[FM24] Football Italia

[danyates8]

I love your methods of using data to find out valuable information then using it to your advantage.

I should imagine it could go really in depth to see which personality/media handling style combo gives the best development results as a %. 

[_Ben_]

18 minutes ago, danyates8 said:

I love your methods of using data to find out valuable information then using it to your advantage.

I should imagine it could go really in depth to see which personality/media handling style combo gives the best development results as a %. 

In previous FMs, I used to keep really detailed records of player development but that was because I was able to play 25+ season careers with little actual interest in the tactical elements of the game. I moved away when I moved my playing style to journeyman saves because I wasn't at clubs long enough to see the impacts of this but now, with some more consistent formulas, I do track this kind of thing.

I have data for 87 players since 2029, of which, 59 have played for more than a year in the academy. Here is that breakdown:

That is the average number of attributes points (not % increase) that each personality has made, per year, in the academy on the left. On the right is the average ability change (sum of total attributes measured against average at the start and then at the end) per personality, too.

There is lots more that I can dig into but I don't always post about this given that it is some way off a realistic metric if I'm honest!

[danyates8]

13 minutes ago, _Ben_ said:

In previous FMs, I used to keep really detailed records of player development but that was because I was able to play 25+ season careers with little actual interest in the tactical elements of the game. I moved away when I moved my playing style to journeyman saves because I wasn't at clubs long enough to see the impacts of this but now, with some more consistent formulas, I do track this kind of thing.

I have data for 87 players since 2029, of which, 59 have played for more than a year in the academy. Here is that breakdown:

That is the average number of attributes points (not % increase) that each personality has made, per year, in the academy on the left. On the right is the average ability change (sum of total attributes measured against average at the start and then at the end) per personality, too.

There is lots more that I can dig into but I don't always post about this given that it is some way off a realistic metric if I'm honest!

Honestly, WOW, is all I can really say. Some really interesting finds there too. Fairly determined coming out on top over determined is slightly surprising. Mercenary is another fascinating one, that growth is something I didn't expect

[_Ben_]

7 minutes ago, danyates8 said:

Honestly, WOW, is all I can really say. Some really interesting finds there too. Fairly determined coming out on top over determined is slightly surprising. Mercenary is another fascinating one, that growth is something I didn't expect

The numbers are still too low in value to really dig into this. I had a save at Guadalajara back on FM20, maybe, and I had twenty seasons worth - some 300 odd players - to really dig into! Obviously Driven looks great but it's just one player!

I'll dig into it a little more and make some outputs that look at determination, age etc and share those.

[lfds89]

4 horas atrás, _Ben_ disse:

The growth metric is a percentage increase from year to year based on the sum of all of their attributes - trying to keep this as vague as possible yet also measurable - something that I am sure actual football teams would want to do. The vs average metric is a comparison of their current sum of attributes compared with the average of all U20 and U18 players currently at the club, which - again - is something that I'm sure could be done by real life clubs, obviously, more so in terms of an 'x player is the strongest passer in the group' rather than numerically, but FM simply cannot work that way, nor can it, realistically, create a collaborative attributes vs performance indicator, given that U18 metrics are so hard to access at the best of times! Therefore, this system will do! The last metric is their consistency of development (which, oddly has gone from the header) but just accounts for any player making more than 4% (seemingly a good measure from the data I have so far) progress on their total attributes year by year. If a player has only been at the club for a year, they cannot have this metric measured, obviously.

I loved this bit. I track the evolution of my players differently but keep it just for the season, I don't have my spreadsheet ready for a multi-season analysis. I might do it one of these days.

[_Ben_]

1 hour ago, lfds89 said:

I loved this bit. I track the evolution of my players differently but keep it just for the season, I don't have my spreadsheet ready for a multi-season analysis. I might do it one of these days.

Thanks! I've tracked it in many different ways before - mean of attributes, harmonic mean, percentage (attribute multiplied by 5) and many more but I wanted to keep this simple and open to the phrase of 'oh, x player has got better at y thing' that could be really said by a real coach!

[_Ben_]

Season Eleven: BIG changes going forward. Smart or risky?

I have played a further seven games but have decided to pause, write down my thoughts and update as I've made three of the biggest decisions that I will have to make across the entirety of this game. I may have made a mistake or I have had a stroke of genius, but that, much like football itself, will be a tale told over the coming months and years.

