Hello there, and thanks for clicking on my guide!

Rematch is a ton of fun, but like a lot of games in the genre, it's very reliant on everyone in the team pulling their weight and working in harmony. Just like real football, it's generally not the team with the best players that wins, it's the team that works together best as a team.

Whilst it won't turn you into Lionel Messi overnight, this guide gives you ten rules that every single player should be looking to follow more often than not in order to give their team (and by extension themselves!) the best chance of both winning the game AND having an enjoyable time doing it.

We're all guilty of breaking these to some degree almost every game - none of us are perfect, but have a read through and see whether any of these are things you sometimes do without realising - maybe there's something in there that can help give you that extra 5% to rank up!

However, before we really get into the meat of this, I want to cover something off:

Nothing in this guide will apply 100% of the time in 100% of situations. In fact, this is so important I'm going to say it again:

Nothing in this guide will apply 100% of the time in 100% of situations.

There will always be exceptions and edge cases. There will always be a scenario where doing the 'wrong' thing is actually going to get you results you couldn't get by doing things the 'right' way. With that said, it's ultimately not that deep - it's a list of ten things that will help you and your team in most situations, and that as players, we should all be looking to follow more often than not.

This is a big one. Everyone here (apart from the AI crawlers no doubt harvesting my work for free) is a human, and humans are fallible bags of meat and chemicals. We get things wrong. We make mistakes. We panic under pressure. We don't always pick the right option.

Accept this. Understand this. You're all trying to win the game the best you can using the skills and knowledge you have available to you. Consider that the dude who just lost the ball as the last man back for the third time this game might not actually be a government psyop sent to see how much mental trauma a player can endure, and might just be some dude who's new to football and doesn't know what to do when being closed down with no good passing options.

You getting tilted and spamming 'Good Job' at him isn't suddenly going to turn him into the second coming of Franz Beckenbauer. Give them a 'We got this!', even if you don't mean it. You can mutter all the names you like in the privacy of your own house, but publicly, just give them a pat on the back and move on. It might not help you win many games directly, but it'll help make you and your team a lot less miserable.

If you're dealing with someone who's genuinely showing no interest in trying to do the right thing and are only in it for themselves, then just leave them to it. Give them a couple of opportunities to do the right thing (we've all screwed up once and been so desperate to get it right the second time we end up doing something even worse!), but if they're obviously just trying to dribble it round the entire opposing team every time no matter the options, then just do the best you can with the rest of the team.

Don't spam them with 'Good Job' or 'Thanks' - it's just going to tilt them even further and make them even less likely to actually contribute, and might push them into outright throwing. Just play as you would if they weren't there - pass to your teammates, make the runs, cover the runners. Maybe they'll get the message, maybe they won't. Maybe in a best-case scenario the defending team will waste a player marking them. You're not going to change their behaviour, so you might as well just roll with it and try and do right by the rest of your team.

I know it's tough, but it's true, and you likely know it deep down.

Football is a team game, and your primary responsibility is to do what is most likely to help the team win, even if it means having to do stuff you don't particularly enjoy/want to do.

It's incredibly frustrating to have to spend half the game jogging from side to side, deep in your own half, marking an opponent who hasn't yet worked out that their galaxy-brained tactic of "standing near the goal and calling for the ball every six seconds" is completely ineffective now you're marking them, but it's still got to be done, and whilst a good team will make sure that this responsibility is shared around, there's always going to be times when no-one else is willing to do it and that means that if you want to give your team the best possible shot at winning, you're gonna have to shoulder the responsibility.

Similarly, when your team is attacking and you've played a pass upfield, your immediate reaction will be to want to dash forward into the box to help out the attacker and try and get on the end of the incoming cross, but stop - actually, does it make more sense for you to drop back, releasing the player that's currently defending to make a late run to the edge of the box? Is someone else out of position, leaving an opponent unmarked, meaning a keeper catching the cross could result in a 1v1 counterattack?

Are you 2-1 down with 30 seconds left and your best attacker has just been randomly assigned goalkeeper? Swallow that pride, your team needs a goal, and they're probably your best chance of getting it - go take the gloves from them.

Some games you get to be the hero they want, some games you have to be the hero they need. Be like Batman.

This is probably a wider discussion that's a whole guide in itself (maybe some other time!), but regardless of whether you feel that having set 'positions' in 5-a-side football is a good thing or not, even if you do have a set position, that doesn't mean that you only have to do the 'main' bit of your job.

Defenders should still be expected to get forward into the opposition half and provide cut-back options for wingers, attackers are absolutely expected to track back and help defend when the opponents have the ball, even goalkeepers are going to be expected to act as a sweeper to cut out speculative through balls or to bring the ball out with their feet to build play from the back and create space for their teammates.

