enigmatic

I played my mate for England. Media wasn't sure why I was calling up someone from the Conference North, but I still got better results than Steve McClaren

I'd be tempted to sell, as for a world class defender he's a bit short, but that does depend on having a realistic replacement lined up. Salary for the replacement shouldn't really be a major factor - £200k a week is £10m a year, and you're getting £150m. Plus I can't see Perela not demanding to renegotiate his contract soon anyway.

Reputation is one of a number of variables in the database which are intended to balance the game and stop the ludicrous scenario of active Bulgarian sides monotonically improving by hoovering up talent from around the world. But yes, also there are other factors such as current ability. Three of Ludogorets' four best players by current ability in the database are on the wrong side of 30, and their current ability will tend to decline over the course of the season. Apparently you also find this basic fact impossible to grasp. If ranking numbers is difficult for you you're probably not the ideal person to tell SI how to develop AI. Not sure how you managed to stop playing as soon as you played a match or two in the Champions League and get bored after five seasons, but I have better things to do with my life than understand why you think you are actually overachieving.

Mate, you say you're interested in the numbers in the database since FM is just numbers in the database: go look them up. Levski have the joint second highest reputation in Bulgaria and as soon as you win the league and make the Champions League group stages and Ludogorets don't you'll be the biggest club in the league. Ludogorets' handful of best players are on the wrong side of 30, and they won't replace them with similar quality if they're considered a smaller team without Champions League football, and sure enough, the league will be quite easy then. And no, it's really not that hard to win the Bulgarian league in the first season with Levski, most of the sides are poor compared with yours. Reckon even the AI could pull it off two or three times out of 10. Ludogorets have massively more money than everyone else in the Bulgarian League, and IRL they've used all that cash to sign some pretty average Brazilians who make them just a little bit better than the other Bulgarian sides, and some of the better Bulgarian players that don't move to better leagues. What they haven't done is sign the highest potential players available at smaller clubs and not sign anyone that isn't better than their starting 11 or high potential or amazing value, because an AI which did this would produce absurd results. And that's Ludogorets - most of the rest of the league is very weak, and has probably got worse rather than better in recent years. Why on earth would FM AI try to overturn that pattern by making all managers super squad optimisers? The purpose of the game AI is to sign the sorts of players Bulgarian clubs actually sign, not the best possible players, because a simulation where everybody signs the best possible players doesn't remotely resemble the real world of football. Why on earth should Man Utd automatically sign all the best players in the world and never make a transfer mistake, just because it's theoretically possible to build a system that would do this with Man Utd resources - arguably FM is already better at optimising their squad than their actual transfer policy, which is why so many people complain about Man Utd winning stuff.... The comparison isn't "why is Civ AI ****?" it's "why isn't regional superiority with the Kilwa in EU4 a challenge after I've swallowed up my immediate neighbour", and the answer isn't "**** AI", it's "because you picked an easy challenge, and refuse to do anything more taxing" See, this kind of childishness is what you're really here for, isn't it? Many players have experience of unrealistic success: I posted how we did it in literally my first reply. It's not especially difficult to win the Bulgarian League with Litex without signing any players if you know how tactics work, because designing a match engine system that doesn't have any tactical vulnerabilities is essentially impossible. It's just that winning league titles with Bulgaria's biggest club historically simply isn't unrealistic overachievement, and no game should make it difficult. Sorry to dent the sense of superiority which is the only thing you've contributed to this discussion, but it's just very, very average performance.

Reputation is a thing because in real life Bulgarian football teams can't and don't sign players with the highest ability they can afford. And the top clubs in Italy buy underperforming Man Utd cast offs, not high performing players in the Danska Liga. This isn't rocket science. Levski will always be one of the best teams in the Bulgarian league which is super lopsided in quality (your starting players are miles better than the fourth best team's, never mind the relegation candidates) and so yes, winning it with them is pretty easy and yes, if you sign some better players and/or have half decent tactics you'll win the odd European tie too. And of course if you're in the Champions League group stages you'll also have more cash than anyone else in the division. That's not even AI, that's how small European leagues work in the real world. You pretend that you started this thread for constructive criticism, and yet so far your sole contribution has been to insult everybody that disagrees with your ridiculous suggestion the AI should try to improve Bulgarian sides and play moneyball in the same way human managers do, and everybody that doesn't think your achievements are spectacularly ordinary and the sort of thing Levski actually did consistently for years before Ludogorets spent a bit of money. There's 99 flaws in the AI, but not making the Bulgarian league unrealistically competitive because a player finds managing the most successful club in the country boring ain't one.

Reputation is for the most part pretty realistic. The second highest scorer in the Danska Liga, a well rounded player who on current evidence is good enough for the Premier League, actually did go to Norwich (when they were in the Championship, on a free transfer). At the other end of the scale, Man Utd have agreed to spend £10m on a 16 year old who hasn't played a minute of senior football because he is perceived as having the potential to be exceptionally good.

Levski? We're hardly talking ridiculous overperformance here. You got a club that finished third IRL to finish first. Jeez, people are complaining about that now?!

It's not an especially difficult point to grasp. There are two ways you get a lesser Bulgarian side to be competitive in European football within a few seasons. One is to buy better players than the side currently has. The other is to use whichever tactical setup is most efficient in the latest match engine The AI doesn't do this, because that's not how Lyudmil Kirov or Sasho Angelov or whoever manage their teams IRL.

You sign players that are better than your team's current standard and reputation would tend to go for, and don't sign players if they represent value for money. And probably work harder than the AI at any one club to find players. The AI doesn't, because otherwise the differences between standards of teams would rapidly disappear, and AI teams never overpaying or buying somebody they don't need wouldn't be very much like real life football either.

Rio Ferdinand regenerated

If you weren't playing a 5 year old game I'd suggest filing a bug report To be brutally honest I'm not sure why you'd pay a transfer fee for an average 34 year old foreigner you can't play until next season anyway, but I guess that's not something you're likely to try again

Finland doesn't exist (outside FM, naturally)

I actually like the medical tab and use the risk ratings to help me with squad rotation, but admittedly my playstyle is slow and anal-retentive...

Colour coding is problematic for the colour blind... Still struggling to understand how pretending real managers have no idea one of their players is a little bit better at taking free kicks or winning tackles than the other one is an improvement tbh. I think a more intuitive display of the radial chart would be a useful option for people familiar with simplistic games like FIFA, but broad categories ranking dissimilar skills like "attacking" is actually a lot further from how people assess player ability in reality.

Paging @Seb Wassell since this is ties into the work he's doing on development after they're born into the game Think the issue is probably the distribution of starting CA rather than PA IMHO Callum Burtons shouldn't be happening. Freshly generated 16 year olds should almost never have 129CA and the few that do should still have plenty of potential for improvement even if their mentality won't necessarily get them there (thinking about Premier League examples in the past couple of decades - maybe only Rooney and Fabregas just about hit that level at 16 and both had elite level potential. The other teenage prodigies who stagnated as teenagers were either never that good or peaked around 18/19) Obviously plenty of 15/16 year old newgens with closer to normal levels of CA should have <20 points of improvement - youth team regulars get released to non-league every year because they're really not able to learn enough to stay ahead of their growing and improving teammates. But not the rare player who are such rapid learners that they're high end Championship/Eredivisie standard before they've kicked a ball in senior football