Neo_Geo

YAC Bingo Macclesfield (England).ods this was one I put together for someone before when they did a Macclesfield save, you can get libre office to open it (think excel might also but not sure as I don’t have it myself)

MAIDEN PREMIER LEAGUE TITLE FOR THE GREENS I'll be cranking up the volume in the early stages of the pre-season to hear that glorious champions league music play as we outclassed Hamrun Spartans this year. How much of that was due to Hamrun Spartans making the Europa Conference League Group Stage I don't know but its great they did well in Europe and now I get the chance to get some save altering funds! We were superb this season, we just managed to get the results with the solitary loss in the league to Hamrun at their ground but we won the home game 2-1. Floriana were surprisingly bad this year which meant we beat them twice which was a good feeling. Adamyan YP-4A was joint top scorer with 16 goals with Michael Attard YP-1A as back-up contributing 10 goals. Josef Borg YP-2A got 13 goals and 10 assists and had a great season but his potential has dropped (see the Youth Intake section for details). Our defence wasn't the greatest but as I say when we needed a result we just got it and it was great to see as we never dropped lower than second throughout the whole season. In the cup we made it one round further losing to Hamrun Spartans in the semi-final. In Europe it was the 3rd Qualifying Round once more and this time it was Rijeka of Croatia that were just too strong for us with a 6-3 aggregate win (we did draw 2-2 at home but that was after the 4-1 loss in the first leg leaving us with far too much to qualify for the next round). In the previous rounds we beat KF Shkëndija Tetovo of North Macedonia 2-0 on aggregate (we should have won by way more) and FK Sutjeska Nikšić of Montenegro 8-2 on aggregate. This save is going to be about trying to go that little bit further in Europe whenever I can and hopefully loaning/selling players to other teams in the league to help them do better when they get a shot in Europe. It's a different type of Youth Academy Challenge than usual because I don't expect I will complete it but I'm interested in seeing how much the coefficients can improve, how much the national team can improve and build a nation that isn't the whipping boys of every club and international qualifying it takes part in. Finances were down from last year due to the £1.4m investment in Training and Youth Training Facilities. Our attendances are growing and with 3 fan days this year with one of the games finishing 6-1 I'm hoping it might give us a little shot in the arm next season. That said it's unlikely we'll be self sufficient from gate receipts or season tickets it's all going to come down to the European money. We climbed 81 places to 420th in Europe and we are now the second highest reputation team in Malta now following our title win. It's all going really well at the moment and I'm having fun doing it. Youth Intake 16 elite talents this year is something I wasn't expecting and whilst I always take this with a pinch of salt I am very happy with a keeper and AMC coming through. I can see both playing a part next season for sure. Top 5 Elite Talents Spreadsheets Club News The board continue to back my endeavours with my Continental Pro Coaching Course underway, Junior Coaching maxed (last year) and Youth Recruitment maxed this year. Training and Youth Facilities have also been improved but doing both is proving costly with the two combined improvements costing £1.4m this season. I need to decide on the direction I want to go in: do I want to continue to improve training facilities but remain semi-pro or shall I park the facility upgrades for now and let the balance build up to something the board are happy to go pro with? I'm feeling the latter here because I think I get more bang for my buck at this stage going professional than going from 6 to 8 in training facilities. In transfers out my previous first choice keeper left for Floriana (to be back-up there ) in the summer window. I didn't offer him a new contract as I felt comfortable with Spiteri YP-4A as my first choice and in this years intake Jean Claude Mizzi YP-5A is more than capable of being understudy (he's already capped at U21 level for Malta). Squad News I continue to trim the squad with a number of players released this year both original squad members and youth players that are just clearly not going to make it here. I have however noticed that the unique IDs are being recycled meaning some of the players from previous intakes that retired are now popping up at other clubs. The giveaway was my keeper from the year 1 intake now being a centre forward! @XaW I seem to recall you mentioning this unique ID recycling and you might have had a workaround, am I just showing my age and not remembering correctly or did you have some magic trick up your sleeve for this? Or is it just a case of deleting the row from the license file so that the name isn't used? I guess I'd need to keep an eye on whether released players are still playing or if they retired and were reborn. As ever I have pulled together the OOTB charts for the squad, starting with the best XI from this season: As you can see middle to front is our strongest area with the back line not quite managing the 7.00 average rating. I've stuck with the same formation for now "If its not broken don't fix it" however I might have to consider different tactics in Europe but I really like the thought of playing football the way I want to play it and just get better over time. The squad depth images show what I have been saying for a while that left back is a problem area but centre back isn't looking too hot either, I tried Matthew Galea YP-4A this year but his stats have actually regressed despite 18 starts and 5 sub-appearances. The main issue with each position quite literally is depth, there are many high potential players (according to the PA rating) but without the ability to loan them getting them game time is quite tough. Three of my youth players are now starting to move to the right in the experience matrix (ranked 2nd, 6th and 14th in my potential tracker). Next seasons best XI looks a little stronger thanks to Camilleri YP-5A in AMC and Galea YP-5A is now at AMR (not considerably better than Marlon Cauchi YP-3A but evidently judged as better to get the starting slot here). I'd love to see a top class CB, LB, AML and SC to come through but I will just have to put more time and effort into the best youth players in each position and tailor their training accordingly. National News No senior squad call ups in the squad yet but 7 are in the U21s and 4 in the U19s (with 3 of the U21s being from my Year 5 intake!). The national side continue to improve their world ranking and sit 3rd in the World Cup qualifying group following their double header wins against North Macedonia, most likely their only wins of this group. Bingo Card Really great year for the bingo card as 22 out of the 100 targets are now complete. The general trend is following how I would have anticipated it with the easier of the tasks in the top left to the most challenging in the bottom right and of the targets I have completed it's certainly following that pattern. That said there may only be realistically 5-10 targets left before it gets really tough so this quickfire completion of 22 targets is likely to be met with decades of nothing Neo_Geo's Final Thoughts Loving the save and really looking forward to turning pro at some point to try and get some of the promising youth players out on loan. It will benefit them, the loaning club, Kercem and of course Maltese football so the sooner I can get to that point the better. I may have to start saving money up rather than looking for facility upgrades so that turning pro can happen and I would argue that having players training nearly every day will see their development improve much more than if they have 8 training facilities instead of 6 but only train once or twice a week. Time for that Champions League music to play loud and proud....

