It says which training regime as caption when you expand the image. That one is 'Walters_mixed = My dense but optimized regime based on theories above. 80 injuries.'
I can't remember what training schedule I used, but it doesn't matter because it was inferior to the HarvestGreen22 training regardless of whatever that image may indicate to you.
So I have concluded so far that for condition, playing 1 in 2 matches is ideal. For match sharpness, typically 2 in 3 matches is ideal, with natural fitness allowing some variation to this. But notably some players will even need weekly matches just to keep up and avoid exponential match fitness decay. I had a look at the availability of 12+ natural fitness in genie scout amongst players, and its fairly common, so I would say try to get players of 12+ natural fitness if you can, as 10 or less is quite unforgiving.
Now, the implications for squad composition. If you think about it, this is really something that hasn't been examined at all, in spite of how consequential we all know it to be - that ill-fated tendency of us to bloat our squads; what even is the actual optimal number of players for a first team squad?
In my view, the number is 20 outfield + 2 goalkeepers + the occasional promotion from reserve/youth squad or loan to cover an injury.
9 matches need sub replacements (10 x 9) 17/53 matches permit sub replacements (6 x 17) 26/53 matches permit sub replacements for high Nat players (4 x 26)
4 developing players (AML/AMR/DL/DR) get 35 matches 6 players (2 ST, 2 DM, 2 DC) get 26 matches
Remember that 25-30 matches/season is the ideal for player development. The reason why the wonderkids should typically be wingers not centre backs or strikers I would reason is that you don't want to interrupt your ST's bucketload of goals and young players aren't usually developed enough to fill the shoes of a proper DC, but also that wingers seem to tire fast and only have 1 of each position instead of 2 on the pitch.
It is definitely adjustable to some extent according to personal preference. Basically, for each wonderkid you add, make one of your starters a high Nat player so they can handle the reduced playing time.
Some extra info:
My figures are based on using the optimal HarvestGreen22 training regime, using rest not recovery. So it is safe to combine this info with those training regimes.
Stamina does NOT effect condition recovery post-match. It only affects condition usage during the match itself.
Having a physio reduces match sharpness decay significantly, but it doesn't matter how good the physio is or how many extra you have - you just need one for the benefit.
50% match sharpness or 1 natural fitness recovers condition to 66% vs 68% for 100% sharpness. 20 natural fitness recovers condition to 74%. I mention these select figures to illustrate that natural fitness is kind of important to condition recovery, and match sharpness less so, but overall condition recovery is pretty stable and predictable regardless of the player.
There is a way to kind of exploit match sharpness gain:
friendlies:
~10 minutes for 100 (1%) match sharpness gain ~25 minutes for 200 (2%) match sharpness gain ~43 minutes for 300 (3%) match sharpness gain ~60 minutes for 400 (4%) match sharpness gain ~78 minutes for 500 (5% - max) match sharpness gain
So if you want to play absolutely optimally, you could sub a player at 78 minutes in friendlies to maximize match fitness. And throwing a player on for 10 minutes gives the most efficient match sharpness boost, while you'd know not to do 7 minutes as it gives them nothing.
For competitive as I mentioned before, it's 9% max instead of 5% max. However, EBFM did find that sometimes players would inexplicably get 10-11% max for a reason he could not identify, but I would just treat this as a kind of bonus.
9% match sharpness gain per 90min competitive match @ 50-65% sharpness 8% match sharpness gain per 90min competitive match @ 70% sharpness 6% match sharpness gain per 90min competitive match @ 80% sharpness 2% match sharpness gain per 90min competitive match @ 90% sharpness
I stated in a post that jadedness doesn't matter much, but match sharpness is crucial.
I feel like this topic deserves it's own thread and I've done some original research for it. And I think that in a way it's one of the last remaining actual challenges of the game to make it fun. If you don't use gegenpress tactic or pick/train high pace/acc then you lose a lot, simple as that. But even if you work out the mechanics of fitness management as I am trying to do, it remains a challenging and rewarding aspect of the game. In fact, just knowing how much it effects win rate to me brings back some significant enjoyment to the game.
