Mario Gomez: Before and After Injury

8 month injury. Think we can all agree the player is pretty much ruined now.

Not whining or complaining, soon as it happened I knew this was coming and went and bought Hulk, but still, LOOK AT THE STAT DROP!

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He dropped a grand total of 52 stat points.

Well, could be a bug but it could also be a feature.

It'd be great to see SI implement a feature wherein you could tell if the player will be able to "rebound" from the injury. For example, a player with 20 pace that shreds their knee likely won't be able to reach that 20 ever again. However, if they were out for five months due to a broken shoulder or something they should obviously be able to get back (or close to) their original pace.

After looking at Gomez' decline, I wouldn't even let him come sniffing around my MLS team!

What bothers me the most is how the CA drops regardless of a player's mental attributes like determination, work rate, and professionalism. Unless I'm mistaken, there's nothing to prevent massive CA loss after being sidelined for half a year or more. Adding in the fact that CA gain is limited after 24, there's little chance for the player to return to top level from the injury.

It'd be great to see SI implement a feature wherein you could tell if the player will be able to "rebound" from the injury. For example, a player with 20 pace that shreds their knee likely won't be able to reach that 20 ever again. However, if they were out for five months due to a broken shoulder or something they should obviously be able to get back (or close to) their original pace.

After looking at Gomez' decline, I wouldn't even let him come sniffing around my MLS team!

except you don't know until they come back, and you can see what injury they have.

an 8 month injury is always going to hurt someone's skills. did he just come back? give it time, maybe he recovers some of those skills. maybe he doesn't. time will tell.

What bothers me the most is how the CA drops regardless of a player's mental attributes like determination, work rate, and professionalism.

Was just about to post this. I get the physical and technical(to some degree) attributes decreasing, but his mental attributes shouldn't take a hit, especially at this margin.

Was just about to post this. I get the physical and technical(to some degree) attributes decreasing, but his mental attributes shouldn't take a hit, especially at this margin.

Some mental attributes will decrease, as one would expect. a player goes in for a tackle, snaps his leg in half, he aint gonna be as brave the next time. He'll be hesitant, catious and maybe even his PPM would change (Always stays on feet).

All depends on the injury, and how quickly his attributes recover, if you train him and play him, maybe within half/full season he'll gain most of his attributes back?? Not sure if he's lost them for good..

The decline in everything but the physical attributes (and even those in some cases like the broken shoulder example) is too extreme. Yeah, damaged cruciate ligaments is not good and will hurt your athletic ability for a while. But why does it have to destroy a natural goalscorers ability to finish and his general ability to play football? That should not happen, especially as a player that age won't recover. Which is also unrealistic because the game treats his 'recovery' as normal development process which at 28 is slow to non-existent. It's not very well thought out especially as long term injuries are so common in this game.

How did he drop 2 in Determination? I don't think I've ever seen an injury cause a Determination to drop by 2 before.

I agree that the drop in technical and mental attributes shouldn't be so extreme.

How did he drop 2 in Determination? I don't think I've ever seen an injury cause a Determination to drop by 2 before.

Maybe during his injury he realised that there are more important things in life than football... his health, for example. Still a drop of 52 points seems a bit harsh.

Not to mention that he will be scared to get another injury, so it's normal that his determination will fall

I don't see what the fuss is about with regards to mental attributes changing? I could be a very determined individual before an 8 month layoff, but other aspects of my personality (hidden ones) might affect that, and there's nothing to say I wouldn't return from injury a lot less determined than I was before. That goes for any attribute really.

If you're playing by those rules then theoretically his determination could also improve after a lengthy injury as he might realise his playing days won't last forever and he becomes determined to achieve as much as possible and make as much money as he can in what is a short window to do so as a professional footballer.

The attribute drop from longer injuries seems pretty harsh to me too, and especially so because most players don't seem able to get the lost points back.

The attribute drop from longer injuries seems pretty harsh to me too, and especially so because most players don't seem able to get the lost points back.

Exactly that. If the attribute drop is that harsh then there has to be a possibility for recovery as well. Players over the age of 26 have normally stopped developing so with the current system these players have no way of gaining their attributes back. That's just not right. A 28 year old should have a very good chance of full recovery after long term injury.

Hmmm, I'm on the fence on this one.

Such a huge and generalized drop looks a bit to extreme.