Whether you complete the challenge or not that is phenomenal

Great going @mschafer13 onwards and upwards

SECOND PLACE ONCE MORE FOR THE GREENS AS THEY MAKE EUROPEAN DEBUT This season we proved that the first season wasn't a fluke.....or that the improvements via the intake were enough to cement our position as 2nd best team in the country. Finishing 5 behind Hamrun and and 13 ahead of Floriana felt like positive progress from the previous season and we even managed to beat Hamrun 4-0 with 3 games to go to keep the fight alive but Hamrun won the last two games (as did we) and the title was retained by the only professional team in the country. A lot of our goals came from the wingers this year and at the start of the season Wayne Borg retired meaning new AMR Marlon Cauchi YP-3A really stepped up and broke the league's highest average rating record in the process. I started to let some of the original players go who were at 1 star current and potential and this trend is likely to continue into next season as our transition to becoming a better team continues. In the cup we only made the quarter final again as we got FM'd at home by Marsaxlokk but again knowing this would allow the focus to return to the league games I wasn't too bothered and from a financial perspective the league money and European money made up the lions share of the inbound finances this year. On that topic our European run lasted 6 games. A 6-2 aggregate win over KF Teuta of Albania followed by a 6-3 aggregate win over Dudelange of Luxembourg set up a 3rd qualifying round tie with Norwegian outfit Tromso who proved to be far too good for us beating us 4-2 in each tie for an 8-4 aggregate win. This was far more than I expected or even hoped for from our first appearance in Europe and the money was absolutely fantastic as the finance graph shows below: Average attendance continues to rise as does our reputation so its all heading in the right direction. Youth Intake Another superb intake as the level of graduate stepped up once more. The preview looked good and the intake didn't disappoint: The bar is raising with each passing season which is quite strange as you see last years top players now become mediocre in the eyes of the coaching staff but I'm certainly not complaining. Elite Intake Once again here are the spreadsheet views of the intake and the 4 years of youth players still at the club. Club News A great season with regards to improvements off the field as 2 rounds of Junior Coaching Budget Increases and Youth Recruitment Improvements were approved. In addition a training facility upgrade and youth training facilities upgrade at a cost of £95k and £190k respectively makes for some great progress in season 4. Coaching courses continue to be sanctioned with the Continental A license now being studied. I'm not sure when/if the board will make the suggestion of turning pro but I'd imagine I'd need a few more seasons of money from Europe and league prize money before they consider it as the end of next season is showing as £177k. Squad News 4 of my players are getting included in the Malta U21 squad (Attard YP-1A, Cauchi YP-3A, Vella YP-3A and Bartolo YP-3A so that's really encouraging at this stage. As I mentioned before Borg retired and I've had to contend with many players who were previously star or important players now becoming squad players and not being happy. I fully expected them to leave when I said I'd have to let them go as they are out of contract but they stayed, then bids came in during the January window and fully expected them to leave......they didn't. That means I will have a large squad next season but not necessarily a happy one. A rare benefit of the semi professional status club is that you can release players whenever you need to so as long as I start to get replacements come through I can allow the original players to start to leave the club slowly. We had our first bids for youth players for fees from Hamrun as they targeted Pascal Gerard YP-3A and Andrew Abdilla YP-3A where they offered decent sums of money relative to their transfer values but luckily they were happy to stay and no bids have been made since Gerard signed his non-contract deal. Here is the Best XI from the season showing a few more averaging over 7. Here are the squad depth images: Next seasons XI according to my HoYD: AML and AMC look like the areas that have a lower level of ability. Country News I've added this section to track how the nation is doing (both international and club). The biggest news this year was an improvement to the coefficient ranking meaning that 2nd place in the league will now provide a place in the 2nd Qualifying round of the Europa Conference. This was then reverted at the end of this season as Malta were overtaken by Luxembourg and Belarus. Malta made the European Championships Qualifying Play-off Semi Finals losing 2-0 to Slovenia. As I was writing this up and continuing the game I got this call-up message in the inbox: 4 of the YP-4 intake have been called up without kicking a ball for the first team. Bingo Card I realised this year that I missed marking off 3 targets last year so its a bumper year this year as I now have 17 targets met. Neo_Geo's Final Thoughts A really solid year where we have consolidated 2nd place in the league with a greater margin than last year between ourselves and Floriana in third. The intake once again looks to have an impact on the strength of the first team next season with further improvements to the Recruitment and Junior Coaching being made. The size of the task ahead of me would be huge if I was focusing on actually completing the challenge but for now I am just focused on getting the club to a point where they can become professional and look to take over from Hamrun as the top Maltese club. That feels achievable if we continue to progress as we have been but for now I am just enjoying having this adventure.

