Freakiie

The newgen template is just stupid, I have no idea why we've had newgen strikers coming through with insanely low finishing for years now. In real life these players either would've been moved to another position, moved on or forced to actually improve their finishing and show they can hit the back of the net. There are definitely players in real life that aren't great at finishing chances that still score lots of goals as they manage to create a lot of chances for themselves. For real players these players are given poor mentals and average finishing by the researchers, to replicate these players not being consistent with chances, so the real life 5 finishing striker doesn't exist, as he'd instead be the real life 5 composure/consistency etc striker.

Yeah just realized, it doesn't tell you until you actually go to order and suddenly see a massive shipping fee get added to your check out.

Shopto.net is €35,14 which I'm pretty sure is by far the cheapest among the officially licensed retailers if you're paying in € and just a couple cents more expensive than CDKeys. One day I'll understand why their price in € is so low, it's pretty much the same price as when you pay in £, which makes no sense. Edit: Actually never mind, seems just like last year Shopto is selling physical copies again (why do these even exist any more when they're literally just a code in a box?!), which means you pay a massive shipping fee. WHY?!

As pointed out, at 22 goals in 50 games you're clearly a very dominant team in your league. This means that you generally won't get a lot of shots against you in general and thus very low numbers for shots on target. That will automatically skew the numbers towards the goals scored against you coming from a low number of shots on target. The opposition obviously can't score against you with their 4th shot on target if they don't even have 4 shots on target. So, as a result, you will see a lot of goals scored against you from the oppositions first shot on target. Honestly, it looks to me like your defense is doing their job fine, but that as a dominant team you run into the occasional counter giving away some solid chances. An average of 0,15xG is really not that low, so the few chances your opposition gets are pretty solid. Of course there could be some other factors at play here as well, perhaps a low concentration GK who struggles with focus as he has nothing to do for most of the match, complacency when your team is ahead or who knows what other factors. Unless it really starts costing you points though I wouldn't be to bothered by it though.

Schedules like this can definitely happen in FM in the PL when you go on deep runs in Europe, League Cup and the FA Cup, as you just play too many games and more than you generally would in real life. If there is an issue with FM it'd be that the scheduling doesn't look far enough ahead, giving the game a relatively small time frame to schedule a lot of matches in. I also don't think the game ever moves games forward, only backwards, but I'm not entirely sure on that. It also happens in other leagues where unrealistic success can result in some very weird scheduling that normally these clubs simply wouldn't have to worry about. I've played in Iceland a couple times and the European group stages are horrible for scheduling, but in real life when did an Icelandic club ever make European group stages and have to worry about this? The other 4 big leagues are highly unlikely to see this issue simply due to having far less games and thus being far less likely to run into extreme congestion, but even then I've had some pretty rough weeks in Spain when you get into the later stages of the cup with 2 ties and are successful in Europe.

That's a shame, I really wanted to learn more about Schrödinger's Wall.

German second teams are rather awkward in FM. They're in the official league pyramid, but most are in the 4th Division (for the Bundesliga clubs at least), so they are in a non playable league. If your second team is in the 4th Division at the start of the game they can be one of the 4 randomly promoted teams to the Third Bundesliga every season at which point they would be in a playable league and are amazing for developing players due to taking part in domestic league matches, but unless that happens they will never have any games, so having players in your reserves at that time is useless.

So, there's a literal wall that you must hit. But wait! If you know what you're doing, then you don't hit that wall and thus there is no wall. What is this, Schrödinger's Wall?

The devs stated that the overall game world is balanced to somewhat mirror real life statistics. That's something completely different from what you are implying and doesn't back up your conclusions at all. Plenty of people have massively over achieved to degrees that are simply not realistic, but the game doesn't stomp them down at some point and goes "nope, this is too unrealistic, bad luck!". No, the game is designed that naturally these performances are incredibly unlikely to happen, but the moment you throw the player into the mix all of this changes as experienced players are far better than the AI. Plenty of people have gone on massive winning streaks, have broken goal scorer records by absurd amounts, have gone from the 10th league to the Premier League with consecutive promotions every season and at no point does the game prevent this by somehow rigging the game against them to prevent these unrealistic achievements. This wall you're claiming simply doesn't exist, otherwise the very exploit tactics you're talking about would never work as they would hit that would faster than any "normal" tactic due to how massively you can overperform with them.

