enigmatic

I'm not a big fan of the IF role myself, but I think a lot of it's perception. Wingers have a relatively straightforward attacking role and nearly always behave largely as you expect them to: they use their pace and dribbling to get somewhere near the byline and whip in a cross, which is great when it creates a genuine goalscoring opportunity and looks like good work even when the cross doesn't find its target. Additionally, FM makes wingers fairly smart about making runs to the back post when an cross is coming in, so a winger still represents a goalscoring threat. By contrast, attacking play for an inside forward is quite varied and complicated. Real life players in congested situations with more theoretical options make worse decisions, and players in FM make slightly more odd decisions like passing the ball a long way back or shooting from bylines than their real life counterparts. The good news for inside forwards is that the defenders make more errors with their positioning too, so there's a lot to be said for having more players running into the penalty area. But FM slightly compensates for defenders' vulnerability to penalty areas being overloaded by making fullbacks defend a bit narrower than most real life defences, so there's even more space for wingers to show off in less-threatening areas out wide, and the inside forward's decision to dribble out of space and into a congested penalty box looks that bit worse if he loses the ball doing it. And failed long shots or dribbles inside look wasteful in a way that failed crosses don't, in life as well as FM. But in FM It's not aided by animations which mean that inside forwards running at a defence tend to look like they're sprinting straight into a player, rather than doing subtle body shifts and stepovers to try to tempt the defender into a rash tackle. And if they get past the opponent, the limited detail in the animations usually makes it look like it's because the silly defender stood still rather than because they've done brilliantly to stay on their feet whilst gently caressing the ball in a way which lulls the defender into mistiming their standing tackle - even if the underlying calculation required the winger to use all their skill and physical attributes to have a chance of getting past the defender Wing play looked a lot more watchable than the shadow strikers I play with now, but the shadow strikers in the awkward-looking narrow front line score a lot more over the course of the season.

Your scout might be slightly underestimating him because his reputation is a bit low. Based on his starting attributes he's a pretty nicely balanced defender who's fairly intelligent but a little slow, isn't likely to make any Best Defender in the Bundesliga lists but is definitely good enough to play in it. There's not a huge difference in ability between him and Mavraj (who I guess is the defender you sold) but I'd probably marginally prefer Mazuch too

Schalke II play competitive senior football in the fourth tier of German football. Bolton Wanderers Development squad play junior football in age-restricted academy leagues outside the English football pyramid

Tom Daly? I bet he dives a lot

Difficult to imagine financial viability being a massive threat to FM They get more or less guaranteed buyers in relatively predictable numbers for a new game every year, and don't have to reinvent the wheel or invest enormous amounts in shiny new artwork to make it worth buying for the average player. And their brand is strong enough to have killed off competitive efforts. Pretty much the ideal situation for a games company. If they are struggling in the last season or two, it's likely the result of investing more in match engines etc than they strictly need to, budgets which can always be cut without harming sales too much

Have to admit I was so impressed with an opponent's rabona cross assist I almost didn't mind conceding the goal. And there are lots and lots of backheels. Just a shame that the dribble animations (and probably the underlying ME logic) appear so much more based on sprinting and so much less on tricks, stepovers and subtle changes in body shape and speed that Messi dribbles at a massed defence like Theo Walcott runs into space

Shadow Striker x 3 Lethal

A logical solution to Santi's research issue would be for the editor to calculate an RCA based on the midpoint of any specified range (or min/max RCAs) so editors get an indication if they're setting the bottom end of ranges too high. I'm assuming the use case for these ranges is when the researcher would otherwise be tempted to leave the attributes blank (i.e. a de-facto 0-20 range), and that ranges would most likely to be applied to players the researcher is very unfamiliar with (who probably have lots of other blank attributes anyway), attributes a researcher is unsure how to rate because the player doesn't display them very often (e.g. centre half's finishing, non specialist's set pieces) which tend to be low-weighted for CA purposes anyway, and mental attributes (which are zero weighted for CA afaik) I'd also assume when the game generates players in each save that it still uses ability/position/age/physique/other-attribute based probability weighting factors when generating attribute values within a particular range (e.g. a 120 CA player with finishing set to ">12" would be more likely to be generated with a finishing of 13 than 20) One practical problem with doing this is that it effectively doubles or triples the size of the starting FM database (since you have a min, max and possibly a "fixed" value for every attribute) but I don't think database size is the problem it used to be, and the min/max ranges would only apply to the original database, not to saves and running games.

