Yellowbucket58

I find getting wide players to score depends more on the player at your disposable rather than the tactic used. The only time I’ve really had success using a prolific goal scoring winger (25+ non-penalty goals) in any FM save was with Mbappe (20 pace/acc with crazing mental and technicals) and a Regen that had amazing technicals/mentals coupled with good pace/acc and monstrous aerial ability. Other than the type of players mentioned above you’ll be hard pressed to get a winger to consistently scoring 20+ np goals year after year. If your wide player is getting anything north of 13+ non penalty goals coupled with some creativity I think that’s pretty great and in line with what world class wide players are producing nowadays. Other than maybe young Ronaldo, Messi and Mbappe don’t really think there’s been a consistently prolific wide player. Maybe Salah, but after that crazy first season he’s usually averaging around 16-19 non penalty goals, which I think is definitely reproducible given you have a player of his ability in game.

While I do agree pace/acceleration are extremely important in the ME, it’s only really necessary on wide players. Central positions are more than fine without elite pace. This does not mean Pace/Acceleration is properly balanced but success can be easily had with players not considered meta.

I would definitely drop the wingers back to DM strata as wingbacks along with the overlap instruction as it’ll increase the wingbacks mentality slightly. Currently running a 3421 with some good wingers turned wingbacks and they’re good for 15+ G/A while also tracking back to form a back 5 which gives some nice solidity. In your set up they won’t track back naturally unless you’re manually using Opposition instruction to press/mark the opposing attacking winger/wingback and even that isn’t as reliable.

It’s really hard to get wingers to score 30+ league goals in this years FM as it is in real life I suppose. I’ve also tried to maximize that position in this years FM but the IF usually caps out at around 20 non-penalty/set piece league goals with a regen player similar to Salah’s abilities ,which is the same output as Salah after that crazy season. The only time I’ve consistently had a IF consistently score around 30+ non-penalty league goals was with Mbappe (Crazy Mixture of Pace/Technicals/Mentals) or as mentioned by @crusadertsar a IF regen that was as dangerous on the ground as he was in the air (Ronaldo). In my experience the hardest part is finding the player rather than getting the desired scoring output.

Sounds great! Wonder if the “extra motivation” to meet goals is tied to the player morale or something else under the hood that accounts for said motivation during a match.

I do think the ME is good but boy does it produce a lot of the same goals. The most common goal scored I’ve seen is a midfielder simply hoofing it over the top of the defense, where the forward then runs into space and scores. Kinda frustrating and boring.

It’s nice to know they fixed or at least tweaked newgen generation. Some of the regens, if not most of them had really strange attribute spread. Attributes such as crossing, dribbling, heading, finishing were at a premium as soon a save progressed 15+ years and the database was mostly all regens. It doesn’t really affect the user as they are able to retrain and focus on certain attributes to improve, but the AI doesn’t really do that, so it lead to AI teams using players in positions and roles they didn’t have proper attributes for. For example, as a save progresses there’s always a dearth of wingbacks/fullbacks with proper crossing/dribbling, and because the AI isn’t really developing these attributes they’ll play players with abysmal ratings in said attributes, which probably isn’t great for the AI team’s performance across seasons. I’ve been able to manually fix this with a mass editor that allows me to tweak the ratings of regens, and it overall does a good in balancing regen attributes. Here’s a report I did on regen attribute spread, which should come in handy when testing for this years changes. Will report what I find.