My overall impression is that counter-intuitively to my mind, it's better to sacrifice condition for match sharpness. Maybe this is why the AI often/always plays players with 87% condition without any rotation. It's because low match sharp players suck in terms of performance, low condition not so much (injury risk is bigger downside here). The other thing about it is that you can deal pretty easily with the problems of low condition - rotate them, pick low injury proneness players, rest them. Match fitness is much trickier, there is only one modest offset for it (natural fitness), it also has a high injury downside, you have to pay the price of lower performance to get their match fitness up if you neglect it, and as I'll show below even friendlies have a limit to recovering match fitness so there's no get out of jail free card really.
I've taken this graph from EBFM's video on match sharpness. What it's telling you is that the difference between 90% and 100% match sharpness is 33% difference in win rate.
For comparison, the difference of pace/acc 10 > 18 is 23.5% win rate according to HarvestGreen22.
To boot, match sharpness significantly impacts injury rate, even at 90%:
So how do we optimize for 100% match fitness of all players every match? And also, how to handle condition in concert with match fitness? There's a lot of variables to consider, it's fascinating to contemplate, but I will try and lay things out in the most straightforward way:
Starting at 100% condition, 90 minutes will reduce to 75% condition (typically).
Condition & match fitness update at midnight (00:00), starting the midnight that may be just a few hours after the match.
It takes 10 days for full recovery to 100% condition.
In FM24, Man City (English Premier League) has the following schedule in a save I looked at:
67 games (excluding national games):
38 league 13 cup 16 continental
Total recovery days between matches:
53 x 7 days 4 x 3 days 5 x 2 days 1 x 16 days 2 x 13 days 1 x 11 days 1 x 9 days
So there are 9 matches where condition recovery will be insufficient, and another 53 which would be sub-optimal. With a weaker team with a less filled up schedule, such as Burnley, I found it could be as low as 6 + 35. In both cases, we would conclude a player should be ideally be rested every 2nd match.
But before we continue, let's look at the other half of the picture, match fitness:
after 3 weeks, match fitness dropped to 98% (recoverable in 1 game) (20 nat) after 4 weeks, match fitness dropped to 94% (20 nat)
after 6 days, match fitness dropped by 1% (10-12 nat) after 8 days, match fitness dropped by 2% (10 nat only) after 9 days, match fitness dropped by 3% (10 nat only) after 11 days, match fitness dropped by 4% (10 nat only) after 12 days, match fitness dropped by 5% (10 nat only) after 13 days, match fitness dropped by 6% (10 nat only) after 14 days, match fitness dropped by 7% (10 nat only) after 15 days, match fitness dropped by 8% (10 nat only) (99% > 91%) after 18 days, match fitness dropped by 11% (10 nat only) after 21 days, match fitness dropped by 15% (10 nat only) after 4 weeks, match fitness dropped by 22% (10 nat only) (99% > 77%)
Friendlies gain match fitness at 55% rate of competitive. As you can see, this is adequate for when the player has low match fitness, but once it hits around ~90% you run into the following complication: You can't have a friendly the day straight after the last one, so you are likely giving at least 2 days rest, yet only gaining 1% match fitness with the friendly.. so potentially you are losing 1% match fitness to later gain 1% match fitness. Hence, at 90%+ match fitness, competitive matches for gaining are recommended, and that means you have to consistently give players playing time - you'll note that the decay rate increases as a player becomes less match fit. Edit: On reflection and doing some testing, this part about friendlies hitting diminishing returns is in error. Unfortunately, I may have to re-evaluate certain conclusions I've drawn based on this presumption, which I'll revisit tomorrow.
If you do the math with the league schedule previously mentioned:
10 nat player needs to play every 8 days 12 nat player needs to play every 11 days (2 in 3 matches) 20 nat player needs to play every 21 days (1 in 3 matches)
So while for condition, a player should ideally play no more frequently than 1 in 2 matches, for match sharpness, a player typically needs to play either every match or 2 in 3 matches in most cases.
I accidentally pressed submit on this thread, so I will add more detail and my theory on squad composition in a followup post soon.
