Scoring goals : from "yayyy!" to "meeeeeh"

[Delial]

Hi everybody,

I'm having troubles at scoring goals since... yeah around 15 games.
What's frustrating is that I started season very well with a tactic I work on for month and when things started to click, it was awesome, we were playing very well and were scoring a lot of goals. But then it started to decrease slowly. My best scoarer scored 17 goals during first half of the season but... only 4 during the last 20 games. He is young, so maybe he is starting to be a bit jaded but I do a lot of rotation so...

Enough talk, here's my tactic. I'm inspired by the work of Graham Potter at Brighton and Franck Haise at RC Lens.
The main one : 3421. The AM(s) is the "passing" one, the AM(A) is the "runner" one. Both are asked to stay wider to occupy half spaces.

The "attack" tactic :

Then my last games, so you can see my performance's decay.

Here's the profile of my best striker :

And here's my training schedules :

The fact is that I'm dominating games, creating at least 5 or 6 good chances (IMHO) per game, but they do not want to score. My team is predicted to end up around the 10th but we are now very close to the top 5, thanks to our very good results at the begining of the season. We are underperforming goals according to our XGs and also, we should be at the 5th place according to our Xpoints.

If anyone has ideas how to help my team to score goals again, it would be awesome. Thanks a lot !

Edited November 1, 2022 by Delial
Wrong screenshot

[Johnny Ace]

That's a great level of detail and your tactics, both look very well thought out 

Only thing I could suggest is, if teams are becoming a bit more difficult to score against, take a couple of the lower risk Team Instructions from your team. Shorter passing and Work ball into the Box will restrict your team's options so removing them for games, or periods of games might open a few more chances 

[Jack722]

12 hours ago, Delial said:

Any set of results looking like that is 100% a man management issue and not tactical. Look at your team talk feedback and dynamics page. Be very sympathetic with your press conferences and team talks, make excuses for your players, encourage and relax instead of demand, praise draws and any scrappy win. Wait until a really easy home game and use the press conferences and team talks to demand an end to the poor run of form. Good luck.

[Delial]

Hi guys,

Thanks for feedback!
I tried my best to be the more "positive" I could be during press conference and team talks but I admit that every 5 games or so, I ask more of players who didn't performed very well since my last individual talk. But I'll try to stick more to your advice.

One thing that I noticed and that worries me a lot is that not only my players don't improve but they even regress ! And it bothers me a lot because I built my own training schedules, following what guys like @Rashidi said on his YT channel. So, I must have understand something very wrong because I buy young players with good potential in order to make them better but if I just screw their carreers (and also mine!), I should change what I'm doing.

Anyway, if you have any advice regarding training schedules in order to make my players progress, I'd be so glad!

[Rashidi]

Not sure which version of the game you are on. 

On earlier versions of FM prior to FM21 we had some explosive growth patterns in youth players. A lot has changed since FM22. Now the growth rates are better though there are definitely still some issues, that I hope will eventually be addressed. 

When talking about training we need to understand CA/PA in context of a whole team first. Most teams in the game have a ratio of 90%, which means that if you took the whole CA of a team and compared it to their PA it should be 0.91. This means that all the team needs is a 10% growth to hit full PA. So a team can reach full potential if you can aim for a year on year growth rate of around 1%. In 10 years the squad you have at your disposal should have reached full PA. That excludes events and factors that can accelerate or decelerate development. These include, staff, facilities, performances etc.

I've run quite a lot of simulations of different training schedules and continue to do so and I have noticed the same pattern 1-2% growth in a 3 year window is pretty decent. Some players may grow very fast, players with great personalities and high potential could see accelerated development and some older players may see slower growth, but all players have a chance to grow so long as they haven't capped their CA.

When playing the game now, I have noticed good steady strong development in most attributes. There are some that grow very slowly and sometimes stay stagnant in spite of your best efforts. Some of these attributes are weighted, like crossing and finishing. On FM23beta since the patch I have been able to improve crossing and finishing for my squad. So the fix Andrew and the boys in the match engine team put in work, though some of you may find it slow. Teamwork and workrate are tougher to go up because you need to use sessions that specifically target them and these are inefficient for a balanced training program since you need to use more than one.

