ZaZ said: 1. Offer the player on TransferRoom for maximum value, without transfer listing, and click to continue. This will reveal clubs interested, even if they are not willing to pay maximum value, and will make the player angry due to high price. 2. After the "No offers for player" message (usually after a day or two), when your player complains about his high price, talk to him and remove the price tag (or ask him to set a new target price together if you are not sure about his value). That will make the player happy again, so you can proceed to sell him normally. Offer him another time for unspecified (or the target price you set) and check the box to transfer list him. 3. After the new "No offers for player" message, you will see new clubs telling why they are not interested (like high wage, high asking price, or anything like that), and some option in the bottom to ask the player to be open about finding a new club. Click that option, and the player will tell he is glad to move if he is not wanted. 4. If there is a club interested, offer him again by unspecified price (or the price you defined with him), and the interested team will usually make an offer. 5. If there is no club interested, then offer him for zero cost. If any club makes an offer, then you know there is interest for a certain price, so you can reject the offer and try to guess the price, slowly decreasing the price until they offer again. 6. If no one wants your player, then offer him on loan to at least save the wages, or sell for zero if anyone wants to take him.
Let me know how this method work for you. I am still working on the best method to sell players. Expand
I have a different way, although for the player that doesn’t want to be offered out you still need to do the steps you have suggested if he is refusing to leave. Also you have to accept that if you try to sell a player his performance may decrease, and if you can’t risk that then wait for the end of season.
1). Look at the players maximum price and offer out higher than that. For a 50 million player maybe 2x but for lesser players as much as 5x. You have to know the market for a player of that quality and factor in your country/league as the game almost always offers below market price if you aren’t in a big 5 league.
2) Assuming you get no bids check with intermediaries to see if they can bring offers. If no offers then lower price and offer out again and repeat as necessary.
3) Once the intermediary’s have offers for you then decide whether to take it. If it’s within 20% of what you offered out at then I would always take it. Accept the best offer, refuse the rest and offer out again a bit higher than the one you accepted (including in your calculation the intermediary fee as you hope to get a new offer with no fee)). If it’s a lot lower consider if to accept or go back to step 2. Don’t take loan offers.
4) If you get a better offer accept it and cancel the previous one. Now follow the usual bidding war strategy, offering for a bit more each time until there are no more increases.
For me this regularly gets more than a strategy of offering out at only max price range and using the agent for offers. The intermediary’s are much better at knowing the market price than your scouts.
Faker said: with this, theres zero set piece training. Does it matter? Expand
SI has always claimed that the set piece training gave a temporary boost in games but any effect is so small no one has ever managed to measure it. The best thing you can do for set pieces is have good routines. That and high attributes for the taker and target man. A good set piece coach will choose better routines than a bad one but doesn’t seem to matter if you do your own routines. Personally I will throw a training in there once in a while but it’s more superstition than based on evidence.
TheBucket said: If the name is "fine", then asking the user to justify his intention behind the name is fine. Obviously. He helped me understand his position, I point out where I disagree, there are points where we do agree. I'm not the first person to bring up an issue with the name, I surely won't be the last person. I don't think you speak for everyone else, try to be more productive next time you join a conversation. Expand
I’m sure you were very productive given the topic of this forum.
The issue is not just that the username is provocative. It is that it makes the community look less serious, less evidence-driven, and more tolerant of political bait. Keeping the name creates friction for everyone else, while changing it costs almost nothing and preserves the person’s actual FM contributions. Expand
The name is fine. If you want to believe a media fiction that’s also fine. It would be best for everyone else if you drop the issue.
tam1236 said: Sorry for digging up old posts, but good estimation - lately made some tests with nation rating. Having clearly best reputation, coaching 20, recruitment 20, youth rating 200 , best swiss newgen was always (~15 times) >150-<160 - not very much randomness, I would even say PA of best five boys was quite regular (btw with rating 1 dropped to >70-<75). I don't suppose this hidden factor is mysterious "football's popularity", which effects no one knows, but rather other more hidden factor. Expand The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players.
Yarema said: The main thing why it works better in real life is sample size. The number of games in a season is a lot lower compared to shots. FM Arena sample sizes are much bigger and thus less prone to variance. Even in real life most leagues rather use xP than xG to sort teams, because it's a better representation of situational nuances.
As for xG difference, it's not quite so simple. As I said you can inflate the number artificially without really adding much to your point total by simply taking more shots even if they are bad on paper. There is also different variance depending what kind of shots you take. For example you can take 1 shot with 1 xG and end up scoring 1 goal, or take 100 shots at 0,01 xG per shot totalling 1 xG but it's actually very likely you'll score 0.
