fat mole

Always thought pace was overpowered due to something else, the relative lack of fast players in lower leagues vs top flight compared to how common that is in real life. There's obviously more top class speed merchants in the upper echelons of football but not to the degree that is presented in FM. It's as though SI know how powerful pace is within the game so give players who are better mentally and technically an extra boost with added pace as that makes a big difference in the match engine. Physicals are actually where lower league players match up relatively well compared to better players, perhaps not for the whole game (stamina) and there's other reasons why PL players will beat them to the ball (anticipation, positioning). There's 147 Premier League players with 15+ pace, 5 in the Vanarama National in a new save I just created. That's just unrealistic. In a sprint race involving all players in both leagues there's no way there'd only be 5 from that division in the top 150 finishers. They'd come out worse than their PL rivals, but it wouldn't be by anywhere near that much. There's also only 16 Vanarama National central midfielders (natural position) out of 164 with a faster top speed than Christian Eriksen (11 pace). 12 are faster by 1 point and 4 by 2 points. There are more than 9.75% of players in that position who have a better top speed than him in that league IRL. He'd completely outplay them in other areas of course. There's 10 Vanrama central defenders out of 162 faster than Harry Maguire in game, all of them by 1 point. I don't think that's remotely true either compared to the real world.

Depends how deep they go down the ladder for me. I usually like to play in England simply because it's 6 divisions deep. Doubt they're going to do that. There's always custom databases, which may or may not work well with women's leagues. Only went custom for my first time this season in men's as 6 tiers was no longer enough. If the game accurately refelcts some of the awful women's teams it might be a fun challenge to play as one of them. Going through WSL stats, the bottom team has finished on 6 points, 11, 11 & 12 from 22 games the past 4 years. There was Sheffield United in the English men's top flight doing similarly poorly this season but that sort of disparity seems to happen more often in the Women's top division. Edit: Looking further, Sporting Huelva have 6 points from 27 in La Liga F, 2 teams are on 13 from 22 in the French women's top league, MSV Duisburg women's team have just 4 from 21 in Germany. If they put really bad teams in the league that like that it could be fun!

Bit random, and I'm not necessarily advocating for a change because this would probably reduce the enjoyment for most players. From a realsim point of view players seem to hit hit the target with shots much more often than in the real-world. Just something I noticed. In-game: Reality:

Thought I had a bug in my save as I had 2 players in my squad valued at £0. Couldn't figure it out but concluded it was because of club and player reputation. Quite sure I'm correct when I say that, feel free to correct me though! Background: Playing with a team called Fairford Town after downloading an extended English League database. They're a tiny club with awful facilities in everything. Started in the English 9th tier and am currently about to start our 2nd season in the Vanarama National League - the 5th tier. We're renting a stadium as ousr wasn't even good enough for the 6th tier. There's no history at all with this club and club rep is now around 2600. It was approximately 1300 when first starting the save. For the past 3 seasons I noticed we had a player stuck on £0 valuation. I'd get lots of bids for him of £0 but they were always from teams he didn't want to move to so it wasn't such a big deal. I don't know if the clubs a player was with previously impacts player rep, but he came up with Stoke as a youth player which seems fairly good compared to our level of club. For reference he's a real-life player called Ian Togo. We've just let him go to Macclesfield in the 7th tier as we have better players now. Obviously he's more valuable to them, and there's a new signing factor, he's suddenly worth £20-£190k. More annoying was a Newgen we signed last season. Picked him up from an Irish amateur team called Home Farm and he was starting in midfield for us. He would have done this season too but I decided to let him go after he and his teammates were unhappy with me for not letting him move. I wanted to keep the squad harmony in tact in the end. We were getting £0 bids from teams 2 and 3 divisions above us. He was regarded as a star player for us, had 2 years remaining on his contract (part-time) and in-game it was saying he had a lot of potential to improve etc. He went to QPR in the Championship in the end and slotted into their U21 squad. His valuation is now £100k-£1m. Like I said, thought it was bug, but delved into it and these 2 players had the lowest reputation of any of our players. First player rep was just under 1000 and still is, second one was just over 1000 but has immediately jumped to Home 1821, Current 2476 after moving. Their reputation and ours played a huge part in all that by the looks of it. I do find it a bit silly though, or paradoxical even. Putting what happened into a real-world kind of context, the second guy was famous enough to be known, wanted and assumedly scouted by Championship and League One clubs, yet his 'reputation' was the second lowest of all our players? He must have a reputation for these clubs to even be aware of him, and a pretty good one for them to want to sign him! Maybe they need to call 'reputation' something else? This siutuation with the second player was a bit of an immersion breaker for me. Using this custom database and starting with a tiny club in it almost certain played a part in things, but I'm sure similar could be encountered in the standard game too. Found it all a bit disappointing. If you're good enough to be wanted by QPR, albeit their U21s, you really shouldn't have the lowest reputation and valuation in my squad. I've received small fees of around £10,000 for 2 worse players with less potential this summer in-game, and the most I could get for him is £0. Realistically he should be our record sale.