[Suggestion] Player development and management

[Judge_Holden]

I often feel when playing the game that there is very little to do between matches, with contact time between the manager and players being limited to pep talks and simple tweaks to training schedules. Of course, this barely reflects the great deal of interaction that a manager will experience with his players and leaves me feeling that the manager has very little influence over how the players develop both their football skills and personalities, as well as reducing the role that player personalities can have within a squad. I feel with a couple of tweaks this could be addressed without the game becoming convoluted as these changes should integrate with the existing system.

The first change I would like to see is how players train their football skills, represented by the technical, physical and mental attributes. At the moment, it often seems that attributes develop in a random and undirected manner and I feel that the manager should have greater control over exactly which attributes develop during training sessions. This could be achieved by selecting a single or collection of related attributes (already categorised as ball-control, fitness, defense, etc) and then assigning the player to the most appropriate coach. For example, a group of five players within the first team squad are needing development in their physical ability; the attributes that the manager wishes to improve are selected (the more attributes that are selected, the greater the division of any Current Ability improvement is between the selected attributes). These players are then assigned to the most appropriate coach, which in the case of these players is the team's fitness coach. The coaches ability to improve the players attributes is governed by the relevant coaching skills as they are in the current system with the gold stars, but the man management skill should allow the coach to train a greater number of players at any one time without penalty.  This could be extended to the role of physiotherapists within the squad, with players being assigned to a physio to reduce their injury proneness and, if the physio has a decent fitness coaching attribute, improve their physical stats as well. 

The second change is partially addressed by the first, but is an attempt to improve the way in which player personalities need to be managed and utilised in order to create the optimal professional environment for player development. This could be achieved by creating an overall personality for each training group as outlined above, which is determined by calculating each of the player personality attributes to create an average (players with a higher influence attribute have a greater weight on this average score). The average score for each personality attribute is then shared by every member of the training group whilst they are part of it. This might mean that if a team possesses a couple of players with poor professionalism the negative effects of this can be mitigated by grouping them with high influence players with good professionalism. Conversely it may also mean that professional but quiet players with low influence may be swayed by more senior players with poor application in training. The coaches personality attributes could also be added to the average of the group that they are leading. This would of course mean that personality attributes need to be made visible to the manager so that they can make informed choices about player groupings.

I hope my suggestions offer food for thought to both developers and players of the game and I'm excited by the possibility that they could be included in a future version.

[Neil Brock]

Reviewed so locked.