Jack Joyce

Hey! As noted on the images - these are taken from design files. The 2D match you're seeing there is just a mockup image and not anything from build (pretty sure it's just an old screengrab of the FM24 2D match).

Don't get much time to respond to things on the forums recently - but just wanted to say this is a really interesting discussion so thanks for all your thoughts on the CB roles. It's great food for thought.

From what I remember it factors into the speed at which they're able to identify the roles the opposition are playing. So you'll be left in the dark for longer if your staff are worse.

AI managers can use the Libero role, but currently only if it's set as a preferred role by the researcher. This is essentially how it's designed yeah, your staff are watching the match and feeding back to your on what roles the opposition are using. We believe info like this is really important because where FM differs to real life quite significantly is, in FM you're watching highlights. If you're on key/extended highlights then you don't see the full picture like a real manager would, so you need a bit more information to fill in the blanks.

The partnership lines are reflective of the player's past performances when used together, and don't impact performance directly. So a good link just means that the two players tend to perform well when used in a partnership (get good ratings).

No worries! This clip from Luke Williams was really interesting and about a similar topic https://x.com/LowerTiers/status/1727315641747886161?s=20

This is actually normal and how most clubs and data companies track corner goals - a corner goal isn't just a goal scored directly from the taker's kick, it's a goal from the corner phase of play. Otherwise no short corner or 2nd phase play would ever be considered a corner goal.

If it's just those two leagues then it's likely because there's something specific about teams/players in those leagues that makes them different to other leagues. We'd need to identify that really to know what to change, but it's likely a research/data thing causing it.

The ME uses the full range of attributes, which can vary over time depending on tons of factors such as consistency, big matches, morale/body language etc. What this means is that your 18 finishing striker won't always be 18 finishing 100% of the time, for example if they're inconsistent they may sometimes be playing like a 13 finishing striker for portions of the match. In terms of playing styles though, there's nothing stopping you from playing any style really based on level of play. The football you're playing is relative and that's important to remember, for example Notts County in the National League last season played a very Pep-esque possession system that received a lot of plaudits, and Barrow did before them at the same level as well. Now, that doesn't mean they're as good as Man City! But relative to the opposition they're playing, they were extremely capable of keeping the ball and building attacks from back-to-front.

The changelog tends to just be a summary of the key changes, but there's nothing major left out of the list. There's often fixes for knock ons to other fixes that hadn't been public yet etc. That we don't list or just combine into a single line. We didn't make any changes to attacking movement, most of the changes were to do with set pieces tbh. The only change between beta and the next ME was reducing injuries to GKs.

I have no idea sorry, I'm all about the Match Engine so when it comes to this sort of thing I know as much as you do. Best to report it as a bug in the bugs forum and someone will let you know.

It's certainly unique but we feel it creates the best metric - if we based our xG numbers on real life finishing then it's never going to be as accurate within an FM world as when trained on FM data, even though we obviously always strive to make our finishing as close to real life as possible anyway, there'll always be slight differences. But it also gives us a lot of added benefits when covering leagues where data coverage isn't the best, for example in lower leagues or in womens football it's very difficult or nigh on impossible to get the level of real-life data our xG models require. But when training using FM data we can play all the matches we like, as many times as we like with all the data that we could possibly ask for.

We run a ton of simulated matches via an automated tool which updates our xG data. We then push that data into the next update so all your xG will update immediately for the next match you play. Old matches played on an older ME will use the old xG data still, any new matches will use the new xG data. What it means though is that if finishing was better in a new engine, the xG would be higher per shot to reflect that, so you can't really use xG to identify better or worse finishing from a game balance POV since it's baked into the data in the first place.

You can believe what you like, but I'd suggest that you need a lot more than one or two matches to draw any sort of conclusion over there being a lack of goals in the new engine or not. You don't have to go back very far to see real-life matches with these exact sort of situations - PSG v Newcastle only a couple of days ago had an xG of 4.54 for PSG, and they needed a very questionable penalty to even score once. If a team never performed under their xG then football would be very boring!

