jacob_m_mack

There is just not enough loan activity. There is no way young players can possibly develop without a huge improvement to the volume of transfer and loan activity. IRL, per Transfermarkt there are currently 47 players on loan from a Premier League side to a Championship side. That number will likely increase in January. I believe all but 2 Championship sides are loaning in at least 1 player from the Prem, with several loaning in as many as 4. In my current save, in it's second season with both the Championship and the Prem loaded, the January window just closed and there is ONE (1) such deal. ONE, 1, singular player on loan from the Premier League to the Championship. This is not okay. My save might be a slight outlier in terms of how low the numbers are but for a 47 to 1 difference from in game to IRL to even happen the system that created that outcome has to be so utterly broken that it's astounding that it made it to release, especially when this is a long standing issue that has been brought up by the community over several iterations of the game. It's yet another issue where, genuinely, I do not care at all if the fix is anywhere near perfect, because literally anything would be better than this.

Not sure if this is the place for it, but I was just reminded that this problem STILL exists and seriously I can't believe that the game is still where it is when it comes to training players new PPMs. Just had a player with 17 long throws try to get the "Long Flat Throw" PPM. Assistant thinks teaching him the PPM is a great idea. Month 1: "Encouraged by early progress", Month 2: "Making excellent progress", Month 3: "Successfully working towards", etc, etc. Never any indication anything is going wrong. Absolutely no reason whatsoever for anything to be going wrong. And then of course: "Despite working hard on his game he still can't do long, flat throws and will stop trying". Seriously, how is THIS where we're at for PPMs??? There just has to be a better way of going about this.

That's great man, but I just loaded a third and fourth fresh save file and got 4 Determination again for Sarr. The odds are extradimensional if this is happening randomly. It is also entirely possible that he started on 4 Determination for you and a some point ticked up to 5. I'd advise you to load a fresh save as the Spurs manager. He will have 4 Determination, I can all but guarantee it. That said, with Dorrington though it seems it was just wild coincidence, he's rolled a 9 and 10 in Nat Fitness these times around. I can upload all of my save files if necessary.

Hey, so I thought this too, it makes sense and it's what FM has done with young players in the past, but it's absolutely not the case. I checked my current save, Sarr has a Determination of 4 there as well, then loaded another fresh save and had him load in with 4 once again, and here are two additional examples of him having 4 Determination: the FMinside database and this user on the Spurs subreddit. Adding on the person who initially reported him to have 4 Determination and that is a 1 in 3200000 chance to happen if it is pure coincidence, but given that I could not find a single counter-example (a save where Sarr did not have 4 Determination), I think it stands to reason that Sarr does have a hard coded Determination of 4. Which, again, prompts the question the original user posed, why does Sarr have a hard coded Determination of 4, especially given that the standard practice for younger players in FM is to have a Determination that is specifically not hard-coded? On that exact same note! Why does Tottenham youngster Alfie Dorrington have a hard coded Natural Fitness of 6? As with Determination my impression was that youngsters generally receive random Natural Fitness ratings outside of fairly extreme circumstances. I can find no record of Dorrington having a record of recurring injury or fitness problems, but his Natural Fitness seems hard coded to 6, as mentioned I loaded 2 saves to check Sarr's Determination, but I also checked Dorrington's Natural Fitness, as it stuck out to me in my first save as being frustrating, as I planned to recruit him. He has 6 Natural Fitness in both saves and does on FM Inside as well. So it is highly, highly likely it is hard-coded to 6. Really want to know the explanation for these, they seem fairly nonsensical. ^The above bit about Dorrington was the result of randomly rolling 6 three times in a row 1/16000 odds but I guess it happens lol.

