[Reasons for Walking Away]

On 14/09/2021 at 03:51, Harper said:

Reminds me of a suggestion I made a while back.

Basically, I think there could be more "pre-negotiation" interaction to gauge what the player/agent is thinking.

Yes. To be honest, we already get that when doing a contract with players from outside the club ("ask agent about availability") - so I agree there's no reason we shouldn't have it when doing a contract with players who are already inside the club. In many cases should already have some kind of existing relationship with their agents from having done their previous deal.

[[Discussion] Improving International Management]

I'd love an improvement of the international experience if you're NOT managing an international team: namely, if you are managing a top flight club team during a summer break - or if even you're unemployed - and there's an international tournament, and you have the trait of a "media friendly manager," it's likely that you would be employed as a studio pundit on a one off or ongoing basis. Benitez, Mourinho, Klopp (in Germany), Wenger, Martinez, etc - all do this. Even ol' Tony Pulis. The game already asks us some of our thoughts on international fixtures, but in order to properly give our thoughts there should really be an overhaul of the PR experience.

Right now, even as a manager you get the same 8-10 questions throughout the season depending on your general performance and it's really tiresome. The international experience could be improved for international managers, club managers, non-managers etc by drastically increasing the amount of realistic questions that come up in a general tournament media session (e.g. "this guy is playing great for his country, why can't he do that for his club?" "this guy is a dual national, do you agree with his choice to pick X country?" "is this the kind of player you would love to work with?"), which would then have a knock on effect on your relationship with other players/agents/managers in the game world.

Speaking to the media can be important in the game but it ends up feeling like a total waste of time since there's little variation. Improving it would of course improve everything, but the international experience might even need it the most. I would probably recommend to SI to get some actual journalists on board for the next version, which shouldn't be too hard as there are people out there like Iain Macintosh who actually used to cover England at international tournaments and are obsessed with FM.

[Expand Player Discipline]

This is good stuff. I think also a lot of it could be helped by adding some variability to the types of questions you get asked in press conferences. The press conference questions need to be about 5-10x broader and that would really add some dimension to the instances you're describing to when a player is disruptive or otherwise out of line.

[Training Unwanted Attributes]

On 29/09/2021 at 13:52, RuhanSimon said:

Sport phycologist's should be on the payroll!  Player could be send to him/her (just like language course) to improve some personality traits.

Love the sport psychologist idea - it's one of actually a number of backroom jobs that have come on over the past few years and aren't in the game yet. Equally you can make the argument that there can be work done on things like not only facilities and coaches, but also nutritionists who can help with things like fitness levels. These are the types of roles that don't exist at a 4th division club necessarily, but as you progress through the divisions become more important to clubs in real life to increase the finer margins of player development.

[[Discussion] More Realistic Board Appraisal and Target Setting]

Having played FM21 for a many hundred hours, I'm struggling to understand the logic in the monthly board appraisals. Obviously it's too late for 22, but this is something that really should be looked at for FM23.

Back in the day, you'd get a monthly update on the 1st with a simple summary of how happy the board was with your performance. Recent versions of the game have introduced various variables to improve against your club culture, but the actual appraisal needs a lot of refinement. To wit:

In my first season with a Premier League title favourite, I started with a £17M transfer budget and won the league by 20 points, having shifted a handful of players and signed Erling Haaland (also meeting a "sign players under 23" target, and should have met a "raise commercial" target by way of his shirt selling the most of anyone, but that didn't work). For this, the board appraised me with a B- for the league campaign. There is no club in the Premier League, be it Leicester City or Liverpool, that would appraise its manager a B- for winning the league by 20 points, while scoring the most goals and finishing with a +70 goal differential and with well managed finances. Equally, it makes no sense to be appraised a B- for winning the FA Cup (against only top flight opponents along the run) having only been given a target of the quarter finals. If this happened IRL, the manager who did this at this club would have a statue at the ground.

Further, FM21's appraisals put far too much weight on individual results in a manner which boards simply don't do. Both good and bad results are contextualised by the vast amount of Premier League clubs, who make decisions on the direction of their team at 30,000 foot high level. Only when managers are in real trouble do clubs start talking about the importance of individual matches (and even sometimes not even then, in the case of clubs like Norwich). You're not going to find a board still praising the manager for the manner of a 4-0 win that happened seven weeks ago, and in my case, having started that title winning season with 14 wins and a draw, that 0-0 draw at Aston Villa was harped on about by the board for three months later. Even at clubs that chop and change the manager often like Chelsea, this doesn't happen. They're dealing with much larger issues and they focus more on the body of work on a moving basis.

Also, this needs to be contextualised in terms of leagues. Chairman who are trigger happy in Serie A are much likelier to hire and fire multiple managers in a given season. Watford and maybe Forest are the only clubs in the English top two divisions that you can say hire and fire as the Serie A teams of the 00s did (e.g. Palermo), where individual fixtures were very much of importance to a board and could put a manager under pressure. Even Serie A has calmed down a bit since then.

