turnip

Dude, it's called Fashion Manager 24, not Footba- Oh, huh

Half of these "wonderkids" will never be good enough to play in the Premier League. It's a media description within the game; it tells you nothing about the player except that his reputation is above a certain threshold. Much like real life wonderkids, in fact.

Season 11: Reggiana, Italian Serie B January Transfers Mats Brinkmann was a youngster we brought in last season from a random Austrian team for nothing; he wasn't integral to the team, or very highly-rated by our staff, so I was happy to collect. Salvatore Asara - after being a key player for us last season - had mostly featured from the bench; he agreed to join Benevento at the end of the season and we got £50k for letting him leave ASAP. Khaled Hadji was the subject of several bids during the window; I turned them all down but eventually Bordeaux made an offer the board couldn't turn down, so we negotiated an "I can live with this deal" arrangement with Lazio. Guychel Saka was brought in as cover at Centre-Back. I doubt he'll ever be great, but he was cheap and a reasonable player for right now. Swinnen is the replacement for Swinnen. He's a slightly different kind of player - more of an Inside Forward than a Winger - but also looks like he could develop really well if the circumstances work out. Pommella was brought in mostly because I needed a replacement for Hadji, but also because Verratti is only with us until the end of the season, so getting someone in who can start blending with the team is helpful. Meanwhile, Miladinovic came in from the Zeljeznicar you're not thinking of. Midfield reinforcements, with Pettena leaving on loan, but also adds a bit extra with set pieces. Again, probably won't ever be a great player, but could be someone quite interesting.

Season 11: Reggiana, Italian Serie B September - December Fixtures Yeah, me neither. My genius tactical masterstroke has consisted of - and you have to promise not to share this with anyone - playing Positive at Home and Attacking when we're Away. Apparently, this is sufficient for success. In fairness, we haven't only used our 4-3-3DM; we also broke out the 4-1-3-2 that I developed at Lusitania for shutting teams down, which, erm, kind of worked but not in the way it was supposed to against Salernitana and then did a bit better against Spezia. My view was that we are probably over-performing, and the xG table seems to confirm this. I expect our form to level off in the back-half of the season, if only because teams will start defending a bit more against us. We have had a fairly settled team, though. Like last season, I've mostly stuck with the same XI, the only regular change being at DC, since when I brought in our two loanees it had apparently escaped my attention that you can't have 3 DCs with "Important Player" status in a 2 DC-formation and keep them all happy unless you rotate them. Miele's manager has been on the phone a couple of times whining about me not playing him as a No-Nonsense Centre-Back; I've started ignoring his calls. Performances have been good, as you'd expect with the team's results. Puggelli didn't start very well, but mid-September I started playing him as a Roaming Playmaker and that was the springboard for him. Some of the interplay between him, Mbarga coming in off the right, Spasovski dropping deep and Larranaga or Ticinovic is really good to watch, even if it's not exactly intentional on my part. We've re-upped a few contracts in the lead-up to the January transfer window. I was delighted to get Alvarez on a new deal for the same wages, but with his MFRC increased from £190k to £1.5m (he originally wanted a £1.9m MFRC, but I traded that for wages). I'm not anticipating much transfer business, but we'll see what happens.

Fickle - 17 points Balanced - 16 points Model Citizen - 15 points Fairly Determined - 12 points

I'm making my way through this thread, but thought I could contribute here. I've got a tertiary save going in the 10th-tier of England, with the editor enabled, and one of my players made 17 points of CA improvement in a season. Playing well, in his best position, in a team that was winning regularly. But at a club with 1 for Training Facilities and with godawful coaches. I had three other players who made between 10-15 points of CA improvement in the same time.

I saw your screenshot in the other thread. City picked a team for the Champions League final... and won. Clearly a bug that needs fixing.

Your argument for how the game is too easy is that the AI doesn't over-play their best players until they fall over dead? Sure dude

Unless you're managing at a high level, you can often ignore staff ratings about players. Attributes trump CA (which is how your staff are rating Mbeka) until you get to the point where you start wanting well-rounded players. He's got decent attributes for a DM at your level who doesn't have to run around much, and the fact he can out-jump most players is probably contributing to his good performances. I'd give him the chance to play in the Vanarama National and see how he gets on; I reckon he'll be okay. League 2 might be a bit beyond him, though.

