The experience with the international management in FM20

[keysi]

The original post is from fmrensie.net.

My latest experience with international management was when I played the Football Manager 2018 within my save in Hungary when I managed the youth team but also the senior national team. I decided to try it again after one year break and managing the only club in FM19. But this time, not the club & country together. Only the nation itself.  the experience with the international management in FM20.

I was not sure if to write like the new post or just place it to the SI Forum to the bugs section. The reason? I found many things I would consider as bugs. Or just stupid misplaced mistakes.

To be honest, I don’t know how to call some of these things. I would expect many things the same when you’re the club & country manager or head coach.

Some of the things are really weird.

Negatives, bugs or just stupid mistakes?

From unknown reason, all matchday responsibilities were assigned to the fitness coach instead of U23/U20 manager or assistant manager.

The same happened within Tactics responsibilities like 'Provides team selection advice' or 'Provides opposition instructions'.

Despite we played 6 matches together within the Gold Cup 2029, there is no feedback from the national board as it suggests 'No matches played yet'. And they are 'Looking forward to seeing the team perform on the pitch'. On the other hand, they are satisfied with the tactics...

Other things that I wanted to edit were subjects and people to follow within the News + Social. I added Extensive content level for Mexico and I added North America to Regions.

I also wanted to edit/reduce the amount of shortlists but it's impossible to work with it as it doesn't react on every place.

The last-mentioned thing was due to the fact I was constantly receiving reports about players I wanted to scout once. But mainly - there is a no option to see, check or edit your shortlists when you are the national team coach and you visit the Scouting Centre.

Or am I blind?

But simply, you would need to become a club manager again to be able to edit your shortlists. Or just delete them.

Data analyst, please?

On the other hand, I still can delete players from the shortlist(s). It's enough to find some player (usually highlighted with some colour, orange in my save) and you know he is in your shortlist(s).

Just hit the right mouse button -> Lists -> Remove from Shortlist. If you make it again, the shortlist option is not here again.

You can't hire Chief Data Analyst or just Data Analyst to your scouting department, only scouts.

That means you don't have pre-match analyst report. You are not able to check even your own team thanks to the analyst report in the team report screen.

The fact you can't have data analyst within your national team staff also means you will see your and your opponent's player roles after 10-15 minutes of the match after the analysis same as within the club management.

But they won't be accurate and it can also lead to the stupid thing like Mezzala in the middle of the flat midfield.

The limmited options for placing advert to sign some staff.

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If I will get used to the fact I can't have a data analyst, I would like to place at least my scout to make opponent's analyst report. But you can't do it in the Responsibilities, only within the Set new assignments in the Scouting Centre.

It would be probably useful to sign scout with also good Presenting Data attribute as "The ability of a Data Analyst to present their data in an efficient and easily digestible manner to the manager and to the Players".

On the other hand, the fact you can't sign a data analyst doesn't mean you can't have Analyst Priorities within assignments...

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Missing the training

I miss one other thing connected to Staff. If you're the club manager, you open the Club Vision screen and you can see how many coaches/scouts/physios etc. you have allowed and how many of them you currently have. There is no information like this when you are the national team manager.

The Mexican national team consisted only from the assistant manager, coach and fitness coach. I offered the job to the new goalkeeping coach, four overall coaches, head physio, three scouts and I was able to continue to sign more and more.

When I wanted to add the fifth coach, there was a note about I already have enough staff in this position. But it would be nice to have it somewhere in the nation info for example. Same as you can see the limits when you are the club manager.

The fact there is no training option when you're the national team manager, you can't manually rest the players between the matches. For example during the World Cup...

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National Pool Reports view

I also found a very weird another thing when I created a custom staff view for my coaches. It includes the Number of training categories assigned to. I as the manager have 10 categories. The rest of the coaches have 0. There is no training available for the national teams...

I would say I'm not the only one who is missing training as the national team manager. I don't say the full training version from the club management is needed.

No.

I think it would great if there would be some pre-match sessions available, same as the set pieces sessions as they should have some pre-match effect.

I got used to visiting the National Pool Reports screen quite often to see how players in the National Pool performed recently.

The general view of this screen includes 8 columns including the squad, team, score, opposition, date, minutes played, goals and the average rating. It would be great to be able to make the custom view here to include more stats and more details.

You are able to see some more stats on the right side of the screen when you click to the specific line but still not all that I would like to see on the first/second sight.

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Home friendlies in a different country

One of the weirdest thing within this national team save was when I set five friendly matches before the World Cup 2030.

Home competitive matches within WC qualification are played at Estadio Azteca (Club América).

I set all 5 pre-Wordl Cup friendlies to be played at home.

All of them are scheduled in the USA - Salt Lake, Pasadena, Denver, Washington and Chicago.

(It's reported here)

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Scouting Centre/Recommendations

This is probably one of the most stupid things I saw during my national team management period. I didn't spot it at the beginning but I found it after several in-game months after I signed Pierre Aubame as my main scout and gave him the responsibility to assign national team scouts.

And it started.

The scouting centre was full of Argentinian, Venezuelan, Peruvian and other nationalities. (I mention the possibility to convince the player to play for your country below but that's not this case).

The example: 8 players recommended in the scouting centre, three of them were with Mexican nationality, five of them were Argentinian, Venezuelan, Peruvian, Argentinian and... Serbian.

None of these players had the second nationality (Mexican) or even the possibility to gain the Mexican passport to play for the country.

Only one of these players were in the Mexican club, 600 days remained to him to gain nationality. In the picture below, you have "Scouted players not in squad" part. There are 9 players, only TWO of them are Mexican.

