We knew Acceleration and Pace were overpowered but this is absolutely mental! Huge flaw in my opinion when you can just search for these two attributes and basically disregard almost everything else. Hurts me especially since I've always valued mental attributes highly and often sacrificed a few points of pace for much better composure/anticipation/off the ball etc.
@@victorpresti this is because its not only pace and acc. Jumping reach is basically in the same tier. So from midfield backwards a player with 14/14 pace/acc but like 18-20 jumping reach is still godly and will outperform any Andres Iniesta out there. Balance is also almost as important as the previous. And strength too. You can see the difference in important in FM ARENA attribute table. there's also "dead" attributes, like "technique". But that's another story altogether
@@ad-zh5ot I don't understand how people find it hard to believe being physically gifted in sport is a bonus that trumps everything else. It's the corner stone of the building blocks to be good at any physical sport.
@@vidiveniviciDCLXVI Weak argument. In football, speed, acceleration and jumping reach are only a cornerstone in lower leagues. FC Barcelona dominated world football with very little running and jumping just a few years ago. Xavi could be the best midfielder in theg ame with none of those stats. But he can't. Because FM is broken. In Fm24, any random player with speed, acc and jumpnig reach is better than Andres Iniesta ever was and this my friend makes the game flawed, As proved by the hundreds of tests done in the attribute table in fm arena. But you do your blind defense of the impossible, whatever allows you to stay a fan.
I noticed this way back in FM 2019 and 2021 where mentioning online I was ridiculed that the match engine is biased towards atlethics more than anything else and mental and technique attributes are there just for cosmetics. I did stopped playing even back than with so much sorrow as any save I start with any Prem. club I always finish top in the first season. Beware as this issue will be most certainly in FM25 as this is something they wont change unless some heavy public outrage backlash.
In my opinion, a big part of this issue is that ball control is severely underpowered. In real life, defenders lose duels all the time. Sometimes defenders step out and the midfielder is so securely on the ball, that he cant lose the ball without being fouled. Even average premier league dribblers can often beat the first defender and create an opportunity. These kind of situations almost never happen in FM, the defender usually stops the attacker in their tracks and forces them into a pass or straight wins the ball.
I think it's because FM bypasses the midfield battle, everything is at either end of the pitch, not a lot happens in the middle like a real game, it's more like a simulation of basketball than football. So the more technical abilities don't have a chance to shine as much.
A LOT of things dont happen in fm.. and it just pisses me off we pay 60$ a year and they cant bother to change or upgrade the game at all. Its 2024… by now this game could have SO much more and actually be a real simulation. Instead we just pay for updated stats and one new feature. And after u watch 100 games in FM.. u have seen it all. The same things happen, same looking goals and crosses and misses… and there are many events common in a real game that never happen. They want the game to feel like an open world simulation but underneath it all its like you’re on train tracks locked in to a certain path. And next FM will be this exact same game again. No cinematic interactions in the lockerroom .. no commentators.. shit this game couldve been made ten years ago there is zero creativity they just spend all their time figuring out players stats?
Fm has no real pressing (the highest level of pressing is just a guy jogging a bit closer to the opponent so he passes the ball), players do dumb things as they have "activity states" - for example sometimes a loose ball is flying somewhere towards your player, but his state is at "wait" so the opposing player just runs next to him and takes the ball. That's kinda how defence gets beat half the time. There's almost no marking - defenders rarely stop attackers with their body. Most of the technicals and mental skills are severely undervalued by the match engine for most plays. There are many ways this game can improve, but I think reworking the attributes and CA (I said this under the previous video too lmao) should be a priority.
@@CimbomFanFiction tbh what they've built in 10 years is crazy compared with the money they had. SEGA is the only thing that they kinda trusted and again they barely gave them any money to work with at the very start. FM kinda grew from there, and honestly been VERY impressed what they've accomplished. We should be genuinely excited for FM 25, especially since unreal engine is coming into the game. Unreal engine will change EVERYTHING, and I mean everything. I swear man, it'll make FIFA like graphics and show how good a manager game can be. Just trust the process.
How about making another experiment? The same thing, pick Nottingam Forest, sack everyone and bring in players with 115 CA, but their best attributes are let's say first touch and decision making or something similar. If they finish mid table, than that would mean that the engine favours "unbalanced" players that are strong in one area, and doesn't favor speed. If the team gets relegated, than we can say speed is more important than anything else.
The thing is speed is part of every action, it is hard to find any other attribute that is in play in as many action. Acceleration and Pace are already the biggest factors in calculating CA for most positions. Decision is probably the closest one. I'd second an similar experiment where decision is the highest attribute in maybe a tiki taka system
Something similar has been done already. Check out FM Arena's Player Attributes Testing. You'd be surprised how some of the attributes straight up don't matter at all.
@@jpsouza It wouldn't surprise me because I've long suspected this - ultimately, making the simplest simulation a gaming dev team can get away with is the cheapest way to make such a game, and this is capitalism; a new version is needed every single year to maximise revenue. Then they hide the poor simulation behind simpler stuff like nice graphics and formulaic player/agent/media interactions etc, and most players don't notice. Perhaps if we had one game every 3 or 4 years with a small update every season, perhaps the team would be more likely to spend more time ensuring an accurate simulation. But again, its capitalism. saving the most money to make the most money is how every company does things. I'd previously suspected that all individual attributes were just window dressing with perhaps overall current ability of each player and total ability of each team determining results and little else. If it turns out its heavily weighted in favour of pace, then that's a similar short cut devs could make. I guess it just underscores what a waste of life playing these games is lol
@@davyprendergast82 I'm guessing the match engine is, indeed, complex and all, but they probably struggled finding balance to the point they had to take some liberties with the attributes in order to achieve a perceived realism. Like, they have scouts and other collaborators grading real players attributes on a scale of 1-20, but I bet they never managed to translate these arbitrary grades to what one would expect to see on the pitch in terms of individual and collective performances. So they found out pace, acceleration and other few attributes could get the job done when it comes to balancing the game and called it a day... if the majority of the clubs in the game perform as expected from their real life counterparts, that's close enough for SI sadly. Even though this is clearly achieved by either chance or ad-hoc tweaking.
Someoen last year played 4231 with man city and replaced the 4 most advanced players with Traore clones, and they were actually better than the real City team that had KDB, Haaland, Silva, Grealish or whoever
I think the problem might not be that pace is overvalued, it's more that bad attributes are too good. Like how many times have we seen lower league players with a 3 in long shots scoring an absolute banger from outside the box? I mean, it can happen, but it should be exceedingly rare. In lower leagues in real life, maybe you get one or two of those per season in the whole league, but in FM like atleast 10% of goals scored seem like they're worldies, regardless of the level of play. So I guess what FM needs is to respect the suck. Like if a player has a 1 in passing, he's just not gonna complete most passes in a satisfactory way. And if some has a 1 in first touch, that ball should be bounce around like a pinball more often than not. Basically, a 1 should be the equivalent of untrained guy that's never played football almost. Cause if bad attributes were actually allowed to BE bad, then ok, that pacey guy is still pacey, but if the ball ever arrives in his general vicinity he's not gonna be able to do anything with it. And as such, the pace is suddenly less useful.
I had a guy with a think a 1 in long shots get the goal of the season for my team if not the league on one of those killier shot from way outside, i think that was probably the only goal he scored. It's crazy.
This for sure. I support Clyde FC, one of if not the worst league teams in Scotland, and some of our players almost literally can't dribble but there is a baseline of competence afforded to all players in FM that doesn't match real life. The match engine does not effectively accommodate the difference between a non-league centre back technical ability and Lionel Messi's.
I'd disagree with this. Because the level of play is much lower it can be easier to look good. Not that uncommon to see what looks like real skill in low leagues
I was doing a Youth to Gold save with Valencia in Spain. Signed Rokas Pukstas, played him as a CM (su). I played every game, no sims no holidays. The guy had 9 for long shots and I swear to god, every goal he scored was from outside of the box. No headers, no free kicks, no penalties, just shots from outside the box.
Yeah that makes databases with park amateur leagues ridiculous. If anyone watches team of far old geezers playing football you quite cannot replicate it in fm
He got 12,11,12th in three seasons.. but its more than that. Thats with zero adjustments, random tactics, no praising your players, and just zero coaching/management overall. So its damn crazy bc if he did play the season normally he would finish like 5-9th
I said this in the original reddit thread: "If I had to guess, the match engine uses player positions to determine whether or not to "roll" for certain actions. If the position is wrong, it just doesn't. So, for example, IF your player is positioned well for a cross after beating his man, THEN it rolls everything for a cross. If he isn't, it either applies pre-set attributes or applies a steep penalty that essentially makes it as such. The problem with this is that any of the stats that aid in your player getting positioned right are therefore the only stats that matter. Whether your crossing is 20 or 1 doesn't matter if your pace/acceleration/agility can't get you in the relative position that allows you to "roll" attributes. So, in effect, the physical position attributes (including dribbling since that likely gives the ball a good position that allows for stat rolls) are the only ones that matter, since players with worse ones never even get to use the technicals. The engine just isn't smart enough to understand "the guy can be standing in the right spot because he's so fast, but he lacks the ability to then do anything to fully utilize this position so the cleverer and more technical player can still beat him." All it sees is "Player X is in position Y so the cross fails automatically."
"It makes sense when I imagine the match engine being a glorified DnD dungeon master. It greatly simplifies the number of calculations if a simple position check on the front end can bypass hundreds of stat rolls. "If position = X, then skip all of the rolls and apply this result instead." It would save thousands of calculations per match, maybe even tens of thousands. The only alternative is to go full physics-based, to where being in the right position is only half the equation. I suspect a big reason in the change in engine is to allow the engine to run way more "stat rolls" in a more lightweight way because attempting that level of detail as-is would basically make the game unplayably slow. I know zero about programming, but that's my guess."
Thats almost correct - Its not flawed , its because each scenario starts out with an X and Y position in the game engine and fast players reach these positions first, most people dont have ALL fast players and ALL of these tests have been done with an ENTIRE TEAM of fast players, meaning that there is no X and Y where a scenario can start where your player wont be first to the ball, if only speed mattered then every save would have Adama Traore as the Ballon Dor winner, it doesnt because although he can blow down the sideline like Usain Bolt, the person he has to cross the ball to can not keep up. When each player in your tactic has this pace and speed they will be first to every scenario, they might lose the ball, but that just creates another scenario - rinse repeat.
@@dynaboyjl.4220 That was what latest FIFA Manager games was trying to be. Sadly, EA stooped their developement right before it had potential to be the best.
I did a similar test after seeing the stats on attributes. I managed a Vanarama South side and only used youth players who I trained in pace/acceleration from day one, only money I spent was on facility upgrades and didn't buy a single player, no editor either. I holidayed every match with no save scumming and the side promoted every single season with pretty much only 16-19 year olds with decent speed. When I got to the prem it did take about 4 years to being a top 3 squad but I avoided relegation. I finished the save about 12 seasons in, I had easily won the prem and UCL, the club still only had 'bad' players as I had only gotten good youth prospects about 4-5 years before I finished so they were still only about 20. I also had over a billion in cash as I wasn't spending anything, even the wages were very low considering.
Dude, I hope Zealand sees your comment! Your experiment sounds both 10x more thorough and damning than his. A youtuber with as big an audience as him could force their hand to make an actual game worthy of your time.
Its been like this for many many years. Back in 2010-11 when I joined the beta tester team for a season , we actually reported this - but the response was they couldn't do anything about it at that time since it would require them to rebuild the entire engine, which obviously take to much time and resources, so that idea was dropped. . Do I have faith in SI to fix it for FM25 ? - not really and its hard to answer . But I think its only a new graphical overlay and the calculation behind will stay the same.
I'm not surprised to hear this. The FM I played the most was FM2010 (which I think was maybe the second year the 3D Match Engine was in the game) and it was apparent then that Physical attributes were overly important, especially in certain areas of the pitch - strikers and wingers mostly. Also, whatever calculations went on to determine the value of a player in a certain position were clearly skewed. I'd see central defenders with Jumping of 10-12 being very highly sought after by AI clubs, when they were constantly being beaten in the air and giving up goals. One team in my save (in the EPL) was outstanding all over the park, but signed 2 CBs with mediocre Jumping stats, which killed them every season. Despite these guys putting up 6.6 average rating season after season the club would persist with them.
For what it's worth, they are swapping engines exactly *because* it will allow them to simulate thing better, as the new engine opens up a lot more complex mechanics and interactions due to its efficiency and ability to replace it in detail graphically.
@@Hodevine what? Unity isn't better than C+ (other than for those actually making the game), it doesn't offer anything special in processing power or calculation capabilities. They're migrating because they want to stop porting their game to every device and this allows them to cut their work and save money massively because Unity's framwork allows them to make the game once and port it with the press of a button. I'm betting the underlying calculations will stay the same.
@@ad-zh5ot I agree. Worked in IT and coding for years. Playing FM/CM since 1998. The engine remain the same as it went out in 2009. To this day they only change cosmetics and some animations, but coding and calculations are entirely different things and to change all that they need to invest in entirely new engine spec designed for football which will never happen. This will be copy.pasted in FM25 make no mistake. Trust me don't buy the new game unless proven and tested otherwise. This sort of stuff was exactly why I stopped playing FM. What's the purpose in playing when u can win with national league players as long as they have good athletics and zero finishing and zero mentals! Yeah go mental beating Man City with 120CA players :D
We do need to call out SI for such massive issues in the code of their game. There's such weird fetish about how amazing and smart their engine is, it's important these tests and the results are shoved towards them. That goes for the next FM as well btw, I think it's super important we have a video like this asap when 25 is out.
I will say in their defense, it is EXTEMELY difficult to make a match engine perfect. Every time you make an alteration to solve one problem it often just creates another.
I mean... its kinda real, isnt it? Mbappes, Haaland, Messi, Ronaldo either have been know or are currently overrunning lines on the highest of performance levels. Haaland is kinda the pinnacle of that. Guardiola told him that non of his other skills are necessary in this system, just his strenght, speed and the tendency to hit the net. End result: Averaging 25 ball contacts and breaking long standing goal scoring records in the best league in the world.