That doesn't mean you should be running around like a headless chicken following the ball all over the pitch, more that you should look for times when being in your 'default' position isn't helping the team. If you're in the 'central attacker' position, you're not expected to be defending deep inside your own penalty area every time (although there might be times when you have to!), but that doesn't mean you should be standing around doing nothing halfway in the opponents half, either. Your job in most cases will be to defend from the front - harassing the deeper-lying attackers near the halfway line, denying them time to pick their pass, tracking late runners etc.

This goes the other way, too. A 'defender' that spends their whole game camped on the edge of their own area, even when the ball is deep in the opposition half, is just as useless to their team as the guy standing up front calling for the ball while double-marked all game.

Above all, your position is just the bit you're expecting to do the most, but your job is to do whatever and be wherever your team and the situation needs you to.

That's technically not true if the ball's going really slowly, but what I really mean here is that if you are just chasing the ball constantly out of possession, you're never ever going to catch it and you're always going to be behind the play.

Back in the day when Rocket League was very new, 'ball chasers' were the scourge of the playerbase. They were players that just perma-boosted around the map, chasing the ball with no clear idea of what they were going to do if they got there other than just hit it as hard as they could. More often than not, the only time they managed to influence the travel of the ball was when they knocked it away from their teammates just as they were making a challenge!

It's super easy to get tunnel vision on the ball - sometimes you have to make split-second decisions on whether to go forward or not, and it's easy to forget the bigger picture when you're having to decide so quickly. However, if everyone on your team goes charging toward the ball, you're just going to create loads of space for the other 4 players - one lob pass and suddenly your poor keeper is staring down the barrel of a 1v3.

Think about and look at what your teammates and opponents are doing - is someone already heading toward the ball? If you go, what will happen with the player you're marking? Has the player going to the ball left someone unattended? Whilst it's generally a good rule of thumb that the closest player to the ball should go to it and their team should then move across to cover the gaps (much like the Rocket League 'rotation' gameplay meta), that's not always possible, and even then, not everyone understands this, so you might be leaving a gap no-one fills.

These are all things you need to consider before triggering that effort sprint and berserking your way toward the ball like a freshly-fired missile.

Seriously. Get out of each others' way. If your teammate is on the ball and running into the area of the pitch you're in, do everything you can to get out of their way and give them some space - ideally you'll want to move into space to give them a passing option, or drop back behind them to cover defensively and potentially pick up on a loose ball if they get tackled, but the main thing is not becoming another obstacle your teammate has to get around. Plus, if your team loses the ball, you've got two players in the same area of the pitch, almost certainly meaning there's an unmarked opponent somewhere.

This also applies for loose balls - if you're going for a ball at the same time as a teammate, have a look at the overall situation and who's going to be best placed once they get it - usually, this will be the player who's moving directly 'up' the pitch toward the opponents goal as opposed to the one tracking back or coming in from the side, as they'll have the momentum and a good view of what's ahead of them up the pitch.

This applies off the ball, too. Only one person can play the ball at a time, so you standing right on top of a teammate is reducing the amount of space your team can cover whilst offering no additional benefit. If you're both marking the same player, then there's almost certainly an opponent that's unmarked somewhere - go find them! (Just make sure your teammate doesn't do the same thing!)

Finally, if your team has the ball and you're looking to make a run, for the love of god make a different run to the teammate next to / ahead of you. It can be tricky enough to pick a good passing option in some games, so you're unlikely to endear yourself to the ball carrier by playacting as conjoined twins with the dude next to you.

One of the most frustrating things to watch a teammate do is to repeatedly try the same thing over and over again in possession despite the fact it's clearly not working. Whether this is a winger trying rainbow flicks over a savvy defender, a keeper smashing long balls up the pitch to a forward player who keeps losing it, or a striker only looking to shoot despite having defenders in front of them.

A particularly common one among inexperienced players is attacking players getting into the corners and just hitting high cross after high cross into the area, where (if they're not blocked by the defender) they're inevitably collected by the keeper or headed away. In many of these situations there's a much easier and safer pass back to an unmarked teammate who'll have a good opportunity to move forward into direct shooting range, or to use the new angle to pick a pass with a better chance of success.

There's also value in mixing things up to keep opponents guessing. If you try and sprint down the outside of the opposing left-back every single time you get on the ball, they'll eventually start to anticipate it and cut you off. Mixing it up by cutting inside or hitting a big cross-field pass every now and then will mean that your 'Plan A' is less predictable and will be more likely to work when you need it most.

Of course, not everything will work first time, and that doesn't mean that you should be afraid to try something again just because it doesn't succeed straight away. However, it's also fine to take a step back and accept that for whatever reason, Plan A isn't working and it's time to try something else. It doesn't mean it's a bad plan, just that it's not the right one today.

The number of people who seemingly play Rematch with only the dribble modifier, slide tackle and 'shoot' keys is alarming, even among players who play within the spirit of a team game and help out. You are given a set of tools for a reason, and they're all more or less useful in certain scenarios - there are times when a slide tackle is exactly what you need, and there are times when it can turn a relatively controlled situation into a near-disaster if you get it wrong.

