[Star player and international group stages]

How ist the game expecting me to manage play time happyness of a starplayer in a first half run of the Bundesliga with 6 championsleague group stage games + 2 domestic cup games and 17 league games. There were 5 weeks at the start of the season with 1 game per season, then the only break in my schedule were the international breaks. In those, the players play as well. I do understand that this is exactly as in real life, but i doubt that in real life the star player of a team would be like, yo coach, i haven't played in 90 % of the matches this season, i am now super pissed. My team is certainly not as deep as it should be, but that does not help at all if the players want more play time then their bodies can take. How do you guys deal with that? I have tried to play my midfield star as much as possible, in the end it have been 10 full games and 5 times from the bench, from 20 games including the 3rd league team in the first cup round. That seems low, but he is just absolutely gassed all the time.

 

Oh, and second question. Is it possible to have two goalkeepers and none of them be on First-Choice Goalkeeper? My First is not exactly good enough to play more then 60% of the time and is not extremely good compared to the squad as well. There seems to be no real option to have a 50/50 split for goal keepers, they are either playing 10% of the matches or all of them :/

[why do coaches only recommend individual focus training on set piece attributes?]

Yes, the fact that one of three good attribute means your assistants hate your individual training assignments is really annoying. Or that strikers with 10 pace and acceleration don't have a weakness anymore... 

The more important issue is though, that I am not sure how important corner free kick and penalty ratings truly are. Regens, especially those affordable to smaller clubs, tend to not have those. Or, more precisely, they tend to not also have those. There is a real shortage of well rounded low level Regens in the game, so that those attributes usually get lower over time. 

[Relative playerratings and reactions for difficult/easy games]

Like, seriously, what is this? Next season, next match against ****ing Bayern, 250 million player salary difference:

Bayern got the luckiest win against my team ever. We were not finishing well and they managed to get two goals from crosses and a penalty. They were objectively the worse team. And my Team felt like they underperformed and needed to be yelled at?!?! What?

[Scouting, the 50 NxGen list and competition for good players]

Again, why is this guy joing me without any competition? The pricetag seems to be somewhat realistic, they are just operating with lower budgets, but for that money, why was no one from tghe top5 leagues in europe bidding against me?

This guy does not want to join me right now, because he got his contract 4 months ago, but in august, i will get him for 4.1 million without competition. And without having found him using scouting. I can obviously chose not to snatch him from the list, but i think it would make more sense to have every club have access to that list and get competition for a bidding war.

[Scouting, the 50 NxGen list and competition for good players]

This might seem extremely counter intuitive, but the way the NxGens and scouting works, something currently feels currently off. I am not experienced with FM, or football, or the transfer market as a whole, i am essentially playing a economy sim right now. I am playing a 3 1/2 star reputation team that recently settled into the Bundesliga, just finished 9th in my second year. My team is basically unknown outside of my country i am not exactly drawing talent from anywhere. Despite this, i am currently having 7 og the top 50 NxGn players in my team or joining me in the future, and i was able to do so with almost no competition. And that kinda ruins the fun, thinking about it.

What i did, was wait until the 50 NxGn list was released, check whcih players at that time were not at a club in a better/similar league, and then bid for them. I had to briefly scout them and then, make an offer for a 10th the value they would get for being in my team, and then give them star player and important player contracts and woosh, they were in my collection of wonderkids. Some of course would not bite, having no interest, but getting so many ridiculously good players to join me for absolute peanuts was...strange. It feels like, some young players are just hard coded to be for the player if he is looking, and this seems especially problematic with the NxGn list, as the AI does not seem to know these players after the list has dropped. I would prefer, if everyone on that list was basically known as a target for every club. If my scouting would be so good, that i would find one of these guys at 15 or 16, before they make it on the NxGn 50, then i have earned getting a "free" wonderkid. If i find him from the list, i will have to fight to get him against the competition of the premier league. If i get him, i probably payed well for him.

