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 need 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. The ‘Best XI’ is shown, with a link to their Strengths and Weaknesses, while a summary of the Analyst Report provides feedback on General Performance, Scoring, Conceding, and Formations Used and Faced.
Analyst Report
The Analyst Report is compiled by the analyst(s) at your club (should you employ at least one) and offers a statistical breakdown of the key players in a range of positions and performance-based metrics.
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 relevant attributes to show strengths and weaknesses in your squad.
Assistant Report
The Assistant report presents Strengths and Weaknesses from the squad as a whole, and suggests a Best XI based on the chosen tactic.
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.
Click on 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. Should you not already be scouting, a handily-placed button exists at the top right of this pop-up dialog to enable you to do just that.
The ‘Filters’ button allows you to streamline or increase the number of players who appear in these lists (for example, you can include youth and reserve team players). 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.
Match Analysis
The Analysis section offers a statistical insight into your previous performances while using certain tactics in a bid to keep you fully informed in your decision-making process.
The ‘Recent Matches Analysis’ distils Positives and Negatives from your last five matches, while you can get into more detail from the ‘Individual Match Analysis’ tab, delving deeper into a specific fixture.
Next Opponent
Ahead of your next fixture, you can check out the Stat Pack and Past Meetings information collated by your analysts to help you prepare.
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 below is used to display just how good a player is:
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, and that the filters are set to include or exclude players in your youth teams and/or out on loan. It then displays the most pertinent ratings to you (be it Current Ability, Best XI, etc.). 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. Make a check of the Team Report a regular part of your managerial planning to reap long-term rewards.