Squad Harmony on Touch - Advice/Guidance/Bug?

[santy001]

I'm finding it extremely difficult to get a grip on squad harmony and team morale. The problem is that even when it has been in a good place in my current game, once the season ends and the team stops playing games it drops. I can think of various arguments as to why this could happen, but they're meaningless fluff as to whether or not they do contribute.

Anyway, for a little over 6 seasons I've mostly been presented with it like this:

A good run of results can see it spike up, but it always, always gravitates back towards this point.

I figured perhaps it was players who had gripes about lack of football weighing it down. So 4 months ago they were all allowed to leave and move on. Either sold, or released at the ends of their contracts. So the squad is full of players without any happiness issues:

And to give the team the best chance of getting off to a good start, arranged a pre-season against teams who were in the leagues below to give a good chance for everyone to get minutes on the board without suffering crushing defeats.

So after a process in which the team has scored 49 goals over the last 5 weeks, and has several players (who were joining the club with good morale which quickly deteriorated to fall in line with the rest of the squad) coming in fresh and getting a good experience behind them why is it still so negative. It's worth mentioning that this is for a team expected to avoid relegation, who avoided relegation last season so it seems really bizarre that a team that is at least achieving its objectives in the world of football is struggling over such a prolonged period with these issues.

[Lucas]

Just now, santy001 said:

I'm finding it extremely difficult to get a grip on squad harmony and team morale. The problem is that even when it has been in a good place in my current game, once the season ends and the team stops playing games it drops. I can think of various arguments as to why this could happen, but they're meaningless fluff as to whether or not they do contribute.

Anyway, for a little over 6 seasons I've mostly been presented with it like this:

A good run of results can see it spike up, but it always, always gravitates back towards this point.

I figured perhaps it was players who had gripes about lack of football weighing it down. So 4 months ago they were all allowed to leave and move on. Either sold, or released at the ends of their contracts. So the squad is full of players without any happiness issues:

And to give the team the best chance of getting off to a good start, arranged a pre-season against teams who were in the leagues below to give a good chance for everyone to get minutes on the board without suffering crushing defeats.

So after a process in which the team has scored 49 goals over the last 5 weeks, and has several players (who were joining the club with good morale which quickly deteriorated to fall in line with the rest of the squad) coming in fresh and getting a good experience behind them why is it still so negative. It's worth mentioning that this is for a team expected to avoid relegation, who avoided relegation last season so it seems really bizarre that a team that is at least achieving its objectives in the world of football is struggling over such a prolonged period with these issues.

I believe it will go down if you're overhauling your squad a lot and there's less team harmony and cohesion in this situation. Obviously, players unhappy will do this too. You should find it increases but it will take into the second half of the season to see some real gains. Once your squad is more settled it should stay higher. 

But if you keep chopping and changing the side with transfer business this will effect squad harmony. 

It does seem a bit much that they are "devastated", so possibly worth raising in the bugs forum so they can advise further. 

It's been all too easy in the past to keep the harmony and cohesion too high. It still is to an extent once you've got a good squad and you're more strategic with squad building.

[santy001]

I'll keep a more focused eye on making sure there's not so much wholesale changes. I don't feel like I've been doing it so much in previous years, but then that's a natural thing to think in hindsight. I'll see how it goes this year and whether I've potentially exacerbated the issue before logging a bug.

[santy001]

It turns out that it isn't promotion that's good for team harmony, nor is it stringing together a few wins. It's relegation.

I did try to follow your suggestion of keeping it fairly stable @Lucas and not making substantial moves in the market etc. Sadly it proved to do nothing for harmony, I should have stuck with the tried and tested cheesier way of just bringing in a bus load of loans in retrospect since loan signings don't seem to anchor their morale to the clubs morale. 

Presumably a save of the team being relegated won't really do much to show that there's a bug, so if I keep on with this team I'll try to remember to splinter off some saves for bug reporting. Although there's a good chance I won't since it just doesn't feel right that after 7 years in game I was never able to get on top of this issue. 

Morale feels way too overcooked for me though on FM, FMT especially. Perfect morale is the ability to take the starting Malmo side to Barcelona and get a draw in the morning, and it seems bad morale is 295 touches in the opposition box resulting in just 9 goals in the evening with Landskrona.