match engine?

i am currently manchester united and have my game saved at my first premier league game of the season v manchester city,i am in a testing situation and keep using this game to see what i can discover.

I get a tactic set to what i think i good,play the game and win in good style,save the tactic and reload and play the same game again and get battered,why is it from one extreme to the other with the same tactic??

11.3 by the way

It is a tough game against good opposition. Football is a game of fine margins. It might be that the two starting tactics have a 50-50 chance of scoring the first goal. If you score it, Man City open up, allowing your slightly superior players (assuming you are Man Utd) to take advantage of the extra space and punish them. However, if they score first, they then sit back and counter, which might find you out in the same manner.

Other minor differences might happen. The AI manager might give a subtly different team talk, which fires up more or less players. The opening 20 minutes might result in a few more or less players playing confidently, which could knock on into a goal from a half chance or a great defensive block on a good chance.

If you are not making logic in match changes to react to the score and patterns of play, I would expect to see a fair degree of randomness in the results. You have the slightly better side, which gives you some advantage, whereas the AI manager is probably making better in-match decisions, which balances that out. If you can improve your own decision making, you should see results swaying in your favour.

Note: this is all based on the assumption that your base tactical logic is solid. If it isn't, all manner of weird things might happen.

Because every game of football is different but you don't see it in real life the same as FM because you don't have the option to save & reload a match.

From the moment a match kicks off choices are made does the player pass wide? does he pass to a fullback? a DC? does it go back to the keeper? Where does the next pass go?

While these are minor differences there are also major differences between games, mistakes, a players mentality and the choices that the ai & yourself make during the match. By far though what changes games more than anything else is goals, for every goal scored there is a shift in the feel of the match whether it be FM or RL.