However I can see how a not-so-young player suffering a serious injury might not be the same again when he comes back. Even mental skills can be affected by a long hiatus, especially if the player isn't a determined model professional...

i wonder if the huge drop in stats is a clumsy way of making sure players dont come back from long-term injuries playing really well.

in real life, there is generally a period after an injury that a player struggles to regain form. after awhile they probably do - sometimes they dont.

in FM, the stats rule so much that players such as Rooney get a goal a game.

i can't say whether thats true, or even if the stats will come back up to something resembling their pre-injury stats, but it is concerning.

How did he drop 2 in Determination? I don't think I've ever seen an injury cause a Determination to drop by 2 before.

Pyschologically though, he could think his careers screwed with it being a bad injury... Enough to put anyone off surely? Again with training and reserve games he may get these attributes back quite quickly... You dont just throw someone into a match after 8 months out... But from the images the drop does seem extreme...

Pyschologically though, he could think his careers screwed with it being a bad injury... Enough to put anyone off surely? Again with training and reserve games he may get these attributes back quite quickly... You dont just throw someone into a match after 8 months out... But from the images the drop does seem extreme...

That's the problem. The players that age wont get these attributes back because they've pretty much stopped developing and there's no specific code in the game to simulate recovery. They might gain a point or two here or there over the couple of years they have until the attribute regression code kicks in but they'll never be anywhere close to what they were.

I love the way players become stupider the more their CA drops.

We need to realise that we're looking at a single example here. There are plenty of times when a long term injury doesn't have such a massive effect on players, therefore I think it's realistic. There's a lot of players in the world that simply do not become the same player after a long term injury, and there are some that seem hardly effected by it.

If we had maybe 5-10 examples of different recoveries from long term injuries then we have more to go on than just (what is possibly) an extreme case.

If you're playing by those rules then theoretically his determination could also improve after a lengthy injury as he might realise his playing days won't last forever and he becomes determined to achieve as much as possible and make as much money as he can in what is a short window to do so as a professional footballer.

Surely Anticipation would actually increase as any Player like the above would not want another bad injury. Mentally he would be quicker upstairs, unless of course the Player was a Moron to begin with.

We need to realise that we're looking at a single example here. There are plenty of times when a long term injury doesn't have such a massive effect on players, therefore I think it's realistic. There's a lot of players in the world that simply do not become the same player after a long term injury, and there are some that seem hardly effected by it.

If we had maybe 5-10 examples of different recoveries from long term injuries then we have more to go on than just (what is possibly) an extreme case.

This is not a once off, its already happened to me twice before with different players, this time however I decided I would screenshot before and after so I can see exactly what changes.

Fact is, the player is 28, been out for 8 months in a top flight club and has been replaced. I have no desire to give him play time "just incase" his stats do actually return, hes 28, his stats have dropped a huge amount and hes not even fit for the bench.

This example seems a bit extreme, but generally I think this feature is a good addition.

Here is Hulk after a 2 and a half week injury.

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Penalty, Technique and Heading (pffft) all dropped 1.

Composure increased by 1 (I dont understand that at all).

That is 1 stat per week for a minor injury.

Oh and lets not forget 1million a week from his value.

Players that get two or three 3+ week injuries for me take a real beating in their ratings, enough to lose a whole star off their assistant manager report often enough. Those out for 6 months or more often lose even more. I scouted Essien for Milan after his injury and he was given a 2.5 star rating, with his stats noticeably depleted across the board. If players returning from injury picked up 10 or more plusses in their attributes quite quickly after returning from injury, with maybe some permanent decreases depending on the player's mental strengths, this could be seen as reasonable. But I'm not seeing that.

Players that get two or three 3+ week injuries for me take a real beating in their ratings, enough to lose a whole star off their assistant manager report often enough. Those out for 6 months or more often lose even more. I scouted Essien for Milan after his injury and he was given a 2.5 star rating, with his stats noticeably depleted across the board. If players returning from injury picked up 10 or more plusses in their attributes quite quickly after returning from injury, with maybe some permanent decreases depending on the player's mental strengths, this could be seen as reasonable. But I'm not seeing that.

So true. Even the harsh decreases might be sometimes acceptable, if it was possible to get most/all lost attribute points back. I just lost Ribery for 5-6 months because of a broken leg, so I guess that's pretty much his career then..

He (Gomez) still looks like he could be useful.