Just so people are aware, FM's xG model is trained on FM match data from the latest engine. So the xG stat will adapt to the finishing of the current engine automatically and is not likely to be representative of any changes to finishing or chance conversion between versions.

Yes, goals are lower following the ME changes as a result of defensive improvements and tweaks to heading accuracy when players are being challenged directly by a defender. For example in the Premier League, total goals per game went from around 3.1 per game to about 2.84 which should hopefully be a pretty good balance.

Full detail matches are played out decision-by-decision (of which there's 4 per second per player), whatever happens happens, we don't have anything like X % chance of winning that gets adjusted. So when there's a red card, we just play out the match with 10 v 11 and see what happens. It might be that the team with 10 sit back a bit more which can make it a bit harder to create open-play chances depending on your system and team.

Would need to see specific examples - but I wouldn't call what Evidence Based FM does "proof" by any stretch of the imagination. I've been sent their stuff before. For example in the post you're replying to - Marking absolutely does have an effect in the ME, almost every aspect of tracking runs and defending against dribbling factors in marking. It can be very easy for misinformation like this to spread from flawed tests, often without much scrutiny on how those tests were carried out.

As has been said above, there's so many variables at play, even when playing two teams who are using the same formation. The best thing you could do is a large series of matches against the exact same team with the exact same lineup and conditions, only changing the instructions in question. This way any statistics you collect are about as consistent as you can make it, and with a sufficient enough sample size to rule out... just bad luck.

OPPDA is probably one of the best examples of a stat that can be interpreted/implemented in hundreds of different ways, depending on provider. But other stats such as xG, 'big chance', clearance, dribble etc. are all oftentimes just subjective, down to the interpretation of the person recording the stats and can differ between providers. As an example, some providers don't use xG to decide what a 'big chance' is, instead it's just down to the person recording the stats to decide whether it feels like one to them. Some providers even use this kind of subjective 'big chance' statistic IN their xG calculations! Comparing stats between different providers can be a dangerous game. For OPPDA, not just the location of the pitch you use, but also simply how you define a 'defensive action' in the first place will have a huge impact on how the resulting stat comes out. I generally wouldn't recommend comparing this stat to real-life providers, instead just using it to compare different teams within the gameworld and seeing if the teams that are low/high feel right based on how they are playing.

If you are on Very Attacking mentality in added time then your goalkeeper will join attacking corners automatically. We may in future add an option to disable this functionality, in case some managers don't want their keepers ever going up for them, but allowing a goalkeeper to attack every corner regardless of match context is not supported in the new system and there's not really a realistic use-case for it. There should also be nothing prevent you from choosing where players go for each corner (other than the goalkeeper thing above).

There is short-term condition which drains when a player is running at speed, and they'll need a break to recover it. This is separate to the 'overall' condition you see on a player. Oftentimes when you see a player slow to track back, or your team waiting for the next pressing trigger, they're recovering their short-term condition.

Definitely worth posting these examples in a bug thread, ideally with a save game right before the negotiation if possible. They really help a lot with this kind of stuff QA will investigate it in detail to see if there's any issues under the hood

It's not my area to be honest - but in situations like this I think it'd come down to the player's hidden attributes, how ambitious they are etc. Some players would be happy in this situation (Foden), and others won't be (Palmer). It's a tricky balance and obviously it's never a nice position to be put in as a manager. But it's the sort of story that's nice to tell in FM since it's a common problem in football, with players like Balogun as well at Arsenal.

Not saying there's not issues with this stuff - but realistically speaking is this that bad? It seems like a case where a player wants regular first-team football, and you're rightly not willing to offer it. It's not that unusual for a player to rate themselves higher than you might do. Bit like Cole Palmer leaving City to Chelsea. He was valued at City but wanted to be a regular starter and City wouldn't guarantee that. The only real solution is to sell them, right? But obviously you can make a bug report for anything you see, and the team will check it all.