A Few of my players are not motivated in playing for me>>> Any ideas why??

A Few of my players are not motivated in playing for me>>> This really bugs me. 5 seasons in and it's gone 1st in Championship, then Premiership 9th, 5th, 5th and 6th, now currently occupying 6th place in my 6th season so hardly bad League performances but for as long as I can remember this phrase is always made by my Assistant in his advice screen. No mention of which players they are and as to why, just that a few are struggling to find the motivation to play for me.

In past incarnations I wouldn't worry too much but at the end of the last season the team was very inconsistant so I private chatted with practically every player basically assertively telling them to buck their ideas up. Went and won 5 on the spin battering Spurs and Liverpool on the way so as mentioned on these forums I think that morale has a massive effect. The other thing I thought was that I started as a Sunday League Footballer but my reputation is now National after all those years so I doubt it's that.

So with regards to why for 5 seasons there is a lack of motivation, anyone have any ideas why or whether it really affects things?

Maybe your rep of "national" is a bit low for a club that is in the contention for European spots, and that you have a couple of very ambitious players that react negatively to that.

Maybe they are not happy with things you (or the ass.man) have said in team talks.

Maybe you have fined them or warned them, and they feel that it was not called for. Maybe you haven't given them the contracts they feel they deserve.

It can be quite a number of things.

Perhaps now you are fighting at the top end of the premiership a national reputation doesn't cut it with your players any more? Or do you use a lot of the same team talks, they may get tired with hearing the same instructions all of the time and find motivation difficult as a result of that

it's a new game ruining patch that supposedly makes the game more 'realisitc' but i think that is for full time fmers and not normal people who don't have the time to tweak every little tactical detail

You can be quite sure that team morale and happiness has nothing to do with tactics. It has a great deal to do with team talks, team performance and standing, contracts, personalities, man management etc. - but not with tactics. Of course, if you play crappy tactics and lose all your matches ...

Oh and btw - I disagree that the tweaking of morale in the latest patch is "game ruining" - quite the opposite. And I don't play FM full time either.

It's a matter of opinion.

It would help to know which players had the problem though!! All morale is good, no-one criticises Team Talks on the whole. It's quite bizarre.

Nothing in the players profile information? That's weird.

If you go to the "Reports" section on the Player Profile screen, there is an option for Match Reports of each player - use this to identify which players have the issue with you

National may not be enough no. It is not much for a top PL side. Half of PL is Continental

I find this annoying when it is a player who signed for ME not for a previous manager. If they can't motivate themelves to play for a manager with such a low rep why sign for me in the first place. Even more annoying when the player in question had the opportunity to sign for other clubs with higher rep managers but chose mine.

Any way I don't find it to have that big an influence on performances just less chance of a reaction from a team talk or player interaction. I just hate seeing it though.

If you go to the "Reports" section on the Player Profile screen, there is an option for Match Reports of each player - use this to identify which players have the issue with you

Thanks for that great shout. It seems that it's 90% have issues because I have such a low reputation in the game!! Even top stars like Alonso, Van Persie and Anderson who signed at the start of this season which begs the question if they feel that way why on earth did they sign?!

So the question is how long does it take to have a top reputation?! I think in previous games it only took two reasonable seasons to make Continental. I think to be in 5 Premiership seasons 9th, 5th, 5th and 6th, now currently occupying 6th with 4 Euro Cup Qualifications for a Club like West Ham with no money is good is it not? Was also offered the England job but I turned it down as I stupidly thought you automatically resigned from your Club if you took a National post. Four Awards including Premier League Manager of The Year in 13/14, two Manager of the Month Awards which probably isn't enough but as I say it's West Ham!!!

Could it be linked to starting as a Sunday League Manager? If so it must take 20 years to step up!!!!

Thanks for that great shout. It seems that it's 90% have issues because I have such a low reputation in the game!! Even top stars like Alonso, Van Persie and Anderson who signed at the start of this season which begs the question if they feel that way why on earth did they sign?!

So the question is how long does it take to have a top reputation?! I think in previous games it only took two reasonable seasons to make Continental. I think to be in 5 Premiership seasons 9th, 5th, 5th and 6th, now currently occupying 6th with 4 Euro Cup Qualifications for a Club like West Ham with no money is good is it not? Was also offered the England job but I turned it down as I stupidly thought you automatically resigned from your Club if you took a National post. Four Awards including Premier League Manager of The Year in 13/14, two Manager of the Month Awards which probably isn't enough but as I say it's West Ham!!!