Just that it’s the worse in FM, fifa has a better match engine than fm in regards to pace/physicality. And in fifa mentals barely even matter by design because you are controlling the players. FM25 hopefully addresses this issue that has existed since like forever.
Is it because physical attributes I imagine aren’t effect by hidden attributes like consistency or big matches, and that are more effective later in the game due to a lack of AI rotating and resting tired players, so they get more chances and possession
I just tried a similar test on FM2022 in the Scottish league. Mid table team, only played my fastest players and loaned in a few speedy dudes from other clubs. Was constantly challenging for the top of the league, made it to one cup final (lost to Rangers) and lost the Scottish cup semi final 1-0 to Rangers after dominating the game and conceding in the 90th minute. Pace/acceleration is OP.
If you want to try it with a open league try Belgium or Spain I abuse the "pace meta" and across 9 seasons ive wom the league twice Obviously my players arent as bad as the ones in the video but their key stuff is still just pace Fm isn't that realistic 😂
I just ran this experiment after watching your video. I took Aveley in the national south who were predicted to come 22nd I terminated everyone's contracts and brought in players with high pace and acceleration that were interested in signing for us. I simmed the whole season and just got promoted via the playoff final.
as an italian viewer, seeing Zealand running the average Hellas Verona/whatever team plays Gasperini-like football in Serie A season experiment is great, I'm so used to random players that run really fast finishing mid-table that this doesn't upset me the slightest
Try it in a network game Zealand. (athlete's team VS average EPL team) Would be interesting to see If Loluju or whoever can counter-act it with tactics or if he simply losses out to the athletic players.
"I can't convince Notthingam Forest to clean their team and start signing all of these guys" Tony Bloom overhearing this in Brighton: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
I did this this week with Deportivo Alaves. When I took over they had 0 wins, 5 draws and 9 losses. I brought in pace/accel guys and comfortably avoided relegation and over the next two years, only signing pacey guys had them playing CL football and splitting the games with Barca and Real. I would say try to get some fast guys that are tall too and a striker with good strength and jumping reach/heading and run a direct pass tactic and once you get your tactical familiarity past a certain point, you should be golden. Also Owen Otasowie is a beast in this game
Now I know the secret behind Largie Ramazani. That man gives me nightmares every time I have to face Almeria in FM. Acceleration 18, Pace 17. Always scores against me and outperforms my most of my players because of those two attributes, his mentals are crap, his technicals are below average.
I think people should go back to FM22/23/21and do the test there too. I suspect 99 percent that you get similar results but the test should be done anyway to see if this is a fm24 specific issue. I doubt it is though.
Back in my FM09 save, I had a team that keeper aside all had pace of 18,19 or 20 - it out performed everyone. When you watched the matches, the ball kept being hit long into space and my players basically won all the foot races to the ball. Obviously this side was pace to the extreme (one which wasn't planned that way until the last few seasons in the save when I suddenly realised everyone was quick and then made a point of upgrading those with pace 15 with those with 18)
The hidden atrributes of the assistant manager matter a lot, changing the formation itself means nothing when the assistant prefers to play defensive football. A better idea would be to select a style of play in the tactics menu and while skipping time you can just select "use preferred tactic" so that the assistant uses a tactic that suits players with high pace the most. It all points to the fact that a formation with good instructions that suit your players are too op in this game. Countless times I've seen weak teams have much high possesion that the much stronger opponent ( In my recent save for example Albania had a 59% possesion against italy which would never happen in real life). I love the game and spent a couple thousand hours in my recent years of playing it but it's nowhere close to being realistic with the current match engine as it's filled with exploits and many attributes and tactics are just unbalanced. Hopefully they'll fix it in the next game.
That was a hot topic in the Polish FM community around FM10 (yes, so long ago). A guy took medium Ligue 3 team (French third level), used FMRTE to change all players pace and acc to 20, and just played. Demolished Ligue 3, demolished Ligue 2 and then finished 3rd in Ligue 1. All with third level players, just with buffed pace and acceleration.
I think FM not only over values pace, accelleration and Strength, because they are always 100% for every game as long as the player is fit, but also hidden attributes like consistency and important matches, because the higher the number the more augmented the technical and mental attributes are for each game. The way it works is that before a game there is a dice roll from 1-25. If the players consistency is less than 20, say 10, then if the roll is 10-25 the players mental/technicals take a huge hit. Physicals are unnaffected. That is why physicals are particularly overpowered.
Please explain how the number of the dice roll interacts with the number for consistency. I don't really understand what you mean. My very basic understanding of how the consistency/important matches attributes work is to take each mental/technical attribute and essentially multiply it by the consistency/important matches attribute, and that gives your players 'actual' in-game attribute compared to the opposition players 'actual' in-game attributes. I know it doesn't work the way I've explained it and it works the way that you've explained it, but please explain it a little more clearly for me please. Many thanks.
@@timmoleft7147 There are hidden attributes such as Consistency and Important matches. They, like other attributes, are 1-20. However, no player in real life is 100% consistent or plays well in every big game so its more like a max of 20/25. So a player with 20/20 will keep his stats 80% of the time in each game/big match. The game decides this on dice rolls out of 25. A player with 20/20 will keep 100% of his technical/mental stats if he rolls a 20 or lower out of a 25 sided dice. If the roll is say, a 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 then the player takes a penalty to these technical/mentals. How much we dont know but it could be a minus 1 or 2 for each mental/technical attribute. So a player with 20 technique may become a 19 or 18 etc. Physicals are never affected by Consistency/Imp Matches. As long as the player is 100% fit they will retain their high Acc/Pace etc and hence why they are so powerful. There is more to it. There is Pressure hidden stat, which may affected the player at the business end of a season. Another factor is some attributes are actually linked in game. Work Rate and OTB are affected by the Determination of a player. If you are winning a game 10-0 and your determination is say 1/20 then the players OTB, Work Rate and perhaps Concentration, takes a hit in game. This makes sense because players get lazy when the game is won. Same is true when you are losing 10-0. players may just give up.
@timmoleft7147 my understanding is this. If a player has 20 consistency then the odds of his attributes being "worse" than face value is 20:25. Or in simpler terms 80% of the time he will play to his attributes. Another extreme example, consistency of 1 would give a 1:25 (4%). However this doesn't take into account other hidden attributes which may also impact a players stats such as important matches. Which I believe can either increase or decrease the players stats depending on the important match value (I could be wrong on this)
I think Evidence Based Football Manager or someone else has experimented with important matches and consistency and it turns out they don't work as expected and don't really matter.
I would say that most attributes will influence a percentage chance - take an easy pass, the engine will calculate the probability of that pass being played well depending on the passing attribute. Pace (as well as stamina, jumping reach, ...) is "always on" and not about probabilities. A pace 19 player is always faster than a pace 18 player. How is this important? Well, for one, with enough pace everything gets easier. Players have more space, passes are easier, first touches are not made under pressure, etc. Secondly, all the bad passes during the game don't matter as long as you make the most of the passes that do work. A technically weaker team will get fewer chances, but in 90 minutes there are still enough opportunities.
It basically gives more leeway for mistakes. A bad pass? The player is more able to run after the ball, or chase the opponent in case of a turnover. They're more able to run in behind defense, and can catch up with the ball when the enemy plays risky passes.
@@victorpresti Exactly, and we saw in the video that it help capitilise on the oppositions mistakes like with the backpass to the keeper and the guy scores it. Thats not a situation many people would be thinking about when they signed a pacey striker.
This is the end of this engine, and the end of FM as we've known it since years and years. Adding to that the wages requests, attitude issues of most players, the obvious scripts , this has been a catastrophic game.
Football Manager used to be my favorite game of all time, I put nearly 400 hours into these games but I have to admit that they simply are not fun anymore. The official introduction of default GenGenPress with a generic 4-2-3-1 just broke the game and no amount of mods I have tried can fix it. I purposely pick a terrible team in the Vanarama North League and with those tactics you win 95% of games regardless of who you are playing, you get promoted every single year even if your squad is trash. Can you find a striker with 17+ pace? Now you are winning every game by 5 goals even if that striker has terrible finishing. Whole game needs a complete overhaul using true AI that learns in real time.
IMO the problem is that the stamina simulation in the game does not do a good enough job of slowing players down as they use their energy. You can press with a high line for 90 minutes and guys with no stamina will still be sprinting up and down the pitch. The pace advantage is exacerbated when players will simply sprint themselves to death for you for 90 minutes. I suspect they've made this decision consciously so as to allow plug-and-play tactics to continue to exist.
I wonder if it’s the AI under estimating the team due to the current ability and then pushing forward which is leaving gaps in behind for the pace to exploit, if that’s the case it would be interesting to see this experiment over a few years and see if they adjust
My thoughts exactly. I noticed often I'd go on an amazing fa cup run in my first season with a non-league club and then revert to mean second season once league clubs took my team seriously
@@gunaodegaia9082 The match highlights don't really show that though. They only show high XG events - not events that could lead to high XG events. IE - if that winger is outrunning the fullback 20 times a game, the highlights only show the one where he actually crosses properly. IE, it doesn't look like its a pace goal - but the opportunity was created by pace. Almost all the highlight goals were wingers crossing to guys who were completely open. Those absolutely are pace goals.
I've been banned from SI's FM forums more times than I can remember, always after providing similar data to that in the video. My main gripe has always been those games where you have 30+ shots, 8 ccc's and 12 half chances, yet you lose 1-0 because your world class defender stands still whilst the opposition forward casually takes the ball from his feet and taps it home past a clearly confused keeper. The stats I tend to take notice of in FM24 are the GK's, after I came across it I went through all my saves to check and low and behold in every save my GK's had the lowest save %. To put this in perspective, I had a Man City save where I'd lost one game all season and conceded only 18 goals, yet Ederson had only had a 61% save ratio even though his expected save ratio was 82%. I'm seeing game after game where short players with jumping ability as low as 3 are getting above my 6ft4 jumping 18 defender to score goals(the latest came from a worldie cross from a player with a "7" crossing attribute) as a one off its acceptable but it has become so common place that I've started to expect it in every game. I lost a CL final 2-1 to Barca with both goals 25 yard curling screamers from their CB's with the highest long shot attribute of those players being 5. It was their only 2 shots on target in the match whilst my side had created multiple ccc's and half chances. One of the most recent findings was that the AI were 20 plus times more likely to score from their first shot on goal than I am, in fact, statistically the AI is more likely to score a scorcher from distance than I am from a CCC. These are not stats that the game represents, you have to go back through your games, but its simple maths and it concludes that the match engine is far from what SI claim it to be, its actually coded to allow the AI to compete. If you think I'm making it up or I'm full of cr*p, remember that all FM is is a series of calculations, everything about the game is based on math, so why is it that the game after all these years continues to tell me with 3 games left of the season and I'm sat in 3rd place 10 points clear of the team below me yet it is still telling me that I have to this point still only qualified for the EL rather than the CL? If it can't even do the simple math, who knows how messed up its match calculations are.
Same thing I wrote in the last video of Z about the Ronaldo vs Messi teams WC. Big guys made it to the final stages, but how in the hell all my 17+ JR defenders lose all the headers in my damn area, so fkn tired of receving goals because they can't make a header properly to reject the ball.
I wander what would happen if you did the test with players that are not Premier league level but had relatively high technical and mental attributes but low physical ones, for example older players. I want to see where they would finish.
Exactly this. I’d like to see a similar experiment with other attributes being so high. I think an entire team of A+ players in one skill set will be at least mid table in the premier league and that’s quite realistic.
they suck, it's basically what aging players are... i had 37 year old James Rodriguez at Viborg in the Danish league... 5 pace, 5 strength but 17+ all technical and he did literally nothing lol
Isn't this just a united simulation of the last 10 years? Doesnt matter if your outfield doesn't have a clue so long as you have david de gea between the sticks you'll get results😂
This has been the case for years, physical attributes are the most powerful in the match engine, always have been going back to Championship manager days (yes I've been playing that long)!
Seeing Noah Ohio,a mid striker who has been memed by my classmates because he's mid and I am a Standard Liège fan from Antwerp in a Zealand vid was something I never expected
Very legitimate points - you can bet that when you holiday that they do every little thing that we dont bother to do. Little tweaks throughout, basing instructions fully based on the opposition, optimising rest as well as theres a big squad here. I am sure as well that when you move players via the editor adaptability doesnt really matter as the engine just reads them as being players on the team as opposed to new signings.
I mean, actually talking to players, adjusting your tactics or training, along with other stuff you usually do when you play normally should make a difference. How much of a difference is what I don't know 😅
When you have the detail level on max (when you can go back and watch the whole match) there is no difference Since I’m managing the team the detail level is naturally on max, I just am not there to make in-match adjustments
This does make sense, considering the vast agreement that Gegenpress has been overpowered in the last few FM's, how difficult it is to make any type of possession or defending tactic. But it's hard to watch. Like we all knew it but having confirmation of it sucks.
Been a long time part of FM. I remember back in FM20 taking over some non-league semi-pro team in Ireland, with an average PA (potential ability) of around 60. Gave them a 4-2-4 wide formation, and the largest field to play on that was possible. Trained an endurance and quickness session every week. After three years, all the players had 15+ endurance, work rate, pace, and acceleration. Outside that, their skills largely averaged in the 7s and 8s. The result was kind of astonishing. I was able to push the tempo and pressing intensity to levels that would ordinarily be unsustainable (deep red was now blue), and opposition teams would be completely unable to cope, and also drained of stamina by mid game just trying to keep up, particularly on the giant home field. While I could usually get in 2-3 goals by half-time, I'd usually get in quite a few more after it. It wasn't uncommon for opposition teams to end the match with 7 players on the field due to injuries (just because they were so exhausted). I had one terrible poacher with maybe 8 finishing get over 100 goals in a single season, which was hilarious as nobody was even remotely interested in signing him. They became the leading premier team of Ireland, no problem. By the third year, they reached the semi-finals in Euro Champions League, and won it by the fourth. I think the total payroll was something like $120k USD yearly, so the club got a lot of nice upgrades off that.
I recently had a situation with a player where I finally understood how important pace and acceleration is in the game. He was a RB with 18 Acceleration and 16 pace but his other stats wre mediocre. I had another RB who was clearly better in every aspect except those two stats where he was having a 15 Acceleration and 16 pace. The difference in performance is insane. He just looks better all around - plays better passes, better crosses and had a 7.5 rating while the other one had 7.0. Generally I have the feeling the game lies to us: my squads alway overperform. I built a squad full of wonderkids thinking it would be nice to see them develop to a major CL contesting team but they win the CL in their second season.
