Fenerbahce midfielders are absolutely butchered with the winter update with ridiculous pace values

Please keep in mind that pace is one of the most impactful attributes, and Fenerbahce is unplayable now. Two of Fener's best midfielders move like turtles, and they are both agile, quick, hardworking, fast players in real life. Furthermore, their roles on the pitch also require a lot of movement with and without the ball. The game is ruined for Fener fans now. Seeing Ziyech and Bonucci outrun Szymanski and Fred renders the game unplayable.

Edited March 5 by GorkemSahin

Keep in mind that a player's Pace is how fast he runs at full speed.  So you can think of it as the speed at which he runs when he's sprinting.

Acceleration, on the other hand, is how fast he runs over short distances.  So, for a midfielder or a player who plays in a more crowded area of the pitch, acceleration is a much more important attribute to have than pace.

So I would suggest thinking of speed not as a single attribute as defined by pace but rather something observed as a combination of attributes.

Acceleration is how quickly he reaches his top speed.
Agility is how quickly he is able to change direction without losing speed.
Balance is how well he is able to maintain his speed when changing direction.
Pace is the top speed at which he can travel.

Just because a player's top speed is not very high, doesn't mean he's ineffective.  It basically means he's more likely to get beaten by a speedy player when caught in a lot of space.  So based on what you describe it looks like the Fenerbahce researcher believes that Fenerbahce's midfield players are relatively weak when caught in lots of space while they are more effective in more crowded areas of the pitch.

So perhaps you may want to use a playing style that suits those kinds of players to get the best out of them.

 

Hello perpetua,

I think your explanation about the pace and acceleration attribute makes sense. But I think there are inconsistencies in the turkish league. 

For example:
Hakim Ziyech has 11 pace and 13 acceleration
Sebastian Szymański has 9 pace and 14 acceleration

A player like szymanski who has clips of him sprinting to catch strikers as a last man, or beats offside line repeatedly is slower in nearly every sense than a playmaking winger who is rapidly declining in terms of physical attributes in real life.

Also new transfers (especially loan players) from other leagues to the turkish league does not follow the same formula in terms of acceleration and pace.
Rade krunic for example has 14 pace and 13 acceleration. That makes him faster than batshuayi, szymanski, ismail yüksek, mert hakan yandaş and arguably fred. He is nearly identical in terms of pace with mert müldür and çağlar söyüncü.
This does not make sense to me. Shouldn't all football manager database share same formulas for attributes?
You can say that turkish league has low pace in general, but that is not caused by just players. Yes some of the players does not have physical capabilities as players from other league but turkish leagues problems are mostly caused by playstyles and referees.

Also in terms of upgrades and downgrades. Does a player like Michi Batshuayi really deserves his current ability reduced more signaficantly than a player like Wilfered Zaha? Or a relatively low performing player like İcardi (compared to the last season) should stay at the abilities while some other players that are performing better than last year are getting downgrades (like batshuayi).

While I respect your opinion, and I understand that fenerbahçe is not the leader in the turkish league, the league is still really close and players from fenerbahçe does not really deserve that kind of downgrades.

I know this is a new account but I am a long time player, I just do not follow the forums that much. But this ''issue'' really made me write here.

Hopefully you have a great week and day, looking forward to your answer.

Regarding performances:  Player performances fluctuate.  This is built into the game with various factors such as tactical suitability, personal traits, injury likelihood, fitness to count a few.  We rate player ability.  Performance is an indicator of ability in the long run, but in the short run (a few weeks or months) performance is not necessarily a good indicator of ability.  So while I appreciate that you may wish to see quick improvements or quick reductions of ability tied to performance of individuals, this does not necessarily work well with the rest of the game mechanics (such as the the transfer market or AI behaviour).

Regarding ratings of Krunic and some other players in other leagues.  This is a choice by the researcher.  If certain attributes are high, it means other attributes are low to compensate and vice versa.  Do I think Krunic has that level of pace?  No.  But it is a choice made by his previous club's researcher which we should respect.  I am sure you can identify many more players who should probably have a faster top speed than Krunic in other leagues but aren't rated that way.   It is difficult to achieve that cross-border consistency mainly because different individuals rate players with their own interpretations and personal biases.  This is not too distinct from different professional club scouts watching the same player and coming to different conclusions about the player's skills.  This has always been the case. 