 

What's even stranger is, that nobody is coming for them. From my current 8 players with value above 10 million, only 2 are interesting to the big clubs and i will definetely lose them. Everyone below the age of 22 seems to not draw any attention. So, i can just keep them until they are good enough, sell them for ridiculous profits and buy the next, better wonderkid. I know that this kind of play is highly encouraged by streamers and guides because it is so lucrative, but i really do not understand why the game is so timid on those younger players. I mean, they have zero problem unsettling anyone else in my club, but that guy:

Yeah, nobody is interested in him i guess. I fully expect to lose him in 2 years at the latest, but until then, i guess he is just not fast enough for an offer I get that it might make sense to these really big clubs  to allow a player to get experience in a midtable club of the Bundesliga and then take the "finished" product, and he is kinda expensive for a club between Bayern and me, but it looks like the game is again intentionally looking away, so that the gamer can feel he has that special young talent.

 

[Are the wages in FM22 out of control?]

The worst about this whole issue is how frequent players are thinking they deserve a new contract. I get that wages escalate extremely fast the better players are, and in the end very minor changes to player ability warrant major changes in wage. That's fine. And if my young player, who is worth 75m and earns 300k p/a might ask to get Starplayer money if he plays 80% of matches thinks he might be more valuable, i get that. But the amount of players developing not really, having a good run of 5 games and come to you and ask for3 times the money is problematic. I am cerainly not good at keeping wages down, so i doubt that i made such great deals with all of them that they have no other choice but evaluate their contracts new after 12 months. Maybe Si should make players a bit better at making deals that match their probably development and a youngster expecting very high playing time would demand escalators in the deal, so that their wages rise automatically well enough. Having 4 year delas renegotiated after 1 year 60 % of the time is no fun.

And by the way, the other thing that bothers me are the physios and the like, alsoays asking for 30% wage rises. Makes sense.

 

[Relative playerratings and reactions for difficult/easy games]

So, after 6 seasons playing in 3 different leagues one of the things that bugs me the most are games against clear favourites. Like playing as the newly promoted team against Bayern. The game recognizes to some extent, that you should expect to be completely dominated, but in other aspects, it completely ignores that fact.

To me, most problematic are the player ratings. If i get dominated 4:0 by Bayern and end the match with 0.3 xG and two shots on goal with a team that earns 24m p/a, i would say the players did not necessarily play bad. Yet, my players dip into 5.9 territory like in games against underdogs were we should be winning. Are they now terrible? Should i yell at them? Everytime in this scenario, i am looking at the full-time teamtalk thinking i am doing russian roulette here. "You gave it your all, well done." was what i took last time, and my 5.9 players were unhappy:

 

So then i had to yell at them, and now they are okayish. The game does not differentiate between a player being absolutely not up for a normal challenge and being constantly overrun by a worldclass player. But the players do have different expectations for the game and will want to have them be addressed, the coach just has to guess where exactly those expectations are. If we would get more of an indicator how they themselves rate their performance, that would be great.

A more minor issue are the press conferences and questions for those games, they are just awful. The most beloved question is always "why did you not take player x from the field?" That's usually a really stupid question in every interview that it is asked, when you have 5 people all at 6.0 or lower, it hurts my brain. The few questions that are somewhat addressing a strong difference in capabilities are not enough. This shows in the third league playing the fa cup against a Championsleague team and you get the same questions as playing against the favourite to win promotion in your league. Or the question why you have a negative streak against Coach XY when he has trained Bayern and you have trained a random third league team that got seeded a third time against them... It's minor things like this that make it hard to take seriously.

[Bad youth players requesting squad player?]

If nobody tells me i am stupid and i just have to click button x to switch from First to second team inn negotiations, i will do that

 

[Bad youth players requesting squad player?]

12 minutes ago, Johnny Ace said:

What does the report say on his personality? He may be the big headed type who thinks he's better than he is

I'd just bin him off, he's got a cool name though 

It has been now 3 players in 2 weeks with the same range of skill that did this. Sounds like a bug. I binned those that were really arrogant in their talks

[Bad youth players requesting squad player?]

Yes, none of my staff recommended me to keep em or put them anywhere near the first team. It's not the first time, basically whenever a youngster that ends in the second team wants a new contract, they go for squad player or similar and are not at all willing to accept less. It feels like they are arguing for a spot in the affiliate team, but i haven't found a way to distinguish betwwen two playing time wise. You either are squad player or you are not squad player. Maybe there is a way, but my staff seem to also believe these guys are youngsters and youngsters only.

[Bad youth players requesting squad player?]

