1. Select a league to play; if you are new, select a popular/familiar league and preferably a rich club (go look at Real Madrid, Chelsea, Manchester City etc). More money = more fun to find/choose/buy/hire good players/staff.
2. Clean up your staff; get rid of expensive redundant staff (check their stats and if you are not sure what you are doing again, either look at this list for straight out list of good coaches or this link for an understanding of how the staff stats work
3. Plan the team formation that you want to play with (4-4-2 etc), usually you will be able to know what's the preferred/best matching formation from the meeting with team coaches. It would be based on your current team players and while it is good to listen to it, you can always restructure the entire team, it is your team now after all. If you don't mind exercising your brain further, check this link and this link - it will be a REALLY long read but if you are keen bout playing FM2014 like a possibly-real manager, it will be a good read.
4. Clean up your players; re-contract or get rid of expensive old/weakening players, bring in young new blood (wonderkids), and make sure you have back up for each positions that you planned in your formation else create a back up formation in advance.
5. Play a few friendly games to get the hang of it and see how your formation/players turned out to be! If they sucked too badly, reload your previous saved game or tough it out like a real manager! Muahahaha.

*There are plenty more stuff (budget, board of morons directors, scouting, youth training, babies players management, etc) to read/plan and play around with but go check out FM Scout/FM Base or ask what you are not sure bout in the LYN FM thread - I think most of the folks in it played FM series for ages by now.