We will, of course, take a good look at Krunic over the next few months and rate him to the best of our ability at the end of the season in preparation of the FM 25 database.

Cheers.

Edited March 6 by perpetua

To further add to my last comments.  We observe Turkish clubs in European competitions and how physically superior sides (think Northern European and Scandinavian especially) tend to give more trouble to Turkish teams because of their athleticism or physical size (in addition to their .

It's probably a useful exercise to make comparisons with how these sides are rated in comparison to players who are playing in Turkey.  I suspect you'll come to the same conclusion with most of the Turkish research team that our players, for the most part, are rated quite fairly.

Similarly another useful exercise is to compare players who play different positions.  After all, a player plays a specific position because of his attributes.  Not because it was randomly decided that the player is a winger or a central midfielder.  

As a general rule, and this is well established in academic articles, central midfielders tend to be the players with the lowest maximum speed.  They are followed by central defenders who are second slowest.  Then come strikers, then full-backs and finally the fastest players tend to be wingers on average.

We should hopefully see this in the game/database as well.  It should be quite rare that a central midfielder or central defender has a higher top speed than an average or below average winger in the same league.

 

Edited March 7 by perpetua

I mean - the whole profile of Sebastian Szymański is totally messed up and I have no idea how it got through the verification. And I don't care about his pace - this is horribly wrong and makes the researchers for Fener/Turkish league look bad, but I kinda understand the logic with balancing the attributes for central midfielders* and won't argue with that, but man - the rest? Like he might be the best Polish player ever to be included in the official db and it's so unfair, that I don't even know where to start.

 

*however he is not your stereotypical central midfielder as he started as a pacey winger with a very high motor and there is a lot of proof for that in previous databases (and verified by researchers for various teams/leagues)

 

3 hours ago, joeys said:

I mean - the whole profile of Sebastian Szymański is totally messed up and I have no idea how it got through the verification. And I don't care about his pace - this is horribly wrong and makes the researchers for Fener/Turkish league look bad, but I kinda understand the logic with balancing the attributes for central midfielders* and won't argue with that, but man - the rest? Like he might be the best Polish player ever to be included in the official db and it's so unfair, that I don't even know where to start.

 

*however he is not your stereotypical central midfielder as he started as a pacey winger with a very high motor and there is a lot of proof for that in previous databases (and verified by researchers for various teams/leagues)

I appreciate your comment.

What he has been at Fenerbahce is a second striker who takes good advantage of the space created for him by Dzeko.  As a result, he has scored quite a few nice goals.  Perhaps the Fenerbahce researcher is a bit optimistic on him but I don't really think he's too far off in terms of overall ability (ie. CA).

Attributes can always be rated differently through different eyes.

@perpetua

 

Thank you for your response.

I have been playing FM for years, I understand that if I have players with low pace, I should change my tactics accordingly. I also understand what pace means. I also see that midfielders are usually not as fast as wingers or full-backs.

 

On the other hand I also know that Szymanski used to play as a winger, and that Szymanski and Fred are not slower than 40 years old Pepe or 38 years old Bonucci at any distance, regardless of which attributes contribute to speed to what extend. Over the many years where I have kept playing FM, I have seen many winter upgrades and downgrades which I did not agree with, but none of them made me sign up for the forums to complain about them, similar to @bariskoklu. No football enjoyer could ever watch a game of Fener and then claim that Szymanski's pace should be 9. I do not understand why the Turkish researchers felt the need to reduce Fred and Szymanski's paces by 50% in a few months. How can such a young player lose half of their top speed in a few months?

 

Even the researchers themselves keep feeling the need to justify this pace downgrade every five minutes here in their video stream, because they know it themselves that it is an insane nerf: 

They keep claiming that there was a formula given to them to calculate players' paces by statistics. First of all, no other researcher from any other country uses that formula. Even if your formula is the most accurate and realistic one, it still ruins the game for us, Fener fans, since Fener midfielders are the only ones whose pace values are calculated by this formula. Secondly, most leagues on earth do not even have the infrastructure to calculate and accumulate data regarding players' top speeds, so having such a formula also makes no sense. Third and last point is that if you are playing at Fener as an attacking midfielder against other, much weaker Turkish teams, you will never have long and wide spaces where you can sprint onto, even if you are Mbappe or Vinicius. Whole game will be played in a small, narrow area near the opponent's goal. The formula does not make sense once again. You won't be able to measure players' pace values this way.

