Grez

Looks solid, setting up at pieces at the beginning of a save was one of the most tedious tasks - and having the set piece roles react more fluidly makes a ton of sense. Pretty happy with this. I do have a few questions. 1) What exactly does the set piece attribute do? Hopefully it's only related to the staff members ability to coach and improve "set piece familiarity", not their ability to select the correct players for each role? 2) Is set piece familiarity lost if you change set piece tactics? If so - doesn't this discourage players from experimenting with set pieces once it's set up? 3) Do set piece coaches preferences matter if I select my own set pieces? Does it affect their ability to coach or does it just affect the set pieces they'll choose if I delegate set pieces to them. Cheers

I don't think it necessarily matters whether the AI can make use of the changes or not. The AI doesn't make use of everything that the current tactics page provides either, it clearly just chooses from a list of preset tactics. There's no reason why having split offensive and defensive tactics would need to function any differently - give the AI a long enough list of options to choose from and they'll provide a decent competition. As for "game-breaking" tactics, I don't really see any point in worrying about that. We shouldn't be avoiding making progress just in case somebody finds a tactic that's too strong. Even if somebody did - so what? It's mostly a single player game, there's no real competition or money on the line here, it doesn't matter if somebody finds a game breaking tactic as long as it's not *every* tactic or something the average player is likely to find. People who want to ruin the game for themselves already do by save scumming or using the editor, so an overpowered tactic to download really shouldn't be a big deal (especially since you can patch it out later anyway). I get what you're saying about it not being a free for all simulator, I just think the game would be better if it was. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a bad update, it's just we've come so close to adding the ability to assign proper offensive/defensive cover but taken it out of the hands of the manager, which is a real shame.

Yeah I think my main issue is just that in certain scenarios your players are essentially just ignoring your tactics. You can't have an IWB and Libero pushing up together. Why not? Because it doesn't align with some arbitrary set of rules for what football should look like? Maybe it's a bad tactic that will leave me defensively weak - but surely that's my decision as a manager. Any change that automates positions/tactics rather than putting it in the hands of the manager is a bad change that risks making every tactic feel the same. I like the idea of players adjusting their positioning to cover for each other, it's fundamentally a good idea, but I feel like you should have control over how that happens and who covers for who. Perhaps these current rules would make a good default, but the fact that you can't change them is disappointing. Deciding on the offensive and defensive team structure seems like a core decision for management, so the fact that we can only choose one side of it seems a little crazy in an update that is supposed to be focused around player positioning.

The animation, physics and lighting stuff looks nice. There's always going to be a limit given we're still on the old graphics engine, but I think it looks pretty good from what we can see. I'm a little torn on the positional stuff. I like what you're trying to do with it and I can see myself trying to make use of the role changes, but I can't help but feel like it's a bit of a missed opportunity when this could be achieved by offering the ability to split offensive and defensive formations into two. It wouldn't have to be mandatory (to avoid confusing new managers), but it would let managers achieve this kind of positional fluidity in a more customisable way. It feels to me like there's going to be a lot of new rules and interactions attached to player roles that you just have to know. How well documented in game will the interactions between a libero and inverted wingback be? How obvious will it be to new players that a CAM will move over to accommodate a marauding Segundo Volante? What if you have two Segundo Volantes, does the CAM stay more central in a more crowded space, or do the Segundo Volantes go more wide? What about a Segundo Volante behind a CM-attack, does the SV progress less in order to stay in a separate space from the CM-A? These interactions are not all entirely obvious to me and I doubt the tactics screen goes into this kind of depth. It also potentially takes away a level of creativity from managers if your players automatically move - what if I WANT my CAM and Segundo Volante to move into the same space to create an overload and potentially draw more defenders over to that area - I can't because my CAM insists on drifting away into another space. What if I want my Libero to take priority over my IWB when moving forward? I can't do that because it's hard coded into the game. I think having these new movements as a default is a solid first step, but the logical conclusion to all this is to provide an option of a split defensive/offensive tactics page where you can set up two formations, and instructions for each phase of play, so that I can tell my players exactly what I want them to do rather than the players assuming or me having to guess how two roles interact.

