NineCloudNine

You can do this now. Every manager (indeed every non-player) has a large list of preferences, tendencies and personality traits. Clubs and Boards also have playing style preferences. It’s these which difficulty mods like Davincid’s tinker with. There are clearly going to be limitations on how these work in-game (ME, player type and quality etc) but in theory all the necessary tools exist to do what you describe.

That happens when a player’s reputation is larger than that of the club. Reputation changes faster for players than for clubs so until your club reputation catches up (which can take years) you risk this problem. This may well throw up some oddities because it’s a crude system, but the idea that a player would want to leave a successful club to go to one with greater historical standing is not itself unusual.

The distinction that FM draws between AML/R and ML/R is a hangover from a time when there was a big difference between a wide midfielder (Beckham) and a winger (Giggs) in a world that mainly played 4-4-2. I agree that it makes little sense now. That said, the entire position / role system is arguably artificial and restrictive given the fluidity of modern football systems. It’s necessary because SI are coding a game which inevitably has to be a simplistic version of the real thing. Hopefully this will change with the new game engine. Lots of things in the game are like this - intended to represent rather than replicate some aspect of football. I’m sure real life loan contracts don’t include clauses specifying AM rather than M as playing position, but they do include a clear expectation of how a player will be used in a team and the clauses in FM loan contracts - however clunky - reflect that. This game module - like so many others - could do with a polish. In the meantime, don’t agree to clauses in a loan contract that you don’t intend to fulfil .

I don’t think this is the case. You’ve been given a budget you can spend. Where this leaves the club’s bank balance is the Board’s problem, not yours. Same with transfer and wage budgets - as you spend them the overall bank balance depletes.

You’re not playing real football, you’re playing a game and in that game you agreed to a bunch of optional conditions which you then didn’t fulfil.

The highlighted sentence makes sense if “Bundesliga 2” is replaced by “DFB Cup”. I’d report that in the bug forum, it’s either a text bug or an actual error in the way the qualification is set in the database.

Don’t make promises.

You have to manage his training, game intensity and minutes. You can change the tempo or pressing intensity during the game, you can change training intensity (especially the rest options based on condition). When he gets fatigued, tell him you are going to rest him. He might not like it, but it won’t be as bad as if you only start him in 60% of the games, as you’re doing now. Also accept that you will often have to play players well below optimal condition. IRL Saka clearly starts some games with what we’d see as a non-full condition heart. And his performances do suffer - he has been obviously tired at some points. Balancing star player expectations, performance, tactical needs and fatigue is a challenge. Both De Bruyne and Salah have thrown proper strops being taken off this season and they are star, seasoned pros in top teams. It’s part of the game.

Starting 11/18 games would be a problem for real life Saka too. This game module is twitchy, but I don’t think this is an example of it misfiring.

I might have misunderstood but I thought the problem was not being able to see which players have been registered for the B team, since such registration is a pre-requisite for being able to add them to a first team squad for a match.

If you hover your mouse over the ‘Ine’ icon, a popup should tell you the reason they are ineligible. I suspect not being in a playable league is indeed the problem, since there’s nothing to register them for.

I think what happens is that the game treats each contract offer as a separate event. There’s a wage and playing status the player expects *which is different for each club* depending on the club’s reputation relative to his. So he rejects an offer which fails to reach his expectation for one club, but accepts another which exceeds his expectation for that club, even though it’s lower in absolute terms. I do like that wage isn’t everything. It is good to have a player accept a lower wage at a smaller club in return for higher squad status and more guaranteed playing time. It just seems over-tuned in some instances.

Strawman. No-one has come anywhere near suggesting this. If the game makes you this angry, just walk away. It’s not worth it.