This doesn't shock me at all. I use a tactic that relies on everybody having massive pace, The slowest guy on my team has fourteen pace and plays as a defensive midfielder.
I would have liked to see what the locker room atmosphere and team cohesion were for these saves because I often feel like they are the truly overpowered part of FM.
I´ve always had a hunch about this, since playing with norwegian team Vålerenga in FM 2011, with their star striker Luton Shelton who had 18 pace and 19 Acceleration, the rest of his abilities were on average maybe a 9 or 8. He would still finish with anywhere from 30 to 40 goals every season...
It's important to note that the CA of a player is not calculated only on his attributes. Indeed, the amount of positions they can play in + their level with both feet are a huge part to calculate the CA of a player. For exemple a player who can play centreback, leftback, rightback, and DM will have a way higher CA than a DM only. Also a player that can play with both of his feets will be higher CA than a single leged player. Basically a stiker with only one leg at 120CA will always be more efficient than a 150CA double leged player who can play wherever he wants on the attack front.
Clearly the engine values pace and acc, I think where it gets exploited is there isn't enough possible variance between 1 and 20. When you play lower leagues the games aren't too different and ultimately that's where this problem begins. The difference between a 9 passing and 18 passing is noticeable but not as noticeable as it should. Whereas that same gap but on pace and acceleration is as noticeable as it should be. Would be curious to see if putting the detail level on low would yield similar results. I wonder if the quick sim engine is better at generating more realistic results
I've known for years how OP pace and acceleration were, but I didn't realise it was THAT OP. I first realised when I got Tamworth to the prem and couldn't find any good strikers in my price range, so I ended up just buying the fastest striker I could find, that guy ended up getting about 40 goals. This works for any position on the pitch except goalkeeper, if you want a good goalie for little money, go for reflexes.
I've seen Yira Sor play for Slavia. There are highlights of a conference league match Slavia vs Lask where in 2 matches he had 3 goals from like 8 breakaways. They just kicked the ball forward and he went for it. In the second game he literally went around a guy by just kicking the ball forward and RUNNING AROUND THE GUY! His pace was insane. Seriously, look it up. But he only had luck in the european leagues where the opponent played a high defense line. In Czech league, Slavia were considered one of the best teams so everybody played very deep with low chance of a pass behind the back line.
This is the way most people have gotten back to back promotiona since i started playing this game ( fm17, but probably since forever ) and onwards. Getting physical beasts and ignore most of the other stuff, then slowly add more of the other stuff as you get up in the leagues
I've played the game with CA and PA visible on my squad screen all season, there are players who's CA rises constantly and they get to 180+ but they're playing terribly the whole season. I get that a players ability can be really high, but if they have low consistency for example they can be hit and miss, that makes sense. But if a player is a striker and they haven't scored for 20 games, yet their ability goes up and up to the point they are one of the highest CA's in the world, something ain't right.
You should make the exact same team but in the championship. They should get promoted in most if not all simulations if they are a mid-table premier league team. If they don't, there could be more to it than pace/ acc being broken.
I wonder if a few other factors can make up the difference, although I’m not that well versed with the engine overall: 1) Could it be possible that the engine favors user controlled teams over the course of a season like this? 2) Assuming there’s a luck factor in the engine, maybe it’s simply overpowered? 3) Could it be the case that the engine operates under a certain condition like “Teams in this division will perform at (insert minimum level) regardless of who’s signed to them? Clearly, the likely case is that physical attributes can make up for mediocre or worse technicals. But what other factors come into play here to boost this team from, say, an 18th place finish to just outside 10th?
Saw the name Dion Rankine on your list. That name rung a bell, I check one of my saves, and sure enough, I had used him in lower leagues In Vanarama South, Vanarama, and Sky Bet 2 Rankine recorded average ratings ranging from 7.33 to 7.90 Rankine did hit a major stumbling block i=once reaching Sky Bet 1, with ratings ranging from 6.56 - 6.72, and now as a 30-year-old in 2033/34, he's playing in the Scottish 3rd tier, with a CA of 87 and a PA of 138 Solid lower tier player. Can't imagine that he would be any good with a Premier League team.
Im convinced some stats dont even mean anything too. I remember starting a save with spurs im fm23 and harry kane with 19 finishing was missing 7 sitters a game, meanwhile players with 11 long shots and 12 finishing were cosplaying prime cr7
Man, except for two or three players on the pitch (like a midfielder that's all vision and passing), that's pretty much what I did anyway in all of my saves. It's disappointing that it's that broken, I just wanted it to be a little broken
It seems that most players also have godlike touch and dribbling, which kinda squashes the whole technical stat. With all of the money they make, they might as well hire someone who can help fine tune their engine.
Do you know if this happens specifically with pace and acceleration? Because I feel that the game is sort-of-biased with any team and any formation or players you play with, you will always sort of do good, never really fail.
I Hope You Read This!I think the problem is detail level.I play a save with detail level set at maximum in every playable league.The game is very hard the AI is very smart and i also tried to tale advantage of the pace and acceleration.I think if the game makes a quick SIM of the match This problem occurs.But If the detail level is set properly at the expense of speed the problem disspappears.Not to mention other benefits.
I think there is a certain bias ingame engine towards the player controlled teams. What I would do, is set up pre-game editor for a team, Nottingham for example, and then start up the game, and pick.. any team, let us say Man Utd, and run simulation 4-5 like that. Put in transfer ban on Nottingham so they can not sign anyone.
hey zealand, first time fm player here. ur videos have inspired to give the game a go. currently on my first save with sunderland in my first year i made the playoffs in the championship finishing 6th but losing to norwich in the semi. in my second go i was promoted finished second. brought in a wonderkid and many other good players and i’m now 8th in the premier after 25 games played
i think it's a huge flaw, i mean, one of the important reason playing FM is the good feeling, one of the main challenge is doing good with our disadvantage we had in the league, this just takes away that good feeling, because turns out we are not as good as we thought we were, this literally show that we didn't get a championship squad to mid table because we are good, but simply there's a flaw in the game, it's like take away our efforts, like what's the point ? even we didn't manage the team they still thriving, we didn't make a difference as a manager. i hope they fix that, because we all love this game.
I think if you've played FM for any meaningful amount of time, we all kinda knew this was the case. Same thing with training not having any affect whatsoever, but we still do it anyway because like you said, it kinda kills the entire game and shifts your mentality towards these broken mechanics. If the goals you're seeing has nothing to do with pace, IMO this means the algorithm for the match engine is not actually taking individual attributes into account, but rather as a whole. If a player has high pace but poor passing, because the algorithm weighs pace so highly, it'll show the player as having good passing and able to make ridiculous plas.
I wonder if the solution would be for SI to extend attributes outside of the 1-20 scale for FM25; creating bigger gulfs between players and then allowing for those attributes to have more of an impact.
0:42 Now imagine my surprise when I accidentally stumbled upon such a "supertactic" in CM01/02 by having to deal with an Injury Crisis... EDIT: Ever since CM97/98 (god I feel old typing that...) I basically only looked at: Pace, Passing, Stamina, Strength, Height, Determination (in that order) without anything to actually base that on but vibes. And always did well. Acceleration and Work Rate have been working into that when they finally became a thing. But the basic always was "fast, strong, tall, who can pass a ball" And then added Determination and WorkRate because they sound important for professional athletes. Turns out the match engine agrees (and has done so for literal decades... again... feeling old...)
its been like this for a couple years, i signed ricky jade jones for rangers for the future and first season he was top scorer in the scottish prem and was my top scorer in the uel. he didn’t have anything apart from pace had like 10 shooting
"A boost to speed is a boost to all skills" - MockRock It does not surprise me this is how this ended up. The highlights don't show much but how many neutral balls are won because they get there first? How much extra possession does that get them? With your highest goal scorer on the like for like test being under 10, that means goals were coming from everywhere. If you can beat them to the ball, you get to apply the skills you do have and they don't. I think that's why that works in the engine and why it only works in the engine.
My first full FM save I brought a Czech striker called Lucas Julis who got me 32 goals in Spanish segunda and over 20 in la liga, in real life he got 1 goal for Ibiza and only had 1 season where he scored over 10 in his career. Made me realise it is as not realistic as people make out. I feel the game gives the players team some leniency. Still fun
Surely it’s more concerning that nobody is talking about the inverse. Does a lack of pace cause players in FM to under perform to an unreasonable extent? Can you get players who have bundles of technical ability and game intelligence, but lack pace, to perform as you’d expect? Like a David Silva or Sergio Busquets type of player.
Well when you have a great player who gets old and loses their physical attributes, they do tend to perform extremely poorly. So I think this is another issue that is part of the same problem.
I'd guess that explains why 140CA Jonathan Ikone with 16 accel 16 agility and 16 pace had 20+ G/A and was my second highest rated player when I won all domestic trophies within 2 years at Fiorentina
I HAVE PLAYED MORE HOURS THAN YOU AND CAN EXPLAIN WHY THIS OCCURS. I am not great at explaining things but let me try, FM Games are made up of mathematical scenarios, this is why attributes and other conditions matter as all of them affect the numbers used to make such calculations in scenarios. To add insult to injury not only is there direct mathematical calculations, at the end of each calculation there is a thing called Random Number Generation or RNG which adds an element of luck to the calculations scoring sequence. Each component of the scenario is weighted differently, but almost ALL scenarios include an X and Y co-ordinate to start the scenario. If you can imagine the field being a chess board of black and white squares, each scenario starts on one of those squares, it has an X and a Y. The engine then calculates which player/s (one of each team) would be FIRST TO ARRIVE at the scenario, this is based on a LOT of things, but mainly, the tactical positions, the traits and the tactics employed, ie a wing back sits higher than a full back etc but the biggest factor is speed. And here is where your issue occurs, the game assumes you wont have EVERY SINGLE PLAYER as super fast and strong, but in EVERY test that EVERYONE has done ALL of the team posses this pace, agility and strength, this causes a problem because it means if you were starting a scenario ANYWHERE on the chessboard of the field on ANY X and Y co-ordinate - your player will be first to the ball all the time and every time. If only half of your team was fast and strong this would not occur, it does not matter if these physical players cant pass at all as a misplaced pass creates the beginning of yet another new scenario and a new X and Y position, so you constantly are first to the ball, therefore having a weighted advantage to win the ball and when you lose the ball, you will be first to the next scenario anyhow, the game weights the first player to arrive very heavily - it has to or tactics would not work. I tested this thoroughly, even at first placing fast players next to slow players in my tactics so that NO fast player was next to another fast player, I also tried having one whole side of my team fast and the other normal. Think of it like this. You place a team of 11 men (fast players) in a circle and 11 women (Normal Players) in a circle shape, the same shape and evenly spaced, you tell them you have a drone that will drop a ball into the center of the circle but no one can move to get the ball until the ball hits the ground then you drop the ball in the center of the circle - the MEN (fast players) always arrive first, unless the ball is dropped somewhere that is not the middle of the circle and lands at a womans feet.... Now imagine that it is a chess board and the players are overlayed onto that chess board (you can actually see this with the "coverage" section of the tactics screen, except that is justa few squares instead of several hundred in the engine) so your team has its positions on the chess board based on your tactics and the other team has theirs as well, there will be spaces of green grass that a scenario can start but ... ANYwhere that the drone drops the ball, you will be first to the ball because your players are fast. strong and spaced out in a tactic to give good coverage. The game assumes that no one in their right mind would pick a team of fast and poorly technical players and as Pace and Agility are rare, its uncommon to have ALL of the fast players in your database on one team.. the other issue is that speed is Linear, and needs to be a constant value for other calculations in the game, so you cant simply adjust the speed of arrival for the calculation without affecting speeds use in other areas. In short the TLDR is - if you staggered between normal and fast/strong players in your team you will do worse, if all of your team is the same they will do well together because they are all the first to arrive, and if you half and half it, one side of your team will do better than the other. NO ONE has tested anything other than ALL fast/strong players. The equations rely on so many things mathematically and everything affects them, ie if a player is not fully fit he may not be as fast, so subtract.001 etc. Its all maths... Like this Scenario Location = A3 Header Two closest players are - left attacking mid and opposing right fullback Who is closer to this square - well that depends on an inside forward, winger, wingback, full back as well as tactical instructions.? Next.... ok two closest players, calculate distances... Player A has to travel 4 meters, Player B has to travel 6 meters... Next who is faster per meter to arrive first.. Player A is faster than player B as he has fast accel and pace, so he will arrive before player B. Next,.... if Player A arrives with enough time before player B then there is no heading challenge, scenario over player A wins the ball without a challenge. But If both players arrive close enough to the same time initiate a duel, and this is where attributes come in, ie if the ball is in the air then a header, so jumping , heading, strength and then roll a dice RNG - take away any subtractions, ie tired, injured, distracted (homesick) and the higher mathematical total score wins this scenario.. (its far from as simple as that, but you get the idea, all things affect the final total for a scenario, be that Homesick, Upset, Tired, Injured - these factors subtract from the total) With a nice spread (tactic) accross chess square (field) from your team with each position covered by a fast player there is NO WHERE a scenario cant start where you are not likely to be first to the ball and often not require a challenge or any pressure placed on a pass, shot, header etc, meaning you don't need such huge values for it. If there is no pressure on the person with the ball their control, passing, shooting etc does not need to be as high - but if a player is close to them it does need to be. NO ONE has tested without EVERY player in their team as super hyped on speed and strength, and that's is not realistic. If the speed and strength was the only attribute that matters then Adama would be winning the Balon Dor every save - but Adama does not do so well, why... because although HE can sprint down the byline with the ball, the person he crosses to is likely not to be fast enough to match him in time for the cross he makes, unless the ENTIRE team is fast. If Speed was all that mattered then technical players would not get the highest scores in the game and the most goals. Is speed heavily weighted, YES, it is too much so - YES - but its only broken if EVERY player on your team is that fast/strong and in most databases that is not going to be easy to achieve without an editor, yes you can focus on just signing these kind of players, but unless you are at a top club, thats not so easy to do as they are spread out in the game, most tests use the editor to transfer a player from one club to another or they simply create a full team of physical gems, this is not how the game would play out without an editor unless at a massive club.
