Bojanbbz94

There are still way too many questions that either a) are totally unrealistic and would never be asked in real life. or b) have no meaningful impact on the game. Both increasingly feel like a legacy thing that are still in the game because that's just the way things have always been. They need to be re-considered. a) includes things like being asked your opinion on a recent manager sacking, or (even more bizarrely) a rival manager in your division transfer-listing a player. I genuinely cannot imagine a real-life press conference where a journalist would dare ask a fully-professional manager how they feel about a club he has nothing to do with transfer-listing their second-choice defensive midfielder, who barely ever plays and is obviously surplus to requirements. The answer would be, at best, to deflect and say you "I don't want to talk about other clubs, its not my place" or, at worse, to criticise the question itself and say something like "What has it got to do with me and why should I care? Don't you have something more pertinent to ask me about my squad or the upcoming fixture?" b) includes things like asking my opinion on VAR or how I feel about the league I manage in having a winter break / not having a winter break (delete as appropriate). Yes, these are real-life talking points so I can understand why they are in the game from a realism perspective. But the difference is that in real life clubs and managers have a stake in the leagues they play in, and might have the power to change policies if enough of them ask for it. In FM, we can't. The league rules are hard-coded in and that's that. So why ask me? Unless a question has the ability to change a metric in the game (the morale of one of my players, a rival manager's relationship with me, how a transfer target feels about me, if I'll be fined by the league for disparaging a referee, etc. etc.), I'm not sure it should be in the game. They're just bits of fluff I'm clicking through to get into the meaningful questions. In one recent fixture, I lost 5-2 and in a post-match press conference with six questions in it, three of them were about VAR. They could have asked me about my CB who made a mistake, my striker who missed two clear-cut chances and got subbed with a 6.0 rating, my relationship with the AI manager, anything. But no, three questions about an in-game mechanic I cannot change making the right decision to disallow a goal.

Jarden Dublin, chief scout at Stoke City, has English listed as his nationality in-game, but he's American. Local press article here says he is "a former Google worker from the United States", and that "Dublin has needed to be patient to secure a work permit for his move": https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/stoke-city-jared-dublin-transfer-8551383 His LinkedIn says he studied at UCL Berkley, and that he worked a few jobs in California before coming the UK: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jareddublin/ He also speaks with an American accent in this video, for what it's worth (starts talking around 1min 45 seconds):

I do get what you are saying, and I don't disagree with you. But I also don't think this is a good thing. For a start, if a feature of the game feels off or unrealistic to the extent that it is detrimental to the player's experience this is obviously not ideal for a game that markets as the most realistic football simulation out there. But more importantly, it is really not good that so many features in the game right now really do have, as you say, no 'viable impact on gameplay'. If a feature really only has a minimal affect on the game at all (if any), what is it doing in the final product? What is it achieving other than adding unnecessary bloat to the game: more info for a player to read but to immediately dismiss, screens for a player to click through even though the pages hold no meaningful information, more complexity (and frankly adding work) that I have to navigate before I actually get to the fun and engaging parts of the game? I can understand this with new features that are being implemented and tested in the latest edition of the game so that they can be refined in the future. But increasingly it feels like a lot of features to the game don't actually add any value to the experience. Staff meetings being a formal event that I have to click through to advance the game, rather than informal pop-ups that I can choose to engage with or dismiss as I see fit. Recruitment meetings are forced on me multiple times a transfer window, even though they have literally not even once used any information to inform any transfer decisions (that's what my scouting assignments were and are already for). Squad dynamics has been in the game since 2018 but, to be blunt, it remains a mostly meaningless feature that you are totally safe to dismiss. I certainly don't want to shoot the messenger here, and I agree with you that many player interactions feel mostly meaningless. But if it's an element to the game that only takes away from your sense of immersion if you think about it too hard, and can safely be ignored by a player who understands the systems enough, then it is a feature that seriously lacks polish.

If an 'ongoing' scouting assignment ends, and files a list of reports away on a different screen, without the player manually clicking a button to end the assignment then, by very definition, it isn't 'ongoing'. It is a time-sensitive task, and it is creating more manual work for a player to navigate through more screens to look for historic reports. Bit of an odd UI choice to limit visibility of a revamped feature of the game, imho.

Liverpool got relegated after about 15 years in an FM save I did once, but that was off the back of a slow decline and a few season of mid table mediocrity before they went down. They made very light work of the Championship the next season.

No worries! I appreciate that Stoke's boardroom situation is very unique and I'm sure that causes some problems to code for, but just wanted to flag. lol

Hey just as a quick FYI, this seems to still be happening in FM23. I don't have a lot of spare time atm, but I've tested it twice just by holidaying to June 2023 at the start of a save and on both occasions Stoke have been taken over as a result of Peter Coates retiring. Where is the best place to raise this?

Not necessarily in any particular order, but as a minimum: Passing. First touch. Vision. Composure. Teamwork. Decisions. But just generally, any attributes that the game tells you are important for a deep-lying playmaker in a support role, to be honest.

Correct me if I am wrong but the release clause and the extension are mutually exclusive, no? Unless the release clause has an expiration date. So for example: if a player signs a three-year deal with a one-year optional extension that the club can activate at anytime, there is nothing stopping you from activating the clause to deter bids. But the release clause is a separate clause in the contract, no? A buying club can trigger it at any time and offer him a contract. And if the player agrees a contract and arranges a move, you then cannot force a player to stay for an extra year when he has already been sold.

