enigmatic

Hardest part about consecutive promotions to the Bundesliga is lack of funds in my experience (boards ignoring the €20m you've got in the bank and the minimum €20m a year you'll average over the next two seasons even with consecutive relegations and giving you €10m combined wage and transfer budget) though that situation might not be as bad at 1860 as it was at someone like Unterhaching. Which is where the loans come in particularly handy, not least because loans of just-about-good-enough players to fill desperate gaps are more easily terminated if you find better options at the end of the transfer window or even January. Second season, if you stay up, is where you start having money to invest in the equity of 18 year old Colombians that still have some way to go to make their potential, make some of your loan signings permanent, pick up international standard free transfers that want €1.5m+ in annual wages etc. On the plus side, Bundesliga 2 standard players can normally perform absolutely fine in the Bundesliga especially since German players are normally physically sound with good attitudes, tbh my advice would be a mixture of all of the above, probably with your best players being loans and your backups being cheap loans or released youngsters that might improve. Re-loaning players is probably easier than you think too: Bundesliga sides will usually have good existing squad depth and the AI isn't that strategic about cashing in on much-improved prospects. Extending the loans as early as possible is a good start in ensuring you have a core squad with tactical familiarity,

Absolutely. Same IRL. If a manager asks, say, Fred to play a disciplined defensive role, Fred is still going to do a bit of ball chasing and get caught out of position on occasion because Fred's an aggressive ball chaser with comparatively average positional awareness. Plus as others have pointed out his actual instructions are to be a defensive midfielder that defends fairly high up the park and participates in the team's high press. "Hold position" in that context is an instruction not to burst into the box, not to stay close to his centre halves and let the player in front of him cross the halfway line before considering putting him under any pressure. If you want him to play like an anchor man, there's the anchor man role for that. But you might find his habit of closing down when your other midfielder for whatever reason isn't interested actually solves more problems than it causes overall...

Bignot is very hardworking and aggressive, it's not surprising he closes a player down when nobody else does, especially on a support duty which means he isn't supposed to just stick around in front of the back four. General team high pressing instructions and instructions to always close a player down might encourage him to do it more too. Hard to say it's even a bad decision in that clip - the space he leaves behind contains one forward marked by two defenders with Murray also nearby and he gets right up in the opponent's face to limit his passing options; if anything I'd be more concerned if Murray has a habit of doing nothing useful in the way of pressing or covering.

Think the financial and transfer model might be even more work than the ME changes. Women's football has considerably fewer professional clubs and clubs period, different funding models, completely different patterns of free transfers and international transfers and arguably more expectations of rapid growth than men's football. Again, you could just stick 150CA internationals into a lower-league mens football transfer model plus cash injections and international moves and tweak some numbers, but that might not be so great. The flip side of that is there's a lot about the current men's model that's less than ideal and some of the work done to make a women's football model work (especially matching players to clubs when there aren't many suitable clubs in the market) might help evolve the men's model too. Recent events (and viewing figures) both support SI having made the correct decision investing in bringing women's football into the game. But I'd be surprised if I saw it in time for next year.

We're a bit confused by what the "nike" lopsided roles have to do with Mourinho. John Terry played on the left, next to Gallas for much of the 2004/5 season (and for most of his career next to the defensively excellent Ashley Cole) with Carvalho on the right next to Ferreira. Which as you say, is more logical than having the speedy cover player next to the defensive left back and the slow, aggressive stopper next to the attacking fullback. There certainly wasn't any kind of plan to create a lopsided defence. Easiest way to provide stability in FM is to set both defenders to the standard DC role and tweak fullback roles according to their skills, the quality of the opposition wide players, whether your own winger cuts inside or goes wide and whether you're winning or not. That's more like how Mourinho and most other managers would think about things anyway

You could certainly considerably improve the test by not eliminating the main variable the sessions are supposed to improve in the short term (tactical familiarity)....

This is great BoringJamesMilner content

This feels like the classic "it depends" question. If I'm picking my first choice central defender, I want an excellent DC, not a pretty useful DRLC/DM who will let the opposition strikers score more goals by being a bit slower and dopier, even if they have really good passing. For my fourth choice central defender, on a budget and with a pretty limited or injury prone second choice DL, the DRLC/DM is going to have more appeal. It's less clear cut the difference between a fairly well rounded winger who can do a lot of things in the final third quite well from either side of the pitch, and a player who's excellent as a one dimensional player sprinting to the byline and crossing on their one good foot but can't pass or shoot or do stuff on their weaker foot, because the well rounded player might be better as first choice against opponents that can defend against pace/crosses as well as better cover and more possible to experiment with to find different ways to create chances (although there's likely a room for both in my squad) A player who's perfectly adapted to a role I rarely ever use isn't much use to me, unless he can retrain (or is so good he makes me consider changing shape). But some players are so much better than others at their level that they'll perform better out of position than specialists.

The less relevant attributes (all of)...

I'd argue that the game allowing Spurs to win the Champions League, something which has never happened, is a bigger flaw in the game than strikers missing one on ones, something which actually happens more often than they score them IRL...

It's a "we don't have much transfer budget unaccounted for, but we're still prepared to offer you at least £8.5m which will become nearly £15m with some trivially simple add ons, plus 20% of profit from next sale which potentially makes the bid worth more than his release clause in the long run. I mean, I wouldn't say yes to it if I didn't want to sell the player, but I've seen more blatant lowballs (and managers fearing they'd lose him to someone else for the release clause might happily negotiate it up a bit) The "unused monthly fee" being higher is a bit odd for a mandatory future fee transfer (though in this case it isn't completely pointless, means they're paying you nearly an extra million quid if he's not starting in his first season, which should help ease worries you never see those appearance fees)

And also, progression towards that potential is influenced considerably less by age/personality and considerably more by playing well in a suitable level team than previous FM versions. Players with great personalities' development can just stop at 20 if they're not playing, or improve significantly in their late 20s. The reason most FMers don't discover these players is they sign someone else instead.

