Please Clarify: Current and Potential Ability vs Stats

I need to understand how this works, and hopefully someone can clarify by referring to what I am saying. As I understand it:

Current Ability is the ability level of player at the present. This has no affect on the pitch or in a match. Instead, all it means is that the attributes directly relevant to a player's natural playing position will add up to form the player's Current Ability via some mathematical formula.

Potential Ability is the level that, with luck/training/experience, the player's Current Ability will grow to. Again, this hidden attribute has no affect on the pitch or in a match. It just means that when the Current Ability grows, the player's stats grow.

Current/Potential Ability will not affect hidden Mental Traits such as Adaptability, Professionalism, etc, however it could increase one or two hidden Playing Traits such as Consistency.

Therefore, lets assume one scenario. There are two players with the same mentality, same professionalism, same consistency, same hidden stats, and play in the same position. One player is CA 190, the other is 160. If the 160 player has better stats than the 190 (maybe because they started the game off that way), e.g. he can dribble just as well, and is as fast, but has more all round strength and balance, does this mean the 160 player is a better player in a match than the 190 player?

So the overall message by SI is that playing attributes (taking into consideration the hidden menality ones) is far more important than the C/P Ability attributes, and the CA/PA are just guidelines as to how the playing attributes will grow or diminish over time?

If you think about it in simple terms, in real life, John O'Shea has a lot less ABILITY than ..... Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo For example Ronaldo may be 185 and Oshea 150. But you have to remember Ronaldo can cross the ball better, is faster, stronger, a better finisher, a better headerer, ....

So I believe that in FM the player with a higher Ability, should have better stats.

If you think about it in simple terms, in real life, John O'Shea has a lot less ABILITY than ..... Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo For example Ronaldo may be 185 and Oshea 150. But you have to remember Ronaldo can cross the ball better, is faster, stronger, a better finisher, a better headerer, ....

So I believe that in FM the player with a higher Ability, should have better stats.

Yeah but thats an obvious comparison because its a crap player vs a legendary player.

If you put aside "player with higher CA should have better stats" logic, what about when stats wise they're similar, but there's a significant gap in CA/PA? If the original post was correct in that CA/PA has no direct impact on the pitch at all, then I would be better off for example cashing in on the higher CA player if I wanted to strengthen elsewhere (ignoring reputation of course)?

I know what your saying, I have traditionally always played players with BETTER ABILITY, as I trust that to be a fair measure. I might be wrong but I have quite successfull teams

If a player has better stats but worse ability, I can only imagine that changing over time. I would imagine the player with the better ability will quickly catch up and overtake

But I imagine the PERFORMANCES of a player is purely judged on his player stats.

I would also really like to get this clarified, because you often see this scenario: one player with great stats but a mediocre CA and another player with not quite as good stats but with a higher CA. Which one is better(of course generally speaking)?

I reckon the one with the better stats.

I think the ability is just there to generally guide which way the stats will go, up or down. I might be totally wrong but thats my view

The one with better attributes is better. As said, CA and PA don't have an influence on match day, attributes do.

..not if he has poor weak foot ability

How do two players with identical CAs have markedly different attributes? Is that really possible, or do you just mean a better distribution? (For example, two defenders, one has high defending attributes, while the other has high set piece attributes,)

I think the focus on CA/PA seems misguided. Yes, in general high CA/PA would suggest a good player/potential to be a good player, but at the end of the day, I don't think you can take into account what you can't see. Scout reports, assuming your scout is somewhat competent, should be a reasonable indication of how good a player is. It is then up to you, the manager, to decide/rate the players ability, based on the in-game, visible attributes.

Suppose you are looking for an attacking midfielder and you have two potential targets:

A) AM who is technical, can keep ball and can pass. CA = 150

B) AM who is a scorer and fast. CA = 165.

If I am looking for a distributor of the ball, I am definately buying Player A. If I am looking for a scorer, I am buying B. If I have no idea what I am looking for, I am probably buying B.

The relationship between CA/PA and Attributes goes something like this.

A players attributes are either relative or absolute meaning that they grow and decline in relation to development, training and each other or that they do not improve or alter through this manner and are attributes that do not change based upon a players growth, improvement and training etc. Whether an attribute is relative or absolute depends upon the position of that player, but in general most attributes you see ingame are relative attributes for all players.

Take for example Influence or Determination. These are not relative attributes as they do not improve or decline through natural progression and player experience. They grow and decline only through very rare ingame events.

All relative attributes, and these depend on position, are closely related to CA. Infact relative attributes are CA. CA is a measure of the current total level of ability a player currently has within all his relative attributes. As CA increases or decreases so will the available ability within all his relative attributes. However not all attributes require the same amount of CA to improve by the same degree. Improving physical attributes requires much more total ability/CA than improving technical skills by the same degree. In short the higher a players CA then the higher the total sum of all ability within all of his relative attributes, but these may be distributed in such a way that the really heavy attributes like physical attributes take up much of the CA and produce an apparently inferior player.

So a player with a high CA has a higher total amount of ability within all his relative attributes, and through training these can be redistributed to produce a superior player to one with a lower CA, but equally through training you can favour really heavy attributes and produce a player that on the pitch is inferior overall to a player with low CA. Training allows you to redistribute CA amongst relative attributes and is an essential part of making sure a player with high CA really is a superior player on the pitch.

PA is simply a theoretical maximum limit that CA can reach. Very often CA will get nowhere near PA, and even with the best development strategies and best coaching and best match experience will often peak just below PA.

Depends. If you are playing the matches yourself or if you let the AI handle it. Cause I used to go by rating and never play my own matches. I always got owned. But when I started going by CA and PA I did a lot better.

However, I've started to notice especially after the patch that I think there is something else involved. Probably yes its the attributes. Like Almunia (sic, the Arsenal GK) ends does not have the highest CA but is always top 3 for GK of the Year.

Same goes for Keirrison the kid's CA and PA is not the best in the world but his PA is still good nonetheless. But even when he is young and his CA is low, he still is an awesome player and way better than the other expensive players I can by.

I seems to me there is a bit of a varying depending on the patch as they try to make it more realistic. However, I feel patch 9.2 was way better than 9.3 as it actually more or less was predicting RL results, even if I run the 9.3 patch with 9.2 b. IE Scolari getting sacked, Arsenal being bad for a bit, Bayern not winning anything, Villa coming up, Everton doing well but even though with massive injures, Italian clubs never making it that far in Champions League, Charlton and Southampton dying off, etc.

I bet those guys who made FMRTE got the formula when they were dissembling the codes. They just don't want to share

I couldn't be bothered to do this either. But position does affect how each ability cost.

Did you really need to reopen a 4 year old thread just to post this?