Adama was scoring 30+ goals for many ppl in saves from FM the last few years. Also whether it’s realistic to fill your team full of super athletes or not, the fact that you can do this and have it succeed in the game proves the engine has a major flaw, since this obviously wouldn’t happen in real life. A team full of super athletes but lower league technical and mental attributes is getting relegated from the EPL every single time in reality.
The thing is it IS realistic for athleticism (speed in particular) to be very impactful in the game and on a player's ability to perform. We just have to look at some of the players we consider to at the top of the game throughout the years. Mbappe, Haaland, Cristiano, R9, Henry, Eusébio, Péle... even Messi, Maradona or Ronaldinho, who might not be the first guys coming to mind as speedy players, could outpace most other players. Of course these might not be the best examples given their many extraordinary qualities but I'd argue their speed is actually much more relevant to their success on the pitch than one might want to admit. So the major issue here (from my perspective) is how the current or potential ability don't properly reflect the impact of athleticism and not so much how athleticism affects outcomes in the game.
Seeing how little progress SI made in much 'easier" departments as Player interaction, AI squad building or even AI faces, I dont have any confidence the new match engine is going to be halfway decent and just as exploitable
Really interesting test. I'd be interested to see if the results are the same if a non-player controlled team was given the same conditions. I know you left the management to your assistant but it is still the 'Player Team,' and I feel like the game has some player-favouring biases built in. I mean it's not exactly uncommon for FM players to overperform the expectations of the board, overperform what the players they have on their team really should be accomplishing. I have never had a situation in FM where I'm been promoted to the Prem and then had to actually worry about getting relegated the next season, I'm always at least mid-table, and I don't exactly think I'm an especially great player. We tend to put these overperformances down to the fact that we, as humans, are managing our team in a smarter way than the AI. We care about dynamics more, we make more sensible transfer decisions, we optimise training and make more robust tactics. And some of that is true, but tbh the game probably also just gives players more favourable dice rolls. As a game designer, you don't want your players mired in a game so realistic that they feel like they can't progress, so you tip the odds in their favour a bit. So even not-very-good players can still feel like they can win the game and climb up the leagues. If Nottingham Forest can still make 12th in this scenario whilst the 'player team' is Manchester City, then its all about the attributes. If not, then 'player bias' is likely muddling the results imo.
Totally agree. Some of this is surely player bias. Yes pace/acceleration, physicals are clearly OP but I'm sure there's player controlled bias in the game. I've seen players with the worst squad in the league and still win the league comfortably or finish way higher than expected. You see some of the rebuilds creators do and they don't have the best players but win UCL's quite easily. Shouldn't be possible.
This is quite interesting, I got Onuacho purely based on 20 jumping reach and a few pacey players too. Onuachu has 8 goals and 7.5 average in 10 games, including a win against Porto. I feel like some pacey players dont just work, but mid table in the prem with absolutely awful players is amazing
Explains why bang average players always seem to be lethal against you and your elite and world class players miss sitters and get nervous facing relegation fodder The game is weird, I've see players in open position refuse to pass to the other guy for a tap in and yet my team cohesion is full, they have green links to each other and have above 14 teamwork and Decisions
oh boi. You just solved the "season after promotion to the prem" dilemma for all of us XD. And I say that as an ACTUAL Cardiff-main manager (08, 17 and 23 fms)
It's just way easier to implement pace in the ME than any other attributes. Scaling pace from 1-20 is pretty easy, but how does one scale decisions, anticipation, concentration, composure, etc 1-20 and have it as much of an impact in the ME as pace? I think they need to scale down the amount of mental attributes and we'd already see an improvement.
You should do a few tests with top tactics from FM Arena. Leaving the tactics up to your Ass Man is highly dubious, noone in their right mind does that when holidaying a save.
My eyes opened up to that few years ago, when I was on FM-Arena checked some posts for training help... and it was pretty much Quickness and Workrate for some. Think the GK one was technique (not sure). There was no need to change it to anything else.
I played a save in FM11 with Sunderland in which I concentrated on signing fast players. Absolutely crushed it. This has been true since at least then.
The real test would be to knock all of their other attributes down to 1. freeze their attributes at the recommended level and then see how they perform. then slowly increase the attributes until you reach the original level of each player. This way you should be able to tell when the minimum baseline hits .
This honestly feels like old news. Pretty much every lower league FM guide suggests this exact personnel strategy, and outside of GK I don’t ever buy players with pace below 15 in top flight saves.
I recently started a save for the lower leagues of Denmark, and I was really confused why we were dominating and shitting on teams left and right, scoring 2+ goals every game. After watching this video, I realized it makes a lot of sense. Who knew recruiting a team entirely of pace merchants (including on defense) playing double wing players? Early crosses would lead you to shitting on other teams.
I think you need 2 further tests to get to the bottom of it. Test 1: Sign players with the same range of current ability, but not focused on a particular attribute. This will show if it is pace or if FM gives any team a player manages a boost so they think they are great, endorphins are released and the addiction kicks in. Test 2: Do the pace test in the real life EPL. This will show if FM is getting it wrong or the real life mangers are missing a trick. Test 1 has probably been done somewhere, but I look forward to your Test 2 video.
I remember the Grid system tactic in FM10, i think it was. Put Messi or someone else fast as the middle striker and he alone would score about 150 goals per season.
Recently did a save myself as Brighton and Nottingham got 5th, and I went through the team and I was shocked as outside of 2 or 3 players no one extremely stands out.
Wow, ive always subconsciously done this on every park to prem i do, usuaally every stat i have is worst im the league except pace and accel, and usually put perform. This video really affirms this as a wrokong strategy
I am not surprised. I had a youth academy challenge save on fm 21. Really struggled for the first decade. Then by accident I discovered fm arena and in the next five years I got three promotions haha. Just by focusing on pacy players and exclusively training quickness. For gk I only trained reflexes. Had a really good dribbler who I placed on the edge of area during defensive set pieces. He would collect the loose ball and just dribble the whole pitch. He woukd score six or seven goals like that a season
Football manager had been using the same 1-20 attributes and 1-200 current/potential ability system since the Championship manager days. It's not a surprise to me that there are balance issues with modern FMs (think of how many more leagues and detail there is now vs the old days). But changing it is likely a much bigger job than giving the graphics engine a fresh coat of paint.
Let me preface this by saying that I do agree that certain tactics and certain attributes are unrealistically favoured in the match engine. But, I do think a major flaw in these types of experiment’s is that the results are usually perceived in a binary of ‘physical skills/gegenpress= success’ despite the results not purely coming from the vacuum of how physically gifted players are or how good a 4-2-3-1 Gegenpress is; overlooking the impact of an effective strategy (the 4-2-3-1 Gegenpress, a system famously physically demanding, but rewarding if successful) combined with considered recruitment for said strategy (enduring, physically gifted players). To expand, Brighton wouldn’t play out from the back with Everton’s usual back 4. It’s simply nonsensical, they’re professional players, but they’re not patient, composed ball players. By the same virtue, you wouldn’t ask a back 4 Brighton may field to play the same way as Everton due to the physical and mental differences in the two. Simply what I mean by this, is that when you hire quick, strong and enduring players in a Gegenpress system, or systems requiring those work-rates, as Atalanta have, there is no guarantee that they are a suitable side regarding the mentality needed (in FM, stats such as bravery, work rates, decision making, aggression, positioning, ect) of a strict system a manager such as Simeone may run, or for a more clear picture of what I am trying to represent, Conte’s tactically related struggles at Tottenham. I do feel as if recruitment for purpose is being downplayed by these experiments, that the success of this experiment is centred around very successful recruitment. In the same way Brighton use statistics to identify undervalued players in the market, with varying experience, or prior valuation as players who could make it at the top level; I argue that these sorts of experiments are doing the same thing but with the scouting of ideal physical attributes on otherwise unsuitable or undervalued players. Obviously you need a level of physical capability to play at the top level, I am not going to deny that and I do think it is fair for physical attributes to have some form of emphasis. A midfielders ability to run a full 90 is almost incontestably more important than their ability to try tricks, shoot from distance or their free kick taking ability as an individual, you can work around their technical deficiencies a lot easier than an inability to run great distances. However, I do think that these sorts of experiment results would change significantly if more specialisation was required of the same players used, or if there was more consideration required in offensive, or defensive play, whether that’s being a compact defensive unit, or having very intensely considered attacking approaches. Going back to the prior example, that same midfielder in a tiki taka system also happens to not be very good at passing, in this example he is almost certainly not at the required standard. Just my 2 cents on the matter. I do think that this experiment more highlights the benefit of considered player acquisition than the benefits of purely having quick players, or running a gegenpress. But, this is entirely my subjective opinion. Love your content Zealand!
I remember around 2009 sabotaging Arsenal by playing 5 midfielders and attackers, going on holiday use current tactic and starting line up. They still were insanely difficult to beat. Sometimes the game has strange balance.
I dont agree with you, Players with extreme rare physical abilities are not easy to find in the game... Your problem just like 99% of the players of football manager is that you see the attributes of the players in the wrong way... many people miss judge players qualities by ignoring key factors such as strenght, height, agility and Pace... physical atributes can be decisive in key positions of the field... And it seems to me that many people just completely miss judge players by looking at raw numbers, instead of checking how the player is built... a player with 115-120 potential, can be better than a player with 130, if its atributes are placed in where it counts for the position he is targeted... so many players have USELESS atribute numbers that makes them look overal "good" in the perspective of potential One thing i hate about South American players per example, is that very often you see in Argentina, Uruguay, or Brazil, players that have extreme qualities in technique, like they have 15 or 16 at pretty much everything, and if you show their profile into a kid that ony started playing football manager yesterday what will that kid see? "Oh this player is great, he has 140 potential... 16 dribbling, 16 finishing, first touch 16, decisions 16 yada yada.... on paper excelent players... Then they have 163 height, (meters), 3 strenght, very low agressivity, miserable impulsion... and terrible consistency... do you know what it takes for a player to be betterthan this? a striker that has only 115 potential.... but has 14 finishing, 13 heading, 11 composure, 12 anteicipation, and then by luck, has 14 acceleratioon, 13 impulsion, 14 strenght, some decent 10 balance nad and agility... this is enough for this striker to be ABSOLUTELY superior to the one that you just saw above... why? because RAW numbers arent everything, and thats why souting players based on potential ability is not inteligent at all.. an inteligent football manager player will seek players based on the model of play of its team, if i want a positional striker i will favor the player based on the attributes i seek... when searching for great players in great leagues, you should use the same thinking at the scale of play you are, simply because numbers arent everything, and sometimes its better to have a dutch tall as fuck player with 20 heading, than heaving the latest super wonder kid with potential ability of 179 that unluckly has 80% of its stats on his physical and mental areas being neglected on physical... So when i seek players, i do really funky things with the search, i like to prioritize rare things, specially with youngsters... Very often when i seek a youth player, i seek RAW physical atributes, that later i can channel or correct with training... at my current save, i discovered an Argentinian that was a right full back, with impressive physical skills and some good decent mental skills, but mediocre technical side, the great thing about him, is that he is tall as fuck, so i am training him to be a center defender... where he can take full advantage of its height and strenght, being also very fast... he has 13 tracking, which will be enough to deal with anyone, if i manage to make him 12 on marking, he will be a very good central defender, better than others that have 15 or 15 of those atributes but then mediocre physical side. Physical atributes that are too high impact the game more than the rest, and thats normal, because thats how real life works, what people should do its to re-think the way play the game and i think its amazing that the game is actually not following just raw numbers but being smart enough when simulating physics.
We knew Acceleration and Pace were overpowered but this is absolutely mental!
Huge flaw in my opinion when you can just search for these two attributes and basically disregard almost everything else.
Hurts me especially since I've always valued mental attributes highly and often sacrificed a few points of pace for much better composure/anticipation/off the ball etc.
It's not that simple. There are ways and roles you can put players without any pace on that they'll excel.
@@victorpresti this is because its not only pace and acc. Jumping reach is basically in the same tier. So from midfield backwards a player with 14/14 pace/acc but like 18-20 jumping reach is still godly and will outperform any Andres Iniesta out there. Balance is also almost as important as the previous. And strength too. You can see the difference in important in FM ARENA attribute table.
there's also "dead" attributes, like "technique". But that's another story altogether
@@ad-zh5ot I don't understand how people find it hard to believe being physically gifted in sport is a bonus that trumps everything else. It's the corner stone of the building blocks to be good at any physical sport.
@@vidiveniviciDCLXVI Weak argument. In football, speed, acceleration and jumping reach are only a cornerstone in lower leagues. FC Barcelona dominated world football with very little running and jumping just a few years ago. Xavi could be the best midfielder in theg ame with none of those stats. But he can't. Because FM is broken.
In Fm24, any random player with speed, acc and jumpnig reach is better than Andres Iniesta ever was and this my friend makes the game flawed, As proved by the hundreds of tests done in the attribute table in fm arena. But you do your blind defense of the impossible, whatever allows you to stay a fan.
I noticed this way back in FM 2019 and 2021 where mentioning online I was ridiculed that the match engine is biased towards atlethics more than anything else and mental and technique attributes are there just for cosmetics. I did stopped playing even back than with so much sorrow as any save I start with any Prem. club I always finish top in the first season. Beware as this issue will be most certainly in FM25 as this is something they wont change unless some heavy public outrage backlash.
In my opinion, a big part of this issue is that ball control is severely underpowered. In real life, defenders lose duels all the time. Sometimes defenders step out and the midfielder is so securely on the ball, that he cant lose the ball without being fouled. Even average premier league dribblers can often beat the first defender and create an opportunity. These kind of situations almost never happen in FM, the defender usually stops the attacker in their tracks and forces them into a pass or straight wins the ball.
I think it's because FM bypasses the midfield battle, everything is at either end of the pitch, not a lot happens in the middle like a real game, it's more like a simulation of basketball than football. So the more technical abilities don't have a chance to shine as much.
A LOT of things dont happen in fm.. and it just pisses me off we pay 60$ a year and they cant bother to change or upgrade the game at all. Its 2024… by now this game could have SO much more and actually be a real simulation. Instead we just pay for updated stats and one new feature.