These come from your recruitment focuses. What seems to happen is as follows: You create a recruitment focus Your staff take some time to decide who to scout Initial scouting happens in the background away from your scouting priorities, and any bad or near-miss players are filtered out The remaining players are scouted for 2 matches each via your scouting priorities The recruitment focus is complete (or restarts if its set to ongoing) Step 3 gives you what appears to be a fully extensive scout of each player, so this is the key part of the recruitment focus. Step 4 gives you an extra box on your scouting report which shows some stats about the player's performance in each game, and the ability to watch a highlights package of the player. So if you don't care about the information from step 4 (and let's be honest, nobody really does) you might be better off just cancelling the recruitment focus and starting a new one back at step 1 rather than having all these players scouted for an extra 2 matches.

Just as a follow up - I think I was wrong about what's happening. We noticed that the scouting priorities were missing after save/reload, so we assumed that was related to the issue, but I don't think that's true. We've noticed that during our network game (not only after load) the scouting priorities seem to disappear, but if you continue the game a few times they reappear later (perhaps the next day). So it's actually more of a display issue with information being temporarily lost from the UI. It still only seems to be happening to the non-hosting players. Sorry for the confusion and hope that helps. Grez

I think the wording they used was "less frustrating". I don't think having a bit more information would make it particularly hard / difficult, it just turns a fairly arbitrary decision into an informed decision, which I think is better game-play. I think if you have 6 intermediaries and very little information about any of them, you're just going to pick the highest price unless it's the deadline day and need it done quickly. I just don't see a lot of point in presenting the player with that decision, it's not very meaningful.

Generally sounds OK, my initial impression on Intermediaries is that the decision making process around selecting your intermediary feels a little arbitrary. Perhaps it'll play-out different in-game, but if you give me a list of 6 intermediaries I'm just going to pick the one that promises the most money (minus fees of course). I think the selection screen would feel much more meaningful if it contained more details, for example a few ideas: More detailed a area knowledge - Is the intermediary a specialist in France or Germany? Perhaps if I have a French player, a French intermediary might be a good option. Just saying "regional" or "continental" feels a bit too vague for me to do anything with. Expected player salary - it might affect how likely a player is to leave, or any compensation I need to pay to the player for them to leave Expected level of football - for example does the intermediary expect to offer Champions League football, Europa football, a top-5 league, a top-20 league etc - this would affect the players decision and therefore mine How long the process will take (if better intermediaries are quicker, give me an estimated timeline or a deadline for each intermediary) Intermediary confidence level in making a sale - one Intermediary might think they have a small chance of selling your player for 30m, whereas another intermediary might only expect to get 25m but they're very confident in making it happen. This gives us a real decision to make depending how pressed for time and desperate we are to sell. An estimate of the player's chances of wanting to accept a move from this intermediary - similar to above, it gives you a decision to make based on how desperate you are to make a sale (Although maybe you can infer player the chances yourself if you know the regions / salary etc, and skip this column) If you give us this kind of information, and the outcomes vary significantly enough between intermediaries, it would feel like a meaningful decision. Just seeing a list of prices and fees doesn't feel like a decision, I'll just pick the biggest number. Or maybe I'm wrong, we'll see how it plays out in game.

Genuinely the best feature blog I've read in years. There's always a lot of focus on big headline features, but it's these core-gameplay improvements that actually make or break the football manager experience. If the AI actually builds real squads, develops their youth, and rotates correctly it'll make such a big difference to how we enjoy the game and compete. I do wonder how it'll affect game difficulty. If the AI makes better decisions the game should be harder, which as an experienced player is VERY welcome, I just wonder how we balance the game for both newbies and veterans alike.

Hi, I've had a lot of issues with position training over the last few years, however the crux of the issue is with positional knowledge affecting the current ability of a player. What you think is going to happen: You sign a new player, he's 26 and pretty much at the peak of his potential, and while he has a background playing as a CM (20/20 at CM) his attributes are probably more suitable for playing on the wing and he already knows how to play LW fairly well (14/20). It seems like a very logical signing to re-train and play on the wing. What actually happens: You sign the player and play and train him at LW. As his knowledge of LW increases, all of his other attributes absolutely plummet and he becomes a shadow of his former self. Learning a new position (one that he already knew pretty well) made him slower, and stopped him from being able to concentrate or dribble. I've seen extreme examples of this where I had a young fullback who looked like he should be a good striker. I retrained him to striker to make better use of his attributes just to watch him fall apart and become absolutely useless at everything, forcing me to sell him instead. It's also a problem when using your reserve teams to maintain fitness because your staff will play players out of position, forcing them to learn new positions and become worse players as a result (this should also stop happening, maybe only gaining positional knowledge while specifically training that position would be a good idea). The solution: Change the way positional knowledge is calculated. Don't involve current ability at all, use versatility only. Use the versatility attribute to define the maximum "positional ability" that a player has. A player with 1 versatility could be capped at around 30 positional ability - they could probably play their main position 20/20, and one other position 10/20. If you try to train that player in additional positions they could start to forget their other secondary positions (so the new position essentially just "steals" points from old positions). Players with higher versatility could be able to learn more positions for "free" before it "steals" points from other positions. Obviously I don't know exactly how CA / positional knowledge is currently calculated, so maybe this exact solution doesn't work for whatever reason, but there must be some solution to stop ruining players when training positions. These kind of changes can work out well in real life (Joelinton is a great example, he had the correct attributes to play CM so he moved from ST to CM and he played better as a result, but if you were to do something similar in game he would get physically worse). Cheers, Grez