To me, this comes from the fact that users will actually drop players for "form" and will shuffle their lineups to get the best performing players in, which, because certain players perform much better than their CA in the match engine and certain players perform much worse, allows them, through trial and error, to assemble an 11 that is much better than they should be able to get their hands on at their current level. And similarly, the user will tinker with their tactics early on until they find something that overperforms significantly, at which point they basically lock it in and ride with it for the rest of the save. And meanwhile the AI is just using their highest CA lineup (which in all likelihood is far from their best lineup), and a default tactic (which in all likelihood is an awful tactic). If you have a "ramp-up league" like the VNL North or South, where the competition is all so terrible that you can walk the league while spending half the year fiddling around with tactics and lineups consequence-free, then, far from the extra promotions adding additional challenge, things actually get to be much easier. Especially since, from that point forwards, your team will be riding a dynamics bomb, where the positive atmosphere at the club produces a feedback loop where the atmosphere gives your players super powers, which leads to more wins, which leads to more atmosphere, which leads to more super powers. If SI were to try to fix this I'd suggest two things: 1. The AI actually drops players for poor form and, if the player replacing them performs well then the starting spot is their's to lose from that point forwards. This would let the AI "discover" their best 11 over the course of a season, just as the user does, rather than sticking by players who are horrendous in the match engine but happen to have a high CA. And 2. The high end of morale should produce a far less extreme effect. I certainly agree that dynamics are incredibly important, and I think the low-end of morale should definitely produce a very strong feedback loop that can send a talented team spiralling down the table. I think this is clearly re-enforced by real-world examples. But I do not think the flip-side should be true. I do not think that positive vibes can pull a bad team up the table the same way negative ones can drag a good team down. I think togetherness and fluency are extremely important, having a good understanding of your teammates and knowing how they will react to certain situations, but I think this comes from continuity more than it does from atmosphere. Two examples of this might be the Arsenal and Newcastle teams from last season: Both teams overperformed relative to what people might have expected in the preseason. And while there were certainly very strong positive atmospheres at those respective clubs, a big part of why they were able to translate that atmosphere onto the pitch was that both sides suffered very few injuries and thus had extremely consistent starting 11s. This let them develop a remarkable degree of fluency and understanding between their players on the pitch. Even if other teams had the depth needed to put similarly talented lineups on the pitch in spite of their injuries, the fact remained that those injuries disrupted the building of fluency and comfort with those lineups, giving an edge to Newcastle and Arsenal. I think that shifting the effects of the high end of morale towards Team Cohesion would be a good idea, but I would rename Team Cohesion to Lineup Cohesion, and have it primarily be a representation of the consistency of your starting 11, tracking how frequently the members of your lineup have shared the pitch with each other in recent history, rather than being based on dynamics. This should prevent users from snowballing out of control and could especially prevent users from chaining together promotions to the point of absurdity. After all, the player suffers injuries just like the AI, and will have their Lineup Cohesion consistently disrupted by that, and if they're earning frequent promotions then they'll have to occasionally reset their Lineup Cohesion by turning over their roster to account for the higher competition level. Of course, attempting to ride this togetherness to a high finish without turning the team over should also be an option, as Kieran McKenna's Ipswich Town are showing this season.

He isn't actually per FBref, he has 39 progressive passes to Romero's 50. Maybe if you're using a different stats provider though? Not sure what exactly that has to do with anything though, not trying to get bogged down in the semantics of what stats provider to use, or who specifically has better stats than who, just trying to illustrate that Romero is one of the most progressive CBs in the league and that current his attribute spread and PPMs don't lead to him performing as such in the game.

Seconding Romero's ball-playing being far too poor in the current DB. I think his aggressiveness out of possession has wrongly coloured people's perception of how good he is on the ball. He's joint 3rd among Prem CBs for progressive passes this year, tied with Dias, trailing only Dunk and Andersen. 4th among CBs in progressive passing distance, trailing only Silva, Dunk and Saliba. Also 5th in the entire prem in progressive carrying distance (dribbling attribute of 9 btw). He semi-regularly breaks out of the defensive line and joins in attacks when one of his carries takes him past the first line of the press too, so it's not like he's just running the ball into empty space. Even if we take the "Don't think about about the number from 1-20, it's about creating an accurate simulation", this doesn't do that, especially with "Dives into tackles" being his only player trait. It might be that Spurs in my save are 17th, but Romero in my save is currently averaging 2.6 progressive passes per 90, well below his averages from both 21-22 and 22-23, and substantially less than half his average from this year. No real way to track progressive carrying, but no reason to assume that would be in-line with real life either, given 9 dribbling and no PPMs that would increase his carrying volume. But also, when the discrepancies between game and real world are this wild, it's hard not to think of things with the simple 1-20 in mind: objectively one of the best ball-playing centerbacks on the planet should not have the ball-playing attributes of a League One CB.