This really is a frustrating part of the national team management in the Football Manager. The only way how to stop these recommendations is to cancel all assignments, take the responsibility back or tick the "don't receive" option within the recommendations filter.

But what's the point to have it here? Things like this are the top bull***** and it puts me off to play it.

A couple of weeks later - players from the current national team were included in the scouting centre. The same stupid thing as in FM18 when I wrote about it...

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Positives?

If I liked something it has to be the option to convince some player to play for your country. It was Tomás Belmonte in our case. This 31-year-old experienced Argentinian midfielder never received Argentina call up and he became available to play for Mexico after 7 years with Monterrey.

I decided to try it and he accepted the offer immediately. Despite I had no problem with both central midfield roles, it was a great boost to have such a good and experienced player available.

It was midway through the Gold Cup so he was not able to play for us in this tournament. But I called him up for next month's World Cup qualifying matches and he was also one of the key players during the World Cup 2030.

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The conservative approach

I'm quite a conservative player in terms of squad changes, massive incoming and outgoing transfers or some big squad overhaul.

I was always happy to have around 10-12 players for 7-10 seasons and just to be able to add new young blood.

That means it's not hard to be the national coach because you don't play as many matches as with the club and if your key & standout players are injury-free, you don't have to change too much.

There are two possible approaches in my eyes.

1. You can select your starting XI and play with these players, when they are not injured, for many years if they are still good enough. I could imagine having 85% of my starting XI same for the whole time with the Mexican national team as there were a lot of young players. The eldest one was 31 when I took over the national team.
2. The second option is to keep, for example, four or five players as the main core of the squad and the rest will be different for every international break. I can't imagine to have it like this and I didn't try it. I rather am the first option-type of the manager. The way I have most of the squad together and just replace the injured or out of form players, it's more comfortable for me.

The above is also the reason why I didn't use too many different players. 90% of the squad was the same for all the years.

*It would be great to have something like "The number of players used" stat in the game.*

I love this game for many years but.

• One thing is that this post and writing it during one in-game year with the national team completely killed my intention to play this game for more time.
• I'm really happy I wrote it as my last post of FM20 because if I would experienced it and wrote it earlier, this save would end very early.
• There are too many stupid things and when I saw them (and wrote about them) I just sat before the laptop with the open mouth and what the fu*k? How is it even possible?

[Sluglips]

A very comprehensive and thought provoking post.

They best thing I found about managing club and international at the same time was, if you give a player a cap for the first time, he instantly like you. Which makes it much easier to sign him for your club. 

[USASoundersFan]

Good points in the original post. Easily one of the most frustrating aspects of Football Manager for me is how little the developers have done with the international side. From what I've read elsewhere on these forums, it seems that part of the game has actually gone backwards over the past several years.

Personally, the perceived drama of which country players will play for, if they have that choice, doesn't do much for me and, in many cases, is unrealistic. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like top players in FM base their decision more on which national team is better when, in real life, much more goes into it than that.

Scouting definitely needs work. Also, in many cases, it makes little sense which players I have full knowledge of and which I do not at any given time.

Otherwise, I want a more club-like experience as far as training and interactions with players and others go. Yes, I expect to not do much between international windows, but I would like my workload to be much more intensive during those periods than they currently are. Particularly for big events. Playing in a World Cup or similar competition for weeks, possibly having your team for a month and a half, and not be able to have any control over their training whatsoever is frustrating.

If the developers would put more into the international side of FM, I would absolutely be playing this game significantly more than I do.

[Sluglips]

International management does feel like an after thought tbh.

[Mars_Blackmon]

100%
 

The funny thing is, International Management is what got me into Football Manager in the first place.

 

I had fun playing FIFA World Cup but I wanted something much deeper. I ran into Football Manager 2012. Fun times with that game but international management have not changed since and you can even say it has regressed!

[bielsadidnothingwrong]

International management could be so much better with minor improvements like adding training, player relationships (can't even say "good job" after a big game), and use of data analysts in scouting, all of which are already features in the game!

[duesouth]

Excellent write up - no question international management lacks the polish of the rest of the game.  Certainly would love to be able to have a Data Analyst - I really miss not having that report before a match.

[Cal585]

How is the fitness these days? Haven't played Internationally this edition but I remember in past having problems where you'd have 2 games close together and all your key players would be too exhausted for the 2nd one.

[keysi]

14 minutes ago, Cal585 said:

How is the fitness these days? Haven't played Internationally this edition but I remember in past having problems where you'd have 2 games close together and all your key players would be too exhausted for the 2nd one.

The fitness was not the issue during the one calendar I played with Mexico including the World Cup final appearance. Three or four players usually went to the match with 85-85% condition but with 98-100% match sharpness so it was alright in my eyes.

Only one player who played most of the matches had it vice versa. Not sure why but he had 75% of match sharpness for the whole tournament despite he played in the starting XI every three days.

But overall, the fitness issue was fixed in my eyes, at least from this my own experience. Maybe someone has a different one.

[Sheriff7]

Hi mate!As for the title of your  topic the only answer is "the same like 6-7 last years".Believe it or not THEY HAVEN'T CHANGE NOTHING in International management for (at least) 5-6 years now,they just DON'T CARE although many guys here made some excellent suggestions for every version of fm.Your topic is great and very detailed. Υοu should raise it here too https://community.sigames.com/forum/680-football-manager-feature-requests/.

[petertr]

The staff responsibility thing happens across the entire game if you sack the coach that was delegated a responsibility, it moves to the next best option.  If you get rid of lots of people, an obscure staff member can end up controlling loads of stuff.

I had a fitness coach running every part of my U18 and U23 teams for about a year at one point before I realised!

 

 

I've just taken on an international job.  My first thought it, why do I have coaches when I don't have a training page?