My first request would be that SI pay some more attention to fixing some minor but very annoying bugs that I've reported, like players being angry at being left out of squads they're ineligible for and not being offered your existing captain in the annual "you must choose a new captain" screen More talking to players (the standard options to praise a performance, proactively tell a player he's being "rested" from a particular squad, possibly beg a young dual national to join your team) would be nice. There could probably be reasonable interactions with club managers too even if they're mostly cosmetic (e.g. asking opinion of whether a young players are ready for international football) and the useful-in-the-unlikely-event-they-agree options of suggesting a new position/role for a player to be trained in or suggesting a player gets more game time or a loan. SI also made a decision to hide tactical fluidity for international managers. Possibly this is for the logical reason tactical fluidity is never going to be that high because matches are spaced a long way apart, and there's nothing international managers can really do to influence this, but you still get assman pre-match warmup notes that some of your players need "more time in the middle"; if there are still calculations going on behind the scenes for this it'd be nice to get some indication which players need more experience or find your tactics hard to get to grips with outside the game. Lastly, it'd be nice if they changed the fitness model of international squad members players in inactive leagues when you're managing international teams to match that of the players in active leagues (at the moment players in inactive leagues appear to revert back to near full fitness very quickly unlike players in simulated leagues who stay tire and have a "match fitness" which appears to be based on their status at their club rather than whether they've played all tournament or sat on the bench all tournament)

The problem with that might be that it results in the low JCA non-players actually giving better advice and making better decisions about dropping players...

Not sure I understand the "any other roles are not suitable at all" since anyone capable of playing as a complete forward should be capable of playing as an advanced forward, a poacher and probably a deep lying forward as well. But also don't see why two complete forwards with an AM behind them wouldn't work if they're good enough: they'll do a lot of flamboyant stuff and roam all over the pitch but that's presumably what you want from them, and roaming wide is probably a good thing in a narrow formation

I'd report the changed promise as a bug

I'm under the impression Decisions is a little overrated for central midfielders (even ran an experiment with sides whose players and tactical base were identical except for some of them having three Decisions 1 players in central midfield and some of them having three Decisions 20 players; the difference between them really wasn't as acute as you'd expect or as clear as some other attributes stand out. Maybe it would stand out a lot more if they were playing at a high tempo) With Adam I'd suspect he'll err on the side of being a little overambitious with some of his passes and shots, but that's not the worst thing in the world, particularly if you're playing in the Championship where your opponents aren't always fantastic either

In recent FMs I've won the Premier League with an entire side of players with a CA of 125 (fringe player of relegation candidate level) simply because their attributes were well distributed and suited to how they were asked to play. (Also, they hardly ever fouled) So I think the "attributes make no difference" is just you, and I say that even as my top scorer in the Bundesliga has a finishing of 8...

I think the benefit of developing his weaker foot depends heavily on where he plays. If he's usually deep or wide he'll have the time and space to use his stronger foot, in which case you might rather he used those training points on improving his defensive ability and being even better at passing. If he plays higher up the pitch in a role where he's usually got a defender marking him or closing him down, a bit more ability on his weaker foot gives him a lot more options (or fewer miskicks when he gets forced onto his left foot) , and that's worth sacrificing improvements in his decision making or stamina for. Fullback would be an unusual option for a player with immense creative passing ability, limited defensive abilities and no crossing ability, unless you have a formation that uses IWBs as a major creative force. He screams "deep lying playmaker" to me.