It's weird being at this point again so soon and this time its the end of an era with the game changing significantly. Best of luck with Dulwich sir p.s. their kit colours are a belter for custom kits!

Spending some family time today so didn't get much progress made.......but I made new kits for Kercem Ajax, what do you guys think? The home kit has a proper 90s poppers feel to them with the kappa logo strip along the shoulders

THE GREENS FINISH RUNNER UP IN TOP TIER IN SEASON 3 Once again this squad keeps surprising me as we managed to sneak a 2nd place finish drawing 4-4 with Floriana on the last day of the season to finish second on goal difference. That said we were second for almost the entire second half of the season and at one point were only 4 behind Hamrun Spartans! We conceded more than 1 goal a game but managed to maintain a healthy 2+ goal a game scored average which ultimately gave us the GD advantage over Floriana. Surprisingly the 5 losses were not 2 to Hamrun and 2 to Floriana plus another. We only lost one to each of these but twice to Hibernians (one time was 2 days after another game as the scheduling is bonkers, 4 weeks without a game then 3 in the space of 6 days!) All European places are conference league 1st qualifying round except for the champions of course and I don't expect anything from this at all next season, any money we can get from it will be put straight into the Youth Recruitment and Junior Coaching. In the cup we got put out by eventual winners Valletta in the Quarter Finals and to be honest the way the league fixtures played out I was somewhat relieved to not have further fixtures to add to the weird congestion. I'd love for the board to move to another stadium that was a dedicated stadium so that I can just play the fixtures as they should be but this could be some way off. EDIT: Forgot the club & competitions image Youth Intake A superb intake, most likely the HoYD and the first round of improvements starting to come through as the preview looked very promising and the actual intake did not disappoint: Top 5 Elite Talents I said I'd hide the spreadsheet stuff in case no one wants to see it, so here it is: Club News A solid year as far as the off the field elements were concerned as the Youth Recruitment and Junior Coaching increases were approved following the lovely, lovely prize money for finishing second: I was able to get a further 2 coaching badge courses approved as well meaning I am now studying for Continental C license. Here are the transfers for the season: Squad News I have decided to focus my attention on the youth players using my new spreadsheet and for the full squad I will continue to track the overall depth and experience using the in game features. Here is the Best XI from this season: An obvious drop off in terms of average rating compared to the Challenge League but this is to be expected. The quality of the intake this year has had a significant impact on the current player's rated current ability as can be seen in the squad depth: The experience matrix shows Wayne Borg move into the experienced bracket and luckily Cauchi YP-3A came through this year as a ready made replacement (upgrade in fact) on the right wing as Wayne's skills are starting to falter due to age. In terms of the Best XI for next season this is what the coaches reckon I have: What's encouraging is that the potential of Attard YP1-A and Xereb YP-1A have remained at the 5(ish) potential even with the new additions this year. I think it's more likely I will play Gerard at DM, Xereb at MC and then Josef Borg YP-2A in the AMC role as I move away from Saliba at DM. Bingo Card Another 2 targets met by avoiding relegation from the top tier and Michael Attard YP-1A reaching 62 appearances for the club. Neo_Geo's Final Thoughts Incredible season and some foundations are now starting to be put in place to get this club producing the best Maltese talent. The intake was really promising and starts to build a little bit of quality in some of the areas of the park that are currently lacking. European football (albeit most likely two games) is a real bonus at this point but who knows what might happen. Enjoying the save thoroughly and I have real intrigue over the way the players develop over the coming seasons and how my spreadsheet will track them.

