Suggestion: Improve Use of staff to give you insight into why a player plays like he does

[2feet]

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/robbie-fowler-liverpool-premier-league-28361914

I just read this article by Robbie Fowler about why Liverpool are struggling this season.

He says young players are inconsistent because of their age, and this is natural:

"Harvey Elliott and Fabio ­Carvalho have had a lot of game time, but I don’t think they’re quite at that top international level yet, and the same can be said of Curtis Jones.

And in a nutshell, there you have inconsistency explained. Young players are being asked to do a lot of the heavy lifting this season – Konate is still a novice too – and they are naturally inconsistent."

I wondered if this is reflected in FM?

Do young players have naturally lower consistency in FM?

I think our staff should tell us this, because I would never have really thought of it being linked to his age.

This could be an opportunity to improve the Assistant Manager, and how he communicates with us.

The game could improve how you can tap into your staff's knowledge to gain interesting and useful insight into why each of your players plays the way he does, and how we can potentially improve them.

This could be added to Staff Meeting Reports.

Or if there was an option to 'Ask Assistant Manager's opinion on Tommy Jones (a young player in my squad)', then the manager could mention some aspects of this players hidden attributes.

He might say:

"Tommy Jones is still relatively young for a footballer and as such his consistency is not yet at the level we would like. The more experience he gets playing games, the better his consistency should improve. Or the more we do XYZ to the player, the more chance of his consistency improving"

"Tommy Jones has a temperamental personality but we expect this to improve as he grows." etc.

This would help me to understand some of the fundamental rules of how players develop and what I should expect from the player in the future in terms of their hidden attribute development.

At the moment the game keeps this so hidden that the only way to find out is to search online for answers, and I don't think this should be necessary, the game should tell us this as part of it's immersion. It would improve the experience and the sense of a gameworld.

If we knew what the things we should do to improve our players hidden attributes were, then we could do them. And if there is a balance of risk/reward for doing them e.g. it's risky to play young players but you need to do so in order to improve their consistency, then that would leave us with decisions to make. So if you play young players they are more likely to be inconsistent and you are more likely to lose the game. But if you dont then they wont develop.

These kind of dilemmas should be said in conversation with staff. The staff should define the dilemna then leave it in your hands to decide what to do.

Edited November 3, 2022 by 2feet

[Señor Dan]

Of course, something that the game lacks is the natural conversation that guides the user on what decisions to make.

FM is an impossible game to tackle for a person who doesn't know about football, and it shouldn't be, because even potential buyers of the game miss out. These types of decisions and strategic challenges need to be explained in a simple way without having to resort to YouTube videos outside the game.

[Zachary Whyte]

Thanks for the detailed suggestion. This is going to be reviewed and may yet be rejected or end up in a future FM.