You can also create scenarios where tactics become win more in the sense that when they win they win big with high xG difference which adds up over the season but is actually not contributing to any additional points. Expand
This is just not correct. Larger sample size makes xG difference work better irl, and xP is a worse predictor than xG difference. There is a lot of research to show this. This is why the site was moving in that direction.
Your final point may be correct in FM but look back to the OP where it was the goals against that was being hypothesized as the source of the problem, not the goals for.
Tsubasa said: Pal, this isn't real life, it's a pc game.
It could be that in Football Manager, xG stat is just a cosmetic thing, like thousand other things in the game, which are purply cosmetic.
As you might notice in Football Manager many crazy tactical approaches work but in real they would never work.
The game developers want that when play FM you to "feel" like it's real life so they add things from real life but there's no guaranty that those things work like in real life. Expand
Yes, it could be SI presents a meaningless number. But why? irl xG is only an approximate prediction but in the game there must be a known probability of scoring for the match engine to work. So why would SI invent a different (wrong) number when they already calculated the correct number? It’s exactly because it’s a pc game that it should be even more predictive, because it is the causal mechanism of goals being scored.
Yarema said: xG isn't a perfect metric either. And if you try to optimize for highest xG the tactic might not actually function as well as you'd like. It is possible to inflate xG by taking lots of shots that "never really have a chance to go in" and while statistically you may "deserve" to score a goal, two or three based on xG it's actually not realistic to expect it to happen week after week. On the other hand there are certain counterattacks with relatively low xG (lets say 0,26 or something) that more often than not end up being a goal.
At the end of the day given a large enough sample size I think points are a good metric to evaluate tactics. You have the option to sort by xG, GD, GF, GA as well if you prefer one those. Expand
The question I’m raising is whether the sample size is in fact enough. Clearly the thinking was to use xG difference because it gives more precision for any fixed sample size. And this is correct in real life too. I’m not trying to be annoying or rude, but I don’t see how you can just look at the results and decide that there is some particular flaw about how xG is counted. If xG difference is not accurately predicting the points winner as the number of simulation increases towards infinity then this is a massive, massive problem with the match engine. It is literally saying that when SI programs a shot to have a probability x of scoring then the either a) the probability is not x, or b) SI can’t correctly add up x over the game.
Lapidus said: At the end of the day, you win leagues not because you have the highest possession or xG but because you have the highest points so the points is king Expand
But in real life it’s been shown that xG difference is the better predictor of the future. The point of the testing is to know which tactic will be the most likely to be best when you use it in your game. The points gained in the testing is an inaccurate measure of this and does not decide who wins in your league, it is only a prediction with an error.
I’m not sure why you conclude that xG against is the problem here. In your example you could equally well say xG for is also below the actual goals scored and therefore the error is in the other direction. It seems very unlikely that the match engine can make a mistake that only affects goals scored by one of the two teams. After all every goal against one team is a goal for the other team. To trust actual goals more than xG you would have to believe that when the match engine says a shot is worth 0.1 xG it then calculates the result using a probability that is different than 10% chance of a goal. That would be a massive error by SI.
From what we know about real life, it is quite possible for actual points scored to be discrepant from xG difference in a season. But it is the xG difference that is the better predictor of future points totals. Of course in a simulation we should expect the two things to converge if the sample size is large enough. So are you concluding that this is not happening? If this is the case then I would agree that points is the only measure you can trust, but not that you have actually diagnosed the problem with xG only that something in the match engine is very broken.
Surely this is what should be expected. No real league has every team equal to the ability of the top 7 teams in the world. At most in the league you face 3 such teams. In the champions league you can ignore everything up to the round of 16 since any team of that calibre should qualify; after that you have 4 games and you can be lucky enough to face only 2 or up to 4 teams that calibre. My point is that the randomness is in reality a lot less since being successful over 6 league games or 2-4 CL games puts you in a very strong position where your fate is determined by beating inferior opponents and the outcome has much less variation than in the testing league.
Excellent. It seems unlikely that xG is diverging from the process that SI is using to determine if a shot actually goes in. So it should definitely be a more accurate reflection of performance than goals scored and conceded.
ZaZ said: There was a time when they said you would be able to customize your view, dragging the window cards you want to see in your home screen. I still don't know how to do that, if it was ever implemented. Expand
Wasn’t that part of the FM25 hype? I think in SIs minds they can just pretend anything that happened before the cancellation never actually existed.
ZaZ said: It is pointless. In semi-pro teams, the players are so bad that it is often better to hire a full team of free players once you get promoted. Sometimes you keep a few of them after promotion, but the training is not so efficient when you barely have enough staff or training grounds. Expand
I agree. I’ve tracked CA for semi-pro teams and even if you pick up good quality young players released from top teams they hardly improve. Maybe if you could get them at 18, but by the typical 21, 22 they are released growth has already slowed down even with proper facilities. Better to take profit after promotion and sign the better quality free transfers that will now join.