Progress in Europe with an incredibly strong second leg victory over favourites Liverpool, meaning that we faced Danish side Randers in the semi final after they overcame my affiliate club, Rudes. Lens or Heerenveen would be our opponents in the final, if we make it that far. Our league form has suffered a little, as we dropped points at home to Torino and, annoyingly, against our bogey side - Monza. They now have won both ties and, therefore, have the advantage should head-to-head come into place.

But yet you'd still consider us very unlucky as, on xPts - at least - we're the best side in the league just going through a little poor spell. Still, the top eight does not have Lazio or Juve in it and still it lacks a real dominant force as Atalanta's form as well as that of Napoli and Monza really have closed the hap on Inter and Milan out front. It's unlikely that the two Milanese sides will be caught by anyone else though.

- - -

The big one!

Honestly - I looked around at the quality of talent available to me, knowing that - clear as day - both Villalba and Hoyos have significantly outgrown us in terms of their quality and their demands. However, the transfer market is not kind to us - clearly three seasons of Serie A action isn't enough to cement ourselves as a big club and the quality that I could have brought in, spending around €50m on a keeper and between €60-70m on a forward was just not there. I could have spent it on 18 year old South American wonderkids but that didn't quite feel realistic to me. So I did this...

Noticing that Chelsea were interested in Hoyos, I had a look through their squad, identifying anyone who may be interesting in joining, getting a scout report on a number of players. Emmanuel Medina fits my profile as a young player who has a great personality, fits with the style of player I want and holds an EU passport, too. Not getting huge numbers of minutes at Chelsea meant that the deal was easier to broker and they accepted my offer for him, with Hoyos going the other way. Great and, in my opinion, improves us at centre back and makes a decision slightly easier about interest in a current player I have there, but that didn't solve my keeper problem.

Next, Real Madrid announced their interest in a really unsettled Villalba. I followed the same protocols, knowing that - here - I'd very likely take quite a sharp hit in terms of quality so wanted to ensure that the player fit was as perfect as could be. Michele Izzo is a product of their youth academy but isn't deemed good enough for them to get first team minutes. Great - this solves the striker issue; I now have, honestly, a more rounded striker even if not having the same absolute quality but I still don't have a keeper.

That is where interest in Guillermo Mendoza came to fruition. Spurs had Marco Carnesecchi in their squad and he had some interest in joining me. Not quite as good as Hoyos and much older but, realistically, a stop gap whilst I try and develop some of my own young keepers.

Like for like, we have almost certainly decreased in quality except for at centre back:

• Izzo vs Villalba: comparison
• Medina vs Mendoza: comparison
• Carnesecchi vs Hoyos: comparison

Whilst it is no Kenwyne Jones for Peter Odemwingie swap deal, Serie A does have a history of using part exchanges - Cocu for Seedorf, Fernando Torres for Alessio Cerci (!!!), Roberto Carlos for Ivan Zamorano, Diego Simeone for Christian Vieri, Giampaolo Pazzini for Antonio Cassano, Andrea Pirlo for Andrés Guglielminpietro, Bonucci for Higuain and Caldara etc etc, which makes these moves - despite not being Serie A to Serie A feel more realistic. I'd love to know what other people think!

The takeaway from this is:

• All three incoming players are earning less than Pau Cubarsi - my highest earner on €70k p/w
• At present, none of the three incoming players are unhappy, whereas Hoyos and Villalba have, repeatedly, asked for new deals
• No money has changed hands so clubs I may have approached for signings won't be able to increase market values, knowing we've had significant windfall
• I have created parity within the quality of my squad, meaning that, whilst we may be weaker overall, we are not completely reliant on two players as we often have been.
• The board are likely to be unhappy as they will probably consider the P/Ex as a loss on the transfer fee as Villalba cost €17m and Hoyos cost €12m. I hope that this does not have long lasting implications.

In addition to these new faces, I also welcomed sixteen new players into my academy and, honestly, feel like I've been gifted by an absolutely excellent youth intake:

 Paolo Menciassi | Nemanja Mitrovic 

I love both of these players but require some quite intensive work from Menciassi before he can progress much further whilst the sheer size of Mitrovic will be a huge bonus in our backline, even if - right now - he does lack a little defensive awareness.