Season 11: Reggiana, Italian Serie B The summer brought about a need for a re-build. We'd cobbled together a good team for Serie C, but another year on, the carefully-curated Shortlists from my days in Portugal were a lot smaller. Turns out, when you can't afford to scout anyone, there's limited value keeping a tab on a lot of them. Serie B is also a bit of a weird league. The strength is usually pretty good, but there are usually a few teams who struggle for whatever reason and their morale goes in the toilet faster than you can say "man, that barium enema was horrendous" and they never escape. We didn't manage to renew any of our loans. I didn't try, either. The club apparently hadn't bothered negotiating a deal for Pellielo's clause, so that's still out there. (A shame; he's worth £13-20m, so we could easily get £5m+ to sell the clause). Meanwhile, the other two players got new contracts from their parent clubs. Transfers Veratti was the main sale. With a modest MFRC, I negotiated the initial transfer value down and - again - went for the 50% ONS clause, which both Empoli and some other club agreed on. He's with us for the season, on a 0% loan. Jallow was the Gambian we couldn't dump and wouldn't use, but we are at least rid of around half his wages, while Nocerina was another modestly-talented player on too much money. Spasovski is our new striker, and looks like a better-rounded player than Pellielo was (if early season form is anything to go by). With good, affordable, DCs in short supply, we got a couple in on loan who'll rotate with Alvarez. As soon as I saw Amir Gharbi, I smacked the "Offer Contract" button so hard, I think my mouse broke; he'll play DM mostly, but can do a good job at MC, possibly alongside Ticinovic who I was delighted to pick up for £50k. My coaches don't think he's great, but I think there's a lot to like. Mbarga, meanwhile, is cover for Spasovski up top, but will primarily be our livewire AMR - he's a bit one-dimensional, but sometimes you just need someone who runs around a lot. Another young player who caught my eye was Khalid Hadji. It's fair to say he has a high opinion of himself, asking for Regular Starter status before I negotiated down to Squad Player. Sometimes, players like him get generated with CA that's actually quite close to their PA, but if he's just a bit of a freak, he could be a hell of a player in a few seasons. Manuel Puggelli, our most expensive transfer, was probably the one I was least interested in - he came with repeated excellent scout reports which I kinda "meh"'d my way through, but we needed another MC and if he's actually got the potential for growth my scouts insist, he should be good value. Otomo, at the bottom of the list, is a Cameroonian (with French 2nd nat) whose agent was shopping him around on deadline day. He looks promising, if raw, but we don't really need him right now. He's going to spend a few more months on loan in Cameroon and join us in January. Hopefully he'll develop a bit in the meantime. August Fixtures A good start to the season. The two cup matches - against teams a division below and above us, respectively - were both fairly even games and the win over Torino we just about edged. The games against Bari and Perugia were both very one-sided; one in our favour, one against. I considered throwing the cup matches, but the next match isn't until December, so fixture congestion isn't really a thing. Attendances being absolute ******* definitely is, though, and the £9.5k money you get for playing is so contemptuous it's actually funny. Not all cups are created equally, but the ones in Italy were all created out of sheer spite.

I do think the game can be weighted a bit too much towards counter-attacks. Sometimes, though, particularly if you have quite a young team, your players will concede when you're on top just because your defense aren't concentrating enough (because they haven't had much to do).

