Squad and Team Report
You’ll spend much of your time poring over the Squad screen as you look to develop and mould a group of individual players into a finely-tuned machine capable of success. It’s therefore worth familiarising yourself with this particular screen, and the screens associated with it.
The Team Report is the best way to take both an at-a-glance look and a detailed study of the players available to you. It is a comprehensive breakdown of your squad from top to bottom, with your backroom staff presenting you with all the information you will need to know to prepare and build a successful team. It is broken down into a number of sections, with an Overview panel bringing together the most important statistics in one place.
Overview
The Overview screen presents an immediate and detailed look at the team’s Pros and Cons in the same style as the Coach and Scout report cards do for players elsewhere in the game. Information on squad depth, attributes, goalscoring trends and on-pitch production are gathered and presented accordingly, while a sub-panel towards the right of the screen gives a brief overview of your Squad Depth.
Squad Depth
Your squad is broken down by formation and position, with each position box then displaying every player who can feature there, plus their competency in the form of a star rating. Scroll up and down the page to view the full length of the pitch and the depth available in every position.
Select the numbered person icon to the top right of each positional box to bring up a dialog presenting the information in more detail. Each position has a hierarchy of capability and suitability as well as any information regarding players you are currently scouting to play there for ease of comparison.
The ‘Filter’ button allows you to streamline or increase the number of players who appear in these lists. The ‘Customisations’ toggle allows you to manually remove players from a position (if you would rather not consider a player in a given area of the team, for example) while the ‘Roles’ menu has four different options for the information being presented to you.
To change the member of staff who compiles this part of the report, navigate to the ‘Opinion of:’ drop-down menu and select accordingly from the list of available staff.
Stats
This section presents a breakdown of team statistics across a wide range of areas and also highlights the best and worst performers accordingly.
Facts
This section presents a breakdown of statistical leaders in your team – such as the youngest and oldest players – and compares them to the leaders within your league.
Comparison
This section takes a number of statistics from your squad and compares them across the rest of the league to see how your charges compare. The ‘General’ tab takes miscellaneous information such as height and weight, whereas the positional breakdowns take an average of particular attributes to show strengths and weaknesses in your squad.
How can I make best use of the information available to me?
With such a wealth of information at your disposal, it might be easy to feel overwhelmed, and to not know how best to identify the real strengths and weaknesses of your squad.
- The Overview screen is by far the best place to start as it distils everything into a succinct Strength or Weakness. The words used in each item are also instructive of what, if any, action you should take next; the scale representing the level of talent being described leaves you more informed about just how much improvement can be made:
Star, Excellent, Superb, Very Good, Good, Fairly Good, Decent, Useful, Low, Unsuitable
- Tailor the Squad Depth view to your own circumstances. Ensure it’s based off your primary tactic and defined roles, displays the most pertinent ratings to you (whether that be Current Ability, Best XI, etc.), and ensure the filters are set to include or exclude players as you want. If you configure this part of the report to your own specific needs, you’ll find it serves you a lot better.
- Use all of the screens frequently. Players develop, teams change, and every time something new happens, the data you’ve previously reviewed runs the risk of becoming outdated. Making a check of the Team Report a regular part of your managerial planning will reap long-term rewards.