Diego Rondon | Angelo Luongo | Giovanni Ficara | Landry Bessala | Wessel van der Ende | Abdessamad Benhamou | Cristian Maggi | Riccardo Cisternino 

Of these, I actually dislike Ficara but, with the attributes he has, will try and turn him to a second striker. Of this liss, the Moroccan Benhamou looks like he could become a nice wing back as does Maggi on the other side. Whilst not reaching La Masia levels, yet, it does leave us with a stacked under 18 squad and gives me lots of thoughts to consider with those reaching the next level in the under 20 squad. Again, my learning tells me that each of these will react very differently to loans or exposure to first team so I need to consider things over the course of the next pre-season.

Forza Biancoscudati!

[Reiver]

Please teach Ficara to look for the pass rather that shooting!

[_Ben_]

3 minutes ago, Reiver said:

Please teach Ficara to look for the pass rather that shooting!

I'm just going to teach him to run, but not with the ball. His composure means that he literally cannot receive the ball within half a mile of an opponent as he's just going to get scared, or will have switched off and done something else in the meantime.

[keeper#1]

Harmonic mean?  Is this a math class or Football Manager?  

[_Ben_]

8 hours ago, keeper#1 said:

Harmonic mean?  Is this a math class or Football Manager?  

If you want a maths lesson - the harmonic mean is the mean of the reciprocals so 10 and 20 would produce a mean of 15 but become 1/10 and 1/20 which has a mean of 13.3. I saw someone use it on these boards years ago but I like it because it places more weight on the outliers, which, in my quest for ‘rounded players’ really helped!

[danyates8]

I've got some great memories of that Kenwyne Jones / Peter Odemwingie swap deal. Odemwingie was excellent for us down at Stoke. Excellent post again with some pretty savvy business dealings. 

[_Ben_]

1 hour ago, danyates8 said:

I've got some great memories of that Kenwyne Jones / Peter Odemwingie swap deal. Odemwingie was excellent for us down at Stoke. Excellent post again with some pretty savvy business dealings. 

I had completely forgotten about Jones but cannot forget the utter chaos of Deadline Day Peter! We'll see whether these moves are savvy or just really, really pessimistic as time goes on but it's been fun to explore a way of dealing that I haven't really done before, especially as it is something that seems more common in Serie A than elsewhere!

[Slipky]

Paolo Menciassi's my kinda guy. Lower determination than I would've liked but other than that I like him as a prospect.

Edited 10 hours ago by Slipky

[_Ben_]

25 minutes ago, Slipky said:

Paolo Menciassi's my kinda guy. Lower determination than I would've liked but other than that I like him as a prospect.

I like him. Must say that Abdessamad Benhamou is probably my favourite though, given how rounded his attributes are but I am already quite stacked in the WBR role, so may need to be creative.

[Slipky]

6 minutes ago, _Ben_ said:

I like him. Must say that Abdessamad Benhamou is probably my favourite though, given how rounded his attributes are but I am already quite stacked in the WBR role, so may need to be creative.

Could turn into a lethal, lethal prospect. Looking forward for future updates!

[_Ben_]

Season Eleven: Continental success, at last

Despite a confusing message from the board in regards to my youth setup, they continue to reject my approaches to make it any better. The long term aim for this academy can be summed up by this tweet, aove, that I saw last night: That is where I sit with my own philosophy. Yes, I want to win but, more than that, I'd rather win with players the club have developed in its image. With that thought in my head, I rounded off the remainder of the league season, with some success:

I've spent the past season or so trying to get through games a little quicker, developing the wider narrative of the Messinian brand and our own academy exploits and, as such, games have been played on key highlights and, maybe, I've missed some of the opportunities to perform just as well as we could have. That being said, we've been fairly fluid across the latter part of the season, dropping points away at Fiorentina in a pretty dour performance that was only matched by the relative hammering in the Coppa Italia final, whereby a strong, strong Inter team put us to the sword and restricted our attacking opportunities. If last season was marked by the development of the youth setup, this was marked by some gutsy transfer dealings, then next year will surely be the year that I look to put things together tactically once again, with a really new-look squad. We go into that period having recorded a record high league position:

Avoiding defeat against Atalanta before Monza themselves lost to Napoli meant that we wouldn't be demoted to sixth place and finish in the Europa League spots. Or, so I though. A Champions League place was given to use based on our overall co-efficient, which is an incredible achievement here. We managed to convert some of our draws from last year into wins and built on our strong defence, falling off ever so slightly in the scoring department. Napoli endured a tough season whilst the Milan sides put some space between them and the chasing pack, with the red half of the city continuing to cement themselves as the best team in recent Serie A history.