That’s very top heavy and your players risk tripping over each other around the box. I’d drop Casimiro to DM and move Mount to CM as either a B2B or a CM-S. You’ll have more movement and a more stable defence. W-attack will drive to the byline. Personally I wouldn’t use Garnacho like that, I think he’s better cutting in as an IW. W-support with instructions to cut inside might work. I’m also not convinced Shaw is a CWB, I think a slightly more conservative role (FB-S) would allow him to support Rashford rather than push into similar wide positions.

I’m guessing that you have a higher reputation, therefore he expected you to pay more, plus Elche most likely offered a higher squad status I’d post it in the bug forum, it’s hard to see how that is working as intended.

This is brilliant. The range of different ways people play FM is awesome.

It's not weird - goals direct from free kicks are very rare. For example, there have only been 9 in the EPL this season, out of 1,126 goals, shared between only 6 teams (Man City have 3 and Phil Foden is the only player to have scored more than 1). It's been in decline for years. This is an interesting read: https://www.premierleague.com/news/4001463

Don’t promise to improve the forwards then . Those are not improvements on the players you had.

Very happy for you

I could be wrong but I believe sponsor income is a once-per-year credit, around the season reset date.

I don’t think ‘focused’ is a personality type, it’s a state of mind before or during a game, usually resulting from a team talk or a touchline shout (like ‘don’t get complacent’ or indeed ‘focus’). Personality-related traits (like professionalism, pressure) do have an effect here, but focused is not itself a personality type, at least as far as I am aware.

The challenge here is that you yourself have seen he’s not good enough for the Prem, so no Prem team is going to want him, but on the other hand no Championship team is going to want to pay £20m, which is a notional value based on him being a Premiership player. It’s definitely true that reputation is overly influential in FM and can lag behind changes in club success. But on the other hand, as pointed out by @wazzaflow10 getting Chelmsford to the Premiership is almost inconceivable IRL so should the game be adapting to a rise of that rapidity? If reputation rose and fell as fast as you are going up and down the leagues, the game world would become extremely volatile.

This is interesting and I’m glad you replied. Yes, for the goalkeeper there is luck involved because they have to make a choice (left, right, stand still, wait, go early etc) with either limited/no information or very little time. My perspective was from that of the penalty taker. A penalty hit hard into any of the 4 corners if the goal is unsaveable no matter what the keeper does. The only reason a penalty taker would not to do that is a failure of either technique or nerve (or both, the latter leading to the former). As a penalty taker has - via practice - both technique and nerves under their control, there should be no luck involved. Where a penalty taker can get lucky is a poorly taken penalty that goes in because the keeper guessed wrong. So in that sense there is luck involved in a shootout, but only if you accept that the takers will not have eliminated it through the quality of their execution. It always used to be a mantra - even at the very highest levels - that a penalty shootout was a lottery because the pressure conditions cannot be replicated in practice. I recall Sven Goran Erikson shooting this down with a casual “of course you can practice for it, it’s a skill like any other”. With modern undetstanding of visualisation and mental control skills, this is even more true now. The mental focus of the taker is what keepers try to disrupt. The technical skill is largely a given, failing only when the mind gets in the way, like Harry Kane overthinking his second penalty of the game in the World Cup and trying to hit it harder/more precisely. Or Aurelien Tchouameni allowing himself to be irritated by Martinez throwing the ball away. So I don’t think there should be any luck involved in the taking of a penalty because it is in the gift of the taker to eliminate luck as a factor. However, you are also right that it is possible for luck to affect the result of a penalty shootout because whether a poor penalty is saved or not definitely includes an element of chance because of the choices/guesses a keeper has to make.

That's fine if you wish, but for the record I am genuinely interested in your view. I think it's a really interesting topic. It's not about being swayed or not. Opinions which differ from mine are more interesting than ones which just agree.

I’m interested to know what part of success or failure in taking a penalty you think is down to luck (by which I mean is outside the control of the penalty taker). I’m not saying it’s easy btw. Just that both the technical and mental elements can be trained to the point where it makes no difference what the keeper does or what the circumstances are.