Season 10: Reggiana, Italian Serie C/B I resigned from Lusitania Lourosa the day after our Portuguese Cup win and then mostly just waited for the extra leagues to become active. When they did, one club emerged as the most interesting choice. Reggiana - a club I've always considered pretty decent - had just finished 18th in Serie C/A and only avoided relegation back to Serie D (which they'd escaped two seasons previously) via the Relegation Playout. I knew about a couple of their players already - a promising striker and a somewhat primitive full-back. The rest seemed... okay, I guess, but I always struggle to work out how good players should be when I've dropped back from an excellent team to one that's a bit more bargain basement. The board wanted us to make the Playoffs, which would seem ambitious in most circumstances, but since half the league can make the Playoffs in Serie C, notsomuch. It did look potentially troublesome, as we got moved from Serie C/A to C/B which was - of course; SI will be SI - the league that two Serie B teams had got relegated into: Pescara and Modena. Transfers The first order of business was selling our promising striker. We got £65k + £50k in clauses, 50% of Next Sale and a season long loan back to us on 0% wages. We also let a bunch of utterly talentless young players leave for free. Paying someone £450 p/w to be worthless is silly. We signed a few new players to bolster the ranks and give us a bit more actual 'talent'. Enrique Alvarez, Roberto and Alex Larranaga were already on my shortlist while Ignacio Ferrer was brought in because our DMs were all awful. We ended up replacing our other MC with another loanee (joining Roberto in cyan on our squad list) I'd been monitoring for a while. Our front three, though, was made of three players at the club when I joined. Alessio Pellielo (the kid we sold, then loaned back) plus an AMR and AML. I turned down several bids for each of the wingers because the bids weren't very good and we'd have to pay a lot of money to replace them. We set up with a 4-3-3-DM to make the most of our 3 good players and give us some defensive solidity. I did try to sign a couple of players from Lusitania, but they weren't interested. Fixtures Of all the ways I thought the season would start, spanking Ancona 7-0 wasn't anywhere near the list. Our performances in the first three games were actually really helpful in telling me what we might be able to achieve. The fact we blew out all three teams helped me decide that the Serie C Cup - which I've always contended sucks ass - could suck ass. I like having 1 match per week for most of the season, thank you very much (especially after last season, my heart rate is still recovering from that) so we rotated fully for the loss in that stupid stupid stupid stupid competition. By October, it was fairly clear that Pescara would be our main competitors for the league, so I was happy with the exciting 3-3 draw with them. It doesn't take a genius to identify where most of our goals came from: Pellielo is one of those strikers who - if the Defense is good - he barely gets a kick, but he tends to drag defenders after him, creating space for other players (sidenote: it'd be good if FM actually recognised that as a good thing, but that's "ah well, nonetheless" territory). At the end of December, Ancona almost redeemed themselves for their opening-day humiliation, but we grabbed a last-minute winner. With 10 matches to go, it was still a two-horse race: us or Pescara. The single promotion slot is a killer because the Playoffs are so random. Also, it's always easier to get promoted the first season in an active league than 2-3-6-9 seasons down the line. We strengthened a little in January, with a bit of added depth on each wing and at DC/DM, and managed to offload a couple more hobos. Our highest-paid player - a Gambian ST of no discernible talent - was just too highly-paid to leave without causing a massive fuss, so we had to arrange for a transfer only after the window closed, and with the agreement to pay a hefty chunk of his wages. The second half of the season wasn't quite as impressive as the first, but we were able to keep our noses ahead of Pescara long enough for their form to fall off. Ours did, too, but where they subsided to late defeats, we managed to cling on for draws. The 3-3 against Gubbio saw me spend most of the match screaming things at my computer that the mods say I'm not allowed to post on the forums: having pulled back from 0-2 just before half-time to take the lead, we conceded a late equaliser. The game against Viterbese a few days later wasn't any better. The Serie C Super Cup, when it rolled around, was just as pointless as everything else. Once you've already clinched promotion, who even cares about something like this? Youth Intake Mostly pants, but with a couple of decent prospects and one very promising one. Stefano Russo is probably more of a ML at this time than a DL, but I'm going to see if we can train him to be a DL, given the generally desperate state of full-backs in FM24. His technical attributes aren't far off being good enough to do a job for us as is. Fabio Russo (no apparent relation) is just someone who looks like he could be a decent player when he's older and get the odd substitute appearance next season if all goes well. Summary Job done as far as this season was concerned. Like I said, getting promoted the first season a league gets fully simulated is a real bonus since it saves a lot of hassle. We'll have a substantial rebuilding job in the summer, since there's a lot of dead weight in the squad and not much wage budget, even with the increased allowance that comes from promotion. Our scouting has also been limited this season because the financial situation is pretty bad, so we haven't really developed much of a shortlist. On the plus side, though, I did get my Continental Pro license, so now I'm as good as I'll ever get as a coach, combined with having a great reputation.

Nah, you need at least 400k+ for a decent save, imo

Yeah, the combination of having a high contract and being at a really successful club - with high reputation - is probably stopping most clubs making an offer.

The way the game sorts out newgens is intentionally kept really opaque by SI. I've been playing the game for more or less 30 years and I can kind of understand how it works, but so much depends on how your save is set up that it's functionally impossible to explain what happens in any single player's save.