Could it be linked to starting as a Sunday League Manager? If so it must take 20 years to step up!!!!

You need to win stuff. I have the same problems with Roma because I haven't brought titles to the club and now we're in the third season. I have fixed their horrible finances, brought lots of talent to the club and brought them into the title race and Champions League but they still all hate me.

I still have National reputation I think, but the club is Continental and many of the players are too. Once I win something I think I will become much more respected.

Edit: I started with Automatic reputation which gave me Regional in the beginning. It has increased but there is probably a long way to go still. Coming 6th and 4th counts very little towards reputation, so yes you need to win something. Preferably the league and Champions League.

The answers in this thread prove just how far past reality this patch has gone with stuff like this: "You need to win stuff", "national may not be enough/doesn't cut it"...

He's taken a team from the Championship to a consistent top six side. If this happened in real life the manager would be adored by all fans and players. How on earth can you use the logic "they're a top six side, national reputation may not be enough" when it's him who has guided them to this point?!

The reputation thing is already too rigid with clubs, and now it's been brought in with the user too. Yet it still has the same simplistic flaws.

"I'm not motivated to play for you any more because you've built us into a bigger club"

You need to win stuff. I have the same problems with Roma because I haven't brought titles to the club and now we're in the third season. I have fixed their horrible finances, brought lots of talent to the club and brought them into the title race and Champions League but they still all hate me.

I will counter this with the real life examples of David Moyes (0 trophies), Arsene Wenger (nowt for years) & Martin O'Neill (only with the Auld Firm).

Moyes has won nothing with Everton, he joined them after a brief spell at Preston where he won nothing yet he is considered to be one of the best managers in the league & is often lauded for being able to get the most out of limited resources. If your career took a similar path in FM you'd be out of a job inside 3 years.

It's all well & good having players being unsure about a manager who has limited experience but if we cannot gain the trust & confidence of the players by showing them you have the tactical ability to turn them into winners (see above named managers) then the likely outcome under the current system is that eventually your players will stop listening to you, losses will result so players will become demotivated & then listen to you even less.

Just trying to help the op understand WHY he is seeing what he is seeing - that doesn't necessarily mean that we DEFEND these supposedly flawed game mechanics. There are plenty of logically flawed issues with FM, and many of them relates to morale, reputation, players and staff AI, etc. The game is not perfect. But neither is it flawed to the point that it can be called a crap game. I think that is an opinion I'm sharing with the vast majority of seasoned FM players. Quite the contrary; for many of us FM is the best game there is, warts and all, and it's highly enjoyable to play, for the most part.

I can easily imagine that things like this are extremely difficult to get right. If it IS a flaw, then I'm sure it will be rectified in good time. In the meantime it's not very difficult to enjoy playing this game, despite the remaining flaws.

The flaw, in this instance, seems to be that a rep of "national" is deemed to be not high enough for the players in the team. It should be, but if it isn't - then that's a flaw. A minor one, in my opinion. But bring it to the attention of the SI people, and I'm quite confident they will try to rectify it, if they can. It may not be possible with just a patch though.

I will counter this with the real life examples of David Moyes (0 trophies), Arsene Wenger (nowt for years) & Martin O'Neill (only with the Auld Firm).

Moyes has won nothing with Everton, he joined them after a brief spell at Preston where he won nothing yet he is considered to be one of the best managers in the league & is often lauded for being able to get the most out of limited resources. If your career took a similar path in FM you'd be out of a job inside 3 years.

It's all well & good having players being unsure about a manager who has limited experience but if we cannot gain the trust & confidence of the players by showing them you have the tactical ability to turn them into winners (see above named managers) then the likely outcome under the current system is that eventually your players will stop listening to you, losses will result so players will become demotivated & then listen to you even less.

Yes if you read my post carefully I don't defend this issue at all. I simply state what is, not what should be. It is less of a "bug" in my case, though, because I haven't actually achieved anything tangible yet. He took a Championship team into a top PL team, though, and that is much worse. It shouldn't be necessary to play in Career Mode in order to enjoy the game, yet that is evidently what SI has tried to achieve. The reputation system doesn't work at all for players who take a small club up the divisions quickly currently. It is much too rigid...