The main reason it's problematic is one of the best ways to ensure a multiplayer game moves quickly is to do all of your scouting setup / staff setup etc while people are offline, and then try to play through your games when people are online. We keep the save in a shared Dropbox, and anyone can log on at any time to scout. This bug means that it's more difficult to keep the save flowing. People end up with their scouting priorities getting wiped out at random times unless you're very careful about when you save / making sure you take control of every manager when you save.

Something to improve game difficulty. I love the game but it feels completely pointless at the moment, it's just a grind when the game is so easy - it's like half of the game is missing. I want to battle against relegation and worry about getting fired - sometimes I want to actually get fired too. I want to build a squad over several seasons and develop players rather than just getting promoted back to back and replacing the entire squad. I'm ok with the idea that taking over a tiny club might lead to you getting stuck in league one or the championship due to lack of finances. I just want to feel like I've earned my wins. FM has reached the point where it's difficult to fail, and the joy of winning has gone as a result. My concern is that the game will be marketed at the casual players who pick it up at the start of the season, play a couple of seasons as man utd and buy Messi, Mbappe etc, win the champions league and then quit until next year. I'm fine with the game being easy for those casual players, but can we please have a realistic mode where it's actually difficult to climb the leagues, and relegation/being fired is a real possibility?

Hi, I sometimes play on my laptop, which is a 2-in-1 laptop with a touchscreen that can fold over into a tablet. For the most part FM actually works really well in tablet mode - but there are two main areas that repeatedly cause me issues and it seems like they would be fairly simple to improve: 1) Text boxes The application doesn't currently detect when you're in tablet mode and use the on-screen keyboard for input when you select a text box. At the moment my workaround is to play in windowed mode so that I can see the taskbar, and leave the on-screen keyboard shortcut permanently enabled on the taskbar so that I can activate it when needed - but this is far from ideal. Plenty of applications (for example this browser) manage this detection flawlessly, so clearly it's possible. 2) Scrolling through lists With a mouse you spin the mousewheel to navigate a list. On a touchpad you can use two-finger gestures (or whatever gesture you have set up) to navigate a list. On a touchscreen laptop you would expect to use gestures in the same way that you would with a touchpad, but it does not work. I guess when you gesture with a touchscreen it generates a different kind of event to a touchpad, and this is not being handled by FM. Technically FM does have the little scroll bars that you can click/slide, but they're tiny and very easy to misclick - if you're scrolling through a list of 1000 players in the player search screen it's very hard to be precise about where you scroll to - they're quite a poor experience. These two small fixes would make a huge improvement to the experience of playing with a touchscreen laptop. Tested using: ASUS Zenbook Flip / Windows 11 Cheers, Grez