It depends what kind of team you want to build. If you want to stack your team with players who are as good as you can get, then you'll probably have to offer new contracts at minimum every 18-24 months. Start with your best, or most irreplaceable players, and work backwards from there. This should mean that whatever money you have available for contracts always goes on the most important players. For players were you can't keep them or don't want to keep them, try to identify these guys - again - 18-24 months in advance of their contract running out. This gives you plenty of time to either give them a run in the team in the lead-up to a transfer window opening, find them a loan to do much the same thing, or start shopping them around. The exception here is if you've got a very talented youngster who's improving. Here, if there's already interest, you can usually get away with waiting until 12 months before his contract expires. But, I'm talking "very talented" here - 'good for League 2' won't be good enough unless clubs think he'll be good enough for the Premier League.

Season 9: Lusitãnia Lourosa, Portugal, Liga Portugal Bwin End of Season update We played a lot of matches between the start of February and the end of the season. I mean... a lot. On 6 separate occasions, we had a single day of rest between matches. It's genuinely one of the few times playing FM I've actually felt justified in having the sort of insane squad size we have. We were able to rotate - and rest - enough that we never really got slammed by the kind of injury crisis that you might expect. Still, in the spirit of having a truly bonkers number of fixtures, I'm going to break with my usual update style and talk you through each. and. every. one. So you have to suffer as well. February 2-1 vs Moreirense, League Cup Semi-Final The Second XI were awful in the first half, but we made some tactical changes in the second half to turn it around and grab a late winner. The win was undeserved but not the criminal act it threatened to be. 1-0 vs Moreirense, League 17-year old debutante Ivan De Rosa, playing in place of the injured Souleymane Mendy, scored after 27 seconds and then neither team did anything notable for the rest of the match. Zzzz. 0-1 vs Porto, League The Second XI stank up their second match in succession, creating almost nothing. They did at least stink so bad that Porto couldn't create much either. 4-1 vs Rio Ave, League 70% possession, 25 shots, 2.86xG (to Rio Ave's 0.48) and Marcel Ribera on a tear. What's not to like? 1-1 vs VTSC, League An own-goal after 40 seconds gave us a lead but we were never any better than our opponents and a draw was a fair result 3-1 vs Monaco, Champions League We absolutely robbed Monaco blind, scoring from our only 2 shots on target and getting a lucky own-goal to really squeeze some lemon into the wound. 1-0 vs Porto, League The Second XI conspired with Porto to produce the second fetid fart of a match in 2 weeks. Bucur came off the bench to score a bullet header from a corner in the only moment of value in the match. 4-1 vs Monaco, Champions League 61% possession, 21 shots, 3.03xG (to Monaco's 0.77) and Marcel Ribera on a tear. What's not to like? Augustin Barlocco - our WBL - utterly shredded Monaco's DR, his international teammate, throughout the match. March 4-0 vs Boavista, League We kicked March off by watching the Second XI breeze past a poor Boavista team. 6-0 vs Benfica, League Benfica's Head Coach clearly doesn't value squad depth. His team were knackered after a mid-week match against Newcastle and we were not. 2-1 vs Milan, Champions League In an unusual development, we struggled for possession, but a change of formation gave us enough chances to grab a late winner on the night. 3-0 vs Oriental, League A dominating first-half performance saw me trot out the old "Don't let your performance drop" team talk and we created ****-all in the second half. 0-1 vs Milan, Champions League I chose the wrong tactical setup and we created basically nothing for the entire match. We were lucky to hold on for penalties and our eventual win. 3-2 vs Leixoes, League We were sublime in the first half, genuinely playing some of the best football of the season. We were then absolute ******* in the second half and I had to bring on Mendy and go old-fashioned Gung-Ho to grab the win. April (is the cruellest month) 2-1 vs Santa Clara, League Jovicic managed the impressive feat of scoring all 3 goals in a 2-1 win. Well done? 3-3 vs Barcelona, Champions League Assuming we'd get pummeled if we went with the same tactical gameplan as in the league stage, I sent us out attacking and it worked pretty well! Goals for both Wing-Backs is a rarity I always enjoy seeing. 2-0 vs Braga, League Two days later, we visited the 3-sided stadium and in a fairly boring game we took our two good chances to - if not steal - then at least pinch the win. 5-1 vs Famalicao, League Two days after that, we got 3 early goals against a usually pretty good team, their CM responded with a studs-up flying red card and we could ease up for once. 2-2 vs Barcelona, Champions League A blessed two full days of rest sent us into this match with decent fitness and we responded with another good performance. The tie going to penalties was a fair result given the closeness of both games. 5-1 vs Portimonense, League In which Bernardo Morgado had a bit of a moment. We will speak no more of this. 0-0 vs Porto, PT Cup I set the team out to avoid losing and that's what happened. Yet another fairly even game between [spoiler] the best two teams in the league. 2-2 vs Porto, League Cup FM's "back-to-back matches against the same team makes for better drama" generator needs a new trick. I suspect Porto are as tired of facing us as we are of them. We were the better team, but Roko Stanic missed his penalty and the dream was over Oh, sorry, this cup sucks balls. Who cares? 