That's an interesting possibility. I don't think so but it would make sense.

[Bad youth players requesting squad player?]

Can somebody explain this to me? I have had a lot of youth players coming through the U19 team and suck. I sually tend to just ignore them and set them for release when they are 19, but a few of them are....interesting. Like this guy:

I am playing in the Bundesliga, this guys is hilariously bad, even for a 3rd league team, he is not going to start. He feels he deserves a new contract. I told him i would look into it. That's what he wants:

If i click okay, he would want to earn 90k p/a, which is okay i guess, but he would still never play. He does not accept less playing time them that. Is this playing time for my reserve team, that is not in a league and consists only of the 4-5 youth players that wait to be released? Or is this guy actually believing, he should start in my first team? The recommende playing time for him in contract negotians is...youngster.

[Promoted to premier league with Fulham - am I doomed?]

I've got the sneaking suspicion, that the combination of high spirits due to being promoted and other teams not taking you all too seriously is a little too strong, and intentionally so. gong from the 15th worst paid team in the 2nd Bundesliga to finishing 7th in the Bundesliga in the first year seems to be a stretch. I was getting absolutely murdered by Dortmund and Bayern, and about 5-6 games were also dominated by the other team. But the rest of the games i was hanging quite comfortably with the youngest team and by far poorest team in the league. I've got the feeling, if you don't use your first season to improve the teams, then you will have a very hard time, but the first season is hard to fail.

[Spend the original transfer budget]

I just had a very productive first season in Bundesliga and got 60 mill for the placement. Yeah. Now, i missed a little tidbit in the club vision, and accepted it without thinking too much about the implications. As the title suggests, "Spend the original transfer budget" is a problem. Basically, i don't have a position where i can fit in a real upgrade. Not because the team is so cracked and i will beat Bayern next season, but because my existing team already has too many playing time promises. My club thought it would be incredibly generous to me and increased my wage budget from 21 to 49m and the transfer budget at 28 mil, basically putting all the new money into those two pots. So, three questions:

1) Can i shift some of the transfer money now into the wage budget so that i don'Ät have to buy players for 30 million without the board being cranky?

2) I haven't found a way to ask the club to shift money from wage to the overall balance at all. Does that exist? I would prefer to have them feel super rich, so that we can upgrade our facilities.

3) Are Performance analysts doing anything besides enabling me to have graphs about my team that i will never read? The club proposes to raise the budget for them every year and i always would prefer the money somewhere else. I am sure i am missing out on a lot of information in the data hub, that is not the point. Are they improving my team or giving me scouting information?

 

Thanks a lot

[Player value and scouting arrangements]

One of the issues is probably, that, it is super easy to have a very good BWM(De). I dunno, i will take the money. But the thing is, i expeceted this guy to have a higher potential. He is as 4 yellow 1 withe star potential as the rest of my young players. Which equates to decent or good bundesliga player for all of them. No idea.

[Player value and scouting arrangements]

Hi, two quick questions.

My scouts are really ineffective. They are generating soooo few scout reports. Especially my youngster scouting. I had a much better experience when i was a 2nd Bundesliga team and was onlyallowed to scout europe. All my scouts are scouting 4 countries within one scouting region with max age 21 and potential ability is at least excellent. My playing level has not gone up significantly, yet my scouts don't find anyone. THey are also not getting any more knowledge of the countries they are scouting. For instance, this guy has been one of my scouts for a few years doing Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Serbia:

He is not perfect, but he was ablke to find me 4 players that are currently in my team. But for the last 8-10 months, nothing. This guy hasn't found a single person yet since i put him into french speaking west african countries:

This guy is in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Switzerland, nothing.

There should be a lot of players capable of improving my squad, yet my scouts don't find any... The ones i get, i get by checking top 50 wonderkids and national teams and manually scouting some of those that seem to be cheap and interested. Which has given me this guy:

I love him obiously, but i don't really get, why he is worth 70 million. His PA is Bundesliga standard player, he has huge holes in his game, When i bought him for 2.3 million from the israeli league i was very happy when he decided do come to me over some very high prestige clubs and when i saw that he wanted a 77 million release clause, i didn't know what had hit me. Why is the game valueing him so high?

[unreasonable player contracts]

Thanks, i will try this.