And after u watch 100 games in FM.. u have seen it all. The same things happen, same looking goals and crosses and misses… and there are many events common in a real game that never happen. They want the game to feel like an open world simulation but underneath it all its like you’re on train tracks locked in to a certain path. And next FM will be this exact same game again. No cinematic interactions in the lockerroom .. no commentators.. shit this game couldve been made ten years ago there is zero creativity they just spend all their time figuring out players stats?
Fm has no real pressing (the highest level of pressing is just a guy jogging a bit closer to the opponent so he passes the ball), players do dumb things as they have "activity states" - for example sometimes a loose ball is flying somewhere towards your player, but his state is at "wait" so the opposing player just runs next to him and takes the ball. That's kinda how defence gets beat half the time. There's almost no marking - defenders rarely stop attackers with their body. Most of the technicals and mental skills are severely undervalued by the match engine for most plays.
There are many ways this game can improve, but I think reworking the attributes and CA (I said this under the previous video too lmao) should be a priority.
@@CimbomFanFiction tbh what they've built in 10 years is crazy compared with the money they had. SEGA is the only thing that they kinda trusted and again they barely gave them any money to work with at the very start. FM kinda grew from there, and honestly been VERY impressed what they've accomplished. We should be genuinely excited for FM 25, especially since unreal engine is coming into the game. Unreal engine will change EVERYTHING, and I mean everything. I swear man, it'll make FIFA like graphics and show how good a manager game can be. Just trust the process.
I mean there has been one player who never got dribbled past in 2019 and got robbed of a ballon d'or (Van Dijk)
How about making another experiment? The same thing, pick Nottingam Forest, sack everyone and bring in players with 115 CA, but their best attributes are let's say first touch and decision making or something similar. If they finish mid table, than that would mean that the engine favours "unbalanced" players that are strong in one area, and doesn't favor speed. If the team gets relegated, than we can say speed is more important than anything else.
The thing is speed is part of every action, it is hard to find any other attribute that is in play in as many action. Acceleration and Pace are already the biggest factors in calculating CA for most positions. Decision is probably the closest one. I'd second an similar experiment where decision is the highest attribute in maybe a tiki taka system
Something similar has been done already. Check out FM Arena's Player Attributes Testing. You'd be surprised how some of the attributes straight up don't matter at all.
@@jpsouza It wouldn't surprise me because I've long suspected this - ultimately, making the simplest simulation a gaming dev team can get away with is the cheapest way to make such a game, and this is capitalism; a new version is needed every single year to maximise revenue. Then they hide the poor simulation behind simpler stuff like nice graphics and formulaic player/agent/media interactions etc, and most players don't notice. Perhaps if we had one game every 3 or 4 years with a small update every season, perhaps the team would be more likely to spend more time ensuring an accurate simulation. But again, its capitalism. saving the most money to make the most money is how every company does things. I'd previously suspected that all individual attributes were just window dressing with perhaps overall current ability of each player and total ability of each team determining results and little else. If it turns out its heavily weighted in favour of pace, then that's a similar short cut devs could make. I guess it just underscores what a waste of life playing these games is lol
@@davyprendergast82 I'm guessing the match engine is, indeed, complex and all, but they probably struggled finding balance to the point they had to take some liberties with the attributes in order to achieve a perceived realism. Like, they have scouts and other collaborators grading real players attributes on a scale of 1-20, but I bet they never managed to translate these arbitrary grades to what one would expect to see on the pitch in terms of individual and collective performances. So they found out pace, acceleration and other few attributes could get the job done when it comes to balancing the game and called it a day... if the majority of the clubs in the game perform as expected from their real life counterparts, that's close enough for SI sadly. Even though this is clearly achieved by either chance or ad-hoc tweaking.
Best comment so far
I had a sneaky suspicion of this when Adama Traore consistently got over 50 goal contributions on my Wolves save back in FM20
don't go far back, in FM23, my Adama Traore had above 7.5 avg pts, double digits assist & goal per season
Someoen last year played 4231 with man city and replaced the 4 most advanced players with Traore clones, and they were actually better than the real City team that had KDB, Haaland, Silva, Grealish or whoever
@@asdfghjkl123722 that's wild. Is this a video? Would love to check it out.
Won the league season one with spurs, no son or kane, but Adama scored 37 goals.
Brought Adama to Celtic in ‘24. A 35g/35a pots performance 😅
I think the problem might not be that pace is overvalued, it's more that bad attributes are too good. Like how many times have we seen lower league players with a 3 in long shots scoring an absolute banger from outside the box? I mean, it can happen, but it should be exceedingly rare. In lower leagues in real life, maybe you get one or two of those per season in the whole league, but in FM like atleast 10% of goals scored seem like they're worldies, regardless of the level of play. So I guess what FM needs is to respect the suck. Like if a player has a 1 in passing, he's just not gonna complete most passes in a satisfactory way. And if some has a 1 in first touch, that ball should be bounce around like a pinball more often than not. Basically, a 1 should be the equivalent of untrained guy that's never played football almost. Cause if bad attributes were actually allowed to BE bad, then ok, that pacey guy is still pacey, but if the ball ever arrives in his general vicinity he's not gonna be able to do anything with it. And as such, the pace is suddenly less useful.
I had a guy with a think a 1 in long shots get the goal of the season for my team if not the league on one of those killier shot from way outside, i think that was probably the only goal he scored. It's crazy.
This for sure. I support Clyde FC, one of if not the worst league teams in Scotland, and some of our players almost literally can't dribble but there is a baseline of competence afforded to all players in FM that doesn't match real life. The match engine does not effectively accommodate the difference between a non-league centre back technical ability and Lionel Messi's.
I'd disagree with this. Because the level of play is much lower it can be easier to look good. Not that uncommon to see what looks like real skill in low leagues
I was doing a Youth to Gold save with Valencia in Spain. Signed Rokas Pukstas, played him as a CM (su). I played every game, no sims no holidays. The guy had 9 for long shots and I swear to god, every goal he scored was from outside of the box. No headers, no free kicks, no penalties, just shots from outside the box.
Yeah that makes databases with park amateur leagues ridiculous. If anyone watches team of far old geezers playing football you quite cannot replicate it in fm
He got 12,11,12th in three seasons.. but its more than that. Thats with zero adjustments, random tactics, no praising your players, and just zero coaching/management overall. So its damn crazy bc if he did play the season normally he would finish like 5-9th
That's exactly what Zealand said in the video.
@@WooCash1900 yeaaah he did at the end. Woops
I said this in the original reddit thread:
"If I had to guess, the match engine uses player positions to determine whether or not to "roll" for certain actions. If the position is wrong, it just doesn't. So, for example, IF your player is positioned well for a cross after beating his man, THEN it rolls everything for a cross. If he isn't, it either applies pre-set attributes or applies a steep penalty that essentially makes it as such. The problem with this is that any of the stats that aid in your player getting positioned right are therefore the only stats that matter. Whether your crossing is 20 or 1 doesn't matter if your pace/acceleration/agility can't get you in the relative position that allows you to "roll" attributes. So, in effect, the physical position attributes (including dribbling since that likely gives the ball a good position that allows for stat rolls) are the only ones that matter, since players with worse ones never even get to use the technicals. The engine just isn't smart enough to understand "the guy can be standing in the right spot because he's so fast, but he lacks the ability to then do anything to fully utilize this position so the cleverer and more technical player can still beat him." All it sees is "Player X is in position Y so the cross fails automatically."
"It makes sense when I imagine the match engine being a glorified DnD dungeon master. It greatly simplifies the number of calculations if a simple position check on the front end can bypass hundreds of stat rolls. "If position = X, then skip all of the rolls and apply this result instead." It would save thousands of calculations per match, maybe even tens of thousands. The only alternative is to go full physics-based, to where being in the right position is only half the equation. I suspect a big reason in the change in engine is to allow the engine to run way more "stat rolls" in a more lightweight way because attempting that level of detail as-is would basically make the game unplayably slow. I know zero about programming, but that's my guess."
Thats almost correct -
Its not flawed , its because each scenario starts out with an X and Y position in the game engine and fast players reach these positions first, most people dont have ALL fast players and ALL of these tests have been done with an ENTIRE TEAM of fast players, meaning that there is no X and Y where a scenario can start where your player wont be first to the ball, if only speed mattered then every save would have Adama Traore as the Ballon Dor winner, it doesnt because although he can blow down the sideline like Usain Bolt, the person he has to cross the ball to can not keep up. When each player in your tactic has this pace and speed they will be first to every scenario, they might lose the ball, but that just creates another scenario - rinse repeat.
@@ThePandaKen I would love a real physics based sports sim that actually tries to account for this stuff, even if it was super slow.
@@dynaboyjl.4220 That was what latest FIFA Manager games was trying to be. Sadly, EA stooped their developement right before it had potential to be the best.
I did a similar test after seeing the stats on attributes. I managed a Vanarama South side and only used youth players who I trained in pace/acceleration from day one, only money I spent was on facility upgrades and didn't buy a single player, no editor either. I holidayed every match with no save scumming and the side promoted every single season with pretty much only 16-19 year olds with decent speed. When I got to the prem it did take about 4 years to being a top 3 squad but I avoided relegation. I finished the save about 12 seasons in, I had easily won the prem and UCL, the club still only had 'bad' players as I had only gotten good youth prospects about 4-5 years before I finished so they were still only about 20. I also had over a billion in cash as I wasn't spending anything, even the wages were very low considering.
Dude, I hope Zealand sees your comment! Your experiment sounds both 10x more thorough and damning than his. A youtuber with as big an audience as him could force their hand to make an actual game worthy of your time.
You're going to need evidence for this lol.
Its been like this for many many years. Back in 2010-11 when I joined the beta tester team for a season , we actually reported this - but the response was they couldn't do anything about it at that time since it would require them to rebuild the entire engine, which obviously take to much time and resources, so that idea was dropped. . Do I have faith in SI to fix it for FM25 ? - not really and its hard to answer . But I think its only a new graphical overlay and the calculation behind will stay the same.
I'm not surprised to hear this. The FM I played the most was FM2010 (which I think was maybe the second year the 3D Match Engine was in the game) and it was apparent then that Physical attributes were overly important, especially in certain areas of the pitch - strikers and wingers mostly. Also, whatever calculations went on to determine the value of a player in a certain position were clearly skewed. I'd see central defenders with Jumping of 10-12 being very highly sought after by AI clubs, when they were constantly being beaten in the air and giving up goals. One team in my save (in the EPL) was outstanding all over the park, but signed 2 CBs with mediocre Jumping stats, which killed them every season. Despite these guys putting up 6.6 average rating season after season the club would persist with them.
I hate that you’re so right
Here’s praying we get a remake in my lifetime
For what it's worth, they are swapping engines exactly *because* it will allow them to simulate thing better, as the new engine opens up a lot more complex mechanics and interactions due to its efficiency and ability to replace it in detail graphically.
@@Hodevine what? Unity isn't better than C+ (other than for those actually making the game), it doesn't offer anything special in processing power or calculation capabilities. They're migrating because they want to stop porting their game to every device and this allows them to cut their work and save money massively because Unity's framwork allows them to make the game once and port it with the press of a button. I'm betting the underlying calculations will stay the same.
@@ad-zh5ot I agree. Worked in IT and coding for years. Playing FM/CM since 1998. The engine remain the same as it went out in 2009. To this day they only change cosmetics and some animations, but coding and calculations are entirely different things and to change all that they need to invest in entirely new engine spec designed for football which will never happen. This will be copy.pasted in FM25 make no mistake. Trust me don't buy the new game unless proven and tested otherwise. This sort of stuff was exactly why I stopped playing FM. What's the purpose in playing when u can win with national league players as long as they have good athletics and zero finishing and zero mentals! Yeah go mental beating Man City with 120CA players :D
We do need to call out SI for such massive issues in the code of their game. There's such weird fetish about how amazing and smart their engine is, it's important these tests and the results are shoved towards them. That goes for the next FM as well btw, I think it's super important we have a video like this asap when 25 is out.
Ya lol. Their match engine sucks
I will say in their defense, it is EXTEMELY difficult to make a match engine perfect. Every time you make an alteration to solve one problem it often just creates another.
@@Writeous0ne why defend them, if they still can't put together a decent ME after all these years then they just shouldn't bother
@@gazhammer10001 when it comes to exploits in games there is one easy fix, don't do it.
@@Writeous0ne???
guess there's always a pace meta in every football game
The pace meta is even IRL. Look at Adeyemi for example, the guy IRL doesn't know how to make a proper pass, yet he's a starter at BVB.
@@ahmedramisoufari8820 come off it LOL
weird, almost like in real life pace is important? hm should be analysed further
I mean... its kinda real, isnt it?
Mbappes, Haaland, Messi, Ronaldo
either have been know or are currently overrunning lines on the highest of performance levels.
Haaland is kinda the pinnacle of that. Guardiola told him that non of his other skills are necessary in this system, just his strenght, speed and the tendency to hit the net.
End result: Averaging 25 ball contacts and breaking long standing goal scoring records in the best league in the world.
Just that it’s the worse in FM, fifa has a better match engine than fm in regards to pace/physicality. And in fifa mentals barely even matter by design because you are controlling the players. FM25 hopefully addresses this issue that has existed since like forever.
Is it because physical attributes I imagine aren’t effect by hidden attributes like consistency or big matches, and that are more effective later in the game due to a lack of AI rotating and resting tired players, so they get more chances and possession
I'd b esurprised. My stiriker with 17 pace 18 accelration scored a hattrick in the CL final with 'doesn't like big matches' trait
I just tried a similar test on FM2022 in the Scottish league.
Mid table team, only played my fastest players and loaned in a few speedy dudes from other clubs.
Was constantly challenging for the top of the league, made it to one cup final (lost to Rangers) and lost the Scottish cup semi final 1-0 to Rangers after dominating the game and conceding in the 90th minute.
Pace/acceleration is OP.
Just like real life.