2-2 vs PSG, Champions League Mildly astonished to find the crybabies of Paris proudly strutting a 7-3 formation (oh, the ambition), we rocked up with a 5-2-2-1, took an early 2-0 lead and then held on fairly comfortably for a draw. They edged the xG, but they did have two tap-ins. May (and I don't know what's real any more) 1-0 vs Rio Ave, League Souleymane Mendy got his first MVP award of the week with a back post header right at the end. Did we deserve it? HAVE YOU SEEN HOW MANY MATCHES WE'VE PLAYED?!?!?!?!?! OF COURSE WE ****ING DESERVED IT. 2-1 vs PSG, Champions League Having learned the usual amount from the first leg, PSG paraded their 7-3 formation like a young Kate Middleton definitely not trying to snag a prince at a certain fashion show. You can't be upwardly-mobile when you're PSG, though, and Mendy won it with a stonking free kick and another sweet finish. His celebration for the second goal - rowing backwards across the pitch - was a new one on me, I'll admit. Great animation, though. 2-1 vs Feirense, League We completely outplayed Feirense in both halves, but struggled to put our chances away. Thankfully, we have talent all over the pitch, even in the Second XI. We clinched the title with this win. The cutscene involving the president and the open-top bus got a bit surreal towards the end, but how we laughed. 1-0 vs Braga, League The bestest, most brilliantish gatch of ballfoot with the corner flag oh god not these guys again Marcel Ribera 1-1 vs Sporting, League Hej, det er assistentræner, Morten Davidsen. Vi sendte et hold af hovedsageligt 17/18-årige spillere ud til denne kamp, og en uafgjort 1-1 var nok et retfærdigt resultat. 2-2 vs Estoril Praia Spillerne afsluttede ligakampagnen med en dårlig 2-2 uafgjort på Estoril Praia. Manageren er blevet sendt på ferie for hans velbefindende, og da han spurgte resultatet, fandt vi på noget for at holde ham glad PT Cup Final 3-0 vs Estoril Praia, PT Cup Final A couple of weeks after our plain-tuckered-out players struggled to beat the same team, our Second XI quite convincingly beat them 3-0. Champions League Final Rodriguez was a surprise to see here. He's a DL whose level is probably at a mid-table Portuguese Premier League team. We signed Pusnik last season, but loaned him back to Koper for the campaign. His PA has dropped from 5 to 4 stars in the last couple of months, but he still looks decent. The other 4 players are probably legit picks, although I was surprised to see Baldwin above Yalike-Balie, who's just a much better player. Youth Intake Not much depth, to say the least, but Vando Fiteira is legitimately bonkers, and Barry McKeown looks pretty good as well. It's worth providing a little context to show just how good Fiteira could be if his PA is a fair representation. Francisco Marques and Marcel Ribera are considered by my coaches to be our best players, each rated at 4.5 stars. So Fiteira could be better than them. Summary Summarising the season is a bit tricky. We overachieved in Europe, that's for sure. We got a bastard hard league stage draw, battled through and then had to face the expected level of bastard-hard fixtures at the sharp end. Did we get lucky? Yes, and probably got more good luck than bad luck. That said, in a season with 63 matches, we played 39 of them between 5th January and the end of the season. In a quest to get the true essence of this hardship, I turned to the most objective thing possible: MATHS. And Excel. Between the start of the season and the end of December, we played 24 games in 149 days: a match every 6.2 days. Between the 5th January and the end of the season, we played 39 games in 150 days: a match every 3.85 days. So, to reiterate what I said all the way at the top of this update: that is a lot of games. I have no illusions about the strength of our first team. We have a very good first team. Is is among the best in Europe? Almost certainly not. But, if you're playing a match every 3-4 days, many of them quite tough, it's not really about whether your best XI is great. It's about your squad. And, as the title of this thread asserts, we have many players and much squad depth. To make this visual. That's every player on the books at our club who is rated 4.5* or higher for PA, where 4.5 stars is allegedly "World-Class". As it happens, I disagree on that label. I think Ribera and Marques are both excellent players who'd make the squad at most top clubs, but they seem a little way off World Class to me. Still, having 27 players be considered contenders to match or surpass that is pretty impressive. Plus, we have 6 transfers already agreed for players who'd add to that number. In terms of the actual season, we had 5 players hit double-figures for goals - Morgado, Madureira, Stanic, Mendy and Ribera - and 5 players hit double-figures for assists - Rebelo, Mendy, Rodrigues, Madureira and Barlocco. Mendy got our highest average rating. It's funny that Ribera is considered our 'best' striker, since if we need a goal late on, it's Mendy I bring on as a sub if they're both on the bench. There's the fact he's strong in the air or with the ball on the floor, or that he can play AM R/L as well as up-top. He's also just a bit of an overall beast when he's playing well - I've seen him track back almost to the edge of our area to close a player down. Ribera has his moments, and on his day he's phenomenal, but he also seems quite easy to mark out of the game. Random Player Showcase(s) Gil Yaliké-Balie was signed from CFDFA in Ivory Coast for £10k (lol). We agreed the deal when he was 16 and by the time he signed, he'd played basically 2 seasons in their first team and had developed really well. He's been at Ac. Viseu this season and has continued that trajectory. He's still a little raw, but he looks amazing. Mariano Cortés was relatively expensive for a pick-up from lower-league Spain, at £1.8m. He's had a couple of good loan deals this season and last and now looks like the player I was hoping he could be. He'll still benefit from some top-flight experience, but if he's got enough potential to use up, he could be a real game-changer. Next steps Right up to the point we beat Arsenal, I was thinking about having another season to see if we could build and improve. Now, I'm not sure. There is the World Club Cup, I suppose, but gods alive I hate that tournament. I've queued up a few extra leagues to become active in the next couple of months. I think what I'll do is move on, but create a backup save in case I want to come back at some point in the future.

