Match fitness?

I was just thinking that for the next game, it would be nice if SI changed the "match fitness" part of the game, so that professional players who are training regularly don't suffer from a lack of match fitness.

I agree that if players have been on holiday or injured for a long period of time, they should suffer from a lack of match fitness, but I have read interviews with professional players who said it was a myth that if you haven't played matches for a while, you're not match fit. The reason for this is that they train every day to make sure that they're in the best possible physical condition to play competitive matches when their team needs them.

Anyone else agree?

match fitness, as I understand, includes 2 different aspects - physical and mental.

Physically I agree with OP. If you haven't played a game for a while, it doesn't mean that you can't run for 90 minutes. Although poor match fitness is justified if player just returns from injury

Mental aspect is more tricky and means that player perhaps cannot feel very comfortable in game as he hasn't had competitive football for a while. I'm not sure how it's implemented in ME, but for now only lack of physical match fitness is visual in FM, as the player condition drops faster when he's not fit, but to make it more realistic, it should somewhat affect composure/concentration attributes or something like that as well.

I disagree with the two posters above, Match Fitness is very much observable in real life both in terms of becoming exhausted towards the end of a game and in terms of the sharpness of behaviour and understanding of teammates.

Watching Manchester United regularly this season it was quite easy to observe the effect that injuries, time out, and regular playing time has on players. Fletcher became jaded towards the end of the season while Evra was perhaps player of the year. In contrast Gary Neville had an extremely shakey start to his reintroduction to first team football but grew into the role, while Carrick missed alot of game through poor form and when he started looked completely off the boil. Ryan Giggs was out for a couple of weeks with a fractured arm and lost the edge he had earlier in the season despite his rest and despite the fact he could still do fitness training. Vidic took a while to get back into the side after injury, whereas Paul Scholes had a relatively uninterrupted season and went from being in quite poor form to outstanding levels of play at the end of the season.

Match Fitness, in my opinion, is far from a myth but is perhaps not very "scientific" a term. There is a lot it covers, from actual physical fitness for the game of football produced by regularly playing 90 minutes as opposed to training, with the mental aspects of confidence, understanding of players around you, and general "getting into the groove" all playing a role.

As for the game mechanics, there are two elements to a players Condition. One is his Physical Fitness and the other is his Match Experience. Experience plays a key role in FM and is the abstraction of all the above issues. While it may not be completely spot-on, it is an abstraction and I think it does it's jobs quite well.

Well I remember when I used to play football and came back from injury. I had the sense that my mind didn't catch up with the speed of the game and movement, whereas when I was in form it was the contrary. My mind felt faster than the rest of the game. That meant a lot actually.