@naterr glad the board didn't sack you as that would have been really harsh.

Ok, I've been trying out some ideas around potential today and I've realised that the absolute value of a player's potential is not the goal, its about understanding who at the club is worth spending time and effort on developing more than others. This led me to a ranking based system which ranks players on a number criteria: Lower Drive (Based on Determination and lower range values for Ambition and Professionalism based on Personality) Upper Drive (Based on Determination and upper range values for Ambition and Professionalism based on Personality) Upper Transfer Value (ranked based on the highest estimated value but this is messed up for Semi Pro given youth players have value and when they go to non-contract it goes to zero so I have commented this out unless we go Pro) Average Attributes (Looks at all attributes that apply to goalkeepers or outfield players, trying to do this for specific role is really tough unless I edit the HTML rule with the desired role to then use in the calculations) Attribute changes by category (GK, Technical, Mental and Physical changes from the previous year the better the overall attribute delta the better the ranking - however as I am still in season 3 when I started this I will need to wait until season 4 end to compare season 3 and 4) I then combine the ranks (additive) and the idea is the lowest score overall is the highest ranked potential player. When I ran this I was finding older players featuring at the top of the list and at some point when I filter out the non-youth players (I will probably do this for season 3 and 4 for Kercem Ajax) and run this for a few seasons the older players should really start to fall down the list. To do this I added age * 3 to the combined ranks score (essentially for each year difference another 3 is added to the overall ranking so the young you are the lower this will be and the bigger the age gap the wider this will be). This is just a first stab and as with the other elements it needs data and analysis over many seasons to start to see whether its any good or not. This image is the potential sheet and whilst it still lists the Transfer value its not actually included in the calculation at this moment. I have not added the previous year attribute averages as that would have required this export to have existed at the end of season 2. The ordering is going to be a pain here when having to manually add values in, so I may well paste the data from the HTML file ordered by name, sort the previous year by name, copy and paste and patch any differences in personnel and then sort once more by the ranking. It's not ideal but for now it will do (I can always include a csv export which is then used to be read in the following year if I can be bothered to do that!) I tried to include the potential rating by my assistant which would have formed part of the rankings however they don't appear in any format of exporting from the game and I'm not manually keying a decimal representation of the star ratings (after 4/5 intakes there might be as many as 60 players!). What I have found with this so far is that someone like Michael Attard YP-1A (also changed my naming convention so that I can easily filter out all youth players from the non-youth players) had the best overall average attributes and at the moment is a 4.5 star CA and 4.5-5 star PA player, so why does he rank 17th? It's related to his personality which is Unambitious. I can clearly see he is a good player for me but as far as developing beyond where he is its not as likely as the likes of Josef Borg YP-2A who is Professional and still boasts decent average attributes (and is a year younger). Here are those two players: Attard YP-1A Borg YP-2A Attard certainly has the better current ability according to the coach reports but you can see the training effects on Borg. What are the general thoughts here would you rank Borg as being the potentially better player or Attard (in which case the potential ranking needs some work). I think if these were professional contract players the estimated value would play a part here but perhaps I need to weight the current attributes a little more, if I multiply that ranking by 2 Attard YP-1A comes out in 9th rather than 17th: That is literally changing a 1 to 2 in the code to have quite the change, so I need to get more seasons under my belt now and see what the real indicators are that I should be weighting higher than the others. I promise I'll just be playing the game tomorrow rather than doing Python/Spreadsheet fiddling!

