FM27 match engine: what we know so far

[caiograco]

I also did a test to learn about home-advantage and crowds. This is a follow up from a point from @Purity in another thread. I tested home advantage on 86 different grounds, with identical sides, so the only difference is where the match is played. These are reported in study 15b

• Overall home advantage is +0.22 xG and +0.37 points per match, same as my first test.
• Big stadiums give more than twice as much. Grounds of 40,000 or more give +0.39 xG, smaller ones +0.15 to +0.18, with no trend from 4,000 to 40,000. So it's more like a big stadium bonus than a straight line.
• Pitch size makes no difference.
• The same stadium also varies from match to match more than chance allows, so something about the match itself matters too. Crowd on the day is a candidate, but so are weather and the competition.

The problem is I can't separate crowd, stadium and club here: big stadiums belong to big clubs, and I haven't found an attendance field in the match engine that I can change.

 

[Falbravv]

Once again caio, it's amazing, clearly.

The difference with Purity stay in the variety of tactics in the experiment it's OK ?

I mean, it's more accurate with your test, for the same positions ?

 

[berkss]

On Fitness, positions and match conditions.
Match sharpness and condition are the biggest effects I've measured so far, bigger than anything you can change on the tactics screen. Home advantage is real, morale at kick-off doesn't seem to matter. I think these are already know but its good to document and test them on the same tool.
The table below summarizes the main numbers, in points per game compared with the same matches where everyone is as fresh and sharp as saved.

Change	Effect
Match sharpness 50% vs 100%	−1.03
Match sharpness 75% vs 100%	−0.37
Condition 80% vs 100%	−0.80
Condition 90% vs 100%	−0.28
Every outfield starter at 10 in his own positions	−0.10 xPts
Every position rating at 10 (his own and all others)	−0.30 xPts
Goalkeeper at 10 in goal	−0.53, conceding 0.7 more goals
Team cohesion, lowest to highest	+0.2 to +0.3
Playing at home (identical sides)	1.54 against 1.18 points
Morale 5 to 20 at kick-off	no measurable effect

Here are the questions I think people care about:
Should I rotate my players?
I think the results support that. Starting players at 75% sharpness or 90% condition costs about a third of a point a game, and at 50% sharpness or 80% condition close to a full point. Nothing I tested on the tactics screen comes close to that. These are reported in study 5.

How bad is playing someone out of position?
In my first tests, it seemed that position ratings at 10 cost 0.85 points a game, but a follow-up showed most of that comes from the ratings of the positions players are not playing. With only their own positions at 10, all outfield starters together cost about 0.1 a game. The exception is the goalkeeper, his position rating is basically his shot-stopping. These are reported in study 17

Does an unfamiliar out-of-possession position cost more than an in-possession one?
Neither costs anything I could measure, for the three or four players whose positions change between phases. These are reported in study 17

How big is home advantage?
About the size on real football, which I think is a good thing. With identical squads and tactics, the home side gets +0.21 xG, +0.28 goals and +1.3 shots a game. It varies by ground (different matches - one of twelve gave about +0.5 xG and one gave none) but not with the club's level. These are reported in study 15

Does morale matter?
Not at kick-off. Morale 5, 10 and 20 against the usual 15 are all within ±0.04 a game. It may still matter over a season through other things (training, form, player happiness), which the tool can't see. These are reported in study 15

Note that sharpness, condition and cohesion were tested on real matches from my own save, the rest on neutral ground. I am moving towards the tests on neutral ground since I don't want they to rely on my real matches going forward.

''How bad is playing someone out of position?
In my first tests, it seemed that position ratings at 10 cost 0.85 points a game, but a follow-up showed most of that comes from the ratings of the positions players are not playing. With only their own positions at 10, all outfield starters together cost about 0.1 a game. The exception is the goalkeeper, his position rating is basically his shot-stopping. These are reported in study 17''
I read the study and is this to say players who aren't competent at multiple other positions are worse e.g. a winger who can't play cam costs more points per game than a winger who is also competent centrally?

 

[Artabora]

So Gegen and physical attributes (Pace/Acc) are still meta?

 

[caiograco]

Once again caio, it's amazing, clearly.

The difference with Purity stay in the variety of tactics in the experiment it's OK ?

I mean, it's more accurate with your test, for the same positions ?

I think our results are pretty close. The actual numbers will change depending on the match, the squad, and the tactics being used in the tests. I'm redoing my analyses on a Catenaccio pre set, and the results are pretty much the same. Catenaccio's centre-backs gain less from Pace, Acceleration and Jumping Reach than Gegenpress's, probably because they defend deep with three of them. Its central attacking midfielders gain more from Pace, but otherwise they are very similar.

 

[caiograco]

So Gegen and physical attributes (Pace/Acc) are still meta?

Yes. I create another thread looking inside the match engine to try to understand why.

