WelshMourinho

Because none of these clubs are in a position to ask for something stupid. Not every football team has the financial strength of premier league clubs and nor should they in the game. It is such a lazy workaround to just let any club slap on £100M+ valuations on players. Pretty much any player is priced out of a move on the game, and the clubs themselves are barely benefitting because they're leaving themselves with shoestring budgets to improve the squad on.

I would say it is wrong. How many football clubs are able to hold on to players they don't want to sell? Most of these clubs will have low transfer budgets and will be relying on income from transfers, and yet those incomes aren't happening because any decent player gets slapped with an absurd price on them. The way the market works at the moment is incredibly silly.

It's hard to immerse yourself in a world where the transfer market is absolute bonkers. This is an absurd negotiation. A wonderkid who has 'fringe player' squad status, with the chance to go play regularly at a top club in a league with a fairly strong league, being blocked because of some nonsense £169M mandatory future fee clause. It's even sillier when you consider they're currently trying to sign Jonathan David from me. Everything in the transfer world just appears to happen independently of whatever else is happening in the game world. Then you get into the valuations of players. Lille value Tiago Djalo at 92-111m. Franck Kessie is valued at 46-68M. OGC Nice reckon they're getting between 106-157M for Thuram. Melvin Bard is their LB and in order to get him you're looking at between 79-95M. For a left back in the French division. That's just a quick look at a few top players, and yes they're top players (not actual transfer targets of mine) but not every single football club in world football is operating with the finances of the Premier League TV deal. Any good footballer now requires an ungodly amount of money to acquire them, to the point where I don't even think Premier league clubs can do deals properly in the game.

Think this game from todays session was a perfect example of most things I'm finding frustrating at the moment. Far too many chances for the dominant team, which leads to silly amounts of missed chances, followed up by a poor team (in this case very bottom) being stupidly clinical in response to balance out the spanking they've been on the end of. The cherry on top is the 5 woodworks that happened on top of everything else in this game.

Just had a situation in which Porto offered me a job, and Malaga asked for a meeting to try and keep me. Telling the Malaga board that I felt my time had come to an end for whatever reason rescinded the Porto job offer and obviously ensured my resignation from Malaga.

Considering there was a focus on tactical styles and how ai managers were going to look to recruit in line with those, I can't help but feel I'm seeing very little of these different styles in game. I want to see a wing play style absolutely bombarding me down the wing, and I want to see a vertical tiki taka team slicing through me straight up the pitch. But none of this is happening, Every single team I have played against with a 'wing play' style has used inverted full backs, inverted wingbacks and inverting wingers. I have played Castilla I think 4 times over the previous 3 seasons, and the first time all 4 wide players were inverting. They did finally introduce a winger in the season season but the other 3 were all inverting. I've played Celta, and again, everyone inverting. Like it doesn't matter if I play Real Madrid or a team near the bottom, it's just very repetitive. Throw ins and corners just seem to be the focus, no matter what the style of the opposition utilises. I'm not sure how much can even be done about that with this current engine, but that's just how it plays right now.

While I agree, the problem here, as usual, is that the game itself doesn't present mentality in that way. The description the game gives of a defensive mentality mentions keeping men back, restricting space, slowing things down and frustrating the opponent. It goes as far as saying it relies on direct balls to forwards and then sharp and quick passing from there to score on the counter. Those are all things you want when the opposition begin throwing men forward. For more experienced players like us, we know what mentality is. But it's no surprise people still go to mentality for things like that when the game presents mentality as such.

Honestly so many of my minor grievances have existed in FM for years at this point so I won't touch on them, but something that really does grate is goalkeepers. What makes a good goalkeeper on this game? Because I can't tell at this point, and I don't feel like their ability is judged like other players. As far as I can see the balance is that if my team performs well, my keeper will be a sieve for the few shots he faces. If we're crap then he remembers how to save shots. I can only guess that the better your keeper is, while individually he may not perform great, the overall performance of the team will be better. I also have to touch on it, but the sheer amount of highlights beginning with throw ins and corners. I understand highlights have to start somewhere and dead balls are naturally a good point, but it's silly at points. As a second division side, we played a Barcelona team that played a Brazilian box formation with the likes of Fati, Lewa, Pedri, Gavi and for 60 minutes every highlight bar 2 started from a throw in or a corner. I was hoping to see the difference of levels between the two teams, and instead all I got was Barcelona's silky footballers doing their best peak Tony Pulis impression. They should've sliced and diced us. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the new animations look good and at times the ME plays very well, but when it's off it's an incredibly tedious watch.

Hoping the improvements with the AI's development of player also has the knock on effect of sorting out the transfer market. The prices of some of these players are outrageous and the drop off in quality from the great players to players who clearly have seen very limited gametime is too much. Mind you I think a bigger problem with the game atm is every club acts as though they have premier league finances.

Yeah you basically have to sell immediately/in the summer as it triggers when they get 18 months left, or let them go on a free/hope they change their mind. Feel like this is a feature that needs more fleshing out anyway. It triggers at the same time every single time, and just appears to be random. You can have the happiest player at the club but if you let him get to the 18 months expiry point FM might just decide he wants to move on. In future to stop it, keep an eye on those who have 2 years left and make a decision on whether you want to keep that player. If not, try and sell immediately to get the most value. If you want to keep them for an extended period of time, be prepared to offer a new contract within the next 5 months. FWIW, if it gets to the point where they say they're considering leaving, I've found telling them the atmosphere at the club is positive and they usually agree and back down. I'm sure that's probably only depending on your club atmosphere bar on the dynamics page though, so double check that first.

Penalties seem excessive right now. My Inter team have had 4 pens in 9 league games, plus 3 in 4 Champions Legaue games, two of which came in the same game vs Monaco.

I think skins have already been released with it sorted! I know it's only a small thing, but the decision making behind it is frustrating.

Rather frustrating that attributes have been removed from the scout report. I understand why, in terms of being more realistic in what a scout irl actually does, but this is Football Manager and not real life. No transfer on this game will ever be completed without looking at a player's attributes. This is a numbers game and acting like it isn't just doesn't fit how this game works. I have never looked at a players avg rating at the end of the season and thought, hmm maybe he's on the decline he was average. Why? Because his attributes are still good, so it is probably a tactical error. We don't need anything from scouts other than "find me some players with some nice high numbers please." Sometimes I feel like this chase for realism is focused in entirely the wrong direction.

Which CB has Harry Maguire been mistaken for with those attributes

Very silly post imo. Those teams press well because they have the players and the coaching to be very good at it. On footy manager you stick it on any team with any player and you'll do well. It's nonsense.