Young player reputations still increasing too slowly (still leading to older squads)

Incredibly detailed and useful stuff, it's very much appreciated and will be used alongside our internal analysis.

As we stated in another post, this is a very delicate area and any potential changes always require a lot of work and testing to make sure the game balance isn't compromised. But really do appreciate insight and the effort that goes into examples like this. 

Il 3/11/2022 in 19:36 , Neil Brock ha scritto:

Incredibly detailed and useful stuff, it's very much appreciated and will be used alongside our internal analysis.

As we stated in another post, this is a very delicate area and any potential changes always require a lot of work and testing to make sure the game balance isn't compromised. But really do appreciate insight and the effort that goes into examples like this. 

I really hope this time you guys will fix it and don't leave it broken like you did in FM22...

En 3/11/2022 a las 19:36, Neil Brock dijo:

Incredibly detailed and useful stuff, it's very much appreciated and will be used alongside our internal analysis.

As we stated in another post, this is a very delicate area and any potential changes always require a lot of work and testing to make sure the game balance isn't compromised. But really do appreciate insight and the effort that goes into examples like this. 

Sorry for being repetitive Neil, but game balance IS ALREADY COMPROMISED with this issue. And you had one year for solving this since FM22 had the same problem, that it wasn't at FM21, so we can not understand any excuse because this problem has been in the game for a year, being notified in two BETAS.

 

Please fix this asap

Changes require extensive testing and its not a straight forward area. We appreciate that people feel strongly and it can impact your enjoyment of the game so its of course an area we place high importance on.

Is this gonna be solved tomorrow with the release? Can't believe that after a year we still have the same issue and with all the same excuses after 365 days of "testing"

As I said in another post, it's waful to see the players in the Nationak squads in the World Cup 2030. If you wanna the save I can share it,  but you know what happens. Any plans to fix this problem?

Just throwing my voice behind this to say that this is a huge deal for me. 

I wont give up complaining about this and the full backs regens with low crossing even if in 2030 they don't have it solved.

 

Disgraceful

Adding that this is still an issue I am seeing. New save today, simmed to 2035 and the English team is all above 25 years old. Kills the immersion on saves.

14 hours ago, michael21 said:

Adding that this is still an issue I am seeing. New save today, simmed to 2035 and the English team is all above 25 years old. Kills the immersion on saves.

As said it is something the team current have under review, but changes to player reputation have to be managed extremely carefully given the wide-ranging effect they can have on the game.

On 28/11/2022 at 22:06, albertocerdeira.4 said:

I wont give up complaining about this and the full backs regens with low crossing even if in 2030 they don't have it solved.

 

Disgraceful

In our last update we included tweaks to enable full back newgens to develop in a different way, so you'd be advised to check this again with a new save. 

I've run another holiday save to test the changes after the winter update. I've loaded at least the top two divisions from 8 major European nations - Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain - and holidayed until July 2032.

Firstly, some positives. AI teams are more open to loaning out young players. The average ages of top club teams is around 26-30, which is still a bit too high for my liking, but it's still an improvement of what I was seeing before.

Also, older players are declining slightly faster and drifting out of national teams at more realistic ages. In my holiday save, Raheem Sterling was phased out of the England team at around 32/33, whereas he would previously be playing for England and Chelsea at 36/37, still looking as quick as he is now in his mid-20s. There are still some Modric and Ronaldo types who continue playing at an elite level at 36+, but club and national teams aren't clogged with too many of them anymore.

However, I still feel there's much work to do when it comes to player reputations:

PLAYERS WITH:	2022	2027	2032
4* WR or higher	35	89	100
3.5* WR or higher	154	343	366
3* WR or higher	647	983	1036
2.5* WR or higher	2481	2767	2454

10 years into the save, there are far more players of at least 3* World Reputations than there were at the start. My major issue, though, is how those high-rep players are distributed:

When it comes to reputations, there's a pretty good balance on the original database - but as you get 5 and 10 years into a save, we're seeing far fewer high-rep players aged 24 and under - and more high-rep players in their 30s.

You'll also notice that, when we get to 2032, there are fewer 26-year-olds with high reputations than there are 25-year-olds. Those youngest players from the ODB are still being left behind by their peers and the first generation of newgens.

