ceefax the cat

I've been whingeing about this for years too. It's ridiculous that, even if you wanted to try to scout realistically by looking at performance stats, the game makes it impossible by wiping everybody's data half way through the summer transfer window. There's basically no point using that data as things stand because the sample size is so small, except for a brief period towards the end of each season, that you're more or less flying blind. If all that data really is somewhere in the game and isn't just deleted then it would amazing to be able to access it. Failing that, a utility that spits it into a Google sheet at the end of each season would be fantastic. I like the idea of using skins like Hodr which are all about using stats instead of attributes, but until we have access to historical data (and maybe some more visualisations to make it more instantly digestible) then there really isn't much point. It's a shame because there's an easy step up in realism there for the taking.

That is simply not true is it I get your overall point though, such as it is

Yes, maybe that. Is there a list of season end dates lying around somewhere? Could set reminders to make saves the day before.

@snowofman Since you rather gratuitously deleted my thread asking for attributeless skin recommendations: I have no hope of it being included as a feature, since there are bugs that have been in the game for over a decade. I was more hoping someone had found a workaround, and I mentioned it because it's relevant to attributeless skins and the kind of people who would have looked for / found a workaround are the kind of people who would be into attributeless skins. I think it's pretty fair to bring it up in here tbh - probably the place with the most relevance and greatest chance of feedback. That was some rather OTT, trigger-happy modding if you don't mind me saying. Are you bored?

This looks fantastic. The only big weakness with playing the game this way is that, for some insane reason, all the historical performance stats disappear forever at the end of each season. If there was a workaround (for example, a way of automatically exporting it all to Excel just before the season ends, then that would change the game. Otherwise, you can only scout based on maximum 1 season's worth of data for each player, and you're flying completely blind until a good chunk of each season has been played. It's a huge weakness in the game.

I think I saw one on here a while back but it'd be good to know if there are more out there! I think the game should move more in that direction tbh. There are no 'attributes' in football, only performance. The number of finishes you tuck away IS your finishing attribute, no ifs or buts. There could maybe be some more auxiliary feedback from coaches regarding mental attributes, but a player's profile should pretty much be a collection of performance data over the course of his career. It's far more realistic to say "he got 70% of his shots on target and scored 38 goals in the Isthmian Premier" than "finishing 11 off the ball 14" Individual xG (and x-other things) would be very handy for this but the absolute key would be the game not deleting all performance data at the end of every season, which is just the most horrific design flaw imaginable from a realism point of view, and pretty much forces you to ignore performance data in favour of attributes while scouting. Do we have a way of dumping it all into Excel that doesn't take hours?

This stuff you built.... I'm interested! Care to share?

If only there was a way around the absolutely awful way performance stats for every player just disappear forever at the end of each season!!! It makes scouting / playing based on them (which is easily the most realistic approach) a mammoth pain in the arse.

I'm looking for a skin that's fairly transparent so I can see my lovely city / stadium backgrounds for longer than 0.5 seconds a week. Are there many of those around?

That's been an issue for.... I don't know, feels like literally 20+ years?? And this is the main issue I have - just the sheer number of annoying or buggy elements that remain exactly the same year after year. Top of the list would be player / staff / media interactions. They've always been nothing but an annoying, random way of ruining your career, and in the last decade or more they've changed not one jot, even down to the phrasing. Congratulating your player on winning an international cap and him somehow interpreting it as a personal attack etc etc... it contributes nothing to the gameplay, you're just relieved if somehow, for reasons you don't understand, you squirm through a meeting without annoying anyone. Most interactions feel like a box-ticking exercise with an unnecessary and arbitrarily severe penalty for stepping out of line. I'm amazed at how little the graphics have changed. They were pretty primitive-looking to begin with, like something from the very early 00's / late 90's. Just as with the interactions, you wonder whether anybody at any point in the last 15 years has actually tried to improve them. Tactics wise, there are some long-standing annoyances - 'mentality' and the restrictive player roles have nothing to do with football and should be abolished. Player positions are a mess - I can play MR perfectly but am clueless at AMR, or play DL and MR but have never heard of WBL... just very silly, pointless and easy to put right. I'm pretty sure this willingness to retain bugs and fail to make improvements year after year compares unfavourably to other games. I don't see why it should be that way, considering the price / sales figures. Perhaps someone can explain... On the positive side, the match engine has slowly improved over the years and that is the only reason I keep buying. The game really should almost be all about that. But it doesn't really excuse the glacial pace of progress in other areas.

I had a great league-winning campaign with two AF's who didn't remotely get in each other's way. It was a 4-1-3-2 with the strikers each staying wide and the MC arriving in the box between them. They made a decent number of assists for each other.

I've tried to do all this Ancelotti stuff. The problem is always basically that your defensive shape should be a Sacchi-like 4-4-2, but it's hard to represent the subsequent attacking positional shifts in FM. Especially Gattuso who's a narrow, ballwinning WM on the right and Seedorf who's a WP(a) on the left. It's also hard to get Pirlo to do his thing without leaving your defence a bit exposed. I feel like the FM regista is a bit too gung-ho, while the DLP(d) has this tendency to defend too deep and end up on the toes of the defence. A lot of Ancelotti sides do this and are similarly hard to simulate in FM. His Real Madrid defending as 4-4-2 but attacking as 4-3-3 is another one, but then you have a problem getting your striker to go wide enough and, once again, one of your wingers to tuck in narrowly enough and become almost a genuine MC.