Yeah, British work permits are basically designed to favour players with the sort of club or international experience that could see them playing regularly in the Premier League. (The caps and top tier appearances have to be recent too) I assume your Welsh team isn't there yet.

IIRC sometimes you get "200PA" comments on the feed. they're not accurate though

Yup. They're roles which used regularly over time remove team cohesion issues, and they definitely work in that respect (you can cram them into busy schedules as well, as apart from Match Practice they don't use much condition). But a single session... not going to do much. And especially not going to do much if their team cohesion/morale etc has all been maxed out like it looks like the demo team did...

There are six hidden personality attributes, plus the possibility they acquired a dislike because of his past behaviour.

Did you read my answer? If so, maybe you could consider the possibility that if your best right back is both 5* potential and League One potential and your right winger is 4.5* and Championship potential, it might be because the right wingers at your club generally have more potential than your right backs. Or you could copy/past the same question for a third time and be rude to the next person to try to explain why, I guess. Your call.

They star comparison takes into account other players at your club.

The "not familiar with pressing intensity" is a short term thing based on what they're being trained on, which for your players will be your formation. (Though you wouldn't want a player with low work rate and stamina to be an important part of a pressing side)

Not many since August though. Clearly you're slacking

The As and Cs aren't just based on perceived ability but also how much wage budget they'll take up, how they'll fit into your squad etc. The star ratings does look like a bug, possibly down to confusion over your actual level. There are also intentional differences between coach star ratings which are for the players' overall ability and ratings which are for their ability to play a specific role.

"Likes to beat man repeatedly" means that if they get part way past their opponent with a dribble, they are less likely to use that space to immediately put in a cross/shot/pass, and more likely to turn back and cut across that opponent with the ball again or do another trick to get themselves a bit more space or a different angle. Doing it well when you're a great dribbler (but not necessarily quick enough to run away from your opponent) can result in better final balls but slows the move down a bit. Doing it too much is just showing off. "Moves into channels" is trying to find space in between the centre of defence and the fullback (instead of finding larger amounts of space out wide, coming deep to receive passes or staying up front in the middle but having a marker behind you). It's good for quick forwards you want to run in behind, less good for players you want heavily involved in linkup play, backing into the central defenders or staying wide.

No, a sample size of four games with presumably different starting XIs, starting morale, tactics and scorelines isn't a "barometer for quality", and getting 0.5 yellow cards per game in the Championship fixtures is at least as much of an unexplained deviation from average rates as getting 2.25 yellow cards a game in the Premier League ones. But nobody writes "I think SI is making big games in my promotion season artificially easy" posts Variance is a thing, and those variations over small numbers of matches against somewhat similar opposition are tiny compared with my more-than-twice-as-many-penalties-as-all-the-other-teams-put-together Olympics. Which in turn is obviously a reflection of small sample sizes and tactics and luck of individual games, and my team being more likely to get penalties in a match in general, not some code SI wrote to make Colombia U23's third Olympics very different from their second And no, hidden dirtiness wouldn't manifest "regardless of the opposition". Dirty players foul better players who have the ball for long periods whilst finding a game difficult more often than they foul poorer players who don't have the ball very much whilst happy because they're 3-0 up.... this is pretty fundamental to how football works. And all of us have previous experience. It doesn't necessarily match yours.

Think the main thing is whether they need to be consistent to be good for you. Part of that's whether they're great for your level (in which case probably still OK on bad days) or just about good enough (in which case they'll be poor on match days. Part of that's attribute distribution. Physical attributes aren't affected by consistency, so a powerhouse is still a powerhouse on a bad day (and even if his finishing is really rubbish on those days he might get some unmissable chances). On the other hand, if there's a guy who's only real ability is poaching and he regularly has days when his finishing and movement are below his best... he's probably not as clinical as you want him to be.

This hypothesis has nothing to recommend it over the alternatives you've already mentioned. Your players aren't going to lunge in as much when perfectly happy and winning the game against slower, weaker players who give the ball away through poor technique as they are when they're more unsettled against stronger players who can control a ball, and superior opponents expecting to win will have more of the ball and run at you more and be more likely to draw fouls than weak ones who are expecting to lose and probably actually losing. Don't think I've ever had seven red cards in a season despite being over-promoted quite a bit, so it's also possible you've got some players in key areas who are just naturally dirty or poorly suited to making the challenges you need to or you use inherently dirty BWM/PF/DW roles or hard tackle opponent instructions quite a lot even if you don't set team tackling to hard. Averages for small number events like cards are pretty volatile too. Extreme case: I won an Olympics with seven penalties (including the winner in the final and two in the semi). All the other teams in the tournament had three between them. Now that looks a lot like it was rigged in my favour even accounting for my Colombia side being vastly superior to most of its opponents and playing a lot of possession football in the final third and scoring lots from open play too, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Also, I didn't get those penalties in the previous Olympics with a similar side which also reached the final (and conceded a penalty in it IIRC)... The way that FM match engines actually produce pretty consistent poor results for sides whose players are only slightly worse than their opponents is that relegation candidate managers tend to deploy more defensive tactics (like IRL) which are less effective at picking up three points, but that's one of the areas human managers have a massive advantage...