Similarly, there are times when the difference between landing a pass right on the head of an unmarked teammate in the opposition penalty area and overhitting it for a chasing defender to intercept and start a counterattack is whether you use the modified 'lob' pass or the harder 'shot' pass. Learn all the tools in the freeplay and training modes and practice using them in games - remember which ones are best for which job and use them accordingly.

But this also goes beyond just mechanics. Too many newer players fall into the trap of only seeing value in forward passes, ignoring the ability of a sideways pass to give access to new passing angles and drag defenders out of position, or a backwards pass to escape pressure from an aggressive defender and bring the defending team out to create space. A backwards pass to the goalkeeper is very rarely a bad option, as it retains possession and allows the attacking team to reposition and reset without the risk of an immediate turnover.

One of the big mistakes a lot of new players make is that they become entirely focused on the ball and what it's doing, where it's travelling etc - so much so that they forget that what they should actually be worrying about is their opponents. Whilst the ball does have to cross the goal line to score a goal, it can't do it by itself - it's the opponents that have to put it there, so they should probably be the ones you pay most attention to!

It's only natural (and broadly correct in many circumstances) for your position on the pitch to be dictated by where the ball is - generally you want to move away from the opposition players when your team has the ball and closer to them when you don't, but it's important not to let that go too far - don't get so carried away moving up to support a developing attack that you leave an opposing player completely unmarked on the halfway line!

If you're defending and trying to decide whether to go out to the ball carrier, you'll need to consider what options this will open up for the carrier - are they just going to chip it over you onto the head of the attacker you just left open? Are they just going to take an easy pass to their right to an unmarked teammate?

If your team is attacking, think about where the opponents are before calling for it - calling for the ball when you're being marked by a defender, or literally the opposite end of the pitch isn't just useless to the ball carrier, it's actively making their life harder, as you're adding noise to their decision-making process by adding a 'false' blue line to their screen that they have to process and disregard.

This is one that needs a touch of explaining. A ball-hog isn't necessarily someone who just dribbles and doesn't pass (although many can be), it's someone who tries to put themselves at the centre of every single play, regardless of whether they're well-placed to do so or not.

It's the guy who chases the ball constantly, throwing in 'hail mary' slide tackles that knock the ball away from their own defenders who were shaping up to make a decisive tackle. The gal who, when under pressure in the opponent's corner tries dribble after dribble after rainbow flick to try and beat the two defenders in front of her rather than playing the simple ball back to the unmarked teammate behind her calling for the pass. It's the guy who constantly bugs their teammate on the ball by calling for passes that are functionally impossible to pull off.

If your teammates see you calling for a pass literally every time a tackle goes in, they're just going to ignore the lines pointing in your direction, as they can't tell whether you're genuinely in a good position or just yelling into the void. Similarly, if your teammates know that every time you get the ball you're going to just slow things down to a crawl trying endless tricks before eventually losing out in a 1v2, then they're going to be less likely to pass to you and try something else that's more likely to lead to a chance actually being created.

There's more than enough depth in Rematch's gameplay for you to have plenty to do off the ball - finding space to open up passing options or deny the opponents their own, picking up unmarked opponents or losing your own marker, and watching for signs of a developing counterattack. There's no need for your entire match to revolve around what the ball's doing.

This seems like a no-brainer, but it's something that SO. MANY. players just don't do at all. The next time you're playing a game and receive possession of the ball, take a second to watch what your teammates do. I'd be willing to bet that most of them will immediately run away from you as fast as they can in a straight line, as if you'd suddenly started asking for volunteers to help you catalogue your extensive collection of bootleg 1980s German jazz-funk mp3s.

These players are trying to get forward and trying to find space close to the goal as quickly as possible - in theory that's a good thing, and sometimes it's the right approach, but that's not always helpful when you're the ball carrier being closed down quickly by an opposing defender and all of your options are 'tricky long ball (with charge-up) to a moving target under pressure' - this gets even worse when there's additional defenders between you and the ball.

Instead of sprinting away from the ball carrier the second they win possession, take a look at what others are doing. If they're moving away or are blocked off by by defenders, try and get yourself into a position where the ball carrier has got a 'simple' option if they need it. A relatively straightforward pass that will get the ball away from immediate danger or up the field without risking an immediate turnover is worth it's weight in gold - not just because it reduces the risk of the ball being turned over, but it also forces the defending side to deal with new angles, dragging them out of position and forcing them to make decisions about whether to press the new carrier or stay put.

They won't take it every time - sometimes the easy option isn't the best option. Sometimes the right call really is a booming hit up the field. Sometimes the other player will decide the risk is worth it, but it's still really important to ensure that the option's there if it's needed.