I've had quite a successful career mostly playing with the defensive line and closing down as low as they'll go. We drop off, make sure to mark up in midfield and then counter / start with overlaps etc if that comes to nothing. No reason at all that it can't work. I add a bit of closing down on the wings, and sometimes a pressing forward helps but by and large everyone is just sitting off, restricting space and waiting for an opportunity to win the ball back.

that just sounds like voodoo from the future to me.... how the hell do you do it? Talk to me like I'm 5 etc

forgive me but are there instructions somewhere for making this happen? These are all absolutely amazing. If we could only sidestep the task of manually entering them into config.xml files the game would be well and truly changed!

An ethnicity project pack for coaches and other staff would be tremendous, if anyone feels moved to do that! Wish there was a way to generate config files for them so they just automatically fill a whole league / squad according to nationality. I wonder if there's anyone techie enough among us.... Is it even possible?

It'd be incredibly useful to be able to automatically return from holiday in certain situations, such as: - When a certain job or type of job becomes available - When offered a new contract - When offered an interview I'm sure there are others, but those three in particular would save a lot of time and make being unemployed 99% less tedious. Currently if you're looking for, say, a three-star reputation job in Europe, or a top-tier job with at least a 50k/w budget, you've no choice but to manually press continue, potentially for months, which is obviously incredibly unrewarding. To be able to give the assistant manager more detailed instructions regarding buying and selling players would be great too, rather than just 'reject all bids'.

Thanks! My team of Kazakhs has a lot more personality now

This is fantastic... I know I'm probably missing something obvious here but is there a guide to installing them somewhere? Especially for specific teams, as in, I'd like to make some for my current squad

In a perfect world, 'attributes' would mostly be performance-related stats, such as passes completed, tackle % etc, since that's the kind of thing clubs would actually use to evaluate a player. With maybe some comments like 'excellent first touch and awareness' or whatever. Not sure the ME is advanced enough to be using those things in FM though. I do like the idea of taking away the numerical attributes and ESPECIALLY the stars

I've no doubt interactions with the media and others will be a grindingly repetitive waste of time, 3D graphics will still somehow look like something from 1996, 'mentality' will still represent a weird, pointlessly obstructive membrane between the user and real tactics and lots of players will still be world class wingbacks yet clueless wingers, or elite advanced playmakers with as much idea of how to play number 10 as a goalkeeper, but I'll still probably buy the thing for some reason.

He said passing not pressing but nonetheless, what are those screenshots from?

Simple really. After a decade or so of game time, you're left with a world full of dodgy-looking regen faces. Why not take face pics of retired players below a certain reputation level (so you're unlikely to have seen them before) and assign those to regens? Maybe make it biased towards divisions you haven't managed in yet / as much. Alternatively, use an online tool like https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en to make convincing new ones?

"Mentality" affects every other instruction we give our players, in ways too opaque and unexplained for us to understand. And there is no such thing. Our instructions to our players should BE the mentality. In real life, if I tell my fullbacks not to go forward, my team to take no risks with the ball and waste time, put two holding midfielders in front of the defence, defend deep and close the opposition down on the halfway line, that constitutes a defensive approach. There is no 'attacking' version of that. In FM I can do all of those things and then somehow declare that my 'mentality' is in fact 'very attacking', which then alters all of my other instructions and causes my players to behave very differently, in ways that are never explained. Confusingly, I might even find that my team works better that way because otherwise I'd have been defending too passively and now my players are producing bright, sharp counterattacks when they do win it. It's totally counterintuitive, doesn't do what it says on the tin and has no real reason to be in the game. There just is no attacking version of a very defensive set of instructions, or vice versa, in real life. We should be telling our players literally, visually, what to do on the pitch in absolute terms and that should be the end of it. "Play direct passes and take more risks"...."Ok, but do you mean in a 'cautious' way or an 'attacking' one?" is a conversation that will never happen around any game of real football. We should be telling them simply what we want them to do: "Counterpress, send the fullbacks bombing on with plenty of width, get plenty of bodies into the box and sling crosses in, push up, recycle possession quickly, play at a high tempo, and don't waste any time please". Oh, then we must be attacking, no need to explain any more.... Except in FM all of that goes through the mysterious additional filter of 'mentality'. You might even find it counterintuitively works better on 'balanced' because 'attacking' results in your players trying to get forward too quickly. That is just unnecessary nonsense that has nothing to do with real football and, as we can see in the tactics forum, mostly just serves to confuse the hell out of people and make the game seem like a random black box, so they end up ditching any knowledge of football they thought they had and resorting to trial and error to try and pick their way through the counterintuitive UI. The fact that this one made-up, overarching instruction affects all player behaviour both in AND out of possession makes it even more nonsensical and restrictive . The fact that the most suitable mentalities for keeping possession are defensive while the most suitable ones for breaking forward quickly from deep are attacking highlights the dysfunction of it all, as does the fact that, if you go over to the tactics forum, you'll see very knowledgeable players using roles and mentalities in a way that is totally counterintuitive and contrary to the advice given in the game, more to mitigate the effects of 'mentality' than anything else. "Mentality" in football IS the instructions and there's no reason it couldn't be that simple in FM. It should be the next 'team shape' - a description, not an instruction.

It's a bit weird that we can only watch our tactics and set pieces in actual matches, given the whole point of training is to refine those things. It'd be good to be able to set up a tactic and then watch the first team try to execute it against the reserves for example, and especially useful to watch them try out corner and free kick routines so you can tweak them. It'd make training seem a lot more meaningful than it currently does.