First off I do want to say that the game this year is really pretty great as of first impressions: the performance relative to last year is miles better, for one. I don't use IFBs, but I feel like IWBs play way, way better than last year with the positional play in the match engine, and that positional play is super noticeable and makes the football feel much more natural. I also think the players animate so, so much better, it's far from perfect given the lack of skill moves obviously, but just the fact that the players have some lean to them and can look off-balance, and look far better when turning, it's really great. And shots and headers actually bouncing off the ground is excellent as well. Something that's bothering me though, is with the improved ball physics seemingly resulting in more deflections, is it feels as though players are far too adept at reacting to those deflections and getting shots away from them. A ball can be deflected at a player seemingly moving very fast, from just a few feet away, and they'll take it on as a first time volley. Those are the goals and plays that I notice most frequently as feeling really unnatural, as even if deflections fall in a player's lap they can oftentimes be really hard to take on because they simply can't be anticipated. But overall, really enjoying it so far.

If I want a player in my youth system to learn a new position I should not have to manually re-assign them to that position in the youth team tactics screen every single game. There should be an option to instruct my youth team's staff to only play players in specific positions. This should be available in a tab of the development hub without having to take direct control of youth teams. On a related note: we should be able to instruct youth coaches as to the playing time of the youth players. This would come in handy if, say, I instructed a youth coach to only play a young winger at full back and then instead of actually playing the winger at FB he just benched him, instead choosing to start a natural fullback with higher CA. This could be remedied by telling the coach to make the winger being re-trained a Star Player, ensuring he starts every match and gets the match experience he needs at the new position. Also, I feel like this needs to be something that the AI uses in addition to the user, as I'd imagine it could go a long ways towards fixing the issues people have had with newgen attribute spreads (lack of attacking fullbacks, ball-playing defenders, box-to-box midfielders, etc). If the AI re-trained it's young defensive wingers as fullbacks, young & tall CDMs as ball-playing defenders, young pressing forwards as B2Bers, it would take much the burden of re-training those players off the user (ie. they could just recruit an attacking fullback, rather than recruiting a defensive winger and re-training him as a fullback), while also making the kinds of players you face more varied as saves progress, and being more reflective of real life player development.

No you're absolutely right about anticipation, If I had to guess anticipation works as I said in the post you quoted: the game essentially knows what's going to happen in advance of it happening, and it tips high anticipation players off. If it knows a player is going to make a certain pass then it can tell a high anticipation player "this guy is going to make this pass" and then they can react accordingly, eg. if they have the necessary pace, acceleration and work rate then maybe they can step into the passing lane and intercept. So anticipation is definitely one of the mental attributes that matters, I just think that if Decisions and Positioning are what they say on the tin and don't have actual tangible impacts then it reduces how much of an impact Anticipation can have. eg. if you know a pass is coming but you have the Positioning of a game dev instead of the Positioning of an elite DM then it might not matter, because you won't pre-emptively be in a position where you can act on that knowledge and step in to intercept the pass. And it's just anecdotal but I really do think Positioning is borderline worthless based on my experiences with the game. Of course you've got anecdotal evidence to the contrary, not going to knock that, but I don't know if there's really an effective way to test these things (and I certainly don't have the patience to do it, not my job). And unless someone from SI comes out and says what Positioning actually does then we won't know what it actually does and who's right, because the tooltip is very vague.