My advice is to maintain a balanced training schedule that works on physical, attacking and defensive sessions. The challenge is that the first season on FM can be brutal because of the world cup. How do you get past this? Avoid overplaying your team, make sure the training schedule is not too heavy and definitely not too light. I would definitely only use additional focus on players who are not playing 2 games a week.  Rotate your team and try and avoid jadedness. I still think injury levels on FM23 are way too low, but with proper rotation you should see decent growth rates, fullbacks do improve crossing and strikers do improve finishing. So i would experiment a bit more or wait for a few days. I am sure some training schedules will emerge.  For now I am still running a lot of simulations with training.

[enigmatic]

It's pretty normal for underdog teams to have a harder second half of the season when teams stop treating them like they're easy to beat and adopt tactics that retain possession more and protect against the counter attack better.

Your formation looks particularly likely for that to happen since it's well set up for catching opponents out (three players against two on the break) but not particularly great for breaking down an organised defence because there's only three players likely to threaten the penalty area (and your forwards are probably not better than their defenders)

[Delial]

Thanks a lot @Rashidi, always a pleasure to receive from the bests

I'm playing on FM22. When you're talking about additional focus, is it from the individual training sessions. If so, I admit that I add additional focus to all of my players in order to make them progress on very specific attributes but as I mostly play with teams playing european competitions, I often play 2 games per week. So I will remove the additional focus because maybe, my issue comes from here.

Beside that, can you check the training schedule I uploaded upper and tell if it's a balanced one?

[Delial]

il y a 7 minutes, enigmatic a dit :

It's pretty normal for underdog teams to have a harder second half of the season when teams stop treating them like they're easy to beat and adopt tactics that retain possession more and protect against the counter attack better.

Your formation looks particularly likely for that to happen since it's well set up for catching opponents out (three players against two on the break) but not particularly great for breaking down an organised defence because there's only three players likely to threaten the penalty area (and your forwards are probably not better than their defenders)

Yeah I took that into account but the true is that I dominate most of my games. I mean, I have possession (not too much) and a lot of scoring chances. Like I said, my team is playing well but suddenly, strikers won't score.

I'm not that of an underdog anymore because I play with West Ham for 3 seasons now and manage to get Europa League or Europa Conference everytime so, it's not a surprise anymore that I can beat bigger teams haha.

[mss100]

That tactic is good. can't see any reason why it wouldn't still work. The only problem is... that striker doesn't seem that good. He's not bad, but I can see why he misses chances; one in off his bum and you'll be fine.

 

I play something similar as Atleti; Mitrovic is v good in this system.

[Delial]

Il y a 2 heures, mss100 a dit :

That tactic is good. can't see any reason why it wouldn't still work. The only problem is... that striker doesn't seem that good. He's not bad, but I can see why he misses chances; one in off his bum and you'll be fine.

 

I play something similar as Atleti; Mitrovic is v good in this system.

Thanks a lot. Yeah, I often have too high expectations on my young prospects. I'll try to get players a bit more experienced.

Do you use any PIs for your tactic?

[mss100]

Only PI's are on the two AM's (Stay Wider and Roam from Position). This increases their likelihood to drift wide, support the wing back and make a diamond with the WCB's and CM. It works nicely and produces a 2-3-5 or 3-2-5 in possession, stretching the opposition backline.

[TJR1989]

On 01/11/2022 at 06:57, Delial said:

Hi everybody,

I'm having troubles at scoring goals since... yeah around 15 games.
What's frustrating is that I started season very well with a tactic I work on for month and when things started to click, it was awesome, we were playing very well and were scoring a lot of goals. But then it started to decrease slowly. My best scoarer scored 17 goals during first half of the season but... only 4 during the last 20 games. He is young, so maybe he is starting to be a bit jaded but I do a lot of rotation so...

Enough talk, here's my tactic. I'm inspired by the work of Graham Potter at Brighton and Franck Haise at RC Lens.
The main one : 3421. The AM(s) is the "passing" one, the AM(A) is the "runner" one. Both are asked to stay wider to occupy half spaces.

The "attack" tactic :

Then my last games, so you can see my performance's decay.

Here's the profile of my best striker :

And here's my training schedules :

The fact is that I'm dominating games, creating at least 5 or 6 good chances (IMHO) per game, but they do not want to score. My team is predicted to end up around the 10th but we are now very close to the top 5, thanks to our very good results at the begining of the season. We are underperforming goals according to our XGs and also, we should be at the 5th place according to our Xpoints.

If anyone has ideas how to help my team to score goals again, it would be awesome. Thanks a lot !

This is what I have been been experiencing, I have reported this as a bug and it was declined due to lack of evidence. I notice it alot, for no reason, the players no longer able to score or hit the target when before they were able to loads