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Showing results for tags 'trials'.
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I am a big fan of bringing players in on trial. While at a lower league team, it's not uncommon for more than a hundred players to have a trial with my club over the course of a season. This has been the case for years, going back further than FM08. And I like the changes to trials that have happened in the last couple of iterations - I like the idea of the slow reveal of a player's attributes over the course of the first week, I appreciate the verisimilitude of a board saying "Uh no, mate, we're not doubling the town's population this week just so you can look for cheap players; enough's enough", and I like that lower-level teams are more willing to allow contracted (or Non-Contract) players to leave for a week or two for a trial. All good stuff. But, there's a bit of an issue with how this interacts with Scouting. If I've got a player on Trial, training with my team and presumably taking part in any practice games they have, I don't mind scouts identifying this player and recognising if he's any good. However, it takes until a Trial ends for one of my scouts to slap a 'number' on a player, but a Scout report - and I've seen this happen - can be given for a player who's only been on trial with a club for a day, enough for a club to become interested. But a day into a trial, I'm lucky if I know what any of a player's attributes are as a fixed number, while the star rating is often 2-3 gold stars and then the rest black. Sure, there is a star rating and a coach report from the day a player arrives, but it starts off wildly hit-and-miss and not actually much use for a human player (who will probably want to avoid signing a Poacher-style player with 3 Pace). Also, partway through a trial, I still have no idea what sort of contract I need to offer to get a player to sign - something I have a much better idea of after a scout report. It also kind of removes part of the point of a trial. If I could scout a player anyway and get a recommendation on him within a week, it's not actually any more beneficial - within that week - to get him on trial for that time. (And yeah, there are some players who can't be scouted, but can be trialled, I know.) I don't want to get rid of the things that make trialling good, but I wonder if it can be tweaked to make it a more viable option. Maybe Physical attributes are revealed quicker, maybe more Hidden attributes are flagged up, maybe we get a bit of qualitative information about the player ("He's just going through the motions", "He's getting on really well with Player X") or expected wage demands are suggested.
