mercut1o

The Everton Board's 1st season objective is to qualify for Europe. It's one of their most important objectives and they won't budge on it. They also prefer to see attacking soccer. Do you see Frank Lampard under pressure irl because Everton are midtable after nearly getting relegated last season? No, of course not, but clearly no one even checked this team in the game. Your assistant gives you recommendations about the team; his first recommendation? Bernard and Lucas Digne are our best pairing down the left (according to our team analysis, screenshot included). Neither player has been registered to Everton since at least last January, and for Bernard it's been years. Iwobi is signifcantly worse than Doucoure (screenshot below) and is both slower than Onana and less agile than Gana. Hilariously Iwobi is listed as 26lbs heavier than Doucoure, but Iwobi and Doucoure have the same acceleration and agility. Doucoure has better vision. This means Iwobi is firmly 4th choice in the game midfield 3 despite being Everton's best player in real life. On Onana for a second- he has the highest pace in the squad. Higher than Ben Godfrey, higher than Anthony Gordon...huh? It's like no one even looked at this squad. Tarkowski and Coady are both worse than Michael Keane. The much younger Holgate is as good or better than Coady (same star rating with different stats), making Coady 5th place and a waste of a loan. Coady has England caps from this qualifying campaign in real life, but noooo same skill level as Holgate. Their decision making stats are 6 and 7 respectively. Holgate I could see that for, but Coady? In the backroom staff Paul Clement has worse coaching stats across the board than Sam Allardyce, Sammy Lee, or Craig Shakespeare. So does Ashley Cole, who only has a 12 in technical and a 6 in fitness. In the real world Everton have a decent defense but I guess these two couldn't possibly have contributed to that. Bizarrely, Duncan Ferguson is still around in-game despite his irl departure over the summer, he has mediocre stats, but is really good when used as a technical attacking coach (4/5 stars). He's the best of the bunch as a result. In a complete departure from reality a reasonable set of first actions as new Everton manage in FM23 is to offer Keane and Holgate new long-term contracts, bin the entire backroom staff except Dunc, and immediately sell Iwobi to reinvest in a winger and a striker while you await DCL's return but none of that will matter because the team cannot possibly reach Europe in the first season if you play straight up without save scumming. So you absolutely will get fired first season making this entire inaccurate and frustrating experience a complete waste of time.