Player attitude in pre-season matches

[MaskedReferee]

Evening all,

A quick question about player attitude in pre-season matches, specifically my substitutes.

There is a familiar pattern in me at of the friendly games I play. I'll get a good lead against a team in the first half, make a host of changes but none of my substitutes seem interested in the game and spend 45 minutes playing like a team who have never met eachother before!

I've just played the opening game of my current pre-season tour of the USA. I'm playing as West Ham and opened my tour against Sacramento Republic as a gentle game to go through the motions and get some minutes on the pitch. First half ends and I'm 5-0 up, I change the full team and tell all the substitutes to go out there as there are places up for grabs. A couple of players respond to show 'appeared inspired' but then they all spent the next 45 minutes as either complacent, uninterested or "would rather have stayed on the bench". The game finished 5-1 and second half we barely strung 2 passes together whiley forwards stood offside!

None of the shouts seem to have a positive impact and realistically I think if a manager had 11 players who didn't care they probably would last long at the club!

This isn't a moan because, to an extent, I understand. We're winning 5-0 in a meaningless game against inferior opposition so I'd expect some of the players to not be bothered about the second half. Is there anything I can do though to get them more interested?

[pedrosantos]

Personally, it's an issue present for a few years now and it's not understandable the logic of it. Putting this in perspective: a club signs a new manager, there's a few friendly matches to glue a new tactic and new ideas and the player's response is to get complacent. Nice message they are passing to the new manager . It has no logic and surely an issue SI does not find important to look into. 

[phnompenhandy]

It needs a better word than 'complacent '. It just means the player thinks they're comfortable.  It doesn't affect things as adversely as the word implies. 

 

But to the  O P - you're a no-mark in charge of world class players and you've  just had  their well-loved manager fired.  It's on you to earn their respect  - they owe you nothing. 

[samuelawachie]

2 hours ago, phnompenhandy said:

It needs a better word than 'complacent '. It just means the player thinks they're comfortable.  It doesn't affect things as adversely as the word implies. 

I think I’ve had a similar observation to the OP all these years and it’s really really annoying. But I wonder how much that body language actually had on their performance and how that can be measured? I also notice that they usually go straight from complacent to variants of nervous and nerves once the score becomes closer (from their being complacent!). So I’d rather term it “overconfident”, but I wonder how much impact it has on their actual performance

[pedrosantos]

Ok then, maybe its a question of bad labelling. Even so, it's something that year after year its not looked into.

[Hovis Dexter]

16 hours ago, phnompenhandy said:

But to the  O P - you're a no-mark in charge of world class players and you've  just had  their well-loved manager fired.  It's on you to earn their respect  - they owe you nothing. 

This. I’m assuming that this is your first season at the club. You have to be successful in your first year then review matters. Then you have to prove to the players that the success in the first year wasn’t a fluke. If you’ve been successful for two years then you may well have earned the respect of all the players and you should then get positive responses from the whole team. It’s, quite rightly, hard to earn the respect of the whole team.

[MaskedReferee]

Thanks for the responses guys. It's my second season at the club having had a successful first year but it sounds as though it might be a combination of how the body language is described by the game and some mechanics happening under the hood. It's only pre-season so I don't mind. It was like that in my first season and they switched it on for the competitive games.

I might raise a post elsewhere though (probably under the feature requests rather than a bug) to refine the body language descriptions. Its great that you can see how players are 'feeling' before coming on to the pitch but I think it needs a bit of work. If you are winning comfortably most players coming on tend to have "would rather have stayed on the bench" which is probably true of some players but I think it happens too often. It always seems a bit odd as well when 17 year olds making their first-team debut come on to the pitch and don't seem to want to be there!

[Ray Floyd]

I'm new to this forum, please help me, where can I play this game? I have played a lot of games online before, I don't know if this game can be played with friends online? Can someone explain it to me?

Edited January 5, 2023 by Ray Floyd

[DarJ]

4 hours ago, Ray Floyd said:

I'm new to this forum, please help me, where can I play this game? I have played a lot of online games before, I don't know if this game can be played with friends online? Can someone explain it to me?

You can play offline or online with friends but if you’re going to play with friends you all need to be available to play at the same time