@hyrule_king what team are you managing, I can’t quite see the logo

There will be no exact science to this, I literally just followed the game's model of what each role should be like and ranked the green attributes higher than the blue using weighting. If you decide that the blue attributes are just as important then your approach of taking the average will be exactly what you need. I expect I'll tweak this over time as it's likely the out of the box model SI have may not be an exact match for what I look for in these players. Say for instance you value work rate and stamina for every midfield position as you want a really hard working engine in your team then I can just tweak the weightings for these and it will adjust the ratings accordingly.

Ok, you can tell I have a week off as I've completely caught the bug and can't seem to stop myself. The last addition was the training ratings and I hinted at having a look at being able to focus on the training needed for the role I want the player to play in.......well I've been busy today At the right end of the training sheet where I see the attribute averages for each of the training focus values (my last post) I have now added the desired role i.e. the role I want this player to play in my team (I've just put this as the full list of positions to choose from rather than cross referencing with the values used for the sheet with the roles that fit my tactic as I think it's not a great idea to shoehorn every player into just the roles you have as sometimes you may want other options (for example I may want to train up a few inside forwards if I come up against as team where I want to overload the centre of the park as they play on the wing a lot). Anyway, you select the desired position and the columns to the right are then filled in with values. These values are calculated by using the weightings for that selected role against the attributes associated with that training focus. For example for a fullback defensive positioning is 4.3 (5 for marking and positioning and 3 for decisions giving a weighting average of 4.3). I then subtract players attribute average from 20 and multiply by the weighting average to give me a "priority" score out of a possible 95 (so if they score 1`for everything and all weightings are 5 then 20-1 = 19 *5 = 95) to a possible minimum of 0 if all scores are 20 or the role you have selected has no attributes associated with that training focus. Once these are calculated the max value is retrieved and the focus columns shows the optimal column to get the player training in for that given role (again all based on attributes). So in general the sheet shows where work needs to be done for players if I want to play them in that particular role, so an obvious one is Karl Borg Y1-B who if I want to play him in his strongest current role based on his attributes I really need to work on his attacking movement as it is ranked at priority 91.5 Here is that player: Most likely a lost cause considering he has low determination and very poor technical and mental skills. So the one it suggested for the AMC_AM role was to get him training on attacking movement as this was highlighted as the worst for that role based on his attributes. The attributes for it are Off the Ball, Anticipation and Decisions (so 3, 1 and 1 giving an average of 1.67). The weighting for this training for an AMC_AM is 5 (5 for each of the attributes), so we have 18.3(rounded to 1 DP) multiplied by 5 which is 91.5. The only tricky thing is that since there is SOME data that I have added in the spreadsheet that is relative to the row (player) in question if the order of the export changes I may get corrupt data. I don't see a way around this other than keeping the last spreadsheet to cross check because if I sell players or their position changes then the order of the players in the export will change too. There is no way to get the preferred role included for the player to get it to show in the filter view. One thing that might interest some people (as I didn't know this) if you sort by one column first (say position) you can then do a secondary sort by SHIFT + CLICK on the column you want as the secondary. I ordered my export using position first then age thinking it won't change year on year until I remembered new players join, current players leave and then sometimes the positions will change if a player retrains successfully. Next its on to thinking about how to determine a rough potential (most likely using the upper transfer estimate, the coach rating with a pinch of salt and then sprinkle in the personality to give an idea of whether they will reach the potential). This will probably all be obsolete when FM 25 comes out

I use the green and blue attributes suggested by the game and apply a 5 and 3 times weighting for each of these as a starting point. Here is the IWB and IFB: Role 1v1 Acc Aer Agg Agi Ant Bal Bra Cmd Com Cmp Cnt Cor Cro Dec Det Dri Ecc Fin Fir Fla Fre Han Hea Jum Kic Ldr Lon L Th Mar Nat OtB Pac Pas Pen Pos Pun Ref Sta Str Tck Tea Tec Thr TRO Vis Wor FB_IFB 0 0 0 3 3 3 0 3 0 0 3 3 0 0 3 0 3 0 0 3 0 0 0 5 3 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 3 3 0 5 0 0 0 5 5 0 3 0 0 0 3 FB_IWB 0 5 0 0 3 3 0 0 0 0 5 3 0 3 5 0 3 0 0 5 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 3 0 5 3 5 0 3 0 0 3 0 5 5 5 0 0 5 3