[unreasonable player contracts]

Hi, i just got my team to overperform and ended up in promotion to my top league. One of the players making it happen asked me mid season for a new contract reflecting his new abbilities, but he is super happy and was okay with delaying the contract talks to after the season. With the promotion in the bag i now approached him to see what he wants and....well. He is currently a four star player with his top form. He wants to be an important player, and he wants to have a big pay rise. I could live with both  promises, considering he currently makes about 500k a year with bonuses and deserves to be raised to my other top earners at about 1 million/year. But, he wants 2,5m. He is not worth that money to me, neither compared to the rest of the squad, nor considering what i am willing to pay for my players in general. And i think he might not be worth that for anyone. So, when i failed to get him anywhere near what i would like to pay, i walked away. He wanted to immediately talk to me about my broken promise and i picked the option, that i promised him to talk about a new contract, but i never promised him what he considers he is due. And he was happy about that. He is in high spirits still, and has another year in his contract. Now, he is also worth 2-3m and if i cannot keep him, i will try to sell him, but do you know of a good way to get this player to just take a reduced contract? I feel like this one should be happy with 1.2 to 1.3 million in Bundesliga, but maybe i am just way off. Will it help to give him a new contract in the next year? I felt the game does not update your status after a promotion until after the new season officially starts.

[Tactics help needed]

I am not too worried about the tactic, i was just showing it to provide context for the decisions i have to make. It currently works (with occasionally bad spells) provided that iam still not nearly spending as much as the rest of the league. But i think it is pimportant to note that Tom Kljun is not a natural fit to the rest of the squad, as everytim he is on the field an AF switches to a winger. He also just requested more playing time, which i told him i would provide, and he was awful in the first game i played him in and got carried by a stroing team performance in the second. still 0 goals/3 assists in 10 games. He is also not being targeted by transfer offers right now, the one team that is interested wants him for a third his minimum tranfer value. Rodriguez on the other hand is being persued by a bunch of clubs and i just offered him a contract about as expensive as Schuler and Bulatovic have. And to make everything even more confusing, Schuler just scored a hattrick in the second game i played him to ensure my promise for his playing time.

I should also mention, that money really is a secondary issue. I am locked on playing time of my existing players, i could buy and pay a buch of additional players, i just don't have targets that would be better and willing to play less to switch them.

[Tactics help needed]

Hi, i have now settled somfortably into 2. Bundesliga and am improving, but i am hitting a limit of my playstyle as recruiting end of contracts does not help me anymore and the players i do get need a lot of persuasion to move to this small and underrated 2nd league german team. So, the players that i get and like have to be convinced through pretty but playing time promises. It means that i have little wiggle room for new players coming in. But also, due to being just a small 2nd league team, i do not get all too many young prospects yet, my scouting reach is europeand the few young players i find are usually highly contested. So, i was very happy with binding 3 new great young forwards to my team and until now this worked well, but now two of them have become unhappy with their playing time and i think the third will follow. I need some help with deciding who to drop or how to solve it without dropping anyone.

 

Here is my tactic:

1) Luca Schuler. He is my legacy player, he scored all the goals in my first and third season, but he has not performed all too well now that i rotate him a lot. He is on a regular starter promise and has just been promised to get an increase in playing time. He is usually reliable and clinical, he is a fan favourite and a team leader.

2)Tom Kljun. He is my first new young player. He is a winger and when he plays we switch the 2nd CF spot to a left winger. He hasn't performed that well so far, specially with the playing time he had, he is on an important player promise and will soon be unhappy about that. He is the most obvious person to cut, but he has a high potential and is getting better, he also wants to have a new contract.

3)Milan Bulatovic. My current star player. He is great, i have recently giving him a new contract because interest in him is high, he is scoring and playing very well, but he is consuming a lot of game time. He is also not showing that five star potential, but apart from that, which is the only reason i could see not to keep him. He is also not super sought after by other clubs.

4) Carlos Rodriguez, the newest and youngest. He just got over being unhappy, i had to play him in more matches. He rewarded me with a lot of goals and he will develop a lot. He is currently on impact sub, which helps a lot and there is a lot of room for me to pay him well. He is wanted by a lot of clubs though.