Additionally, the flexibility of club culture updates on a seasonal basis should better take into account the achievements of the manager. Having won an unprecedented League/CL/FA Cup treble (ie Man Utd 99), I found myself totally unable to influence the huge influx of new targets the next season. This is unrealistic, given it's come at a club which has left that almost completely to the manager to influence before any of them won a trophy several times over in the course of the last 25 years. Normally, any "big 6" club apart from Chelsea has allowed the manager to be an active participant in establishing club culture, and usually the manager's influence at any club (again apart from Chelsea, or perhaps Juventus or Real, and even then Mourinho Mk1 at Chelsea and Zidane at Madrid enjoyed some luxuries) expands rather than diminishes after winning big trophies.

I know this huge post just sounds like one big complain about my game experience, but if there's going to be board involvement, then we should add more nuance and more frequent and meaningful regular conversations with the board. There should be a strategy that can be set for affiliate clubs rather than just waiting around to see what randos they bring back (post Brexit, this is especially important for sending out loan players to get work permits - or to find a lower division club in your country, or in a country where you can make commercial revenue and then apply preseason tours). If a culture goal is to expand the club's reputation or commercials and we're being appraised on that, then there should be strategic decisions that get made at various points throughout the season with the board and recruitment staff about work that can be done to the club and how that affects the transfer budget, as most clubs have. We sort of have all of the pieces of what a club actually does in the game, but none of it really works like a executive team would (apart from Directors of Football doing contract negotiations).

All of this to say, if the manager is going to be appraised on on/off field activity, then the appraisals should be accurate and realistic in the context of how a board/owner would actually view the performance, and the levers should be there to pull so the manager can influence what they are expected to influence.

[[Discussion] Integration of Preseason Tours and Camps with Commercial Opportunities]

For the last 20 years of FM, we've been able to basically set a preseason tour to any country and take the players there and play a friendly. Back in 2001 it was fun to go to play Hearts of Oak not because it was especially meaningful but just because we could do it.

However, football has really moved on, and managers and boards collaborate every year - especially at the top level - when it comes to preseason (and even midseason) training camps, and especially fitting the money spinning preseason tour into the crowded calendar.

Certainly, these tours should have more of a knock on effect on club finances (and fatigue/fitness) than they do now, which is limited to "you can play this game and get this much money from the match." It would be good for the club to present a number of preseason tour options to maximise sponsors in various parts of the world, which the manager can then accept or decline to various consequences in terms of the board relationship. Maybe choices increase as the relationship improves with the board, or as more global sponsors are attracted to the club. Maybe depending on the fitness coaches you have hired (and their background/ability) or your coaching staff, you'll have to make a give/take decision as to what's best for the club.

The game already requires you to do certain things like raising the commercial revenue (which is at the limits of what a manager would typically control as it is), but this is limited to signing bigger name players who will sell more shirts. Realistically, involvement in things which actually do happen in real life and are frequently much more impactful would be a meaningful addition to the game (managers outside all but the biggest clubs aren't signing players for commercial reasons and even there, commercial reasons are the FFP justification rather than the reason the player is actually signed).

Additionally, places where clubs invest in tours or have long term playing and corporate responsibilities typically come with deeper community engagement. For example, Leicester has close links with Thailand, and many teams have played tours in that part of the world or participated in the opening of local academies that have seen pre-season friendlies played. Maybe if you're owned by Thai or Qatari owners, they require you to play matches there in preseason every few years, and you have to manage that with the requirements of other affiliates who may require friendlies as part of their deals. These friendlies in hot weather countries may come with huge sums of sponsor revenue, and could be good for fitness in the long run, but could be taxing and bring on more muscle injuries. Managers may need to make team selections accordingly. Many other clubs do warm weather camps or in Liverpool's case, frequently have the start of pre-season in the Alps for fitness training at altitude, before going off later on a tour somewhere else. 

The preseason experience right now generally is just a hodgepodge of random matches, tours, or friendly cups, but there is a lot of depth that could be added here to make it extremely impactful for the full season experience when taking finance, fitness, etc all into account.

[Stadium extensions.]

On 10/09/2021 at 21:30, Walrus said:

I’m not sure this is part of a football managers job. Pretty sure that Pep has no role in the stadium design or Tuchel decides whether or not Stamford Bridge has a three or two tier stand. 

actually, i seem to recall when liverpool redid the main stand, klopp (or rodgers, but pretty sure it was klopp) was consulted by the designers when it came to the stadium experience of trying to retain as much noise as possible. not sure if he's been involved in the anfield road redevelopment and the architectural process is obviously outside his remit, but I think depending on the club and the priorities, the manager may well be somewhat involved. also worth bearing in mind that as far as the expansion of a stadium or stand is concerned, the actual seats and seating capacity are just one part of it. depending on the part of the ground, the changing rooms and team/medical/media facilities (Anfield would apply again here) would all be impacted or expanded, and the first team staff would very much be involved with that. maybe not at a club where the manager gets chopped and changed a lot, but certainly at a lower league club where the manager has been in situ for a long time, or at a premier league club that is built around a manager's philosophy.

FM the game has some distance to go to be able to really cover this off but I do actually think it's a great idea. a game this detailed should be able to figure it out: roman and marina aren't going to let you meddle in that, but if you've done an eddie howe and taken the club out of the basement of the football league to the top division and have a philosophy running through the club, you'd probably be involved.