The way we currently deal with clubs turning professional feels fairly chaotic / poorly handled. Take my current save as an example: We were a semi-pro club and the board rejected my requests to turn professional. As far as I'm aware there was nothing in the club vision about turning professional. From March onwards I started making signings for the next season and lined up several incoming transfers on semi-pro contracts. At the end of the season (Around May) I get an email in my inbox saying "The club has decided to turn professional". Now I'm in a position where I have a fully professional club, but around 10-15 players are joining on semi-pro contracts in 2 months time - it doesn't really make any sense. In July the new signings arrive but they all reject professional contracts because "This player has only just signed a new contract and doesn't want to discuss a new contract already". This is obviously unrealistic because most semi-pro footballers would love the opportunity to turn fully professional, and it's bad for me as the manager because I have a team full of semi-pro players that won't be training properly. Another annoyance is that there's no real indication anywhere showing the difference between my semi-pro vs fully pro players in regards to training. Ideas to improve the transition from semi-pro to pro: 1) If a club is planning to turn professional it should be made more obvious, and the conditions required to turn pro should be stated - for example if we're turning professional this year based on promotion / not being relegated it should be made obvious in the club vision / via email 2) Clubs could go under a self-imposed transfer embargo while they wait to decide whether they turn professional or not - for example after the January transfer window closes the board could say "As we are contemplating turning fully professional at the end of this season, we will not permit any incoming transfers until promotion/our league status is secured". As soon as the final game of the season is played the club could turn professional and the transfer embargo lifted. 3) Turning professional should be discussed with the manager ahead of time and we should decide which players to offer professional contracts to. It could look similar to youth-intake day when we decide which youth players to offer contracts to. This should include any prearranged incoming transfers which should be also possible to re-negotiate to fully professional contracts. So as an example lets say we're in the final 3-4 months of the season, the club has announced its intent to turn professional, maybe we're in a self-imposed transfer embargo - during this period I can offer professional contracts to my players which will automatically kick in if we achieve our goals and turn professional. 4) Once you turn professional, it would make sense for any players that were not offered a professional contract to cause issues/have poor morale etc. 5) If you fail to achieve your goal and do not turn professional, it would make sense for some players to be upset about not turning professional and cause issues/have poor morale etc. 6) Give a better indication of what training my semi-pro players will be doing. Previously as a semi-pro club we would have up to 6 training sessions per week, but now I can schedule up to 21. How does this work for my semi-pro players? Are they actually impacted by these sessions? Do they only turn up to a few sessions per week or do all of the sessions still affect these players at a reduced rate? Make this obvious. I think the best thing to do would be to highlight a few sessions per week on the calendar as being semi-pro sessions that all players attend, that way I can schedule the right sessions at the right time. I think these ideas would make the transition from being a semi-pro club to professional club a much smoother and more enjoyable experience. The current experience has been quite frustrating and has felt quite illogical/unrealistic at times. Cheers, Grez

So I've continued my save, and now I have full international scouting it's clear what the issue is with the USA players: The USA teams aren't giving their youth kids proper contracts. There's literally hundreds of youth kids sitting around in "Academy" teams on amateur contracts - and a lot of those players are good players. I think something like 50%+ of the USA's youth national team players on my save were kids from academy teams on amateur contracts. I started scouting them all around August and signed something like 20 of them on a free (I probably own the entire future USA national team now). I did notice that a bunch of them were offered contracts by their clubs around November, but these youth kids had been sitting around for months (maybe years?) before getting given a contract. Clearly this is an error / overlooked area in the AI. If a player is good enough to make the USA's national youth team there's absolutely no way they should be sitting in an academy on an amateur contract. The AI needs to be giving these players contracts and locking them down to their clubs. The "Academy" teams I'm talking about are teams like: Phoenix Academy, Inter Miami Academy, OCSC Academy, FC Dallas Academy etc. It also includes Canadian academies like Whitecaps Academy and Toronto FC Academy. Maybe it'll include other North American countries but I don't know.

Also worth noting the same happens if the AI signs one of your trial players, which you obviously can't work around. It's pretty easy to just terminate your own trials before accepting them, but if the AI signs them you get no prior warning.

Interestingly I've seen some similar patterns. I'm playing as Dunfermline (Scotland). First season my scouting range was Scotland only, second was EU. I do have a few staff with some non-eu knowledge though. Somehow despite never leaving Europe I see a ridiculous number of Argentine players being recommended to me, and similar to OP I've had several USA newgens too. I even signed a few of them. I've been feeling a lot like something weird is happening with scouting/agent recommendations since starting fm23 but it's hard to prove anything. I had a save in a France for a short time and I pretty much only got Argentine and African recommendations from scouting assignments regardless of me scouting primarily around Europe where there should be loads of other options. I think it's becoming less noticeable on my save now I'm further into it and I have a lot of scouting set up, but early on it felt like all I saw were Argentines and Americans. It definitely feels like the way the game is selecting players to recommend is a bit broken.