I guess its realistic, a Sunday League footballer wouldnt start off in the Championship, more like BSN/BSS and in the seasons you work your way up, by the time you are fighting for europe you are the next Alex Ferguson ;x

Yes if you read my post carefully I don't defend this issue at all. I simply state what is, not what should be. It is less of a "bug" in my case, though, because I haven't actually achieved anything tangible yet. He took a Championship team into a top PL team, though, and that is much worse. It shouldn't be necessary to play in Career Mode in order to enjoy the game, yet that is evidently what SI has tried to achieve. The reputation system doesn't work at all for players who take a small club up the divisions quickly currently. It is much too rigid...

I probably could have worded my post better, I didn't mean to infer that you were defended how the game works. I was using your rationale as to what the game requires from the player to highlight why I, like you, feel that something isn't quite right.

I guess its realistic, a Sunday League footballer wouldnt start off in the Championship, more like BSN/BSS and in the seasons you work your way up, by the time you are fighting for europe you are the next Alex Ferguson ;x

It's not realistic at all. I could take over a club in the Championship with no background in the sport at all, but if I led the team to promotion I'd have a very special bond with all the players. On the game they would continue to ignore you.

Reputation should make a difference when you first join a club, who will sign for you etc, but once you've been at a club for a few months it should be purely about how players respond to your approach and results.

It's not realistic at all. I could take over a club in the Championship with no background in the sport at all, but if I led the team to promotion I'd have a very special bond with all the players. On the game they would continue to ignore you.

Reputation should make a difference when you first join a club, who will sign for you etc, but once you've been at a club for a few months it should be purely about how players respond to your approach and results.

Yes, but the point he is making is that in real life there would be no possibiliy of you taking over a club with a sunday league reputation. You are talking about realism, but don't think it unrealistic a person from outside football takes over a proffesional club.

I was just about to start a thread about this very subject.

It was already a problem in FM2011 (the first one I played). If you start your career on the lowest rep level you'll still be held back by it 10 years and multiple promotions and management awards later. That's ridiculous. Your previous activities should only matter for the first 3 years of your career tops. After that you should be judged on your career as a manager (silverware, win ratio, financial management rating,...).

At the moment I'm managing Offenbach in the third tier of German football. It's a ******* for enhancing your reputation since there's no cup and no managerial awards. Every single player in my squad says he can't get motivated by me because of my low reputation.

Like the man says, your reputation could be a ball-breaker for the first 2 or 3 years of game-play. After that, you should get respect/motivation from your players (likely having signed most of them) based solely on what you've achieved and where you've taken the club. Surely this would be more realistic than what is currently happening in the game.

I think that SI needs to take another look at how managers gain reputation. It is fine that they implemented difficulty in the form of severe drawbacks from not having experience from professional football, but they have already recognized that many people choose Sunday-League starting reputation because they want the savegame to be realistic rather than wanting a challenge, so they need to make that clear already from the start. Another issue is that Automatic starting reputation previously set the manager to the average reputation of whatever league the player chose to manage in, but now it is simply set to Regional regardless of league and club. This also with no documentation of any change.

The win ratio, fan popularity, league position compared to media and board predictions, financial control, squad harmony and other signs of good management are evidently completely ignored when manager and club reputation are calculated. The only thing that matters is winning titles. This is unrealistic and takes away much of the enjoyment and variation of the game.

When you take over a small club in the lower leagues and take them up the divisions, it is clear that the club's reputation isn't keeping up at all. This isn't actually a problem regarding the kind of players who want to play for you - I have been able to find good players for the league I'm playing in. However, this lack of flexibility in the reputation system has severe consequences for the ME. Playing as Andorra I won 2nd division and came second in Adelante, now currently in BBVA. All three seasons I have been 1 to 10 underdogs in a majority of matches even though I have mostly won them all (a bit more of a struggle in BBVA but that is only to be expected), and it is clear that I have been severly understimated the whole time because the AI uses the match odds for tactical purposes and often field B-sides against me (and never learn). Evidently, I am still considered a Second Division B side in terms of size. Since my stadium takes 3000 people and the best paid player gets £5500 p/w I'd say that the size of the club is probably about right but half my team are considered good BBVA players (and when I was in Adelante I had plenty of good adelante players), and this is clearly not taken into account by the AI. So all in all, even though the club is small (and rightly so), the team is not weak!