If you want to try it with a open league try Belgium or Spain
I abuse the "pace meta" and across 9 seasons ive wom the league twice
Obviously my players arent as bad as the ones in the video but their key stuff is still just pace
Fm isn't that realistic 😂
I just ran this experiment after watching your video. I took Aveley in the national south who were predicted to come 22nd I terminated everyone's contracts and brought in players with high pace and acceleration that were interested in signing for us. I simmed the whole season and just got promoted via the playoff final.
as an italian viewer, seeing Zealand running the average Hellas Verona/whatever team plays Gasperini-like football in Serie A season experiment is great, I'm so used to random players that run really fast finishing mid-table that this doesn't upset me the slightest
Try it in a network game Zealand. (athlete's team VS average EPL team) Would be interesting to see If Loluju or whoever can counter-act it with tactics or if he simply losses out to the athletic players.
This is a great idea but I think Zealand takes those quite seriously
Have they started doing a network game again???
"I can't convince Notthingam Forest to clean their team and start signing all of these guys"
Tony Bloom overhearing this in Brighton: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
what the actual fuck, I started reading this comment in the exact same second Zealand did
@@Champion2710OMG same 😂
@@Champion2710 wow
Notthingam?
It was nice to work with you misters Ferguson, Mitoma, Gross, Dunk, Moder, Enciso...
The thumbnail with Forest 4th seems realistic, they always do well in FM
Ya bro I swear. They always start winning the league multiple times in a row by like 2040 in pretty much all my saves.
Brentford too
even almeria
@@Abhi_810-s9byeah, and atletico Madrid become trash so quickly
@@OresNGi somehow beat Atleti in the Spanish Cup with my 4th division Spanish team in my first season
I did this this week with Deportivo Alaves. When I took over they had 0 wins, 5 draws and 9 losses. I brought in pace/accel guys and comfortably avoided relegation and over the next two years, only signing pacey guys had them playing CL football and splitting the games with Barca and Real. I would say try to get some fast guys that are tall too and a striker with good strength and jumping reach/heading and run a direct pass tactic and once you get your tactical familiarity past a certain point, you should be golden.
Also Owen Otasowie is a beast in this game
Now I know the secret behind Largie Ramazani. That man gives me nightmares every time I have to face Almeria in FM. Acceleration 18, Pace 17. Always scores against me and outperforms my most of my players because of those two attributes, his mentals are crap, his technicals are below average.
Ramazani also got me 30 league goals in the prem up front
This lad has smashed me to bits a few times as well
I think people should go back to FM22/23/21and do the test there too. I suspect 99 percent that you get similar results but the test should be done anyway to see if this is a fm24 specific issue. I doubt it is though.
I recall that pace/accel was key in 10/11/12/13.
Fast covers a multitude of sins.
@@elLooto yea for sure pace has always been broken no doubt Im just wondering to what extent.
Back in my FM09 save, I had a team that keeper aside all had pace of 18,19 or 20 - it out performed everyone. When you watched the matches, the ball kept being hit long into space and my players basically won all the foot races to the ball. Obviously this side was pace to the extreme (one which wasn't planned that way until the last few seasons in the save when I suddenly realised everyone was quick and then made a point of upgrading those with pace 15 with those with 18)
@@elLooto @zoo3708 I recall pace/accel was key in 03/04 or even 01/02.
For as long as I play FM, people were saying that if you are in a lower leagues, you should focus on physical attributes
The hidden atrributes of the assistant manager matter a lot, changing the formation itself means nothing when the assistant prefers to play defensive football. A better idea would be to select a style of play in the tactics menu and while skipping time you can just select "use preferred tactic" so that the assistant uses a tactic that suits players with high pace the most.
It all points to the fact that a formation with good instructions that suit your players are too op in this game. Countless times I've seen weak teams have much high possesion that the much stronger opponent ( In my recent save for example Albania had a 59% possesion against italy which would never happen in real life). I love the game and spent a couple thousand hours in my recent years of playing it but it's nowhere close to being realistic with the current match engine as it's filled with exploits and many attributes and tactics are just unbalanced. Hopefully they'll fix it in the next game.
Stopping kids from saying you fell off
0 comments? You my friend fell off.
@@MrCatters.0 replies to a reply. My man, you fell off
@@OllieSD 0 replies to a replies reply. my bretherin, you fell off
@@keiganhammond4810 replies to a reply, mein bruder you feel off
@@keiganhammond481 0 replies in one hour? thee mine own cousin hath fallen off
That was a hot topic in the Polish FM community around FM10 (yes, so long ago). A guy took medium Ligue 3 team (French third level), used FMRTE to change all players pace and acc to 20, and just played. Demolished Ligue 3, demolished Ligue 2 and then finished 3rd in Ligue 1. All with third level players, just with buffed pace and acceleration.
I think FM not only over values pace, accelleration and Strength, because they are always 100% for every game as long as the player is fit, but also hidden attributes like consistency and important matches, because the higher the number the more augmented the technical and mental attributes are for each game. The way it works is that before a game there is a dice roll from 1-25. If the players consistency is less than 20, say 10, then if the roll is 10-25 the players mental/technicals take a huge hit. Physicals are unnaffected. That is why physicals are particularly overpowered.
Interesting take, I'd never thought of this.
Please explain how the number of the dice roll interacts with the number for consistency. I don't really understand what you mean. My very basic understanding of how the consistency/important matches attributes work is to take each mental/technical attribute and essentially multiply it by the consistency/important matches attribute, and that gives your players 'actual' in-game attribute compared to the opposition players 'actual' in-game attributes. I know it doesn't work the way I've explained it and it works the way that you've explained it, but please explain it a little more clearly for me please. Many thanks.
@@timmoleft7147 There are hidden attributes such as Consistency and Important matches. They, like other attributes, are 1-20. However, no player in real life is 100% consistent or plays well in every big game so its more like a max of 20/25. So a player with 20/20 will keep his stats 80% of the time in each game/big match.
The game decides this on dice rolls out of 25. A player with 20/20 will keep 100% of his technical/mental stats if he rolls a 20 or lower out of a 25 sided dice. If the roll is say, a 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 then the player takes a penalty to these technical/mentals. How much we dont know but it could be a minus 1 or 2 for each mental/technical attribute. So a player with 20 technique may become a 19 or 18 etc.
Physicals are never affected by Consistency/Imp Matches. As long as the player is 100% fit they will retain their high Acc/Pace etc and hence why they are so powerful.
There is more to it. There is Pressure hidden stat, which may affected the player at the business end of a season.
Another factor is some attributes are actually linked in game. Work Rate and OTB are affected by the Determination of a player. If you are winning a game 10-0 and your determination is say 1/20 then the players OTB, Work Rate and perhaps Concentration, takes a hit in game. This makes sense because players get lazy when the game is won. Same is true when you are losing 10-0. players may just give up.
@timmoleft7147 my understanding is this. If a player has 20 consistency then the odds of his attributes being "worse" than face value is 20:25. Or in simpler terms 80% of the time he will play to his attributes. Another extreme example, consistency of 1 would give a 1:25 (4%). However this doesn't take into account other hidden attributes which may also impact a players stats such as important matches. Which I believe can either increase or decrease the players stats depending on the important match value (I could be wrong on this)
I think Evidence Based Football Manager or someone else has experimented with important matches and consistency and it turns out they don't work as expected and don't really matter.
Put a winger in every position. I'm actually curious to see how much competency at a position matters.
Check out FM Arena they already did, it in FM23 but doubt there are any major change between game.
TLDR: It does matter a lot actually.
I would say that most attributes will influence a percentage chance - take an easy pass, the engine will calculate the probability of that pass being played well depending on the passing attribute. Pace (as well as stamina, jumping reach, ...) is "always on" and not about probabilities. A pace 19 player is always faster than a pace 18 player.
How is this important? Well, for one, with enough pace everything gets easier. Players have more space, passes are easier, first touches are not made under pressure, etc. Secondly, all the bad passes during the game don't matter as long as you make the most of the passes that do work. A technically weaker team will get fewer chances, but in 90 minutes there are still enough opportunities.
It basically gives more leeway for mistakes. A bad pass? The player is more able to run after the ball, or chase the opponent in case of a turnover. They're more able to run in behind defense, and can catch up with the ball when the enemy plays risky passes.
@@victorpresti Exactly, and we saw in the video that it help capitilise on the oppositions mistakes like with the backpass to the keeper and the guy scores it. Thats not a situation many people would be thinking about when they signed a pacey striker.
This is the end of this engine, and the end of FM as we've known it since years and years. Adding to that the wages requests, attitude issues of most players, the obvious scripts , this has been a catastrophic game.
Football Manager used to be my favorite game of all time, I put nearly 400 hours into these games but I have to admit that they simply are not fun anymore. The official introduction of default GenGenPress with a generic 4-2-3-1 just broke the game and no amount of mods I have tried can fix it. I purposely pick a terrible team in the Vanarama North League and with those tactics you win 95% of games regardless of who you are playing, you get promoted every single year even if your squad is trash. Can you find a striker with 17+ pace? Now you are winning every game by 5 goals even if that striker has terrible finishing. Whole game needs a complete overhaul using true AI that learns in real time.
IMO the problem is that the stamina simulation in the game does not do a good enough job of slowing players down as they use their energy. You can press with a high line for 90 minutes and guys with no stamina will still be sprinting up and down the pitch. The pace advantage is exacerbated when players will simply sprint themselves to death for you for 90 minutes.
I suspect they've made this decision consciously so as to allow plug-and-play tactics to continue to exist.
I wonder if it’s the AI under estimating the team due to the current ability and then pushing forward which is leaving gaps in behind for the pace to exploit, if that’s the case it would be interesting to see this experiment over a few years and see if they adjust
My thoughts exactly. I noticed often I'd go on an amazing fa cup run in my first season with a non-league club and then revert to mean second season once league clubs took my team seriously
not really, as match highlights show
@@gunaodegaia9082 The match highlights don't really show that though. They only show high XG events - not events that could lead to high XG events. IE - if that winger is outrunning the fullback 20 times a game, the highlights only show the one where he actually crosses properly. IE, it doesn't look like its a pace goal - but the opportunity was created by pace.
Almost all the highlight goals were wingers crossing to guys who were completely open. Those absolutely are pace goals.
I've been banned from SI's FM forums more times than I can remember, always after providing similar data to that in the video. My main gripe has always been those games where you have 30+ shots, 8 ccc's and 12 half chances, yet you lose 1-0 because your world class defender stands still whilst the opposition forward casually takes the ball from his feet and taps it home past a clearly confused keeper.
The stats I tend to take notice of in FM24 are the GK's, after I came across it I went through all my saves to check and low and behold in every save my GK's had the lowest save %. To put this in perspective, I had a Man City save where I'd lost one game all season and conceded only 18 goals, yet Ederson had only had a 61% save ratio even though his expected save ratio was 82%.
I'm seeing game after game where short players with jumping ability as low as 3 are getting above my 6ft4 jumping 18 defender to score goals(the latest came from a worldie cross from a player with a "7" crossing attribute) as a one off its acceptable but it has become so common place that I've started to expect it in every game.
I lost a CL final 2-1 to Barca with both goals 25 yard curling screamers from their CB's with the highest long shot attribute of those players being 5. It was their only 2 shots on target in the match whilst my side had created multiple ccc's and half chances.
One of the most recent findings was that the AI were 20 plus times more likely to score from their first shot on goal than I am, in fact, statistically the AI is more likely to score a scorcher from distance than I am from a CCC. These are not stats that the game represents, you have to go back through your games, but its simple maths and it concludes that the match engine is far from what SI claim it to be, its actually coded to allow the AI to compete.
If you think I'm making it up or I'm full of cr*p, remember that all FM is is a series of calculations, everything about the game is based on math, so why is it that the game after all these years continues to tell me with 3 games left of the season and I'm sat in 3rd place 10 points clear of the team below me yet it is still telling me that I have to this point still only qualified for the EL rather than the CL?
If it can't even do the simple math, who knows how messed up its match calculations are.
Same thing I wrote in the last video of Z about the Ronaldo vs Messi teams WC. Big guys made it to the final stages, but how in the hell all my 17+ JR defenders lose all the headers in my damn area, so fkn tired of receving goals because they can't make a header properly to reject the ball.
I wander what would happen if you did the test with players that are not Premier league level but had relatively high technical and mental attributes but low physical ones, for example older players. I want to see where they would finish.
Exactly this. I’d like to see a similar experiment with other attributes being so high. I think an entire team of A+ players in one skill set will be at least mid table in the premier league and that’s quite realistic.
they suck, it's basically what aging players are... i had 37 year old James Rodriguez at Viborg in the Danish league... 5 pace, 5 strength but 17+ all technical and he did literally nothing lol
@@ameladolnz7784 Fax, same reason Alexis Sanchez in FM 21 or 20 at United was literally the worst player I have ever used
Isn't this just a united simulation of the last 10 years? Doesnt matter if your outfield doesn't have a clue so long as you have david de gea between the sticks you'll get results😂
This has been the case for years, physical attributes are the most powerful in the match engine, always have been going back to Championship manager days (yes I've been playing that long)!
My first was Championship manager 97/98 on msdos
Seeing Noah Ohio,a mid striker who has been memed by my classmates because he's mid and I am a Standard Liège fan from Antwerp in a Zealand vid was something I never expected
has anyone ever done tests to see if/how the game simulates differently between skipping games (holidaying) vs actually watching the game highlights?
This is what I always reckon with all these tactic testings too. Everyone just vacations it, actual match engine is different
Very legitimate points - you can bet that when you holiday that they do every little thing that we dont bother to do. Little tweaks throughout, basing instructions fully based on the opposition, optimising rest as well as theres a big squad here. I am sure as well that when you move players via the editor adaptability doesnt really matter as the engine just reads them as being players on the team as opposed to new signings.
It still wouldn't make them escape relegation.
I mean, actually talking to players, adjusting your tactics or training, along with other stuff you usually do when you play normally should make a difference. How much of a difference is what I don't know 😅
When you have the detail level on max (when you can go back and watch the whole match) there is no difference
Since I’m managing the team the detail level is naturally on max, I just am not there to make in-match adjustments
This does make sense, considering the vast agreement that Gegenpress has been overpowered in the last few FM's, how difficult it is to make any type of possession or defending tactic. But it's hard to watch. Like we all knew it but having confirmation of it sucks.