I did a test of dribbling specifically. HarvestGreen22 tested dribbling individually, and found it's the most important mental/technical attribute, with +8.2% win rate 12 > 18 drib; +33.5 goals 10 > 20 drib. But we don't know if that's still the case if the player already has high physicals, plus it's worth verifying the claim, so I did two types of tests:
8 vs 20 drib, with 20 pace/acc/jump + 8 other attributes
8 drib:
+52, 83 +77, 90 +67, 92 (came 2nd) +83, 92
20 drib:
+107, 97 +99, 95 +84, 97 +104, 100
Overall result: +30% goals, +10% points
-------------
140 PA 'ideal' templates with 8 drib and freed up CA reassigned randomly to other attributes vs 10-18 drib in my templates. I consider this test a more realistic indication of what you will get if you favor or disfavor dribbling.
8 drib:
+127, 104 +110, 106 +119, 102
10-18 drib:
+121, 107 +146, 107
Overall result: +13% goals, +3% points
--------------
So dribbling is quite significant, even with high physicals.
Note that my tests for this were poorly controlled due to laziness, but I feel it's adequate as a general indication. So it might be +20% or +40% rather than +30% say, but it's clearly a sizable difference. Maybe in the future I will do some more proper testing, so I can present it alongside results of other attribute combos or whatnot.
Sanfierro said: One last question Are U-18 leagues or custom made friendly tournaments enough matches for development? Or does the player have to play in the senior team’s league instead? Expand
For age 14-18, no matches will cap growth at ~60% (~12 CA/season). 20-30 matches ~20 CA/season.
For age 19-20, no matches will cap growth at ~35% (~5 CA/season). 20-30 matches ~14 CA/season.
For age 21-26, no matches will cap growth at near 0% (0 CA). 20-30 matches ~12 CA/season.
For GK, no matches is viable 14-20, but growth will be capped at ~20-35% throughout.
For age 14-18, u18/u23 friendlies are worth ~75% of proper senior matches.
For age 19-20, it's ~64%.
For age 21-23, it's ~50%.
For age 24-26, it's ~30%.
At all ages, senior friendlies are actually a bit worse than u18/u23 friendlies.
So u18/u23 matches are fine up to age 18, even 20 is ok, but 21+ you should loan them out even if it's to a team with poor training facilities. If you can play your best youth player(s) every match in your first team, do so even at age 14.
Subbing players in after 70th minute may actually make growth worse than no appearance, possibly due to foregone training. A crucial point I'll make here is that the game counts cumulative minutes played, not appearances.
As you can see, EBFM's videos have a ton of gold in them that isn't immediately obvious. I also recommend watching the second half of this video for anyone who wants all the precise detail on a bunch of other factors affecting player development. I'm surprised it only has 900 views still.
Trappkjeller said: I really want to try out this method so I just want to kinda get it right. But it seems like my striker would be something like this if I got this right.
Age max 22, preferably only Striker position thats dark green. Good Professionalism
Acceleration/Pace 14 min Bal 12 min Ant/Con 11 min Fin/Head/Comp/OffBall/Work/Det/Aggro/Brave/Jump/Sta/Agil/Drib/Tech/Touch 10 min Long/Pass/Vis/Team/Dec 9 min Cross/Tack/Mark/Pos/Nat/Strenght 8 min
and preferably low on the rest of the stats like Pen/Corner/Free Kick etc..
Am I doing this right or am I dead wrong? Haha! Expand
So what I wrote is the nitty gritty of it all, but really you can reduce it to these general principles:
1. It doesn't matter much what player you sign, because even a low PA 8 pace/acc player can still become a beast with HarvestGreen22's training regimes. 2. What will matter is training progress rate. So sign young players with at least decent professionalism and give them 15-30 matches/season or loan them out. 3. If you want extra performance and/or more rounded players, sign players with mid/high mentals/technicals to begin with. These mostly stagnate or drop with HarvestGreen22 training. 4. Sign players with low 'decisions'. 'Decisions' is a very costly attribute in terms of CA for all positions, yet it's performance impact is negligible. Low decisions frees up CA for better attributes like pace/acc/drib/jump. 5. Sign 'natural' (20) position players only. They have the equivalent of a starting +2 pace advantage over 'accomplished' (18) players, and 18 cannot even be later trained to 20. 6. Try to sign or train up players in line with the ~140 PA ideal attribute templates if really want to optimize things. 7. Avoid dirty players. Worry less about consistency, injury proneness, set pieces. Get a captain GK.