Also, I bought the FM in-game editor so I could look closer at the numbers behind the players. At the start of the save, I looked at the 100 highest-reputation players at each age from 16 up to 35, and charted their average World Reputations. I then did the same thing 5 years and 10 years into the save.

As you can see, reputation growth is pretty steady for the first few years. Younger players generally have lower reputations than their ODB peers up until the age of 23, and then they surge well ahead. That'll likely explain why it's still very difficult for players to become first-team regulars at a top level until 23/24, at which point the game suddenly decides, "Now you're ready."

And here's a similar chart I did, this time focussing on Current Ability rather than World Reputation:

Again, player development looks steady for the first few years... but then things slow down at around 19-23, as many players struggle to get the regular first-team football they need to take their games to the next level. Then they turn 24 and start shooting up, peaking at around 25-31 before a rather steep decline.

Now I'd like you to have a look at the screenshots hidden in the spoilers below. I've sorted the top 30 German, Italian and Spanish players in 2032 by Current Ability. I've highlighted any player aged 25 or under - these will be almost exclusively newgens, though there may be a couple of real-life youngsters in there too. Pay close attention to the WR star ratings compared to their peers.

GERMANY:

Spoiler

ITALY:

Spoiler

SPAIN:

Spoiler

Lastly, to get a greater sense of what impact this has on the international game in FM23, here are a bunch of stats I've compiled, showing just how few players are getting called up for the top European national teams... and how difficult it is for younger, fresher talents to break through.

These top national teams are clearly spreading their caps over fewer players, adding more credence to my suspicions that national team selection is biased much too heavily on reputation - and not enough on form or ability.

In 2022, there are 26 active players from these eight nations who have at least 100 caps - by 2032, this number has increased to 42. By contrast, there were 125 players from these nations with a single international cap each... but a decade later, there were only 44 one-cap wonders, only 18 of whom had been capped during the save.

Using eu-football.info, I looked at every international debutant from those top eight European nations between July 2012 and June 2022, and noted the ages at which these players made their international debuts. During this decade, 616 players debuted for their nations, of which 75% were under the age of 25. Among these were 74 teenagers

Fast forward through the first decade of an FM save, however, and the picture looks rather bleaker...

Where have all the young debutants gone? 4 out of 10 international players from a major European nation have to wait until they're at least 25 to make their debut.

Just look at the state of England and France, neither of whom fielded a single player under the age of 21! I really don't want to keep using Jude Bellingham as a yardstick for FM youth development, but he was still the youngest England senior international in the game until March 2029, when he was aged 25 years and 8 months. The player who took that honour from him was Jude Soonsup-Bell, at the tender age of... er, 25 years and 2 months.

Despite also not fielding any teenagers during the decade, Germany at least buck the trend by blooding most of their internationals between the ages of 20 and 24.

And here is one last chart for you.

I could go into more depth and give you even more charts to look at, and I wish I could find the time to pick out some specific cases, but this is already depressing me enough. While I am somewhat satisfied that at least some progress has been made since I posted my first bug report on this issue nearly a year ago, I still don't believe that the situation has improved enough. There is still so much more that can be done.

As things stand, I'm not convinced that realistic long-term saves on FM23 are viable - certainly not without resorting to mods. And even those mods cannot fix the fundamental flaws FM seems to have when it comes to AI squad management and youth development.

I've now lost any glimmer of hope I had for FM23 - and after holidaying for goodness knows how many in-game years, I feel like it's time to take a long break from Football Manager. In the meantime, I hope you guys can make some more changes, so that FM24 can finally hit that sweet spot where players don't improve or decline too slowly or quickly, and where reputation is no longer the be-all and end-all.

 

Files Uploaded to the OwnCloud:

CFuller_New2022.fm

CFuller_New2027.fm

CFuller_New2032.fm

Edited March 10, 2023 by CFuller

Right, so here are a couple more charts for you, showing the discrepancies between real-life and FM23 when it comes to national team selection.

Note that these charts are based on seasons rather than calendar years. The unusually low/unusually high numbers of debutants in 2019/20 and 2020/21 respectively are obviously due to the pandemic.

Even bearing that in mind, you can see just how few new players are getting capped by the top European national teams on FM. In the 2026/2027, those eight nations only capped 12 new players (England capped the most debutants with four, while France didn't award any new caps that season).