Yeah no, to all of that. I've gone on incredible runs that are hardly feasible in real life. Especially when you take over a team in a weaker league and boost it to CL contender levels you will just repeatedly stomp your domestic league while vacationing and leaving everything to your AssMan going on triple digit unbeaten streaks, the game is not scripted to mirror real life stats at all. As for replaying games, as people tend to point out in those very threads, a lot of what goes into a match is decided long before match day, so saving and reloading right before the match will not change those factors. If anything, it shows that things are working as intended, as the same factors going in have the same result going out most of the time, just like they should. A match starts with the post match team talk from your last game basically. What you say there, what you say in the post match press conference, what you say in the pre match press conference all factors into how your players approach the next game. None of these things change by reloading on the day of the match. Add to that under the hood figures like jadedness and you will end up with games where your team just doesn't show up. It happens in real life often enough as well, plenty of favorites will have days where they just don't look like they ever had a chance at winning that afternoon.

Players actually know your wage budget. Shifting your entire budget towards the transfer budget actually worked to reduce player demands as they were aware you had less budget available in past versions, although I can't confirm that for FM23. Maybe in FM23 it has changed to just be your overall budget? Since finances in FM are insanely easy to manage and making massive profits on the transfer market is no problem whatsoever the human player will generally sit on massive amounts of cash that the game simply doesn't handle very well, as the financial side isn't designed with the expectation that clubs sit on hundreds of millions in the bank. At the same time, might as well just pay players what they want, as money is not an issue in FM anyway and when your club is raking in massive profits over the years it also isn't really a surprise that players know that the club is incredibly wealthy and will want a slice of that pie. The way it is coded into the game with players being aware of your budget is awkward, but if a club like Arsenal were to have a positive transfer balance of half a billion over the next couple years Odegaard would be asking for a massive raise to be sure.

I mean, if a player like Shaw isn't good enough for you to give him play time in some easier games or games or minutes when you already have the game in the bag then your standards are simply way too high. Youngsters need playing time to develop properly and you're not giving yours any as none of them seem to have any minutes in your first team. You're not going to have a bunch of 140-160 CA youngsters just roll out of your youth teams. That was a thing in older FMs when youngsters developed way too quickly even with just playing in the U19, but nowadays you need to actually give them minutes in your senior squad. Seems to me you're playing the game exactly like PL clubs play in real life, just buy buy buy with no time for youngsters unless they're a generational talent and then you wonder why you don't have any players from your own academy playing for you.

For buying players: unsettle them just like the AI does to you. Declare interest in him, then go watch his matches in person, this generally will boost the players interest by a lot. Then make offers, hope to unsettle him, have him try to force a transfer. If you really want to pick a player up for cheap then you need to continue this process for a long time, continue showing interest in the transfer to make sure that the player remains unsettled, while running out his contract. Of course this process takes time and the AI might not budge that much regarding the price, so at some point you either bite the bullet or move on. The alternatives are what turnip posted, have a large list of potential targets and hope the AI naturally transfer lists them, as this generally comes with a massive discount for the player (unless it's an U23 one, then the AI can be really stingy and ask for absurd amounts even if he will walk away for a free a year later), keep an eye on potential free transfers and interesting clauses. Especially relegated clubs from the bigger leagues will often have a couple interesting names and some are bound to have relegation clauses or want to leave because they don't want to play for a relegated club. Outside of that, just keep an eye on the transfer list in general. I have my scouts give me a quick report of every player that is transfer listed above a certain value and especially at the start of the season where the AI will seek to offload players with short contracts you can pick up some proper bargains. Selling is a completely different can of worms. Basically, the moment you start offering out players it kinda suggests that you want the player to leave, so AI often won't go too crazy. Sometimes offering a player out without transfer listing him works, other times you actually get better offers after listing him. It's honestly hard to say. Players that have barely played will be hard to sell, as the AI looks at recent performances and depending on your league reputation players are valued much higher. In the PL however, this results in the players being massively overvalued, so if you play in the PL (or managed to dethrone the PL as the #1 rep league), you're highly unlikely to get offers that actually mirror your players value. Overall, your best bet is just to give the players enough play time to show their stuff and hope they perform well during that time to attract interest.