Latest addition to my spreadsheet is to include an export and a tab for training. This looks at the attributes for each training focus value and simply averages these to give an overall rating out of 20. This means you can easily see the areas that are lacking for a player that training can directly influence, its then up to you whether the area that is lacking is relevant for the role they play in: For my other sheets and colour scales it was all about relativity between the players and their roles i.e. what role is Player A best at, who is best at Pressing Forward Player A or Player B? The top of that scale is the highest player rating for a role or the highest rated role for a player and that should show up as Dark Green. For the table above this is showing the scale of 1-20 so only when a player has strong associated attributes to training focus will it show as green rather than showing the highest value as green overall. This gives me a very good view for the squad as a whole and I can clearly see that for the likes of long throws we have one average player and the rest are lower quartile. I think this is the best formatting for training as it shows me clearly where the team is lacking and where I can directly influence this with focused training. Similarly if I just want to look at one particular player I can then make a decision from here rather than trying to remember which stats are related to which training focus' (I remember a number off by heart but not all) The only thing its missing is where I can see for the role I want to use them in the training focus areas that matter, I may well work on that a bit.

When I said my save was going to be a true build a nation as I was only allowed 1 foreign player in the match squad and 2 to be registered.......turns out that's for the lower leagues. I guess I wasn't looking that far ahead but this now means I can of course have foreign players come through the intake and use them if good enough (so far I've had one player from North Macedonia the rest are Maltese).

THE GREENS ARE INVINCIBLE AS TOP TIER PROMOTION IS IN THE BAG I lost the last of my 3 original strikers in the summer window and one of the defenders who was promised more game time (and was happy with the progress) then left when an offer came in which wasn't the best backdrop to playing a division up. However, as you can see from the title not only did we get promotion we did it in style with an invincible league campaign and reaching the cup semi-final losing to Hamrun Spartans 3-2 (A) and we had beaten Floriana in the 4th Round on penalties. With my other striker leaving I was left with a decision, play a silver rated current ability striker as one of my front two or change the formation. I went with the latter to accommodate one of my promising AMCs from last years intake (though I later discovered via my spreadsheet that I had an original cast member who was excellent there). I moved to a 4-1-1-4 DM Wide Asymmetric AM(CR) formation and whether it was the asymmetry or just getting good balance throughout it worked a treat. 97 goals for and 24 against just sums up how good we were this season, a truly amazing season that sees us gain back to back promotions and now in the top tier in the shortest timeframe possible. I do love playing in these smaller countries with a strong squad! I cannot stress enough how important it is to find a team with a strong squad for the start of this challenge and although you can't see attributes if you can see a potential formation from that initial squad and it has depth then its usually a sound idea to go for that team. Thanks to the money from the cup run I was able to get 2 coaching courses approved (the second was started a few weeks before season end) and then the promotion gave us £120k meaning I was then able to request junior coaching and youth recruitment improvements with a chance they'd get accepted. The Junior Coaching was accepted without any discussion but I had to persuade them for the Youth Recruitment. Both of these are now at 6 which is better than a number of clubs in the Premier League but a number have significantly better Youth Recruitment so the sooner I can improve this the sooner I start to get the best Maltese talent on offer. I've changed the club and competitions page to the right to now show the Maltese Premier Ranking and also the Malta FIFA ranking as this is technically a build a nation save therefore these are important aspects. If I start to get players in the national set-up I will start to follow the Maltese results in more detail as the nation hopefully gets stronger. Youth Intake Getting some decent elites coming through despite having 3 youth recruitment and 3 junior coaching for the first 2 seasons. I don't see any of the players getting into the squad straight away and are more likely to be an upgrade to the back-up that I have. Out of the elites there were 3 with positive personalities (Professional, Fairly Professional and Fairly Determined) which is really good to have at this stage and I will be keeping a keen eye on these 3 players progress over the coming seasons using my new spreadsheet. Elite Talents Here is a zoomed out view of the Y2 intake with regards to their best positions (colour scales are for the role strength per player and not comparing players for a particular role) This shows that one again speed and work rate are the strongest combined attributes for the intake, poor intelligence and awful dead ball. The heat map shows that the intake looks strongest in midfield and attacking midfield in general but with a number of strong greens in the DM positions, weakest in central defence and attack. The best positions back this up with 6 of the 16 having DM_BWM as their best role based on attributes, 5 are AMC_AM, 4 as WM_W and 1 GK_G. What this tells me is that my strikers and central defenders do not stand out in these positions and will need a lot of training in the key attributes to get them up to speed (or just retrain in alternate positions and roles). Squad News As with last year here are some Out Of the Box (Game) images: It paints a similar story to last season with no real changes apart from having a central midfielder come through and my upfront Michael Attard Y1-A is excelling. In terms of the Best Eleven it was an excellent year with our standout being Wayne Borg with 26 goal contributions in 32 games and an average rating of 7.70, the bad news is he is 32 so will not be around for much longer. Only 3 of the first team did not manage to break through the 7.00 average rating mark. Now onto the overall squad view using the new spreadsheet which again I am opting to use on the colour scales depicting the strongest role per player rather than the strongest player per role. This isn't meant to be legible for this post but the spread of the colours gives a clear indication where my team is strong and where it is weak (not that I can do a great deal about this as the intake is completely outside of my control!) I then added another sheet which only has the roles applicable to my tactics being displayed: Here I can now see that for specific roles in the team (for the way I want to play) where I have weaknesses so for instance you can see I don't have any competent ball playing defenders (as they are better suited to central defenders or no nonsense centre-back. The other problem area is pressing forwards with only Michael Attard Y1-A being good enough for this. What will be interesting to see will be checking in on this year on year and in particular filtering out for that Years intake to see how well they fit into my current tactic. Bingo Card A bumper season this year as far as the bingo card was concerned thanks to the invincible league performance with 6 targets being daubed: Neo Geo's Final Thoughts I am having a blast with this save at the moment and looking forward to testing myself against the top flight, based on the cup games I think we have a good chance of staying up if I can keep the squad together. Staying in the division is really important financially with £167k awarded if you can finish out side of the relegation play-off spots (5th to 11th is £167k) and if this is achieved for a season or two I should be able to get the youth recruitment and junior coaching up towards the high teens. The facilities can't be upgraded unless I can get some European football but for now I am just delighted to be in the top tier in season 3 and financially stable following a rough 2 seasons.