But there was slightly more to come, too:

I knew that Heerenveen would be a tough tie for me, given that they would be considered somewhat as underdogs and, more than likely sit off and make themselves really hard to breakdown. A variety of different tweaks to movement within the team - WCB(d) to L(s) and WB(au) to CWB(s), for example - was used to create overloads and freedom in movement to cause issues for them. Despite a missed penalty from Mirabelli, we created a host of chances and should've won by a lot more than we did, scoring late into the first period of extra time. Our second continental final and our first piece of silverware at this level shows the continued growth that this club is going through. It couldn't have been done without some outstanding performances, as seen below:

I'll start with my three departing players as it gives me incredible hunger to work with their replacements to try and achieve this level of success, and more. My top scorer, the best keeper in the league and an incredibly progressive and modern-thinking centre back, who have all featured heavily across their time here. Obviously, the goals from Villalba will be the hardest to replicate but, honestly, despite netting twenty-eight times, I feel that his fitness issues prevented him from being able to play successive nineties in a week. Hoyos, whilst feeling somewhat critical, often struck me as a little soft, palming shots into his net on several occasions across the season and, again, I'd never fully settled on a role that got the best from Mendoza - plus, it was super confusing having two men with the same surname!

However, digging a little further into this data, there are some other strong performances within the team and now that we're not necessarily a one man attack, I really hope that I can see more than this.

Biagioni isn't necessarily rated very highly but has come up time and time again as a player I can rely on. Contributing twenty-one times here shows his importance as a rotational option across different competitions. I do need to be very conscious that the Champions League is a different kettle of fish to the Conference League, though. Mirabelli has also shone and has a track record of scoring goals across his career and, surprisingly, has a really strong record for a striker in the air, despite his smaller stature. Lastly, and in what is almost a plea, I need to keep Zimmermann fit as he has shown his importance across the two half seasons he's played for us, even if he's underscored his xG this last season.

These three will become more important when you corroborate those who are leaving the club with the records that I've been keeping since we arrived in Serie A:

Pau and Amey are settled in the defensive trio whilst now I need to really consider whether Jacopo Lucenti is truly a first team player and, actually, whether Vinci is good enough to play here at all, whilst Hoyos' 130 90s will no longer be increasing. I've also lost my top scorer and, given that he'd decided to join Leeds rather than extend his contract here, the fourth placed man, Santi Farrera. Likewise, I'll be losing my top assister, Franco Carboni, as I allowed him to move on at the end of his deal and he'll be off to the MLS to see out his career.

In terms of what I want to achieve as a team, I have three key metrics:

Goals!

We need to score more and those goals need to come from more parts of the pitch. Of the 102 goals scored by my first team players last season, the two strikers - Mirabelli and Villalba - accounted for 40% of them, with 30% of the goals shared among twelve members of the team. That does lead slightly into the second metric - effective shooting. Of those who accounted for 40% of the goals, they only accounted for 25% of the total shots and, unsurprisingly, accounted for the two of the three players (with more than three shots) who accrued a shot xG of over 0.15. Three players in the team recorded a shot on target ratio of over 50%, but their average shot xG was 0.09, 0.16 and 0.18 - Amey, Vinci and Mirabelli, respectively. Conversion rates of 11.8% - Bellino, 8.5% - Lucenti and 0% - both Chester and Njoh suggest that the deep pivots have struggled, often shooting from range and to little success. We need to become more incisive and create more high quality chances across the team.

The next is control!

Our pitch tilt is pretty strong and we're the second best at not losing possession but then we're only converting that into the seventh best number of box passes and thirteenth best cross completion. We're stopping other teams from entering our final third but then not really progressing it, as much as we could anyway, into the opponents. I don't want to become a team that tries to walk it into the net but I need to convert our pressure into entries into the box rather than possession losses in the opponent's half and final third.

Forza Biancoscudati!