Sort it out for FM10

Its so annoying to see clubs pay big sums of money for players and never play them, the most recent on my current game is Villa paying £14mill for Peter Crouch and playing him just 8 times in a season, now Chelsea have decided to buy him for £22mill and now he's warming the bench at their place. If it happened to just a couple of players a season then fine thats realistic but when its happening to such a high percentage of players bought by big clubs, basically players who are abit out of their depth at a club (like Steve Sidwell and Tal Ben Haim when they were at Chelsea irl) it just isnt realistic. For example on my current save, just second season Chelsea have had Michael Owen for a season and he's made 3 appearances, now start of the second season they've signed Peter Crouch, Steven Davies and Dimi Konstantopoulos, I bet they dont even make 10 appearances between them. Basically its teams buying players that aren't good enough to play for the club, why buy players and not play them, especially for silly amounts of money.

Please fix this for FM10 SI, just stop teams buying obvious inadequate players.

P.S Chelsea's mentioned a lot because they were the best example of my current save.

Agreed. It all comes down to the seeming lack of logic for the AI. An easy fix would be for the game to implement ratings for both clubs and managers; a club's rating (based on its current chairman) would indicate what type of transfers the team generally makes (and what they look for) i.e. cheap/undervalued players, promising youngsters, reliable veterans, all-world players, etc., and the manager ratings would indicate the type of player he/she is looking for to fulfill a specific role, i.e. strong central defenders, full-backs that get forward often, pacey strikers, etc. This way you wouldn't see a team/manager spending money on a player ill-suited for their chosen formation, unless the manager is willing to adapt his tactics to accommodate his new signing. Also, this could add an interesting twist to the player's game, wherein you may prefer to buy cheap players while the board expects you to bring in the big names, leading to some friction between the two sides (this would work for the AI, too.)

I remember in my game Barcelona paid 30million for some Polish striker I had never heard of from Man United and played him 3 times off the bench the whole season. Then they offered him to everyone for something stupid like 22 million. Despite his stats being mediocre anyway

could be fixed but tbh it dosen't bother me much i don't notice!

Also to add to this, it's all good that they are buying players even if they are for too high prices and they arn't good enough for the current team but, as you get further into your career teams stop buying players, biggest example is Man Utd, their team just fades down the leagues as all the players get old and retire, they are replaced by poor youth team members, they will bring in 1 player every three seasons and they also sell players! This leaves the squad poor and thin. If you add a manager to them they have a transfer budget of upwards of £200M so money isnt a problem.

SI - when fixing this please dont make the balance go to far to the other side where players are no longer bought or sold.

I maintain that it's a symptom of the players' reputation module being broken.

I agree, it should be fixed. But, I won't be holding my breath. This has always been a problem with all the incarnations of FM.

Man city are certainly the worst case of this in my save, they buy players for ridiculous prices and sometimes within days of arriving they are placed in the reserves team with no intention of playing them anytime soon...

Yeah - it might happen too much in the game, but the big teams sort of do this in real-life some times. Obviously, Benitez at Liverpool with Keane (and Voronin), and Chelsea pre-Hiddink with Malouda for example. Teams pay big bucks, then the player is quickly out of favor.

Indeed SM. *cough*Shevchenko*cough*

It's a flaw that has been in the game for years and is very unlikely to be fixed for fm10.

SI are a small team and because they have to rush out a new release every year they simply don't have time to make major overhauls to the game. Expect instead to see a few superficial extras bolted onto the game (like team talks and press conferences from previous releases) which will be loudly proclaimed on the back of the dvd case but nothing major will change. All the game breaking flaws will still be there.

The related problem is when they splash vast sums on players who won't fit into their formation (eg buying wingers when the manager plays a narrow 4-4-2 diamond).

Sometimes the real life examples given to justify the obvious faults of the game are completely ridiculous. Voronin signed on a free, Shevchenko played more than 50 games on his first season, and Maluda more than 30. Even Keane played more than 20 games during his short spell at Anfield. It's 100% an issue that needs to be solved. Even if there are same cases IRL, are the exeption and not the rule.

If only they had MPMs - manager preferred moves.

Focuses on young players

Buys experienced pros

Focuses on strong players

Winds up opposition

Brings in overrated players from South America!

I was being tongue-in-cheek elsgouro. It's a very serious but well-known flaw in the game which has been highlighted in many threads already. SI are well aware of it.

If only they had MPMs - manager preferred moves.

Focuses on young players

Buys experienced pros

Focuses on strong players

Winds up opposition

Brings in overrated players from South America!

That's actually a good idea! Might be a interesting proposal for SI to consider?

Although you might need one for LLM, maybe "Buys any hack that's willing to play for us"

I was being tongue-in-cheek elsgouro. It's a very serious but well-known flaw in the game which has been highlighted in many threads already. SI are well aware of it.

I trully hope so, but you're right about other threads about the same issue,I've given feedback to a couple of them, I just wanted to highlight that giving wrong RL examples (bar yours, anyway) isn't going to do FM any good.

I'm still ****ed off about the Italian co-ownership bug from 9.3.0. Really ****ed. No doubt it will be 10.3.0 before it gets fixed.

Again, for the 3rd game running I beg of you. As a loyal away supporter of my football team I think its time Football Manager had away attendances. It wouldnt take much, Just a small number in brackets by the side of the attendance. It would make the game so much better knowing how many fans you take away with you, Especially in big cup games and European away matches. They never listen to me so if you think its decent and your a big cheese, please sort it. Thanks.

First seaon Chelsea bought Vagner Love for 20m and offloaded him end of the season to Real Madrid for 35m

He won Euro Player of the season so probably a bad example

chelsea bough vagner love in the first season in my game too but ended up playing him in most of the games they had in the first 3 seasons (am currently about to start 4th) so they dont *always* make **** signings

the only problem i see is that teams like man utd and arsenal dont continue the tradition setdown by the current managers to buy potential world class young talent and mould them into world beaters, there seems a lack of real quality youth players coming through the top teams who have a good history of producing, ie man utd west ham arsenal etc, they have average but no real quality ones you would expect, instead too many random wonderkids get generated in random countries (half of them cant even get a work permit to come train at a young enough age to be able to turn them into world class players) as opposed to the main places they are found (south america, barcalona/real, milans and top english clubs)

and not only do they not invest in youth, but they dont buy world class players to replace the ones they have when they get too old or get injured...

Back to what Interwolf said about Manager preferred moves - this was suggested about this time last year and many people said it would be a good addition. I think that this was certainly by a great additon for FM 10.

chelsea bough vagner love in the first season in my game too but ended up playing him in most of the games they had in the first 3 seasons (am currently about to start 4th) so they dont *always* make **** signings

the only problem i see is that teams like man utd and arsenal dont continue the tradition setdown by the current managers to buy potential world class young talent and mould them into world beaters, there seems a lack of real quality youth players coming through the top teams who have a good history of producing, ie man utd west ham arsenal etc, they have average but no real quality ones you would expect, instead too many random wonderkids get generated in random countries (half of them cant even get a work permit to come train at a young enough age to be able to turn them into world class players) as opposed to the main places they are found (south america, barcalona/real, milans and top english clubs)

and not only do they not invest in youth, but they dont buy world class players to replace the ones they have when they get too old or get injured...

i agree, ver simular to what i said above