@Koetzer great choice of a save, what an interesting club name. I'm loving these out of the ordinary league choices, makes a nice change from the vanilla ones. Funnily enough one of the players I had in my Croatia save was indeed a Dutch/Surinamese player, I wish you luck as it will be intriguing to see your story unfold.

Made a secondary sheet now that uses the colour scales horizontally to look the roles per player rather than a comparison against the squad and also a new column highlighting the best position which given the colour coded areas of the park (dark blue goal, light blue defence, dark green defensive mid, green midfield, orange attacking midfield, purple strikers) it becomes quite easy to see where your strengths and weaknesses lie.....albeit from an attribute perspective. In the above this is my Kercem Ajax squad and interestingly you can see according to the sheet I have no best position strikers, probably due to an overlap in the attributes with more physical midfield roles as my two strikers are Pressing Forwards. It also shows no central midfielders which is actually quite accurate as I have AMCs and DMs but nothing in between in the middle of the park. The lower the overall attributes the smaller the differences between roles and inaccuracies will obviously come into effect but what this means is that based on attributes retraining and playing players out of position doesn't have as big an effect. I suspect at better quality teams the spread will be a lot more evident but this will be interesting to see if the intakes improve in quality with better starting attributes it might show a different picture. I've also changed some composite "attributes" where I group a few together such as Anticipation, Concentration and Decisions as Intelligence, Pace and Acceleration as Speed, Corners and Free Kicks as Dead Ball and Stamina and Work Rate combined as just Work. These are out of 20 so they act like another attribute. Once again I have two different views: 1 showing the strongest and weakest players for each in the squad comparison view and the other showing the players strongest and weakest areas. In addition I've added an average for each: Squad Comparison Player Strengths and Weakness From the averages I can see the physical side of the squad is stronger, with lower intelligence and poor dead ball abilities. When I look at the squad comparison view I can see Duncan Xuereb Y1-A is my best dead ball "specialist" with 7.5 out of 20 so that means I can look to use him for corners and free kicks most likely. If I look at the same player for the strengths and weaknesses I can see he is a good worker, but lacks speed and has fairly low intelligence. I need to have a think about how I track these year on year which might just be a case of creating a new template for each player and copying the latest years calculations as the last row and it will show a nice progression in each cell and also any changes with the best position. If I couple this with retraining I should see how effective retraining is (and can cross check that with personality to see the impact that has). I really wanted to take the time to get something solid as a foundation for moving forward as my updates felt very bland and I think this will really provide some insight into the squad and some of the key players (I'll obviously include as spoilers so that those that don't want to see this stuff can easily avoid it ) It's hard to stop adding things to this but I think I need to get back to my save now!

