood of winning back the ball. However, this aggressive approach comes with a higher risk of committing fouls and receiving cards, which could result in disadvantages such as reduced player availability due to suspensions.
  
  

Build up. Where do you see the space for creating your own actions and where will you focus your midfielders to build possession. This option doesn't give any bonuses/penalties to your team, it is just a guideline which events to attempt the most.

• Build in the center builds your possession with central midfielders.
• No preferred option builds equally (left, right, center).
• Build on the sides builds your possession through left and right midfield players.
  
  

Approach. How do you prefer to approach opponent's goal. Try to exploit opponent's weak areas with your formation and right approach type. This option doesn't give any bonuses/penalties to your team, it is just a guideline which events to attempt the most.

• No preferred approach keeps balance among all 3 approaches.
  
• Pass into space and send balls behind opponent's defensive line for one on one chances.
• Cross into the box leads to more header situations.
  
• Shoot on sight whenever there is an opening near the edge of the box. Leads to long shots.
  
  

Formations

There are several formations to choose from, 4-4-2 being the default and most neutral formation. Any other formation may bring bonuses or penalties to a determined play. For example, a defending team using 5-3-2 will see a benefit when one of the 5 defenders is going for a tackle. However if the same team is defending using 3-4-3, the same defender will be less effective as they are missing 1 player. The same is true if the player defending is a midfielder or striker, the match engine will also check how many players there are in that position.
Same logic when attacking, a lone striker in a 4-5-1 will struggle to score, comparing to 3-4-3 but since his midfield has 5 players, he will probably be served more often.

So, we can assume that in KOB, 5-3-2 is a defensive formation, 3-4-3 is an attacking formation that will be weaker defending but every attack using a striker, is stronger. This logic is the same for all formations.

For every official match a team plays with a formation, it will gain a 1 star experience towards that formation knowledge, each star gained gives a 1% bonus to players skills for the next match. This experience can be accumulated up to 5 stars, giving a maximum of 5% bonus. To stack this experience the game will only look for the latest 15 official matches, older than that, they will be "forgotten". Formation experience will give bonus to every match type however can only be accumulated on official matches. Formation experience is reset at the end of each season.

Player Positioning

Players should be played on their natural positions, if a player is playing in the wrong position he will get a 20% debuff to his skills.
It is possible to train a player to play in extra sides (left, center, right) than he already does, this costs euros.

Player Duty

Players can be set as a Defensive, Normal or Attacking duty. This setting will result in the match engine giving priority in relevant tasks to these players.
For example, a midfielder set as defensive will be selected more often to defend than other midfielders not set to defensive. Same for attacking, if a midfielder is set to attacking, he will be chosen to start more buildups and receive more attacking balls than other midfielders.
Another example, setting all defenders as defensive will not give priority to any defender while defending, so its important to have different duties if you want different priorities. Same as if you only have 1 striker in your formation, it doesn't matter his duty as he will always have the same priority.