If a club has been promoted to BBVA, that club needs to be considered as good enough to play in the BBVA by the AI, regardless of club size. It should be the other way around: players should consider the club a really small one and be less than impressed, while the AI managers and boards should consider the quality of the players currently at the club + form and league position and just ignore the club's size even though the fans expects an easy win (they arent professionals and should use club reputation as a guide).

Manager reputation in the nation and in the world should of course be quite rigid. A whole nation won't be impressed by a fresh manager taking a medium-sized club to Euro-cup contenders, not in many years - so that part of the game works rather well actually. However, the club's fans, players and board should grow fond of the very same manager quite quickly if he clearly makes a difference. My Roma game is a good example of this. Roma was tipped to end 8th, a mid-table/top half position and I took them to the Europa League first season (ended 5th). I also signed some big names and got rid of overpaid mediocrities, and built for the future (many players with high PA should be recognized as a good development in the game, both by fans and the board). Second season I came second I think (or was it third?) and achieved a place in Champions League for the 3rd season. By this time it should be clear internally in the club that maybe this unrecognized manager had something to bring to the club after all? The players I signed as well as those still at the club are -all- struggling to motivate themselves to play for me, something that makes very little sense.

I think that the solution is to introduce a third layer of Reputation in addition to World and Home (nation); namely Club reputation. A manager can be popular among he players and fans without being recognized as a prodigy worldwide or in the nation. This is not reflected in the game and the recent changes to the balance between manager and club reputation ruins the game for a lot of customers playing Club Mode rather than Career Mode.

Yes, but the point he is making is that in real life there would be no possibiliy of you taking over a club with a sunday league reputation. You are talking about realism, but don't think it unrealistic a person from outside football takes over a proffesional club.

If you're going to make this point then SI may as well remove lower experience levels and only let you start the game as an ex-professional.

After four seasons in which you've won a promotion and then established as a top half club in the top flight, your reputation level should be irrelevant with your own players. You've proven yourselves to them, whether the game wants to recognise this or not. It's currently a very lazy model.

This might be groundbreaking, but why don't we, you know, base how motivated players are around the Motivation attribute? You know, motivation and Motivation sound pretty much the same, which makes it a good base for basing motivation on.

In the name of realism maybe a Sunday League player would never take over at a Professional Club, but at the same time you would have to say that most people starting FM and choosing their reputation as an ex professional player or international player is not in keeping with realism because I would say that 99.9% of people who play the game aren't ex pro's!!

I start as a Sunday League player because that's as far as I got as a player so I choose that reputation on that basis. There isn't an option to play as a Manager in a Sunday League and work your way up and even if there was it would probably take me 200 years to finally get to take over The Hammers!! I choose not to play a career game starting as unemployed because I just want to manage West Ham the team I support and anyway even if I did start as unemployed with mere Sunday League experience I still wouldn't IRL get appointed as Manager of say Darlington!!

So what's more realistic, starting as a Sunday League Rep Manager managing a Premier League Club or choosing International player which I am not and never have been anyway!! Both are as unrealistic as another.....

This is not about that it's about winning trophies as being your only real way of improving a reputation which only a handful of Managers get to achieve anyway. If Man City IRL win the title this year after spending millions on the best players does that mean that Mancini deserves a higher reputation as a Manager than David Moyes who has consistently kept Everton in the top half of the Premier League with no funds?

The starting reputation names are effectively difficulty settings. Think of them as easy/medium/hard etc

You're reading a bit too much into them.

The starting reputation names are effectively difficulty settings. Think of them as easy/medium/hard etc

You're reading a bit too much into them.

Maybe just put them as EASY/MEDIUM/HARD then!!! ;-)

But then it'd look rubbish

I'm having the same issue with Burnley. it's now 2015/16 and this is my 3rd season in the PL (so far finishing 13th and 7th) and currently in 10th place. In the entire squad there is only a 2 or 3 that I didn't sign (one of which Jay Rodriguez is now a club icon having broken the all time club goalscoring record in the promotion season).

I started as 'Automatic' so presumably that means my reputation when I was appointed was consistent with a mid table Championship team.

So, now I have led them to being a top half of the table team, all the players that I signed find it hard to motivate themselves to play for me?