[Football Manager 2019 Pre Release Beta *Official* Feedback Thread]

5 minutes ago, Seb Wassell said:

Crossing - this is more dead-ball crossing, so Free Kicks and Corners. Crossing is prevalent in quite a few of the actual training sessions, just not on an individual basis. 

Dribbling - dribbling around cones isn't really reflective of actual in-match dribbling and not actually something that is done in reality (or at least to achieve "better" dribbling, it is performed as a touch exercise).

Tackling - this isn't really the lack of another player to tackle but rather that tackling is something of an innate ability and not a skill that is directly improved with individual work. It is more a player's positioning, marking, decision making etc. that is worked on and improved one-on-one.

The individual drills included were settled on following conversations with qualified football coaches of varying levels. There is of course scope to add to or edit these in the future, but we'd need some reasoned arguments and solid examples.

The Final Third focus, as a particular example, is partially designed to reflect the work that Arteta did one-on-one with Sterling and Sane throughout last season to improve this aspect of their game.

Thanks for this, a very informative response, especially the Arteta insight!

The tackling explanation makes sense, as does the dribbling explanation (the cones example was a bit flippant on my part, although I'd be interested to know if there were other forms of individual dribbling-training that came up during research, and whether there'd be potential to introduce them as training focuses in the future?).

Just to clarify, when you say "Crossing is prevalent in quite a few of the actual training sessions, just not on an individual basis", is this referring to real-life, FM19, or both? Mainly because I would have thought that Crossing is one of the easier attributes for a player to work on individually - but again, happy to be proven wrong!

[Football Manager 2019 Pre Release Beta *Official* Feedback Thread]

Looking really good so far, and I haven't even reached a match yet!

I like the skin/UI, the tactical styles are a good addition (also good that you can tweak them a little/lot), and the training revamp is very impressive (will take a while to get to grips with, but it should be rewarding when I do!)

The one issue I have so far is with individual training. Training players in 2/3 attributes at once, rather than 1, is an exciting and realistic addition, I think, but some attributes (Tackling, Crossing and Dribbling the 3 I've noticed so far) are individually untrainable, and I find this a bit odd. Someone asked a similar question earlier in the thread, with the reply being that training Tackling individually wouldn't really work - understandable, but a) this doesn't really apply to crossing (pretty sure Beckham put in a lot of solo work on his crosses back in the day) or Dribbling (cones as substitutes for players, etc), and b) other individual trainable attributes would also necessitate other participants, would they not? I don't have a football-coaching background, so I may of course be way off the mark! But I would've thought that Marking, for example, would be difficult to train without someone to mark, or, if you're learning to mark zonally, without another player entering your zone. Similarly for the Attacking Movement and Final Third modules - would training Off the Ball work that well without someone to mark you, or training Decisions or Vision work that well without someone to pass to?

My point being, if the reason for not making tackling, dribbling and crossing individually trainable is that individual training for these attributes isn't particularly viable, there are other attributes which are currently individually trainable which are arguably less viable than the aforementioned 3. Perhaps an individually-trainable Wing Play module (focusing on Crossing, Dribbling, and maybe Decisions) would be a good addition?

I'm less sure where Tackling would fit - but I can see it being quite annoying when you get a great regen whose defensive attributes are all pretty good, except for his tackling, and there's no reliable way of trying to get his tackling close to the level of his other attributes. Likewise, getting an attacking midfield regen with great technicals except for his subpar dribbling will be quite irritating. It was probably slightly too easy on past versions to simply train up one attribute, but the absence of certain attributes in the new model may have gone slightly too far in the opposite direction - though I've only being playing for a couple of hours, so it may end up being less of an issue than I envisage!