[Quickfire Questions and Answers Thread (Tactic and Training Questions Only)]

I got a strange first world problem. I got too much money. After my second in the 2nd Bundesliga, i finished 6th and made a lot of money with a club that already was secure. Now i am having the team with the lowest wage in the league of about 8 million per year, and 4 million wage budged extra plus 5 million transfer budget. THing is, i can' spend all that money. There is nobody worth a lot of money that wants to join and i can't scout for wonderkids because i am only allowed to scout europe. Also, my regular starters are settled in quite well and none of them are worth a lot. So, i am not really able to shift a lot of my mediocre and cheap players and therefore getting good new ones would unsettle a lot of my existing ones. And every time i am asking my board to invest all that money into scouting range or other long time investments, they say dude, we love you, but naah. I would love to get some young talented players into the team, but in order to get them, i have to promise them important player status and all the other stuff. Is there a good way to take all that money and invest it? My current playstyle would get a few small improvements, but let the most of ther money lie dormant, and i don't like that either

[Quickfire Questions and Answers Thread (Tactic and Training Questions Only)]

Interestingly enough, i forscienced the whole thing and....welp. After the first match of the new season, i just set him to release. Cost me 200k, but he just disappeared. No morale hit, no negative player reaction, he is one of the many "board dislikes how you lose players" entries, but they are being drowned by success on the field and good incoming deals. So while i am weary that his replacement might not be able to talk the team out of issues as much, i am very happy that he will not ever get to the point of being unhappy and causing a ruckus. Dodged a bullet.

Second question. Is there a bug with youth players and what they are asking for? I have had several 18 and 19 year olds in my amateur squad, that were considered future prospect and wanted a new deal. They were far away from the main team though. When i tried to negotiate with them, they asked for squad player or even regular starter and when i went for Breakthrough Prospect they either flat out walked away or asked for wages that i could pay my better players at the time. There are certainly some players that are a bit more greedy or delusional about their skills, but this seemed far off for that. I got the feeling they might have talked about playing time promises of my amateurs? If that's a thing, how do i see which team the promise is for?

[Quickfire Questions and Answers Thread (Tactic and Training Questions Only)]

Hi, my team captain is giving me headaches. Starting in 2021 in the 3rd german league, he is a 27 yo DM/CD with 3 1/2 stars in both roles. He is small and slow though, and in his first season he was constantly the worst player in the defense, really struggling to win a place in the team. In season two, now 2nd Bundesliga, he made only 15 appearances with an average rating of 6.59, despite the team having a ridiculous performance of 6th place. So, i don't like him. I don't want to play him, yet, he is a team leader and really helpful as a teamleader, he commands the team really well has been easy to please. Now he want playing time though or go out on a loan. He agreed to being a fringe player and his contract his running out end of this third season, so i am expecting his exodus from the team to not be easy. How do i do that and how much is this gonna cost me? I obviously want him gone, he has 2 1/2 stars now in positions i have very good alternatives, and i dread the moment he starts realizing that i am not gonna give him a new contract. I will not be able to sell him, he earns 200k for his very bad form/rating, so nobodies will want to pay him that, i am honestly thinking about simply release him on a free just to have him gone now. But i have never experienced what happens when the team leader is forced to leave. How much is this gonna affect the team?  There are other players ready to take on team leader, so, that's not an issue, but i am scared.

[Tactics help needed]

Is there a way to get some of this information out of the game without posting a million screenshots?

[Tactics help needed]

Hi, thanks for the tipp. The thing is, i have tried several iterations now and they just don't perform well. With the starting players, i am bad at crossings, as my wingmen either don't have high crossing, or are too slow to utilize it. Still, of my 25 players, 12 are wing players. On the other hand, i am getting sooo many goals against me from crosses or corners, it's insane. The engine seems to really love those compared to anything else, but this could be just my observation as my team is so bad at defending against them. Having no left winger that is more then a speed demon hurts even more, considering that on the left side my better inverted winger would love to get some action. I would accept that the team is just not build very well in FM, but there must be something i just don't see, as i saw comments in the chat of some streamers i am watching to educate myself stating how dominant they have been with exactly that club.

So i would appreciate if someone had some idea what to do, playing direct is something i am trying but the team is more then inconsistent with it. I am really at a loss and i am slowly losing my mind due to it.