I know this has been suggested (and shot down) before, but I want to make a new argument for it. When I picked up FM a few years back I loved it. I played mainly multiplayer - and in that save some of us were successful and winning promotions/trophies, and others struggling and being fired - it was great. The feelings of success when you won were so good, because it felt like failure was just around the corner. The problem is once you learn how to play the game it becomes impossible to fail. A game that is well balanced for new players is never going to be well-balanced for veterans, and the feeling you get from success is not as great, because it feels like it is inevitable. At this point my group are reluctant to buy and play new iterations of the game because the challenge is gone. I want to get back to a situation where I can play the game and take part in: 1) Relegation battles 2) Being a yo-yo team 2) Getting fired and finding new jobs 3) Building/developing lower league teams rather just blasting through back-to-back-to-back promotions and replacing the entire squad every year. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a tick box when you set up your game that modifies a few behaviours. Here's a few simple ideas for how the game mechanics could be adjusted for human controlled teams with a simple on/off switch: 1) Actions that affect morale are less effective 2) Tactical familiarity is reduced by more between seasons and grows more slowly from training 3) Players are injured more often 4) Players are more controversial (so morale/dynamics are harder to manage) 5) Players are more ambitious / less loyal 6) Transfers require more cash up front (we already enforce a 50% up-front payment rule in our multiplayer because of how much you can abuse debt otherwise) 7) Reputation reduced 8) Budgets reduced 9) Transfer revenue retained percentage reduced 10) Board/Fan demands are higher 11) Players build fatigue more quickly 12) Players recover condition/match fitness more slowly 13) Players get more tired during matches 14) Players demand more promises in contracts Most of these changes should just be a modifier to an existing attribute or probability based event, so nothing new or crazy - just checking a feature switch during certain interactions and adjusting the numbers involved. My main issue is that it feels like my league-two side can play like a championship side as long as I keep them happy and they know their tactics - I want my league two side to play more like a league two side. For this to happen it either needs to be MUCH more difficult to keep morale/fitness up, so that the chances of you being able to make your team play at that level is reduced, or the maximum level of your team needs to be lower. There's absolutely no way you should be able to take over the worst team in league two and win the league in your first year outside of something incredible happening, but at the moment it's almost impossible not to. The game feels a bit better balanced at premier-league level, but lower-league gameplay is trivially easy. I'm not asking for hyper-realism or an impossible game, just something that's more interesting for veteran players. Cheers, Grez

Praising training becomes a tedious task that you feel obligated to do every week in order to boost morale. There's nothing interesting/engaging about going down a list of 20 players and praising them all every week, but if you want to win games you want high morale, so you feel like you have to do it. Options: 1) Mass praise (don't really like it, but it solves the issue) 2) Limit the number of players we can praise (top 3, or 3 of our choosing etc) 3) Players react badly if you're praising too many players (feels a bit weird, but maybe you can come up with a decent reason why a player might react badly) 4) You cannot praise a player again for a month or so (maybe the best option - it would force you to be more selective in when you praise. Although in reality you'd just praise the entire team after a loss to get morale back up) Potentially a combination of 2 & 4 would be a good solution. Cheers, Grez

Simple QoL suggestion - when you're training a specific position for a player, make it possible to enforce that the youth/reserve team managers actually play that player in the position you're training - or at least make the manager favour that position. It's particularly frustrating when you're training players in a new position - you have to either fully manage the youth/reserve team, or go back to the reserve/youth team tactics every week and manually move them into their new position or they'll literally never get any playing experience there. I've just spent the last 4 months of my save doing this 1-2 times a week to turn a super defensive fullback into a DM and it feels like a very tedious and avoidable situation. Thanks.

I'm sure everyone has been in this situation before - you're trying to sign a new player, you agree a price with the other club, go in to the contract screen - and you don't have enough money to offer the contract. You have no choice but to walk away from the negotiation, and now the player is upset at you and refuses to speak to you again for several weeks. It's so frustrating. This happens all the time, and at times when we know that we can afford the transfer. Just let us offer the contract and use the "Delay / Cancel / Update Budgets" screen for confirmation if the money isn't there at the end of the transfer. Usually the money isn't there because the transfer relies on selling another player at the same time. Maybe the money isn't there because I'm offering on multiple players, and don't expect to win them all. Sometimes it's just because my money is in my transfer budget, and for some reason the budgets are locked from moving - the money is literally in the budget I just can't touch it. This is genuinely one of the most frustrating interactions in FM and it feels so illogical and easily fixed. Thanks.