Harmony and talking with players

Managing Fiorentina halfway through the second season and currently lying third in Serie A. In the last 15 games we have won 12, drawn 1 and lost 2. The Team Talk Feeback is "morale among the players is excellent at the moment".

So far, so good, except that six players are suddenly "dismayed by the lack of harmony at the club"! None of the players are anywhere near their end of contract, but I have offered a couple of players new contracts to see if that has an impact.

This, imho, is clearly not realistic and needs fine-tuning by SI for FM10. Does anyone have any solutions other than offering new contracts or winning some games?

But, additionally, when looking at how to resolve/improve harmony it bought something to my attention that has been nagging at me for a while. How do managers communicate with players when problems arise? In real life, if you believe what the newspapers publish, it would appear that managers spend an inordinate amount of time communicating with players, but the functionality in FM is limited in this area.

There are team talks and you can openly praise or criticise a player. There is also the option to respond to a news item when a player complains about something, but these options are limited in the response that you can give, plus you can't address some issues such as how often they play, team status, wages, etc. and especially the hated "wants a new challenge" status which doesn't seem to have any solution other than selling then player (as I'm currently experiencing with Montolivo).

So, do you think there should be a new feature that allows private communication between manager and player (perhaps the success of which is influenced by each other's personalities and the manager's ability to motivate/communicate)?

The squad harmony problem is usually caused by some of your players being unhappy for whatever reason.

Check the whole squad, including your reserves and make sure that none of your players have any concerns. If they do, fix them and the squad harmony problem should go away.

I do agree we should have more private communication though.

Granted the current system does not have a large quantity of regular player interaction, but I find it to be a very solid system that pays greater dividends with prevention rather than cure.

I am thoroughly enjoying the subtleties of the admittedly less than blatant man management system in this game. I have highly liked and well respected club veterans in various coaching roles at my club, a 17 year old hot shot born in the area that has his defence coaches and the upper management members all listed in his favoured personell, and a high quantity of close relationships in first team squad, not least of all the fact they all have myself listed as favoured personell. I have so far had no major problems with player happiness and the worst problems I have had lasted for a week maximum, with a couple of personality clashes and one player unhappy at my criticism that were all soon forgotten.

While the breadth of interaction is low, the depth and functionality is there. By getting interested in my players well being and managing their happiness and relationships I have produced an extremely tight and close club that is very much fun to manage and it is nice to look around and see how much of a unit my squad is.

The annoying one for me in this area is players being out injured for a considerable time who become unhappy that they're not first team regulars while they're still only about 60% fit.

For certain issues that the players rise, you will have the possibility to select "resolve issue" under the player. This should definately help a bit. No doubt that they part of the game is lacking, but more features in press conferences and half-time talks start to add up to a more sophisticated approach to communication with your players.

Polar Bear: Under player interaction, you can tell a player that you are planning to rest him, thus giving him a reason for not fielding him.