 

Is there any way we can fix this data error which ruins the game for us and renders it unplayable without editing players ourselves using the editor? We would like to play with Fred and Szymanski we see on the pitch in real life. They are different players in the game now, especially Szymanski has nothing to do with its real-life counterpart. 

 

Edited March 8 by GorkemSahin

23 hours ago, GorkemSahin said:

On the other hand I also know that Szymanski used to play as a winger, and that Szymanski and Fred are not slower than 40 years old Pepe or 38 years old Bonucci at any distance, regardless of which attributes contribute to speed to what extend.

Your statement is predicated upon the assumption that these players are rated correctly. 

40 year old Pepe's pace, for example, is 13.
Based on your argument, Szymanski should be rated higher.  Perhaps 14 or 15.
If that's the case, where do we put a truly fast players like Yusuf Ozdemir or Baris Alper Yilmaz or Osayi-Samuel?
17-18-19?
Then what about players who are even faster?

In my opinion, there is an irrational desire not to rate any player with less than 10 for speed related attributes.

So who should be slow in this database?

Nobody?

If everyone is fast, then speed isn't a factor that makes a difference between teams, making speed an irrelevant attribute.

Suppose every player in the game had tackling of 10 or higher.  Then every player can defend well.  Even worse is if only very few players had tackling of 15 or higher.  Then the entire population of footballers, regardless of position, are stuck in a 6 point range for tackling.  Everyone can tackle at a similar level, making it meaningless to have someone who can tackle.  Same goes for finishing, first touch, passing, decisions etc. etc. etc.

 The game guide/manual has always indicated that even an attribute level of 1 is meant to represent a professional player who is weakest in this attribute.  Key word here is professional.  Not someone playing among friends in a five a side game on the weekends.  So that player who has a 1 rating is meant to be miles better than the average person.  It's the same with pace.  Someone with pace = 1 is a slow professional player but is still an athlete who trains every single day.  10.5 is supposed to be about average speed while 20 is supposed to be extraordinary, once in a generation type of speed.    So it makes no sense whatsoever to restrict attribute ratings to the 10-20 range like your argument suggests.

 

23 hours ago, GorkemSahin said:

They keep claiming that there was a formula given to them to calculate players' paces by statistics.

It's not a formula. 

We are able to observe players' top speed as they display it in matches.  Not every player displays their top speed in matches, in fact they show their top speed perhaps once a season. 

Bundesliga publish these statistics and can be seen by anyone.  Feel free to peruse those lists and see the differences between players.

After taking a look at these, I would suggest the following thought exercise.  Is there any logical or empirical reason for us to believe that the slowest Bundesliga players should be faster than approximately 50% of the world's professional footballer population (assuming that speed is normally distributed - I would actually suggest that the distribution of attributes is half-normal, meaning that in theory there should be far more players with a 1 rating than a 20 rating).

So there is the challenge.  How do you prove that the slowest Bundesliga player is faster than half of all professional footballers.  Or if I am right and there are far more players in the world with a 1 rating than players with a 20 rating, then really how much better is Bonucci's 11 from the average player worldwide?

Here is a hint, Bundesliga 2 also publish players' top speeds.  You'll notice that those are not very different than Bundesliga.  That is, despite the decline in playing level the distribution of players' top speed doesn't change.  There are plenty of players who have a top speed of 36 km/h in Bundesliga 2, just like Bundesliga.  And the lowest outfield players run at approximately 30 km/h.  Go down another level and perhaps you'll see a slight change in the distribution but not as drastic as what we see in the game database.  So the assumption that Bonucci is faster than at least 50% of the footballer population that the Pace rating of 11 implies doesn't appear to have support in this instance.  So why do we have this assumption in the database?  I do not know.

Edited March 9 by perpetua