So let's look at 2 examples:
Both of these players will do good when paired with HarvestGreen22 training, but if I had the choice I would choose the second player because he has decent to strong starting technicals/mentals, whereas the first player will always be stuck with his ~3 long shots and whatnot.
Neither player would pass your filter, and this is why you need to be careful about setting filter attributes too high or having too many. If you do use a filter, something as low and simple as 8 pace/acc min can be enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, then just do an overall visual judgement of the attributes.
Possebrew said: I am beginning to develop the suspicion that the single most important attribute for a striker is not pace, height or acceleration. It's "off-the-ball". Expand
Above + 20 off the ball (for 2 strikers) = +93, 93 2nd sample = +92, 90
Looking at the striker stats specifically, there was no improvement, taken together they were overall slightly worse in line with the overall team result.
what do you think about the find that CA can win games? as mentioned i increased my player’s CA and PA (but not the attributes) directly before a match (so that everything stayed unchanged) and suddenly i started winning against the same team I always lost against (reloaded a savegame many times) it would mean that mental and technical attributes can make a difference because the game assigns CA to them.
maybe this is sports interactives trick to make attributes matter - even if they cannot show things like passing in the match engine (pace / acceleration are very easy to show in the match engine) they just generally change the odds of winning 😀
that’s why i made another small experiment, i gave a player a 20 in passing/technique/vision/flair and compared this to him having a 1 in these attributes. My team won more games because of higher CA but the “passing match stats” like “passes completed” or “key passes” did not change at all Expand
I did a few tests
---------------
(All outfield) 20 pace/acc/jump/drib + 8 other attributes:
I didn't isolate things 100% or take many samples, but I think it's good enough to draw a few key conclusions.
Those technical/mental attributes don't do much, even in combination. And the extra cost is ~40 CA, which is really the nail in the coffin. ~40% extra cost for ~18% extra performance.
It's more difficult to draw a conclusion about whether attribute combos compound performance, but I would say it doesn't seem so. HarvestGreen22's data showing effect of 12 > 18 of each attribute has ~2-3% increased win rate for each of these attributes I boosted. 5x2.5% = 12.5%. I boosted from 8 to 20 and got ~14%-21% extra depending on how you look at it, which is about the same as you'd expect from each attribute alone.
Also it shows that its not just judging based on CA, and my ideal 140 CA templates which are around about the same CA did significantly better
very attacking + shorter passing + be more expressive + shoot on sight = +259, 114 very attacking = +270, 112 very attacking + shorter passing = +286, 114
very attacking + shorter passing, other adjustments + 9 subs = +306, 114 very attacking + shorter passing + work into box, other adjustments + 9 subs = +309, 114 very attacking + shorter passing, other adjustments + 9 subs = +312, 114 attacking + shorter passing, other adjustments + 9 subs = +312, 114
very attacking + shorter passing + work ball into box, other adjustments + 9 subs = +339, 114
Some observations:
The +339 result was not from the test with the most optimizations. So training schedule, pre-season team talk morale boost, match plans, all that mustn't have mattered much. I'm guessing what made the key difference was match fitness. A repeat of the same settings produced +309.
The changes to the tactic of 'very attacking', 'shorter passing' and 'work ball into box' seemed to produce slightly better results, or at least they weren't worse, whereas some others obviously were.
Biggest premier league game win I saw was 23-0.
I realized that penalty taking, and other set pieces, for goalkeeper has 0 weighting. This is potentially useful. I've said before that set piece attributes are not worth picking for. But you may as well select a goalkeeper with decent penalty taking and composure (which there are quite a few of), and make them your penalty taker. It will also have the satisfying effect of making your GK a goalscorer.