 

[caiograco]

''How bad is playing someone out of position?
In my first tests, it seemed that position ratings at 10 cost 0.85 points a game, but a follow-up showed most of that comes from the ratings of the positions players are not playing. With only their own positions at 10, all outfield starters together cost about 0.1 a game. The exception is the goalkeeper, his position rating is basically his shot-stopping. These are reported in study 17''
I read the study and is this to say players who aren't competent at multiple other positions are worse e.g. a winger who can't play cam costs more points per game than a winger who is also competent centrally?

Kind of, but it's small per player. In the test I capped every position rating at 10 for all ten outfield starters at once. That cost about 0.30 xPts a game, against 0.10 when I only capped their own positions. So the other positions mattered, but that's ten players bad at everything at the same time, which never happens. A single winger who can't play AMC probably costs very little.My guess is the engine uses the rating for the area a player is in, so it matters more for a winger who cuts inside. I'd use it as a tie-breaker between similar players. I can test the single-player version if people are interested.

 

[caiograco]

Thank you for your work.

What about player's traits? Are there an impact on the result? Is attributes weight changes when a traits is active? Or traits must have some required attributes to work? Maybe they're are worse if required attributes aren't matched? And it can depends of the position!
Then, it's seems very hard to test...
I can't imagine some attributes are totally useless. My guess is playmaking attributes maybe works only well with a passing traits?

Thanks! Not tested yet, but the engine work I'm reporting in another thread gives a first answer. Traits are switches inside the player's decisions: "Tries Killer Balls Often" changes which teammates he looks for, "Runs With Ball Often" is checked when he decides to dribble, and so on. So a trait changes what a player tries, not how well he does it. The attributes still decide whether it works.That makes your idea plausible: a passing trait could make Passing and Vision matter more, because the player attempts more of the passes where they count. The test is doable since the tool can set traits: trait on/off, with high and low Passing/Vision, by position. I can try adding it to the list of things to check.

 

[caiograco]

amazing work. I appreciate what youve done here!

Im interested in your team instruction findings. Have you tried a clean slate style, while using batched instructions that define styles of play, such as pairing each tempo and directness, then testing those results with each level of patience?

Thanks! Not yet. All my instruction tests changed one instruction at a time on a tactic that already works (Stormbringer from Knap since I was using it on my own save), and on that basis most single instructions did nothing measurable. Starting from a clean slate and testing whole styles makes a lot more sense, since instructions probably work together more than alone. I want to do that when I have free cores (the other tests and the game (my save) are using them). But it would be cool to learn what works with what from scratch or come up with a new tactic using a gradient method.

 

[LightningFlik]

I also did a test to learn about home-advantage and crowds. This is a follow up from a point from @Purity in another thread. I tested home advantage on 86 different grounds, with identical sides, so the only difference is where the match is played. These are reported in study 15b

• Overall home advantage is +0.22 xG and +0.37 points per match, same as my first test.
• Big stadiums give more than twice as much. Grounds of 40,000 or more give +0.39 xG, smaller ones +0.15 to +0.18, with no trend from 4,000 to 40,000. So it's more like a big stadium bonus than a straight line.
• Pitch size makes no difference.
• The same stadium also varies from match to match more than chance allows, so something about the match itself matters too. Crowd on the day is a candidate, but so are weather and the competition.

The problem is I can't separate crowd, stadium and club here: big stadiums belong to big clubs, and I haven't found an attendance field in the match engine that I can change.

I really wish FM Arena hadn't been wiped recently; I experimented with this on FM 24 and laid out all my findings in its own thread. I made a tool which let me play a fixture over and over and I used that to take a real in-game fixture, then swap out teams 1 and 2 (so they're playing at a neutral venue), then messing with max capacity vs actual capacity. The main conclusion was that the more fans you had rooting for you (home or away), the bigger your boost.

 

[GeorgeFloydOverdosed]

I really wish FM Arena hadn't been wiped recently; I experimented with this on FM 24 and laid out all my findings in its own thread. I made a tool which let me play a fixture over and over and I used that to take a real in-game fixture, then swap out teams 1 and 2 (so they're playing at a neutral venue), then messing with max capacity vs actual capacity. The main conclusion was that the more fans you had rooting for you (home or away), the bigger your boost.

You can access quite a bit via waybackmachine and repost if you'd like to.

You can find a post of yours on home ground advantage here (#864) and there are some other notable posts on this page:

Summary of recent findings for optimal play in FM24 & FM26 | Guides, Researches and Hints for Football Manager | FM-Arena

Some stuff has unfortunately been lost. But I was also able to retrieve some stuff from Google's AI. Notably the full content of your 'Some training and development conventional wisdom for fm24' thread. If you want I could send it to you.

I found that with attendance an away fan is worth 25% of a home fan.

I also calculated that +1 home fan increases one of your outfield player's pace by ~0.0035 in FM24, effectively. It's a rough figure, just find it fun to work out the equivalents.