Been a long time part of FM. I remember back in FM20 taking over some non-league semi-pro team in Ireland, with an average PA (potential ability) of around 60. Gave them a 4-2-4 wide formation, and the largest field to play on that was possible. Trained an endurance and quickness session every week. After three years, all the players had 15+ endurance, work rate, pace, and acceleration. Outside that, their skills largely averaged in the 7s and 8s. The result was kind of astonishing.
I was able to push the tempo and pressing intensity to levels that would ordinarily be unsustainable (deep red was now blue), and opposition teams would be completely unable to cope, and also drained of stamina by mid game just trying to keep up, particularly on the giant home field. While I could usually get in 2-3 goals by half-time, I'd usually get in quite a few more after it. It wasn't uncommon for opposition teams to end the match with 7 players on the field due to injuries (just because they were so exhausted). I had one terrible poacher with maybe 8 finishing get over 100 goals in a single season, which was hilarious as nobody was even remotely interested in signing him.
They became the leading premier team of Ireland, no problem. By the third year, they reached the semi-finals in Euro Champions League, and won it by the fourth. I think the total payroll was something like $120k USD yearly, so the club got a lot of nice upgrades off that.
I recently had a situation with a player where I finally understood how important pace and acceleration is in the game. He was a RB with 18 Acceleration and 16 pace but his other stats wre mediocre. I had another RB who was clearly better in every aspect except those two stats where he was having a 15 Acceleration and 16 pace. The difference in performance is insane. He just looks better all around - plays better passes, better crosses and had a 7.5 rating while the other one had 7.0.
Generally I have the feeling the game lies to us: my squads alway overperform. I built a squad full of wonderkids thinking it would be nice to see them develop to a major CL contesting team but they win the CL in their second season.
This doesn't shock me at all. I use a tactic that relies on everybody having massive pace, The slowest guy on my team has fourteen pace and plays as a defensive midfielder.
Watching this 4 months later and forrest is in 5th tied on points with 3rd after 11 games. Thumbnail was spot on
I would have liked to see what the locker room atmosphere and team cohesion were for these saves because I often feel like they are the truly overpowered part of FM.
I´ve always had a hunch about this, since playing with norwegian team Vålerenga in FM 2011, with their star striker Luton Shelton who had 18 pace and 19 Acceleration, the rest of his abilities were on average maybe a 9 or 8. He would still finish with anywhere from 30 to 40 goals every season...
It's important to note that the CA of a player is not calculated only on his attributes. Indeed, the amount of positions they can play in + their level with both feet are a huge part to calculate the CA of a player. For exemple a player who can play centreback, leftback, rightback, and DM will have a way higher CA than a DM only. Also a player that can play with both of his feets will be higher CA than a single leged player.
Basically a stiker with only one leg at 120CA will always be more efficient than a 150CA double leged player who can play wherever he wants on the attack front.
Clearly the engine values pace and acc, I think where it gets exploited is there isn't enough possible variance between 1 and 20. When you play lower leagues the games aren't too different and ultimately that's where this problem begins. The difference between a 9 passing and 18 passing is noticeable but not as noticeable as it should. Whereas that same gap but on pace and acceleration is as noticeable as it should be.
Would be curious to see if putting the detail level on low would yield similar results. I wonder if the quick sim engine is better at generating more realistic results
I've known for years how OP pace and acceleration were, but I didn't realise it was THAT OP. I first realised when I got Tamworth to the prem and couldn't find any good strikers in my price range, so I ended up just buying the fastest striker I could find, that guy ended up getting about 40 goals. This works for any position on the pitch except goalkeeper, if you want a good goalie for little money, go for reflexes.
I've seen Yira Sor play for Slavia. There are highlights of a conference league match Slavia vs Lask where in 2 matches he had 3 goals from like 8 breakaways. They just kicked the ball forward and he went for it. In the second game he literally went around a guy by just kicking the ball forward and RUNNING AROUND THE GUY! His pace was insane. Seriously, look it up. But he only had luck in the european leagues where the opponent played a high defense line. In Czech league, Slavia were considered one of the best teams so everybody played very deep with low chance of a pass behind the back line.
This is the way most people have gotten back to back promotiona since i started playing this game ( fm17, but probably since forever ) and onwards. Getting physical beasts and ignore most of the other stuff, then slowly add more of the other stuff as you get up in the leagues
I've played the game with CA and PA visible on my squad screen all season, there are players who's CA rises constantly and they get to 180+ but they're playing terribly the whole season. I get that a players ability can be really high, but if they have low consistency for example they can be hit and miss, that makes sense. But if a player is a striker and they haven't scored for 20 games, yet their ability goes up and up to the point they are one of the highest CA's in the world, something ain't right.
You should make the exact same team but in the championship. They should get promoted in most if not all simulations if they are a mid-table premier league team. If they don't, there could be more to it than pace/ acc being broken.
I wonder if a few other factors can make up the difference, although I’m not that well versed with the engine overall:
1) Could it be possible that the engine favors user controlled teams over the course of a season like this?
2) Assuming there’s a luck factor in the engine, maybe it’s simply overpowered?
3) Could it be the case that the engine operates under a certain condition like “Teams in this division will perform at (insert minimum level) regardless of who’s signed to them?
Clearly, the likely case is that physical attributes can make up for mediocre or worse technicals. But what other factors come into play here to boost this team from, say, an 18th place finish to just outside 10th?
Love the Cardiff shout out there made me cry, tears of joy
Saw the name Dion Rankine on your list. That name rung a bell, I check one of my saves, and sure enough, I had used him in lower leagues In Vanarama South, Vanarama, and Sky Bet 2 Rankine recorded average ratings ranging from 7.33 to 7.90
Rankine did hit a major stumbling block i=once reaching Sky Bet 1, with ratings ranging from 6.56 - 6.72, and now as a 30-year-old in 2033/34, he's playing in the Scottish 3rd tier, with a CA of 87 and a PA of 138
Solid lower tier player. Can't imagine that he would be any good with a Premier League team.
Im convinced some stats dont even mean anything too. I remember starting a save with spurs im fm23 and harry kane with 19 finishing was missing 7 sitters a game, meanwhile players with 11 long shots and 12 finishing were cosplaying prime cr7
Man, except for two or three players on the pitch (like a midfielder that's all vision and passing), that's pretty much what I did anyway in all of my saves. It's disappointing that it's that broken, I just wanted it to be a little broken
It seems that most players also have godlike touch and dribbling, which kinda squashes the whole technical stat. With all of the money they make, they might as well hire someone who can help fine tune their engine.
Do you know if this happens specifically with pace and acceleration? Because I feel that the game is sort-of-biased with any team and any formation or players you play with, you will always sort of do good, never really fail.
I Hope You Read This!I think the problem is detail level.I play a save with detail level set at maximum in every playable league.The game is very hard the AI is very smart and i also tried to tale advantage of the pace and acceleration.I think if the game makes a quick SIM of the match This problem occurs.But If the detail level is set properly at the expense of speed the problem disspappears.Not to mention other benefits.
I think there is a certain bias ingame engine towards the player controlled teams. What I would do, is set up pre-game editor for a team, Nottingham for example, and then start up the game, and pick.. any team, let us say Man Utd, and run simulation 4-5 like that. Put in transfer ban on Nottingham so they can not sign anyone.
hey zealand, first time fm player here. ur videos have inspired to give the game a go. currently on my first save with sunderland in my first year i made the playoffs in the championship finishing 6th but losing to norwich in the semi. in my second go i was promoted finished second. brought in a wonderkid and many other good players and i’m now 8th in the premier after 25 games played
i think it's a huge flaw, i mean, one of the important reason playing FM is the good feeling, one of the main challenge is doing good with our disadvantage we had in the league, this just takes away that good feeling, because turns out we are not as good as we thought we were, this literally show that we didn't get a championship squad to mid table because we are good, but simply there's a flaw in the game, it's like take away our efforts, like what's the point ? even we didn't manage the team they still thriving, we didn't make a difference as a manager. i hope they fix that, because we all love this game.
I think if you've played FM for any meaningful amount of time, we all kinda knew this was the case. Same thing with training not having any affect whatsoever, but we still do it anyway because like you said, it kinda kills the entire game and shifts your mentality towards these broken mechanics.
If the goals you're seeing has nothing to do with pace, IMO this means the algorithm for the match engine is not actually taking individual attributes into account, but rather as a whole.
If a player has high pace but poor passing, because the algorithm weighs pace so highly, it'll show the player as having good passing and able to make ridiculous plas.
I wonder if the solution would be for SI to extend attributes outside of the 1-20 scale for FM25; creating bigger gulfs between players and then allowing for those attributes to have more of an impact.
0:42 Now imagine my surprise when I accidentally stumbled upon such a "supertactic" in CM01/02 by having to deal with an Injury Crisis...
EDIT: Ever since CM97/98 (god I feel old typing that...) I basically only looked at: Pace, Passing, Stamina, Strength, Height, Determination (in that order) without anything to actually base that on but vibes. And always did well.
Acceleration and Work Rate have been working into that when they finally became a thing. But the basic always was "fast, strong, tall, who can pass a ball" And then added Determination and WorkRate because they sound important for professional athletes. Turns out the match engine agrees (and has done so for literal decades... again... feeling old...)
its been like this for a couple years, i signed ricky jade jones for rangers for the future and first season he was top scorer in the scottish prem and was my top scorer in the uel. he didn’t have anything apart from pace had like 10 shooting
"A boost to speed is a boost to all skills" - MockRock
It does not surprise me this is how this ended up. The highlights don't show much but how many neutral balls are won because they get there first? How much extra possession does that get them? With your highest goal scorer on the like for like test being under 10, that means goals were coming from everywhere. If you can beat them to the ball, you get to apply the skills you do have and they don't. I think that's why that works in the engine and why it only works in the engine.
My first full FM save I brought a Czech striker called Lucas Julis who got me 32 goals in Spanish segunda and over 20 in la liga, in real life he got 1 goal for Ibiza and only had 1 season where he scored over 10 in his career. Made me realise it is as not realistic as people make out. I feel the game gives the players team some leniency. Still fun
Surely it’s more concerning that nobody is talking about the inverse.
Does a lack of pace cause players in FM to under perform to an unreasonable extent?
Can you get players who have bundles of technical ability and game intelligence, but lack pace, to perform as you’d expect? Like a David Silva or Sergio Busquets type of player.
Well when you have a great player who gets old and loses their physical attributes, they do tend to perform extremely poorly. So I think this is another issue that is part of the same problem.
I'd guess that explains why 140CA Jonathan Ikone with 16 accel 16 agility and 16 pace had 20+ G/A and was my second highest rated player when I won all domestic trophies within 2 years at Fiorentina
I HAVE PLAYED MORE HOURS THAN YOU AND CAN EXPLAIN WHY THIS OCCURS.
I am not great at explaining things but let me try,
FM Games are made up of mathematical scenarios, this is why attributes and other conditions matter as all of them affect the numbers used to make such calculations in scenarios.
To add insult to injury not only is there direct mathematical calculations, at the end of each calculation there is a thing called Random Number Generation or RNG which adds an element of luck to the calculations scoring sequence.
Each component of the scenario is weighted differently, but almost ALL scenarios include an X and Y co-ordinate to start the scenario.
If you can imagine the field being a chess board of black and white squares, each scenario starts on one of those squares, it has an X and a Y.
The engine then calculates which player/s (one of each team) would be FIRST TO ARRIVE at the scenario, this is based on a LOT of things, but mainly, the tactical positions, the traits and the tactics employed, ie a wing back sits higher than a full back etc but the biggest factor is speed.
And here is where your issue occurs, the game assumes you wont have EVERY SINGLE PLAYER as super fast and strong, but in EVERY test that EVERYONE has done ALL of the team posses this pace, agility and strength, this causes a problem because it means if you were starting a scenario ANYWHERE on the chessboard of the field on ANY X and Y co-ordinate - your player will be first to the ball all the time and every time.
If only half of your team was fast and strong this would not occur, it does not matter if these physical players cant pass at all as a misplaced pass creates the beginning of yet another new scenario and a new X and Y position, so you constantly are first to the ball, therefore having a weighted advantage to win the ball and when you lose the ball, you will be first to the next scenario anyhow, the game weights the first player to arrive very heavily - it has to or tactics would not work.
I tested this thoroughly, even at first placing fast players next to slow players in my tactics so that NO fast player was next to another fast player, I also tried having one whole side of my team fast and the other normal.
Think of it like this.
You place a team of 11 men (fast players) in a circle and 11 women (Normal Players) in a circle shape, the same shape and evenly spaced, you tell them you have a drone that will drop a ball into the center of the circle but no one can move to get the ball until the ball hits the ground then you drop the ball in the center of the circle - the MEN (fast players) always arrive first, unless the ball is dropped somewhere that is not the middle of the circle and lands at a womans feet....
Now imagine that it is a chess board and the players are overlayed onto that chess board (you can actually see this with the "coverage" section of the tactics screen, except that is justa few squares instead of several hundred in the engine) so your team has its positions on the chess board based on your tactics and the other team has theirs as well, there will be spaces of green grass that a scenario can start but ... ANYwhere that the drone drops the ball, you will be first to the ball because your players are fast. strong and spaced out in a tactic to give good coverage.
The game assumes that no one in their right mind would pick a team of fast and poorly technical players and as Pace and Agility are rare, its uncommon to have ALL of the fast players in your database on one team.. the other issue is that speed is Linear, and needs to be a constant value for other calculations in the game, so you cant simply adjust the speed of arrival for the calculation without affecting speeds use in other areas.
In short the TLDR is - if you staggered between normal and fast/strong players in your team you will do worse, if all of your team is the same they will do well together because they are all the first to arrive, and if you half and half it, one side of your team will do better than the other. NO ONE has tested anything other than ALL fast/strong players.
The equations rely on so many things mathematically and everything affects them, ie if a player is not fully fit he may not be as fast, so subtract.001 etc.
Its all maths...
Like this
Scenario Location = A3 Header
Two closest players are - left attacking mid and opposing right fullback
Who is closer to this square - well that depends on an inside forward, winger, wingback, full back as well as tactical instructions.?
Next.... ok two closest players, calculate distances...
Player A has to travel 4 meters, Player B has to travel 6 meters...
Next who is faster per meter to arrive first.. Player A is faster than player B as he has fast accel and pace, so he will arrive before player B.