Sorry, that post wasn't supposed to go here. It was supposed to go in the thread I quoted from. Not sure how that happened - magic, maybe. But yeah, in my save I have every possible league loaded at least to 'View-Only'. The game is slow, but it works for me.

Oh, okay, I guess I must be mistaken, then. No, it turns out that I'm not mistaken. That's the last 3 seasons of my team; anyone sold for more than £1m. Selling players is, in fact, pretty easy if you're not paying them more than any other team can reasonably offer in wages.

You can sell to teams in inactive leagues, but in my experience they are a lot less active and loaning to teams in inactive leagues is really tough. If you don't plan on managing in a different country, I would recommend setting the added leagues to "Viewable". That way, they're simulated in more detail and the clubs will be more active when it comes to transfers.

Jamal slowly gets out of bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, pulling his fluffy slippers on and drawing back the curtain. He checks his watch. 'Ah', he thinks to himself. 'That's a minute of the day wasted. Easiest £44 I ever made.' A grin forms on his cherubic face. 'Since yesterday, anyway.' 'Sure, the boss wants to get rid of me, and no-one wants to pick up my beautiful wages... but still; getting paid £220 for the five minutes it takes to eat breakfast feels good.' Later, he'll show up for training 10 minutes early. The look of rage on the Head Coach's face every time he sees Jamal around the club him is glorious, and totally worth it. 'Life's good, man.'

How is your game set up with other leagues? If it's just the leagues in the country you're playing in, there won't be that many options to loan players out. The teams in your league won't want your youngsters, and if it's Germany, that only really leaves one league below to send players on loan to, and then you're competing against other tier 1/2 teams. If it is just the one country's leagues you have loaded, and loaning out players is important to you, add some extra leagues.

Welp

I'll also point out that in any given Premier League season you can basically get your "there are too many matches" Bingo card out and start checking off the names of Premier League Head Coaches who are whining about their players being tired/injured/sad because playing two games in a week is too much. Plus, if you want your players to play two matches in a week, give them the week off training. You're Arsenal; your first team is already very good and aside from tactical-specific stuff (Set Pieces, etc) they're not getting much benefit from training.

Okay, SI have said that the "Focus down the ___" instruction results in players getting really tired really quickly. There's your problem.