One other point about learning positions. The cost to go from accomplished to natural is small, so it’s usually worth it to do that if you will use the player in the position where he is accomplished.
I’m glad to see a few more different formations getting tested since my previous post. I understand that a lot of people are focused on trying to create the absolute best tactic so they aren’t going to submit formations that won’t be competitive. That’s entirely their choice. My comment was really to the FMArena team to be aware of the situation and suggesting that they should automatically rerun a wider diversity of tactics. This helps us to know to what extent ME flaws are being addressed by SI and to support members who like to use tactics that are popular in real football.
ZaZ said: Many people are trying different formations, you can see at least a dozen in the first page of the tactic testing log. You are just focusing on the tactics on the top of the table, which are similar because that is what works in this version. People trying to improve the meta will use others as inspiration, or try to tweak their tactics, but that does not stop others from trying what they want. Expand
That was true in v2 but unfortunately not in v3. There are almost no 442, 4231, 433 tested in the latest ME. I think because of the dominance of strikerless 3atb formations people gave up. And now we have at least a partial fix for the defending it’s difficult to tell what impact it’s had on the more realistic formations.
I’ve noticed that almost all the retested tactics are strikerless, 3 atb formations. I understand that priority is given to the highest rated tactics but when the ME is so messed up as it was this year that means that we don’t get enough variety in formations rated in the current ME. I also don’t think I should be submitting tactics that are 99% the work of others just to get them retested. So is it possible to go back and retest more formations from v2 ME? I don’t think I’m alone in not wanting to use completely unrealistic tactics.
2. After the "No offers for player" message (usually after a day or two), when your player complains about his high price, talk to him and remove the price tag (or ask him to set a new target price together if you are not sure about his value). That will make the player happy again, so you can proceed to sell him normally. Offer him another time for unspecified (or the target price you set) and check the box to transfer list him.
3. After the new "No offers for player" message, you will see new clubs telling why they are not interested (like high wage, high asking price, or anything like that), and some option in the bottom to ask the player to be open about finding a new club. Click that option, and the player will tell he is glad to move if he is not wanted.
4. If there is a club interested, offer him again by unspecified price (or the price you defined with him), and the interested team will usually make an offer.
5. If there is no club interested, then offer him for zero cost. If any club makes an offer, then you know there is interest for a certain price, so you can reject the offer and try to guess the price, slowly decreasing the price until they offer again.
6. If no one wants your player, then offer him on loan to at least save the wages, or sell for zero if anyone wants to take him.
Let me know how this method work for you. I am still working on the best method to sell players.
I have a different way, although for the player that doesn’t want to be offered out you still need to do the steps you have suggested if he is refusing to leave. Also you have to accept that if you try to sell a player his performance may decrease, and if you can’t risk that then wait for the end of season.
1). Look at the players maximum price and offer out higher than that. For a 50 million player maybe 2x but for lesser players as much as 5x. You have to know the market for a player of that quality and factor in your country/league as the game almost always offers below market price if you aren’t in a big 5 league.
2) Assuming you get no bids check with intermediaries to see if they can bring offers. If no offers then lower price and offer out again and repeat as necessary.
3) Once the intermediary’s have offers for you then decide whether to take it. If it’s within 20% of what you offered out at then I would always take it. Accept the best offer, refuse the rest and offer out again a bit higher than the one you accepted (including in your calculation the intermediary fee as you hope to get a new offer with no fee)). If it’s a lot lower consider if to accept or go back to step 2. Don’t take loan offers.
4) If you get a better offer accept it and cancel the previous one. Now follow the usual bidding war strategy, offering for a bit more each time until there are no more increases.
For me this regularly gets more than a strategy of offering out at only max price range and using the agent for offers. The intermediary’s are much better at knowing the market price than your scouts.
SI has always claimed that the set piece training gave a temporary boost in games but any effect is so small no one has ever managed to measure it. The best thing you can do for set pieces is have good routines. That and high attributes for the taker and target man. A good set piece coach will choose better routines than a bad one but doesn’t seem to matter if you do your own routines. Personally I will throw a training in there once in a while but it’s more superstition than based on evidence.
I’m sure you were very productive given the topic of this forum.
The issue is not just that the username is provocative. It is that it makes the community look less serious, less evidence-driven, and more tolerant of political bait. Keeping the name creates friction for everyone else, while changing it costs almost nothing and preserves the person’s actual FM contributions.
