Suggestion: make it impossible to find out PA

There are often threads in this forum debating whether to replace the CA/PA system with something different to improve the realism of the game. The response is generally that alternative systems are just as flawed and unrealistic if not more so, but what if instead of replacing the CA/PA system SI just made it impossible to find out a player's PA?

At present we can get a pretty accurate estimate of each player's potential by scouting him. This tends to have a number of unrealistic effects:

Firstly, it makes is quite to easy to see which of your youth prospects are going to make it and which aren't. You may have two identical young players, but you'll treat them differently depending on their potential.

Secondly, it is possible to cheaply assemble a youth team containing all the world's best prospects and then just wait till you have the best team in the world. Not even Arsene Wenger is that good at importing young talent.

Thirdly, an apparently promising young player never turns out to have already reached his peak.

Fourthly, a seemly poor player never turns out to be a surprise late bloomer.

And finally, you have no way of telling which players have potential apart from asking one of your staff. Even if you watch the player in fifty different youth matches your judgement is still vastly inferior to a simple scout report. Can you image Alex Ferguson wondering whether Denny Welback has the potential to make it into the first team and asking Mike Phelan his opinion then taking it as gospel?

All of these problems are really caused by the one fundamental problem of the CA/PA system. It supposes that real life coaches, scouts and managers have some mystical ability to gauge a player's potential. They don't. When someone say "Denny Welbeck has bags of potential" what that really means is "Danny Welbeck is good for his age." When someone says "Kieron Dyer never fulfilled his potential" what that actually means is "Kieron Dyer was good for his age at one point, but he didn't improve as much as most player do."

When people are trying to figure how good a young player might be, they look at how good he currently is, how old he is and what sort of attitude he has, and then draw a conclusion based on what they know about how football players typically develop.

So to get to my point, if we removed the ability of staff in FM to access a player's PA value we would be forced to act much more realistically in our treatment of young players. We would have to estimate based on the player's attributes, age, and personality how good he is likely to become. This would make youth development much more challenging - as it is in real life. Sometimes a seemingly promising player would flop. Other times a player we write off could turn out to prove us wrong.

Instead of having access to a player's PA value scouts and other staff would have to judge players in the same way, and their JPA attribute would simply indicate how good at this they are. Just as in real life, even the best would make mistakes. Obviously the same would apply to AI managers otherwise they'd have an unfair advantage.

Good post. This idea has been brought up in previous version of FM as well. SI's past response is that scouts/staff do not have access to PA, but instead an "estimation of the PA". Neither is very realistic.

I also think that scout reports should be based predominantly on CA. Every scout should recommend a 17 year old with 120 CA, regardless if their PA was 120 or 200.

Fair enough idea, you'd get less people that spend tens of millions on youth because you'd need to take a more cautious approach.

Though I think the scouts are already pretty inaccurate as they are at the moment. i.e. I know for a fact that a non-regen player will be massive even though he can't make the reserves at the moment, but the scouts will tell me he won't be improving, or will only improve to about the level of one of my substitute players.

@SiN8

Thanks.

I agree with you that an "estimation of PA" is still far from realistic.The way the game does it is to make a bad scout slightly wrong about the potential of every player, and a good scout quite accurate in judging the potential of every player. However in real life there are many cases where the vast majority of scouts think a player has potential but he doesn't live up to expectations, and there are also cases where the opposite happens. In other words, real life misjudgements of potential tend to be more player-dependent than scout-dependent whereas in FM the reverse is true.

If the scouts could only make their judgements based on the information available to us human managers this problem would be rectified and the game would be much more realistic.

Another advantage that I didn't mention in my original post is that this would reward managers who have a genuine and realistic skill. Just as in real life, some attributes in FM will continue to improve much more than other beyond a certain age, and people with more knowledge of this will do better at finding young talent than others. That provides far better game-play than just getting the AI to tell you a player's PA.