Robin Van Persie spent most of the first season out injured, and ended up pretty dire. I stuck with him, giving him a little time here and there, and his repalcement Cassano had a similar drop without any injuries, so I ended up letting him go and moving RVP back into the first choice slot up front. By half way through the second season he was back to his best, and it's only the arrival of both Rossi and a free Berbatov that's lost him that spot now... Instead he's slotting in on the wings, in rotation with 3 other quality wingers.

While injuries cause a huge drop, it seems that most of that drop is in "training points" rather than the raw "CA points". I haven't looked with an editor, but otherwise RVP wouldn't have ever regained his stats. If the difference between top training at a top club and not training at all is 2 points, then you can understand a 2 point drop across the board if someone hasn't been training at all.

Well, I agree that there should be a performance drop after an extended period of injury. Certainly not all attributes should be affected and ideally it should depend on the kind of injury someone had incurred - parts of that have already been described here, like a (temporary?) loss of bravery after the player was injured in a tackle attempt for example.

What's really messing all those players up is the fact that SI has probably done something to account for their lack of training (and/or match practice) that directly reflects in the loss of a player's CA, which automatically lowers his attributes across the board. What they haven't done is taken the attribute loss into context. A player that just got fit again after a long inury time-out is probably not playing his best possible football, but baring special situations should at least generally be able to get to where he was before. It would be a much better solution if SI wouldn't take situations that result in the loss of match practice and lack of training due to injuries and strip the player from his very important attributes.

The game needs a kind of bonus/malus system which could record a long time without training due to a prolonged injury and make the player take some time, maybe weeks or even months, before he's back on top of his game. All the same, the game shouldn't touch a player's attributes in most cases - of course there are singular instances when a single or a few attributes may change due to an injury, or where an injury prone player has just reached the point where he can't recover from anymore. But beyond all that, the majority of injured players will be back to playing their regular football in a matter of weeks or months. The way it stands currently, regaining much if anything from such a huge CA loss is impossible beyond a certain age.

Wait, don't we already have something like that? A player's condition value already shows his physical capability to play in a match and that is fine. The match fitness, on the other hand, could be used in exactly these circumstances. If SI were to split the calculation of it in half, then it could be used to keep the attributes of a player unchanged and still use him as a terribly out of form player in the match engine. If an injury would reduce his match fitness rating to anywhere between 50% and 1% - the longer the injury, the lower obviously - and SI would extend the recovery time and effort of that value below 50%, it would be perfect. Any standard bad match fitness due to little play time could be recovered with a few pre-season friendlies and/or a few games in the reserves. More effort would be needed with players recovering from an injury and that might even take months.

Well, no matter how exactly SI will want to solve that issue, the way it's now doesn't work for me. It's been happening in my games too: at least once a season I see a player destroyed due to his stats dropping from moderately to massively. I've never had this big a problem with it in earlier FM releases.

Guiseppe Rossi came back a shell of his former self for me after a torn calf muscle. Dropped at least 1 in most attributes

An important question on player recovery is how AI teams handle the situation, human managers can look beyond a players CA rating because we do not see the precise figure & can manage a players reintroduction to regular first team football which should see them recovery their pre-injury stats.

From what I understand the AI pays far too much attention to the CA figure which would mean that after a lengthy injury lay-off there is a good chance that a star player would not get the right amount of first team appearances as part of their recovery process, this could just add to the problems of long term games becoming less challenging.

This is the only real gripe I have with FM12. I can normally recover the players attributes if he's had a two or three month injury, but any longer than that and it seems like the player won't ever properly recover. In real life, the majority of players make a complete recovery from a half season, or even full season injury, yet in FM the opposite seems to apply.

Frustrating that players like Essien are ruined from the get go, and Barside is right in saying that the AI will just discard players every time they have a fairly serious injury and a subsequent stat drop.

Surely Anticipation would actually increase as any Player like the above would not want another bad injury. Mentally he would be quicker upstairs, unless of course the Player was a Moron to begin with.

If he hasn't played any football for nearly a year, he isn't going to be as mentally sharp as he could be straight away.

I don't think fear of injury would actually make someone better at reading play though. It might make them less aggressive or brave, but it wouldn't make him more aware of where the ball will go next.

It does happen in real life, but I agree with the consensus; technical and mental shouldn't take that much of a beating in this particular example.

However, physical stats is a whole other kettle of fish. Look at Michael Owen, never the same after that hamstring injury pace- and agilitywise.

