Freakiie

But would that really be logical? What about teams that have possession for the sake of possession and defend by not letting their opponents touch the ball? They generally try to win the ball back higher up the field, but then take no risks when actually in possession. Why would they not be allowed to have a low risk mentality while defending relatively high up the pitch? I think just renaming mentality to risk, which what it inherently is, would already make quite a difference. Also, actually explaining properly what this risk means. I wouldn't want it completely removed from the game, as at times having a single setting you simply up or down one notch depending on the situation is really nice to have and I wouldn't want to have to change 5 different player instructions to make my team go slightly more on the offensive. However, as it stands it's incredibly misleading and setting your mentality to defensive won't suddenly make you defensive. Especially if you don't understand the underlying workings of the tactics creator it's no surprise that many people get really confused as to why a "defensive" mentality tends to suck so much. Admittedly I think the presets also don't help here, if I'm not mistaken Catenaccio for example makes you play incredibly deep, stand offish and then dumps a defensive mentality on top of that which just asks for your team to be completely battered because you give up 90% of the pitch to the opposition and when you get the ball back you instantly hoof it up front because that's the lowest risk option. Defending like that for extended periods of time is going to be a disaster for pretty much every team.

Nothing is stopping you from retraining him and playing him in a new position yourself though? Star ratings are just a suggestion and a player playing in a new position won't suddenly forget how to kick a ball.

A 6.2 means the player is having a poor game, but probably hasn't made any blatant mistakes. Of course this could be due to having a bad day, but odds are that your team isn't in the game, especially if you have multiple players with low 6 ratings. So, just subbing out the player in that case generally won't solve the issue that your team as a whole is struggling in the game and as long as you keep struggling the rest of your team will drop in ratings as well because the game simply isn't going well. Often a striker will start with dropping in ratings, because he isn't in the game, but if that's due to your wingers not being able to supply him, then the issue is not really with the striker. So, even if you sub the striker that most likely won't suddenly solve your winger issues, so there is a good chance that your wingers will also start dropping in ratings because they're not playing well either, it just takes a bit longer than for your striker. So, in a situation where your striker has a poor rating, but the players behind him that are supposed to supply him don't have spectacular ratings either the problem probably isn't your striker even if he has the lowest rating.

Looking at my long term save in FM24 I think the AI is pretty decent at this actually. However, the AI will never be as aggressive with wonderkids as the player, as they will focus a large part of their budget on improving their first team. Now whether all those transfers make sense is a different question, but the result is that their budget for youngsters is only a small part of their total budget. Meanwhile, a lot of players basically refuse to ever make a big transfer and just use their entire budget to hover up wonderkids and with the way development in FM works, you basically never get punished for this, especially with real players as the players in the -9 and above PA ranges will always be at worst solid players. Of course with newgens, you will run into the occasional case of a 5* rated wonder kid actually having hit their PA at 19 already and never developing, but those cases are pretty rare. Also, as experienced player it's not hard to notice when a player like that heavily stalls in their development and to just sell them on while they're still young. At the very least it's unlikely you will incur major losses and if you picked him up from a smaller nation you can still easily make a profit even. AI wise, I would like to see them be more aggressive outside of the transfer window and I find the current situation where 15 European clubs are looking at some Brazilian youngster, but 14 are unwilling to make an offer outside of the transfer window and 1 lacks funds rather silly. In real life they would definitely try to be the first to make an offer in the hopes of being faster than their competition. As for players hovering up the real life wonder kids, unless SI starts randomizing these much more heavily at the beginning of a game this will probably always be a thing for the players that want to play this way. It makes little sense to have Marcos Leonardo be wanted by every major club the moment you start a game of FM when in real life he sat at Santos the entire summer and is now being linked with Spartak Moscow. Plenty of these kind of players will move to smaller clubs in Europe, the issue is just that in FM they're basically a guaranteed success, whereas in real life obviously a lot fail for various reasons, which is why real life clubs are much less aggressive in signing wonder kids.

I guess getting into the top division of the NA Nations League would be your best bet. Your club and league reputation will be incredibly difficult to increase if you're not international entering club competitions. Looking at the system, there is a Caribbean Cup which is a pathway into the CONCACAF Champions League, but Montserrat doesn't have an entry. Looking at the rules, Trinidad & Tobago, Dominique Republic, Haiti and Jamaica have 2 spots and the final 2 spots are wild cards that in real life are picked through the Caribbean Shield, but that does not seem to exist in FM. I have no clue how they are assigned in FM though. Just that in 2050 I've never seen a club from Montserrat show up there. Smallest country I've seen to get a wild card spot was Bonaire. Honestly, without any access to an international club competition I'm not sure if your challenge can ever go anywhere. I don't know what pool the Caribbean Cup wild cards are drawn from and whether Montserrat would ever have a chance if you increase your reputation. I think it's going to be really hard for this save to go anywhere, but if you're having fun, might as well keep trying. Alternatively, there is a Caribbean megapack on the forum that would add the Caribbean Shield, which would then give your Montserrat team a chance to climb their way towards the NACL. That would require restarting the save though, so not sure if you want to do that.