Well I've had certain boards constantly block transfers for me because it didn't suit their transfer preferences. Really fun with teams like Wolves, where you can't buy a player if it isn't a massively overpriced Portuguese player, while your finances are by no means great. As for difficulty levels, since you asked about it, what would you even do? In CIV the AI doesn't get better, it just gets absurd bonuses. How would that work in FM though? We already have little issues beating teams better than us, so raw stats aren't going to do much. Not to mention the issue of, what if the stat boost would put a player above 200 CA or beyond 20 in a stat? Can the engine actually compute that? Lets say you boost Morale, what happens if that somehow boosts the AI into overconfidence and makes it even easier? On top of that, a lot of times (especially in the league) the bigger issue is the AI just not being as good as it should be against other AI. I've rolled the league plenty of times because my supposed competitors simply don't reach the point tallies they should. Difficulty levels wouldn't do anything there. Neither would they really help with things like squad building, squad rotation, player happiness and so on. Same goes for other stuff, lets say you give all the AIs way more money, but then the player just gets even more money from their transfers that they can use much better than the AI. Just like how in Civ the AI makes a ton of gold because of all their bonuses and then the player just sells them luxuries at exorbitant prices and ends up as the real winner. As for challenge, why not go into the future on top of what you're doing. You'll have to deal with newgens (which I know isn't everyone's favorite thing in FM), where you can't just tell from your existing knowledge how good they are/will be, any squad you join will be ravaged by decades of AI squad building and your DoF now has twice the crappy players he can try signing for you as the database tends to expand quite a bit over time. Oh and then instead of the preset thing, use whatever tactic your assistant tells you is best for your squad and make it work. Might get lucky with a squad suited for 4-3-3 Gegenpress or you might have to make a 5-4-1 Catenaccio work. Or just grab a tactic you're not familiar with and try to make that your thing over the course of the save and then only agree to join teams that have squads suited to your tactic.

First of all, you stack a whole ton of passing range reducing instructions, which severely limits the options your goalie has. The fewer options he has, the more likely none of the options are good (in his opinion), so the more likely it is for him to hoof the ball up field. Second, as pointed out, you play with low risk (and then lowered risk even further?) which means that the goalie wants to get rid of the ball. The least risky option is to simply hoof it up field and get the ball as far away from your goal as possible. From the looks of your instructions you want to sit deep and play possession in your defense, which is an incredibly risky tactic since if you lose the ball the opposition will immediately be close to your goal (and defenders generally aren't the most comfortable on the ball in the first place). That's a set of heavily contradicting instructions, as the lowest risk option is to hoof the ball up field. The first priority of a low risk mentality is to get the ball away from your goal, while holding possession is what you do when you have the ball further up the field. The lower the risk the more direct your defense tends to be and the shorter/saver passing your offense will use. Vice versa, higher risk mentalities will apply shorter passing in defense to build up and then go for risky passes in the final third, that are more likely to result in possession loss, but can unlock a defense if they're successful. If you want to play a defensive possession based game you need to set your team up in a way where the mentality is not so low that defenders will just hoof it up field, but at the same time your midfield mentality isn't too high so they keep possession in the midfield area. Third, you're playing a sweeper keeper, which naturally is allowed a bit more creative freedom than your regular goalkeeper. So, if he sees a counter attack option he is very likely to go for it, regardless of your instructions.

The media description is based on what his natural position is. Newgens if I'm not mistaken can only have 20 familiarity in one position, so for this newgen it was DM, thus he's described as a "defensive midfielder" even if his attribute spread says otherwise.

Midfielder newgen templates are heavily skewed towards skilled passers. As a result, most DMs end up being trained in roles that don't bother with defensive attributes and the end result is a ton of players that can play as DM, but have no ball winning capabilities.

I don't mind the silly antics that goalies do on the line, but taking the ball and throwing it away is definitely a step beyond that and Martinez should've just gotten booked the first time he did it. If it's without the ball though and not in the takers face, go nuts for all I care.

4/10, winter WC really didn't do it for me and I never quite got into the mood for it. Ended up skipping most of the group stage games and half eyed most of the KO stage on my second monitor with the sound off.

Can't give yellows to players on the field, so you give them to players on the bench. Smart!

Frankfurt, yet despite somewhat following the BL I hadn't heard of him until the semis either.

Dembele has looked fully off the entire KO stages, no idea how he's still starting.

Looked at the replay multiple times, can't even see any contact until Di Maria was already eating grass. Ridiculous decision if you ask me.

How has there only been a single yellow card in this game so far. On top of that, the one actually given yellow was a complete joke.