The name is fine. If you want to believe a media fiction that’s also fine. It would be best for everyone else if you drop the issue.
The quote you are referring to is really a misunderstanding created by looking at a single team. If you make all the other clubs have terrible reputation then you create a situation where your club’s recruitment gets worse because lots of mediocre players now don’t want to go to those other clubs and clutter up your picks. Your team isn’t picking with perfect knowledge so having a much larger pool that want your club dilutes the quality of your choices. The only team attributes that matter for PA of your intake are your club reputation first, followed by youth recruitment second. The youth rating of the country applies to all players recruited in that country, regardless of their nationality. But the number of higher PA players each year also depends on the players that have left the database of active players since the game tries to maintain stable levels of good players in each country. (This is why there tends to be a noticeable jump in high PA recruits in the first year of a save or when you add playable leagues).
Finally affiliates can have a negative effect if they are from countries with low youth ratings but this is both rare and of limited effect. The affiliates give you additional intake players and aren’t replacing high PA players from your own country. Yes they can lower the median but that is like saying that getting 5 200 PA players and a 150 PA player is worse than getting only 5 200 PA players. The negative impact only comes if you have enough affiliates that you hit the maximum limit of the intake (around 16-20) and if lower PA recruits could push out better players from other affiliates or from your local recruited but foreign nationality players.
As for xG difference, it's not quite so simple. As I said you can inflate the number artificially without really adding much to your point total by simply taking more shots even if they are bad on paper. There is also different variance depending what kind of shots you take. For example you can take 1 shot with 1 xG and end up scoring 1 goal, or take 100 shots at 0,01 xG per shot totalling 1 xG but it's actually very likely you'll score 0.
You can also create scenarios where tactics become win more in the sense that when they win they win big with high xG difference which adds up over the season but is actually not contributing to any additional points.
This is just not correct. Larger sample size makes xG difference work better irl, and xP is a worse predictor than xG difference. There is a lot of research to show this. This is why the site was moving in that direction.
Your final point may be correct in FM but look back to the OP where it was the goals against that was being hypothesized as the source of the problem, not the goals for.
It could be that in Football Manager, xG stat is just a cosmetic thing, like thousand other things in the game, which are purply cosmetic.
As you might notice in Football Manager many crazy tactical approaches work but in real they would never work.
The game developers want that when play FM you to "feel" like it's real life so they add things from real life but there's no guaranty that those things work like in real life.
Yes, it could be SI presents a meaningless number. But why? irl xG is only an approximate prediction but in the game there must be a known probability of scoring for the match engine to work. So why would SI invent a different (wrong) number when they already calculated the correct number? It’s exactly because it’s a pc game that it should be even more predictive, because it is the causal mechanism of goals being scored.
At the end of the day given a large enough sample size I think points are a good metric to evaluate tactics. You have the option to sort by xG, GD, GF, GA as well if you prefer one those.
The question I’m raising is whether the sample size is in fact enough. Clearly the thinking was to use xG difference because it gives more precision for any fixed sample size. And this is correct in real life too. I’m not trying to be annoying or rude, but I don’t see how you can just look at the results and decide that there is some particular flaw about how xG is counted. If xG difference is not accurately predicting the points winner as the number of simulation increases towards infinity then this is a massive, massive problem with the match engine. It is literally saying that when SI programs a shot to have a probability x of scoring then the either a) the probability is not x, or b) SI can’t correctly add up x over the game.
But in real life it’s been shown that xG difference is the better predictor of the future. The point of the testing is to know which tactic will be the most likely to be best when you use it in your game. The points gained in the testing is an inaccurate measure of this and does not decide who wins in your league, it is only a prediction with an error.
From what we know about real life, it is quite possible for actual points scored to be discrepant from xG difference in a season. But it is the xG difference that is the better predictor of future points totals. Of course in a simulation we should expect the two things to converge if the sample size is large enough. So are you concluding that this is not happening? If this is the case then I would agree that points is the only measure you can trust, but not that you have actually diagnosed the problem with xG only that something in the match engine is very broken.
Wasn’t that part of the FM25 hype? I think in SIs minds they can just pretend anything that happened before the cancellation never actually existed.
I agree. I’ve tracked CA for semi-pro teams and even if you pick up good quality young players released from top teams they hardly improve. Maybe if you could get them at 18, but by the typical 21, 22 they are released growth has already slowed down even with proper facilities. Better to take profit after promotion and sign the better quality free transfers that will now join.
That was true in v2 but unfortunately not in v3. There are almost no 442, 4231, 433 tested in the latest ME. I think because of the dominance of strikerless 3atb formations people gave up. And now we have at least a partial fix for the defending it’s difficult to tell what impact it’s had on the more realistic formations.