I had been in the same boat for quite a while and I just didn't really want to spend loads of time every end of season with a new intake and changed stats doing a lot of manual work. The nice thing about this is I can be quite lazy at producing it because the hard yards are done in advance. Export the player search view (as its Youth Academy Challenge I don't use it so the view and filter never change), move to the directory for my exports, run the tool and paste the results into the template and voila. However, this really only gives insight into current ability, figuring out potential from here is the next part and to be honest I haven't a clue. Personality can determine how well a player progresses but it gives no such indication over potential so the potential star ratings and the upper estimated value are still valid methods of figuring out the next talent. Looking at this report year on year for my Y1 intake will show their progression (or lack of) and then repeat for Y2, Y3 etc. From there perhaps I will spot patterns that I can then include in this output to aid in separating the wheat from the chaff.

Congrats on the EPL promotion @dkouv

Ok, so my save took a bit of a back seat this weekend as I played about with a way of being able to calculate role suitability based on attributes at scale and also highly configurable. A while back I saw a video from YouTuber squirrel_plays who pulled together a python jupyter notebook program for calculating possible transfer targets. I took that code and modified it so that I now have the following: All Attribute vs All Role Weighting Matrix The above is a first stab at weighting which allocates 5 to the primary attributes for a role and 3 for a secondary with a tertiary value for 1 to add on any other attributes you fancy for example if you really want your wingbacks to take long throws. In truth though you can put any values here and they will work, I've just started with the attributes that the game sees as the most critical and then secondary for each role and over time I will tweak this to suit my specific needs for a save. Export of All Attributes of Current Squad An all attributes filter that doesn't exclude my own players and then specifically filters for Kercem A. players gives me this list that I then export to HTML: I pop this in my Export folder (sub-directory of where the python file is) and I have a Weightings directory containing the attribute vs role weightings matrix, then I run my code against it. The code simply multiplies the weightings for each attribute dependent on the current role being assessed for every player, adds these up and then divides by the total of the weighting before multiplying by 5 to give a "score" out of 100 for suitability. The beauty of this is that if I just go and change some of the weightings and run again I don't have to touch the code and the output will change. The output is an HTML file that I then select all and do a text only paste into my position ratings template excel file (didn't quite figure out how to do this in the python code just yet): I then added the colour scales to each of the ratings to provide a heat map of sorts and given I have listed the roles from goalkeepers to strikers left to right and the players are ordered by position in the same order top to bottom you should see that the yellows and greens follow a top left to bottom right pattern in general. This is most likely overkill for my save at the moment but I had fun pulling this together and I will probably spend some time going through this. I'm curious though about how people are calculating values for potential and for hidden attributes. Given I am only comparing players in my squad its the relative value that matters more than the actual figure itself and as I say I may loosen some of the criteria particularly for my current save (most likely just reducing the number of green and blue attributes for certain roles). For a little case study here are the Rangers defenders and their ratings for positions along the back line: This was before Robin Propper signed and you can see the 3 standouts are John Souttar, Ben Davies and Leon Balogun where the greens are just that little bit darker. Sterling is 24 and doesn't play as a centre back naturally but you can see that he would be a better option than the youth players at this time, whilst Leon King and Clinton Nsiala Makengo have similar scores to Sterling but have more chance of growing into these roles as they are only 20. What it should highlight for the Youth Academy Challenge is how many of the youngsters are in a position to a) take a first team place b) compete for a first team place c) be back-up for a first team place or d) needs to improve before being promoted to first team Unsure if I can share this out given it was based on the code from someone else initially but my own modifications have made it my own and I think the output is a pretty good effort. I'm looking forward to getting back to my save tomorrow and getting my season 2 intake and using it to see how they fare against the players already at the club.

Good to know there are tools out there for this “issue” I can always change the surname when I update the name with the intake identifier but I’m not exactly clued up on Maltese surnames.

Awesome update as usual, you were really unlucky in the cup as I’ve seen those kind of match stats result in a win for “your side” many times but it’s reassuring to know you can hold your own at this stage. Your charts are also an inspiration, I’m wanting to delve more into this space but I feel like such a novice. Guess it’s a case of starting small and working up from there.

Honestly thought after spending a while pulling together the club logos and competition logos that it would all be for nothing as I’d have lost too many players to be competitive and with both the board and fans expecting we’d win the league that I’d be a goner. I also saw in the end of season review there were another 4 players that left, 2 Brazilians with one going to Hibernians in the premier and being really successful this season. I had a look out of curiosity for the status of clubs and it’s just Hamrun Spartans in this pack that are professional. It really excites me at the prospect of building the nation up I just have to see past the 100s of Attards, Borgs, Cauchis and Scerris as the names tend to repeat through the regents Though thank you once more, I feel like that little tip will make this save possible and even if it fails the semi-pro route in small countries where your entire squad is targeted for transfer will not seem that daunting.