Vänsterback

Only care about it when I'm new at a club and have yet to know all the players by myself.

Can't you pick a date for another nation in january or february 2024 and still select a club in MLS?

The picture show that 'niveau actuel' is 153. That is current ability right? So CA is 153, PA is 174?

"As a Man Utd fan..." Isn't it as something else haha? But I can't think of anything in the database stopping selection to the national team except from his home reputation. If that is very low it's unlikely that he will be selected.

The current age-restrictions for players shouldn't really be a problem for implementing U17 squads and competitions. There would likely not be complete IRL-squads in club teams but the game could fill those up with grey players like what is already done for other squads with few players. Also, considering competition that run during a calendar year (such as leagues in Sweden), the 2023 U17 squads consisted mostly of players born in 2006 and 2007, meaning most of them are eligible for FM24 anyway. Those players just populate the U19 squad in the game currently. The youth national team squads would certainly benefit from implementing U17 squads since those selections generally are heavily based on year of birth. Having 16-year olds selected for the U19 NT is immersion breaking to me.

Agree. All the coaches at the club should follow the development plan for each player, including using him in the position he is learning. I have suggested this before. If you see that player as an AML, every coach at the club should see him as that.

Of course some experienced players are nervous as well. Google Per Mertesacker. Acting confident when the manager talks to you despite feeling on the verge of breaking is not strange at all. Not saying that the game represent this perfectly but what you describe does not contradict logic.

One other thing to add here. Are wages actually that known within a team? I get that players that are close friends or share the same agent knows what the other one earns. But is it reasonable that a whole squad immediately learn what their new teammate gets?

Actually Nosaby players seems to have a day off on wednesdays lol

Being stuck with tuesdays and thursdays is the weirdest limitation in the game. It has never made any sense whatsoever. Afternoon sessions 3-5 days per week that you can shuffle around depending on the match schedule should be doable.

It's an estimate and a rough guideline and has never been anything else, who cares if it's one single value or a range? Trust your own judgement regardless. But when buying it's of course more reasonable to aim at the low estimate at first.

Well in most cases our guess still is better than if the game would somehow overwrite the data the researchers have put in. For every Cajuste there are 20 teammates of his in that youth team in FM16 that turned out precisely as semi-pro or amateur as I predicted back then. And hundreds more in other teams I cover. Would a random or 'dynamic' factor increase or even perfect the quality of that data in total? Simply no. It would do that only if that dynamic factor found exactly those players that would turn out better IRL than their PA suggested. And it wouldn't.

None of them has surpassed their potential. It has just been somewhat unknown (and still is of course). Just because I as a researcher set the PA of, for example, Jens Cajuste to barely professional level when I first created him in the FM16 database didn't mean he didn't have Napoli potential at that time. It just meant that I underestimated it and didn't see that potential.

A few points regarding this recurring topic: Ability and performance are two different things. High ability increase the likelyhood of world class performance, not the other way around. Ability is not a reward or points for great performance. Performance can be because of or despite of a player's ability. And above all, if your player is performing that well, just don't replace him. You actually don't have to do that.

The ME didn't however recognize standing on the ball looking around and ignoring the easy passing options until an attacker steals the ball and scores a goal as any kind of mistake.

Yeah since discipline, moral and squad dynamics feel more important than ever it's crucial to be able to criticize these mistakes. But we can't do that if the player gets a decent performance rating.

Ok, that's interesting. In the match in question these mistakes certainly caused the goals. Now I have actually changed my tactics since I'm on the brink of getting sacked and in the last match we at least kept a clean sheet and wasn't overwhelmed in our own penalty area. Meanwhile my CB:s received ratings of just 6.40 and 6.50 (the lowest I've seen all season). Very strange.

In my current save my team has been struck by a severe case of awful form. Since winning the first 6 league games we are now pushing 15 games without a win and our defensive stats are the worst in the league. Much is due to my pretty high risk tactics which have backfired big time (but I'm stubborn). But what is confusing me is that my players still receive decent match ratings all the time. In my last match my CB caused two goals against us by creating chaos out of nowhere as he simply contemplated the meaning of life while the opponents could steal the ball in dangerous areas and score easy goals. His rating however remained at 6.80 and the game seemingly did not recognize what he had done. The only thing my team succeeds at is retaining possession of the ball (around 65% in each game both home and away and against bigger teams), so I wonder if that is affecting my defender's match ratings in such a way that their horrific mistakes are hidden by it?

So the perceived problem is that the game is boring because you quickly learn which players will be world class and that makes every new save predictable. How about not starting so many new saves and instead stick to one for multiple seasons until you have mostly newgens populating the squads? Or start each save with a small club because that will make a huge number of players (that you have never heard of) attractive to your club? Of course a very finite number of players in the starting database will be potentially useful for you if you want to play with Man City for 5 to 10 seasons. And if you start multiple saves with that objective it will get boring and repetative (duh!). But that is not a problem with the game mechanics. That's a problem with your imagination.

I had an idea for different attribute groupings in this thread last year. Was it something like that you were looking for? I think I made a spreadsheet with even more ideas for different polygons, maybe I still have it on my computer.

To be able to set up some pre-defined molds would certainly decrease the need to micro manage youth development. I would love to be able to choose specific criteria or targets for positions and traits for a certain player type and then just select that mold for the youth players that I want to develop accordingly. Also that should indicate for youth and reserve team coaches that the player should be used in the specified positions regardless if he can play other positions. It's annoying to have a player who is to be retrained into a CB constantly being selected as a AMR by the youth coach just because that was his original position. All coaches of the club should use the player according to the development plan for that player ideally.

I want my defensive players to play on their 'natural' side of the pitch but in midfield and attack I am more flexible and tend to use inverted roles quite often.

Well, I don't really accept the LIMITATIONS of training sessions in FM. It's very weird as a manager to only have access to the players two days in a week, even if it's not a fully professional team. And also, currently you can't even choose the days yourself. You are limited to tuesdays and thursdays for some reason. That's perhaps the strangest and most arbitrary limitation in the game. Scheduling a friendly is doable though because that makes sense, or does it? A reasonable limitation however, related to what you are bringing up, would be to just have 1 available session per day for teams where a significant part of the squad don't reach the 'Minimum acceptable full time salary for an adult'. Because that is realistic and makes sense.

Yes, I agree that distance should impact the likelihood of a player moving to another club where he will earn less than a full time salary. However, it would not be unrealistic for a player to move the opposite way (from Gällivare to Stockholm) and play in a lower division because the main driver behind the move might be studying. But since a city's coordinates and attraction are already in the database that should be doable to improve.