Assistant managers are useless

I did a few experiments. One was that I went on holiday for half a season with two clubs. I had one average ass.manager and an excellent one for the other team take over. Both moral and everything was really high. However when you get back from holiday the atmosphere in the dressing room is a major issue. One ass.manager had very high stats, the best I could find, the other not so good but both produced the same bar length when looking at board feedback from the dressing room atmosphere.

Very strange considering both were completely different ass.managers with varied stats yet the dressing room atmosphere is exactly the same for both clubs. I never go on holiday but I just wanted to see what would happen and if there was any difference between ass.managers taking over. I tried this with Celtic and Rangers, so both very even teams.

To my conclusion it seems that side of motivating players doesn't make any difference. One ass.manager had motivation of 6 the other 14. So major differences. Now both teams were bang on equal points difference so that made a good conclusion.

Do you mean you didn't try it with the same team?

What were their man management stats?

Maybe the good assman picked the best team and they performed so he stuck with it, so the non team got unhappy.

Could be hundreds of things.

That is not the case, imho.

It is superbly random to the max of their a*s. LOL.

Motivation is in match I think.

The problem is that AMs don't deal with the squads problems outside of a match. So if someone moans about not getting first team football, the human manager would usually give an answer. When you're on holiday however, the player never gets an answer so a bunch of players will no doubt become unhappy. That obviously unsettles everyone resulting in the bad atmosphere.

I have an issue regarding Assistant manager team talks (and team talks in general to be honest, and some other stuff ).

This is my assistant manager. I'm posting a screenshot so you can tell me if the reason for his stupidities are his attributes.

Anyway, often I let my assistant manager take control over matches (the pointless ones against really poor opposition); I set up the tactics, player selection and go on a holiday for 1 day. When I come back I see that we've won the match as expected, but half of my squad is suddenly unsettled and hates ME for not giving them enough credit. I check the team talk feedback and see that the Assistant simply says nothing at all. Some players have the individual NONE, some have TEAM (NONE) - what's with that?? On the other hand, how come my players can't distinguish me from my assistant manager? And why do the players take his (non-existing) team talks to heart so much, when they just "don't seem to be listening" when I encourage them at half time or tell them I'm pleased with their performance at the end of the match?

His Motivating is low compared to the other stats! This is important for team talks etc...

An experiment over 6 months isnt really long enough to get a true readign of this. In practice, to do a true test, you would need to repeat this porcess over and over a significant amount of times and then draw conclusions from the data collected.

Well, IRL an ass. man taking over as caretaker usually ends badly (i.e. Tony Adams and Ricky Sbragia - though he started off OK, it looks likely that he'll get replaced pretty soon). A good ass. man may not even make a good caretaker.

Personally I can't see the point of the experiment. As a manager, you wouldn't take a holiday in the middle of the season, and if some personal/family crisis loomed that would keep you off work for ages, you'd probably have no choice but to stand down (Martin O'Neill at Celtic and Gary McAllister at Coventry being examples off the top of my head). What the board does from there is up to them, but the ass. man wouldn't be left in control come what may, in any event.

My ass. man is treated like another 'voice' on some issues and in matches. I don't always follow the advice, nor do I accept a recommended team talk if it's not what I want to 'say'. If I feel like taking a break or need to grab food, I either turn the game off or just let it stand (depending on how long I'll be occupied for). I won't go on holiday and risk the ass. man doing his own thing.

An experiment over 6 months isnt really long enough to get a true readign of this. In practice, to do a true test, you would need to repeat this porcess over and over a significant amount of times and then draw conclusions from the data collected.

Simple enough to do a conclusive experiment.

Fire up a new game and use FMRTE to make your assman perfect (CA/PA 200, all attributes 20 - you can do it with one click). Holiday for one year or however long you want.

Now restart and use FMRTE to make the assman the worst possible (again, one click - all atts 1). Rinse and repeat: Holiday for same period and compare results.

i agree dont even listen to him anymore

Simple enough to do a conclusive experiment.

Fire up a new game and use FMRTE to make your assman perfect (CA/PA 200, all attributes 20 - you can do it with one click). Holiday for one year or however long you want.

Now restart and use FMRTE to make the assman the worst possible (again, one click - all atts 1). Rinse and repeat: Holiday for same period and compare results.

If someone with a strong CPU could work this out and post results, I'd be interested to read them. I'd be even more interested if additional tests were done where the Manager only had one stat @ 20 and the rest at 1 (or 10 to have it closer to a 'real baseline'.

For Example:

Assman A: 20 in Tactical Knowledge.

Hypothesis: He will have the most victories (on all levels: Reserves, Youth Team, etc.) when comparisons are done.

Assman B: 20 in Man Management

Hypothesis: Although not highly successful, his players will have gelled nicely and be in good spirits. Happy to be with the club and maybe even have him listed as favoured personel on some of the players lists.

Assman C: 20 in Motivating & Level of Discipline

Hypothesis: Although similar to my expectations for Assman B, I would expect his Win/Loss rescord to be better because of his better understanding of Team Talks & handling warnings for poor behaviour.

Assman D: 20 in Working with Youngsters

Hypothesis: The Youth team has a better win loss record than even Assman A, although his First Team and reserves will not be as successful. Perhaps the training of the Youth Squad will be more advanced. Better quality youths at the end of the experiment.

Assman E: 10 in All Stats

Base Line: All other assmen would be compared to this one and conclusions could be drawn.

Main Comparison Points:

1) Win/Loss Record for First & Youth Team

2) Overall Morale of the Squad

3) Training Levels of the First & Youth Teams

4) Team Talk Results (Might be important to stop at regular intervals (every month, for example) and look at the results of the team talks.

5) Press Conferences. While checking Team Talks, might be worthwhile checking on Press Conference success to see if there one of these stats plays into this.

6) Disciplinary Action taken and results. Don't see how this could be done without sifting through hundreds of e-mails, but it may be important to some peoples selection of Ass Mans.

7) ???? Other points to add?

I don't go on Hoiliday frequently, but knowing some of this would certinaly let players select their Ass Man to make-up for their weakness. It would take awhile for me with my current CPU to churn out this data, but if someone with a decent sytem could put this together I think the result would be quite entertaining reading.

A bog-standard computer running overnight would do it. You only need one league loaded with small database.

You would also need to repeat the experiment a statistically relevant number of times, record the result of each trial, and then look for a trend to make it "valid". A once-off ignores too many possible factors that could cause a season to go bad (key injuries, other teams doing well, players deciding they don't like each other midseason, etc.).

I'm not so keen on the assistant manager's match observations personally, as I play a very customised system at the moment. No matter how good his ratings, he's obviously not as understanding of my game plan as I am. His advice is often far different to things I would do. Having followed his suggestions for several games and under-performed, I went with my own instincts and over-performed.

I guess the AI just isn't there yet to make his responses that intuitive at the moment, as his feedback is clearly and obviously based on purely statistical calculations processed during the progress of matches. The thing is, even then, it's not quite right. I can have 60% or so possession and still be told our passing isn't right. It's too long, too short, misplacing this, not doing that.

I think I'll just be happy for him to sit on the bench and nod his head in agreement as he's clearly not cut out to offer me any beneficial information.