I think re: the attributes don't matter & the inability to distinguish elite players question, the biggest problem for me is that certain mental attributes (some of which are weighted very highly in the CA formula) have very nebulous effects. For lots of attributes I know they have persistent effects throughout (pace, acceleration), have persistent effects when a player is in a a certain state (dribbling), resolve contests between players (jumping reach), or they impact a players performance at completing certain actions (passing, finishing, first touch). I know for certain that these attributes are doing things, they are tangible, these things make the player better, they increase the chances of my team scoring and reduce the chances of the other team scoring. It's true for some mental attributes as well: Composure for example is a mix between state based persistent effect and success chance & degree on actions, as it impacts a player's ability to complete all actions taken under pressure. The tangible effect of composure is why many people point to it as one of the most important mental attributes year after year. The flip side is something like Decisions, if we take the attribute description for Decisions at it's word then it primarily impacts player behaviour and doesn't have an actual tangible, measurable, consistent impact. The thing is SI, who are a bunch of game developers, are never going to be able to model a decision making process that has a substantial impact on the result of an elite level football match. I'm not saying this to slight them, the majority of professional football players & managers could not do this even if they had the inclination and could code like game devs. It's a process that for people who aren't truly elite level footballers may as well be arcane knowledge. The same is true for an attribute like Positioning. And if these attributes are in fact primarily behavioural, then that has run-off effects on the majority of mental attributes. If a player has elite vision but they are making their passing decisions with a game dev's brain then the impact of elite vision is lessened. If the game is handing players with good anticipation advanced warning of what's about to happen it matters alot less if they they're using a game dev's decision making and positioning to react to that knowledge. If a player is known for popping up to make clutch tackles and interceptions despite mediocre physicals because of their positioning, decision-making and work rate then they will seem much more like a slow headless chicken in FM, because their elite level decision making and position making has been all but lost. And so on and so on. The key (and maybe this is already in the game, who knows, I can't see the code) is that no attributes impacting CA can be primarily behavioural, because SI does not have the means to model behaviour equivalent to a top level pro in that it can substantially change the outcome of matches. Again, this isn't a failure on SI's part and no one should expect them to be able to do this. But they can't give "Decisions" a weighting of 8.0 in the CA formula (and thus indirectly siphon points away from crucial attributes) if it's just going to impact a player's decision making. It needs to have a tangible, measurable impact if it's going to be that "important". Just throwing it out there as an example of what it could do: maybe decisions lets a player "re-roll failures". Like say a player with high decisions attempts a high-risk, high-reward pass and the engine initially determines that pass is intercepted. Upon the initial failure of the pass roll a test for the player's decisions and if they roll high enough then the pass actually completes. This could mirror the fact that poor decision makers on a football pitch often take either regressive or high-risk, high-reward actions, while good decision makers will somehow find a way to take low-risk, high-reward actions. As game developers and not-football pros SI will have a hard time identifying how exactly these players consistently find these passes (and again we shouldn't blame them for that, I can't do it either), but they can take steps that will simulate their impact if not the actual process.

Dropping into the defensive line to form a back 3 is a big part of playing as a DM in the modern game as presses get more and more aggressive. It's an important tool in breaking presses, as it lets a player with the freedom to make a progressive carry receive the ball and initiate a carry/survey the field without having to turn with the ball. However it feels like Half-Backs are the only DM role that repeat this behaviour consistently, which is very limiting as it means you have to accept all of the other qualities of a Half-Back if it's something you want from your DM. I actually like the Half-Back's passivity in the final third, but if someone wants more from their DM there then they are essentially barred from having a DM that drops in, which feels a little silly. Just as an example: DMs like Hojberg and Bentancur for Tottenham regularly drop in and join the defensive line IRL but play very aggressively in the final third as well. It's also frustrating as the Half-Back has the "Dribble Less" instruction locked in, which essentially takes away that freedom to make a progressive carry that I mentioned. It would be nice if "Drop In" was something I could tell any DM role to do, unless it specifically conflicts with the role's other duties. It would also be nice if the "Dribble Less" player instruction was dropped from the Half-Back role as that feels like perhaps a relic of a bygone era, again, I actually really like the play of the Half-Back in the final third but in the first third I'd like them to be more progressive and have more freedom in bringing the ball out of defence.

update: stuck with it a bit and all they needed was some tactical familiarity and also for me not to judge them based off a few early bad performances. They drop in very consistently and in fact I really like all of the HB's movement without the ball at their feet, they cover for BPDs playing aggressively, don't put themselves in a position for wasteful long shots, a very nice role. But now my only problem is the Half-Back's "Dribble Less" instruction. I don't want them to dribble less! I want them to bring the ball out of defence!

I've done Half-Back with default instructions in possession (only tackle harder), and Half-Back with shorter passing. Either way they keep getting the ball stolen from behind right in front of my goal. Maybe my players are just not very smart (it is League One after all).

Not talking about just presenting a short passing target for CBs, because if they're positioned in front of the defensive line and facing their own goal then they're vulnerable to interceptions from behind. I'm talking about a DM who will drop in, form a back 3, receive the ball while facing up field and then carry the ball into the midfield, like DMs do in real life. And who will do this very consistently instead of just floating in front of the defensive line most of the time. I've tried both Half-Back and Anchor but they don't do it, they are always facing the wrong way when they receive the ball and make themselves very vulnerable to the press in a very dangerous spot as a result.