Next,.... if Player A arrives with enough time before player B then there is no heading challenge, scenario over player A wins the ball without a challenge.
But
If both players arrive close enough to the same time initiate a duel, and this is where attributes come in, ie if the ball is in the air then a header, so jumping , heading, strength and then roll a dice RNG - take away any subtractions, ie tired, injured, distracted (homesick) and the higher mathematical total score wins this scenario.. (its far from as simple as that, but you get the idea, all things affect the final total for a scenario, be that Homesick, Upset, Tired, Injured - these factors subtract from the total)
With a nice spread (tactic) accross chess square (field) from your team with each position covered by a fast player there is NO WHERE a scenario cant start where you are not likely to be first to the ball and often not require a challenge or any pressure placed on a pass, shot, header etc, meaning you don't need such huge values for it. If there is no pressure on the person with the ball their control, passing, shooting etc does not need to be as high - but if a player is close to them it does need to be.
NO ONE has tested without EVERY player in their team as super hyped on speed and strength, and that's is not realistic.
If the speed and strength was the only attribute that matters then Adama would be winning the Balon Dor every save - but Adama does not do so well, why... because although HE can sprint down the byline with the ball, the person he crosses to is likely not to be fast enough to match him in time for the cross he makes, unless the ENTIRE team is fast.
If Speed was all that mattered then technical players would not get the highest scores in the game and the most goals.
Is speed heavily weighted, YES, it is too much so - YES - but its only broken if EVERY player on your team is that fast/strong and in most databases that is not going to be easy to achieve without an editor, yes you can focus on just signing these kind of players, but unless you are at a top club, thats not so easy to do as they are spread out in the game, most tests use the editor to transfer a player from one club to another or they simply create a full team of physical gems, this is not how the game would play out without an editor unless at a massive club.
Wow that explains a lot! Sounds like FM is pretty realistic to me then 😂
Adama was scoring 30+ goals for many ppl in saves from FM the last few years. Also whether it’s realistic to fill your team full of super athletes or not, the fact that you can do this and have it succeed in the game proves the engine has a major flaw, since this obviously wouldn’t happen in real life. A team full of super athletes but lower league technical and mental attributes is getting relegated from the EPL every single time in reality.
The thing is it IS realistic for athleticism (speed in particular) to be very impactful in the game and on a player's ability to perform. We just have to look at some of the players we consider to at the top of the game throughout the years. Mbappe, Haaland, Cristiano, R9, Henry, Eusébio, Péle... even Messi, Maradona or Ronaldinho, who might not be the first guys coming to mind as speedy players, could outpace most other players. Of course these might not be the best examples given their many extraordinary qualities but I'd argue their speed is actually much more relevant to their success on the pitch than one might want to admit.
So the major issue here (from my perspective) is how the current or potential ability don't properly reflect the impact of athleticism and not so much how athleticism affects outcomes in the game.
Yeah, consider Jamie Vardy for example. N'Golo Kante as well! Pace gives a massive edge!
Seeing how little progress SI made in much 'easier" departments as Player interaction, AI squad building or even AI faces, I dont have any confidence the new match engine is going to be halfway decent and just as exploitable
Really interesting test. I'd be interested to see if the results are the same if a non-player controlled team was given the same conditions. I know you left the management to your assistant but it is still the 'Player Team,' and I feel like the game has some player-favouring biases built in. I mean it's not exactly uncommon for FM players to overperform the expectations of the board, overperform what the players they have on their team really should be accomplishing. I have never had a situation in FM where I'm been promoted to the Prem and then had to actually worry about getting relegated the next season, I'm always at least mid-table, and I don't exactly think I'm an especially great player.
We tend to put these overperformances down to the fact that we, as humans, are managing our team in a smarter way than the AI. We care about dynamics more, we make more sensible transfer decisions, we optimise training and make more robust tactics. And some of that is true, but tbh the game probably also just gives players more favourable dice rolls. As a game designer, you don't want your players mired in a game so realistic that they feel like they can't progress, so you tip the odds in their favour a bit. So even not-very-good players can still feel like they can win the game and climb up the leagues.
If Nottingham Forest can still make 12th in this scenario whilst the 'player team' is Manchester City, then its all about the attributes. If not, then 'player bias' is likely muddling the results imo.
Totally agree. Some of this is surely player bias. Yes pace/acceleration, physicals are clearly OP but I'm sure there's player controlled bias in the game. I've seen players with the worst squad in the league and still win the league comfortably or finish way higher than expected. You see some of the rebuilds creators do and they don't have the best players but win UCL's quite easily. Shouldn't be possible.
I’d like to see a similar but opposite test. Get a bunch of 10 pace guys with 150 CA and see what happens
They will be good
This is quite interesting, I got Onuacho purely based on 20 jumping reach and a few pacey players too. Onuachu has 8 goals and 7.5 average in 10 games, including a win against Porto. I feel like some pacey players dont just work, but mid table in the prem with absolutely awful players is amazing
SI's match engine has more holes in it than a pincushion...
Explains why bang average players always seem to be lethal against you and your elite and world class players miss sitters and get nervous facing relegation fodder
The game is weird, I've see players in open position refuse to pass to the other guy for a tap in and yet my team cohesion is full, they have green links to each other and have above 14 teamwork and Decisions
oh boi. You just solved the "season after promotion to the prem" dilemma for all of us XD. And I say that as an ACTUAL Cardiff-main manager (08, 17 and 23 fms)
CJ HAMILTON is a legend in my save he scored last minute in my first season in league one with burton to win us the playoff finals at Wembley
It's just way easier to implement pace in the ME than any other attributes. Scaling pace from 1-20 is pretty easy, but how does one scale decisions, anticipation, concentration, composure, etc 1-20 and have it as much of an impact in the ME as pace? I think they need to scale down the amount of mental attributes and we'd already see an improvement.
You should do a few tests with top tactics from FM Arena. Leaving the tactics up to your Ass Man is highly dubious, noone in their right mind does that when holidaying a save.
My eyes opened up to that few years ago, when I was on FM-Arena checked some posts for training help... and it was pretty much Quickness and Workrate for some. Think the GK one was technique (not sure). There was no need to change it to anything else.
I played a save in FM11 with Sunderland in which I concentrated on signing fast players. Absolutely crushed it. This has been true since at least then.
The real test would be to knock all of their other attributes down to 1. freeze their attributes at the recommended level and then see how they perform. then slowly increase the attributes until you reach the original level of each player. This way you should be able to tell when the minimum baseline hits .
This honestly feels like old news. Pretty much every lower league FM guide suggests this exact personnel strategy, and outside of GK I don’t ever buy players with pace below 15 in top flight saves.
I recently started a save for the lower leagues of Denmark, and I was really confused why we were dominating and shitting on teams left and right, scoring 2+ goals every game. After watching this video, I realized it makes a lot of sense. Who knew recruiting a team entirely of pace merchants (including on defense) playing double wing players? Early crosses would lead you to shitting on other teams.
I think you need 2 further tests to get to the bottom of it.
Test 1: Sign players with the same range of current ability, but not focused on a particular attribute. This will show if it is pace or if FM gives any team a player manages a boost so they think they are great, endorphins are released and the addiction kicks in.
Test 2: Do the pace test in the real life EPL. This will show if FM is getting it wrong or the real life mangers are missing a trick.
Test 1 has probably been done somewhere, but I look forward to your Test 2 video.
do it yourself
@@T.E.S.S. Can't. I could afford to buy a Premier League club or the in game editor, but not both.
I remember the Grid system tactic in FM10, i think it was. Put Messi or someone else fast as the middle striker and he alone would score about 150 goals per season.
Forest fans seeing Fawaz playing, all shuddering in fear.
this how I have been recruiting since FM 2007
Recently did a save myself as Brighton and Nottingham got 5th, and I went through the team and I was shocked as outside of 2 or 3 players no one extremely stands out.
would be interesting to see if you can do this with a national team, like ghana, who have so many pacey players
As a fifa cm turned fm player. Ricky Jade Jones in lower tier of England was cracked. Good times!
Wow, ive always subconsciously done this on every park to prem i do, usuaally every stat i have is worst im the league except pace and accel, and usually put perform. This video really affirms this as a wrokong strategy
I am not surprised. I had a youth academy challenge save on fm 21. Really struggled for the first decade. Then by accident I discovered fm arena and in the next five years I got three promotions haha. Just by focusing on pacy players and exclusively training quickness. For gk I only trained reflexes. Had a really good dribbler who I placed on the edge of area during defensive set pieces. He would collect the loose ball and just dribble the whole pitch. He woukd score six or seven goals like that a season
Football manager had been using the same 1-20 attributes and 1-200 current/potential ability system since the Championship manager days.
It's not a surprise to me that there are balance issues with modern FMs (think of how many more leagues and detail there is now vs the old days).
But changing it is likely a much bigger job than giving the graphics engine a fresh coat of paint.
Let me preface this by saying that I do agree that certain tactics and certain attributes are unrealistically favoured in the match engine.
But, I do think a major flaw in these types of experiment’s is that the results are usually perceived in a binary of ‘physical skills/gegenpress= success’ despite the results not purely coming from the vacuum of how physically gifted players are or how good a 4-2-3-1 Gegenpress is; overlooking the impact of an effective strategy (the 4-2-3-1 Gegenpress, a system famously physically demanding, but rewarding if successful) combined with considered recruitment for said strategy (enduring, physically gifted players).
To expand, Brighton wouldn’t play out from the back with Everton’s usual back 4. It’s simply nonsensical, they’re professional players, but they’re not patient, composed ball players. By the same virtue, you wouldn’t ask a back 4 Brighton may field to play the same way as Everton due to the physical and mental differences in the two.
Simply what I mean by this, is that when you hire quick, strong and enduring players in a Gegenpress system, or systems requiring those work-rates, as Atalanta have, there is no guarantee that they are a suitable side regarding the mentality needed (in FM, stats such as bravery, work rates, decision making, aggression, positioning, ect) of a strict system a manager such as Simeone may run, or for a more clear picture of what I am trying to represent, Conte’s tactically related struggles at Tottenham.
I do feel as if recruitment for purpose is being downplayed by these experiments, that the success of this experiment is centred around very successful recruitment. In the same way Brighton use statistics to identify undervalued players in the market, with varying experience, or prior valuation as players who could make it at the top level; I argue that these sorts of experiments are doing the same thing but with the scouting of ideal physical attributes on otherwise unsuitable or undervalued players.
Obviously you need a level of physical capability to play at the top level, I am not going to deny that and I do think it is fair for physical attributes to have some form of emphasis. A midfielders ability to run a full 90 is almost incontestably more important than their ability to try tricks, shoot from distance or their free kick taking ability as an individual, you can work around their technical deficiencies a lot easier than an inability to run great distances.
However, I do think that these sorts of experiment results would change significantly if more specialisation was required of the same players used, or if there was more consideration required in offensive, or defensive play, whether that’s being a compact defensive unit, or having very intensely considered attacking approaches. Going back to the prior example, that same midfielder in a tiki taka system also happens to not be very good at passing, in this example he is almost certainly not at the required standard.
Just my 2 cents on the matter. I do think that this experiment more highlights the benefit of considered player acquisition than the benefits of purely having quick players, or running a gegenpress. But, this is entirely my subjective opinion.
Love your content Zealand!
I remember around 2009 sabotaging Arsenal by playing 5 midfielders and attackers, going on holiday use current tactic and starting line up. They still were insanely difficult to beat. Sometimes the game has strange balance.
I dont agree with you,
Players with extreme rare physical abilities are not easy to find in the game...
Your problem just like 99% of the players of football manager is that you see the attributes of the players in the wrong way...
many people miss judge players qualities by ignoring key factors such as strenght, height, agility and Pace... physical atributes can be decisive in key positions of the field...
And it seems to me that many people just completely miss judge players by looking at raw numbers, instead of checking how the player is built...
a player with 115-120 potential, can be better than a player with 130, if its atributes are placed in where it counts for the position he is targeted... so many players have USELESS atribute numbers that makes them look overal "good" in the perspective of potential
One thing i hate about South American players per example, is that very often you see in Argentina, Uruguay, or Brazil, players that have extreme qualities in technique, like they have 15 or 16 at pretty much everything, and if you show their profile into a kid that ony started playing football manager yesterday what will that kid see?
"Oh this player is great, he has 140 potential... 16 dribbling, 16 finishing, first touch 16, decisions 16 yada yada.... on paper excelent players...
Then they have 163 height, (meters), 3 strenght, very low agressivity, miserable impulsion... and terrible consistency...
do you know what it takes for a player to be betterthan this?
a striker that has only 115 potential.... but has 14 finishing, 13 heading, 11 composure, 12 anteicipation, and then by luck, has 14 acceleratioon, 13 impulsion, 14 strenght, some decent 10 balance nad and agility... this is enough for this striker to be ABSOLUTELY superior to the one that you just saw above...
why? because RAW numbers arent everything, and thats why souting players based on potential ability is not inteligent at all..
an inteligent football manager player will seek players based on the model of play of its team, if i want a positional striker i will favor the player based on the attributes i seek... when searching for great players in great leagues, you should use the same thinking at the scale of play you are, simply because numbers arent everything, and sometimes its better to have a dutch tall as fuck player with 20 heading, than heaving the latest super wonder kid with potential ability of 179 that unluckly has 80% of its stats on his physical and mental areas being neglected on physical...
So when i seek players, i do really funky things with the search, i like to prioritize rare things, specially with youngsters...
Very often when i seek a youth player, i seek RAW physical atributes, that later i can channel or correct with training...
at my current save, i discovered an Argentinian that was a right full back, with impressive physical skills and some good decent mental skills, but mediocre technical side, the great thing about him, is that he is tall as fuck, so i am training him to be a center defender... where he can take full advantage of its height and strenght, being also very fast... he has 13 tracking, which will be enough to deal with anyone, if i manage to make him 12 on marking, he will be a very good central defender, better than others that have 15 or 15 of those atributes but then mediocre physical side.
Physical atributes that are too high impact the game more than the rest, and thats normal, because thats how real life works, what people should do its to re-think the way play the game and i think its amazing that the game is actually not following just raw numbers but being smart enough when simulating physics.
Holy Essay, no-one asked.