This chart also shows the average ages of those international debutants per season. Between 2012 and 2022 in real-life, the average age of a debutant was 22.8. In the first decade of this test save, it has gone up to 23.9.

If you're interested, here's how the France squad looks in 2032. I counted, and there are 17 players aged 30 or over - that's about two-thirds of the squad. No wonder that younger French players can't break through!

At club level, things look a little better, but I still see several squads (Arsenal's being the worst example) that are largely filled by older players.

Looking across all the Premier League squads, there are only 37 players under the age of 25 who have a squad status of at least 'Regular Starter'. It's an improvement on my first experiment in November (when there were 28 of these players), but it's still barely half the number of young Regular Starters there were at the start of the save.

 

From what I've gathered while doing this research, it feels like the development of young players into first-team regulars is roughly 1 year behind where it could (or perhaps should) be. In other words, if these players broke through about a year sooner on average, the figures would be much closer to real-life.

If any developers want to have a closer look at my findings, I've attached the Excel workbook I've used to collate my data (CFuller_MarchTest.xlsx).

I have also attached another workbook (CFuller_JanTest.xlsx) - from another experiment that I ran back in late December/early January. This was of course done before the Winter Update, so I doubt it's of much use to you now, but it covers a holiday save that ran for 25 seasons, and compares my results with real-life international data from as far back as 1998. It's a rather sobering look at how much the game changes over the course of a very long-term save.

This will probably be my last post for this bug report - and probably my last for FM23 as a whole. Again, I don't have the appetite to run any more long-term tests during this release cycle, so if anyone wants to take up the baton, then by all means take it. It's so disappointing to see that long-term saves are still being ruined by poor AI squad management and reputation issues, and it's something that really should be properly addressed for FM24.

CFuller_MarchTest.xlsx CFuller_JanTest.xlsx

Il 13/3/2023 in 19:02 , CFuller ha scritto:

It's so disappointing to see that long-term saves are still being ruined by poor AI squad management and reputation issues, and it's something that really should be properly addressed for FM24.

Great work bro, i also have similar numbers when going 2030 and higher. Btw the part i've quoted we all know it won't happen. It was broken in 22, it's broken in 23 and will be broken in 24 because devs clearly don't care about it. Just like international management, transfer system being completly broken, broken set pieces and all the stuff that should have been revamped at least 5 years ago and are still ignored.

I believe SI are honestly trying their best to address this, but it's more complicated than people believe it to be. Like I said, there have been some clear improvements, but there's still lots of work to do in other areas.

The best thing we can do right now as players is give SI as much data and as many examples as possible. Constructive criticism is more helpful than suggesting that the developers "don't care", or saying that everything is "broken" without going into specifics.

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

On 06/04/2023 at 10:00, DMaster2 said:

Great work bro, i also have similar numbers when going 2030 and higher. Btw the part i've quoted we all know it won't happen. It was broken in 22, it's broken in 23 and will be broken in 24 because devs clearly don't care about it. Just like international management, transfer system being completly broken, broken set pieces and all the stuff that should have been revamped at least 5 years ago and are still ignored.

Tell me you don't understand AAA game development without telling me you don't understand AAA game development. The difference between results in release and the winter update are absolutely incredible (how much comes down to RNG is debateable of course) and the engs have done an incredible job in just a short couple of months, as they do every bloody year.

"Completely broken" is useless feedback, all that you list works perfectly fine for me. 

How long do you think the average save lasts? I doubt it's anywhere near 10 years.

12 ore fa, Tbarnes88 ha scritto:

Tell me you don't understand AAA game development without telling me you don't understand AAA game development. The difference between results in release and the winter update are absolutely incredible (how much comes down to RNG is debateable of course) and the engs have done an incredible job in just a short couple of months, as they do every bloody year.

"Completely broken" is useless feedback, all that you list works perfectly fine for me. 

How long do you think the average save lasts? I doubt it's anywhere near 10 years.

Are you seriously defending features that has been broken for literal YEARS? The issue improved through the patches? Sure, but it's still not working since past 2030 there are barely any young players playing for top clubs and national teams. It's still not enough.

And the last sentence simply confirm what i just said. Not many play 10+ years save like me so they literally don't care, like for international management and other stuff they left broken for years.