His star rating a reflection of how your coaches evaluate his Current Ability (this is a hidden attribute in the game) against other members of your squad (and to a lesser extent, against the overall quality of the league you are in). You coaches will be giving him 2.5 stars because there will be forwards in your squad who will be better, no? If you're Manchester United, you're going to have forwards with better finishing and composure than 13, and players with better vision, passing and first touch than him. It is also worth considering that being a 'squad player' at an elite level club like Man United probably still makes him better than 'star players' at lower midtable clubs; it is all relative to the level you're playing at. If he is 25 and he has reached the peak of his potential he won't develop dramatically no matter how well he plays. But, honestly, don't worry about it too much. Star ratings are, at best, a guide to help you work out who the technically better and lesser players in your squad is. Current Ability and Potential Ability are hidden attribute that can definitely take some of the fun and mystery out of the game if you dwell on them too much, imho. What actually matters for players their attributes (and how how players with those attributes work in your system), and also form and consistency. Just like in real life, what matters with strikers isn't how 'good' or 'bad' they are on paper, only how many goals they score. This dude is playing well for you. I assume that in the coaching report 'consistency' is listed as one of his strengths? If so, he should probably continue to play well for you. It might only becomes a problem if he has a blip; but if he played so well for you for so many years, maybe that won't happen. Might be worth having some squad depth just in case, though.

I've been playing since FM13 (skipped FM14 and 15 because I was a skint undergrad at that time, but have hundreds of hours on every subsequent edition), and have had one tycoon takeover ever. I'd be interested to see how often non-player controlled teams get one, but my instinct from all the leagues I've played in is that they're not excessive. I suppose the question here is who is it that you're finding is getting taken over, and in what context? I've not played a lot of FM since the update following the war in Ukraine. But is it Chelsea who you are seeing always get taken over? Because since Abramovich got sanctioned, they always get taken over with one season right? And since they're, yano, Chelsea, I imagine the probability of a high-investment takeover is higher than it is for a normal club? I mean, irl, they're about to be brought by Todd Boehly for £4bn.

Wherever possible, sign players with decent determination, and who your scouts identify as being consistent and professional. Simply don't buy players who are inconsistent or unprofessional; there are always other players out there with similar attributes or potential who don't have such significant issues.

I'm not disagreeing with you about the game mechanics. But that dissonance between the way that a teenager would rationally react to a massive transfer offer irl and the way they the game functions is what frustrates people. If the game is currently not doing a great job of reflecting what people to perceive as realistic, then I think it's reasonable for players question that. Having situations where players consistently turn down higher wages at x club because that clubs has a higher overall wage bill / the league is wealthier only to end up signing a contract with y club on significantly lower terms is silly. Players and agents should recognise that in making overly-demanding contract requests, they are playing a game of brinkmanship that they are going to lose.

I think in real life an 18-year-old in the Danish league would understand that signing a contract with a club in a major European top-flight league, even on a lower wage than he would ideally demand at that level, is an unbelievable opportunity for career development and progression. He'd be playing at a much higher level, and if he plays well over the course of a 3 or 4-year contract that gives him a big opportunity to demand more wages at his new club, or to move on as a Bosman while still at an age where he could be demanding big wages for many years to come. Very few young players would turn down a move to a major European league early in their career, and the game should reflect that. It's just such a huge opportunity to develop yourself and fulfil your ambitions at a very early stage of your career. Turning down such a transfer only to then move (within the same transfer window) to a club in the league he is already playing in, for significantly lower terms than he was previously offered to play in a higher reputation league, is plainly bizarre.

When foreign staff arrive at your club you can, of course, send them on an intensive language course to learn the local language. I've often felt that the inability to get staff to learn foreign languages is a missing feature, though. If I have, for example, a English scout who could only speak English, I would never send them to South America or to a Francophile African country, no matter how high their adaptability is. It is always just easier to hire a scout who already speaks Spanish and send them to South America, even if their scouting stats are lower. It's how I've always played the game, since I started playing in FM13. Maybe I'd feel differently about that if I was able to send a scout on Spanish and Portuguese language courses while they were posted in Argentina and Brazil, and have them learn a new language within the course of a few months. To a certain extent, I'd always favour sending people to places they always have knowledge of and that wouldn't change anyway. I favour sending an Argentinian scout to S. America than I would a Spanish national with no knowledge of S. America; I'd always prefer (where possible) to send a half-decent Senegalese scout to Senegal than I would a good French scout who doesn't have any knowledge of Senegal. But I'd still be interested in being able to send scouts on language courses. Maybe it would be a way for clubs with very limited world knowledge (and hence limited knowledge of foreign staff) to build up their capability as the board allows a bigger and bigger scouting range. It needs a bit of thought, of course. E.g. I don't think it would feel very realistic to be able hire a monolingual scout in their 40s but have them suddenly a polyglot within three or four years by sending them them on consecutive intensive language courses in four or five languages one after another. But an arbitrary cap on how many languages a staff member can learn doesn't feel like an elegant solution when it's not particularly rare irl for well-travelled players to speak four or five languages by the time they retire (or more for players like Lukaku, Seedorf or Ibrahimović).