It seems a bit extreme. Cavani is completely useless at age 28 after 8 months out as well.

While this is understandable in the first few months (maybe even first year), a player with good determination, work rate and professionalism should be able to come back to close to their PA again even if not all the way. (See: Fat Ronaldo)

This kind of collapse would be more consistent for a run of subsequent injuries during recovery rather than the one lengthy lay-off.

My Lukaku on FM 11 got a 8month injury.

Came back after 10months in May. So he missed the whole season.

When he came back in May, stats dropped by alot.

Kept dropping till i 'reserved' him and let his contract run out..

Seems a bit odd really, there's no way that those stats should be affected that much. I can understand a couple of changes if the injury is long term( 6months plu) but 53 stat points dropping ? Madness!!!

Maybe it has something to do with the training program injured players are on???

Playing as Everton in January of 2013 looking at the list of expiring contracts in 6 months to try and get some freebies to add to my small squad and I see Arjen Robben. He looked just as shocking as that Gomez screenshot. I looked on fmrte and his ca had dropped to 142. My editor doesn't work so I can't see what it starts at exactly but he must be at least 170. Even after all that he still wanted huge wages.

Long term injuries are very harsh, my Ribery broke his leg and was out for around 4,5 months, he was rated at 4 stars, and now is only 2 stars. Most of his attributes went down by one. And I'm not confident that he's going to get his CA back.

It depends largely on player age, I signed Wilfried at Stoke and for the first 3 years he managed very few games, his stats had dropped a lot and at 25 with one year left on his contract he didn't look to be worth keeping on. However, I offered him a new deal on a lower wage which he accepted, he's not had any major injuries in the last 12 months (still a few minor niggling ones) but he's better (now at 26) than he was at 22 now, despite at 24/25 looking to be finished.

You have to manage them very carefully though, slowly building them back up and giving it time, you'd be shocked at just how much a player can recover when nurtured back from such a situation.

A 24/25 year old might not have finished his development cycle so yes, they might have a chance to recover, just as any 24 year old has a chance to progress at a good rate with normal training. A 27/28 year old will never recover from this though. By then the development rate has slowed down to almost non-existent in most cases so these players will be ruined no matter what you do or how you treat them. It simply shouldn't be like that.

what do yous reckon to ashley young 9 month injury. Sell or keep. i have nani, valencia, neymar, cavani

Michael Dawson broke his leg on my game, he went from my Captain and first on the team sheet to the reserves over 6 months. He is now my 6th choice CB.

I WISH I had screenshots to show you all, the decline was absolutely unreal.

Still can't bring myself to sell him

EDIT: Yaya Sanogo also broke his leg for me, he is now no longer a good prospect in the 4th season, heartbreaking!

This is a bug, and SI need to limit or slow down the decline of attributes for the first major injury OR increase the rise of his attributes after the injury (depending on age etc.).

The players that age wont get these attributes back because they've pretty much stopped developing and there's no specific code in the game to simulate recovery.

Are you sure about this? My experience - admittedly mainly with previous FM titles - is similar to r0x0r's, i.e. there's a fairly drastic drop when they're injured and out of training but this goes back up over a period of time once they're back. Sometimes not to quite the previous level, sometimes points just seem to get shifted around a bit (possibly affected by the training schedule?) like in the Hulk Composure example here.

If the Gomez example + not recovering any is the norm I'd be worried, but I haven't seen anything like that myself despite a few long-term injuries so I'm a bit cautious of that conclusion.

I would imagine it will depend on the player, if you have a very professional, determined player there is a good chance he will work his ass off to get back to his best, a lesser minded player may not. It would be interesting to see Gomez after a season of first team football. I remember someone did a test with Essien who was out for ages, he played him for 6 months but his stats didnt rise that much, although Essien is older in the game, and it is debatable if he will return the player he once was.

This is the only real gripe I have with FM12. I can normally recover the players attributes if he's had a two or three month injury, but any longer than that and it seems like the player won't ever properly recover. In real life, the majority of players make a complete recovery from a half season, or even full season injury, yet in FM the opposite seems to apply.

Frustrating that players like Essien are ruined from the get go, and Barside is right in saying that the AI will just discard players every time they have a fairly serious injury and a subsequent stat drop.

Exactly right and Essien is the prime example he can be picked up very cheap as soon as he is back from injury whereas in real life Chelsea would not sell a £25m player for peanuts just because he has been injured.