A Dutch club would have to pay them at least €500k/year as they are non-EU players, which a Vanarama quality player is obviously not worth. Pretty sure most other European countries will have minimum wages for players outside of their economic regions as well. UK is pretty much your only option as they are considered non foreign players there. On the other hand, a Vanarama club will never have the funds to scout players playing on some Caribbean island, so the odds of those clubs showing interest are incredibly low. I also don't think you can arrange friendlies against English clubs, as it is probably way too far to travel for either side, otherwise you could perhaps cheese some scout interest that way. In the end you will have to get your reputation up, get your team into the main stages of whatever international competition it is part of and hope that through playing in those games your players will actually get scouted. However, it'll still only be the bigger clubs in Europe that can send their scouts over, so you will want to make sure that all somewhat high reputation domestic leagues around you are active as well, in the hope that perhaps your players can first move to Mexico or the US and then catch the attention of European clubs. You can also try to get international friendlies against big countries and hope that you can attract some scouts to watch your players that way. Honestly this challenge sounds incredible hard, as you're stuck in a much worse football region compared to doing this with countries like Gibraltar or San Marino.

That simply scouts their current agreed play time though. That doesn't necessarily say anything about what playing time the player would want at your club. I don't think there's any specific option you can scout to get players that would happily accept being a back up, unless you scout for players that are way below the level of your club. Your best is probably looking for players with low reputation, those generally aren't too aggressive regarding playing time. If it's a player who is much better than his reputation implies though they will quickly demand a better contract.

How is it false speculation when that is literally what you're doing? What else do you call having a filter looking at 18 different attributes?!

Well until the OP actually shows what filters he is using to find players, this whole discussion is kinda meaningless in the first place. Researchers will make players much more well rounded, whereas newgens tend to do funky stuff. So, if you look at it purely from a perspective of "I want every important attribute to be at least 15+", then yes newgens often suck, because they're simply not as well rounded. I'm not sure if that's a flaw in player development or whether researchers in certain aspects are simply too kind at times, giving players relatively well rounded secondary attributes due to being "premier league level" players, even if they're actually pretty bad in those aspects. From a pure CA point of view, as my 2050 save shows, player development is more than good enough with a massive increase in high CA players. So, the issue is not that players are not developing, the issue is that the players are not developing into the specific mould the OP wants, which is quite a different story. Now, no doubt there are some issues with certain newgen templates, the development of certain attributes and the AI will definitely ignore their own youngsters a bit too hard at times, but overall players are definitely being developed, otherwise the number of 150+ CA players in my save wouldn't be more than double what it is in the original database.

What exactly are you checking though? From the sounds of it you are looking at very specific role profiles? If I just look at CA here is what I got in my 2050 database. Overall, there are 277 150CA+ players in the original database, compared to 529 in mine. So, CA actually inflates quite a bit. At 170+ CA it's 29 vs 66. It's only when you look at the absolute peak CA values that there are no new Messi's running around in my database, but the real life database also only has a single 190 CA player, so it's not like those are very common. Obviously if the player knew that Malmö guy had 171PA they'd been playing him 3 years ago, but without knowing that PA he just looks like a relatively flawed WB who isn't natural in any other position and who knows if Malmö even players WBs. So, yeah, I'm honestly curious what you actually looked at. I do feel like the newgen attribute spreads still need more fine tuning and some attributes probably should develop better than they currently do, but there definitely is not a lack of talent in the future. I think real life players just tend to be a lot more well rounded (to an unrealistic degree at times), so they're much easier to fit into certain position profiles than newgens, whereas newgens struggle a lot more with having obvious flaws in their attributes. As for the AI ignoring high PA players, yes the AI definitely could be a bit better here, especially when they buy these wonderkids for big money only to then never do anything with them, but, plenty of high PA players will also simply not look like future super stars or never quite develop and that's also natural. Sure, when you use a scouting tool you can find a bunch of high PA players that are nowhere near that PA, but when their CA is low then it's not really a surprise that they never play and end up playing and thus never developing. While clubs definitely should be more proactive finding loans for players, a lot of the examples you found look like they generated with a CA so low that it was highly unlikely they would ever reach their PA. Who would play that 188PA goalie when his CA is that poor?

It depends. Yes, aggregate score matters, so if you go 1-0 down while you're massively leading on aggregate players won't really care. However, if you go down pretty badly, while still leading on aggregate, you can definitely tell your players to get things together. Then again, I would still avoid berate, the extreme options like berate or throwing water bottles are generally not something I want to touch.

Home-grown status is working fine, only the player profile is bugged. You can check it using the home-grown tab in the squad view.

Just because you're Barcelona and won the Champions League doesn't mean every player will automatically prefer you to any other club out there. Obviously they're all more than willing to join you, but that doesn't mean you're their preferred choice. The player will even tell you why they chose a different club over yours. Whether that always makes sense is a different story, but in the end not every player will be desperate to play for Barcelona regardless of how often you win the CL.

Anyway, what's up with this? Is it really intended that an intermediary can just tell you to sod off?

The issue though is that you didn't miss out on him, your scout simply decided that the next Messi wasn't worth telling you about because €20m seemed like a bit too much money for an European top club.