However I think I created this before I created my templates so it will be a little different perhaps, and GenieScout also doesn't allow negative weighting for certain attributes. But overall it should be close enough.
Alxy said: Thanks for this post - please can I ask you which skin did you find had the largest player faces (e.g. when you check attributes)? Or is there any skin that would allow you to fit in a whole shot of a player instead of just the player face?
Also is there any way to get player faces in-match (so rather than seeing player shirt numbers you see the player faces?). Thanks Expand
For face size:
WTCS Gold 24 1.3.1 - 9 Sas2025Final-Hidden - 4 (what brought this skin down from no. 1 for me) Dark Polish FM24 Skins v7 - 6 FusionDB FM24 Classic Dark v1.1 - 9 Chove Skin for FM24 - 9
Tato is a popular skin I didn't rate highly, I gave it 5 for face size.
In my view, WTCS 'profile' page for viewing attributes is usable as your default attribute view page, unlike many skins were its just too cluttered. And I like that it gives you 4 different options (i.e. face with kit behind, or just face, etc.)
Chove has perhaps the biggest face for attribute + profile pages (and its centered on profile page), but its quite non-vanilla.
FusionDB is smallish on profile page, but large on attribute page.
I definitely didn't see any skin with full body, and to me face pic can be too big because it just stretches it too big at a certain point (though I only used the sortitoutsi pack).
I took into account 2 other minor face things when giving my overall score btw, which is face icons on squad list screen, and big photos of the board members on the club vision screen. Many skins don't have either of these at all.
5 or above is good/playable 3-4 may even be great in some ways but has serious issues 1-2 trash
I am strongly inclined towards a default-style skin, but I've tried to be somewhat open-minded.
My criteria is:
font clarity responsiveness hidden attributes (footedness, CA/PA, personality, instant result, fitness %, etc.) lack of crowdedness stadium imagery info/data lack of logo intrusiveness comfyness face size lack of bugs
For score 6 or less, I just went with overall initial impressions, with the criteria in mind.
WTCS Gold 24 1.3.1 - 7.64 Sas2025Final-Hidden - 7.09 Dark Polish FM24 Skins v7 - 7.09 Chove Skin for FM24 - 7.09 FusionDB FM24 Classic Dark v1.1 - 7.00
No, I will eventually but they're not very useful anyway; it would give you a better idea of what attributes are realistic I guess. It would be basically an in-between of the shortlist filter and the template ideals.
The Genie Scout ratings I posted in the other thread would be a more useful method, as it accounts for all the attributes in its rating system, but doesn't rule out anyone.
The problem with shortlist filters is that the more attributes requirements you add, exponentially fewer players match them. To make this more concrete, here are a few stats in my data:
~20% of players have 8+ long shots ~17% of players have 10+ dribbling ~27% of STs have 12+ finishing ~25% of AMRs have 10+ finishing ~5.4% of STs have 12+ finishing, 10+ dribbling, 8+ long shots ~12.8% of AMRs have 10+ finishing, 10+ dribbling, 8+ long shots ~4.5% of CBs have 8+ long shots, 8+ dribbling
You can see the problem here with my ~140 DC 'ideal template' having 14 long shots; this would be reduced to say ~6-8 in my 'in depth filter', whereas my 'shortlist filter' doesn't set a minimum on long shots at all.
Bill W said: Regarding the first bit there, since I think a lot of people are going to use tactics where players change positions (DMs <> CMs, AMC<>Strikers, etc), what's the recommendation?
Ensure they're natural in both tactical positions? Ensure they're natural in at least the IP tactic? The OoP tactic? Break the above rule and ensure they're like 18 in both instead of 20 in one?
Also. In that last line, what's considered the minimum conditions to hit the 12.5 and 25.5 CA gains in a year? Expand
As someone said in another thread, it may be that having IP and OoP tactic be the same will be the meta due to the player proficiency downside. But who knows at this point.
Roughly speaking, 18 vs 20 proficiency is around -1.5 pace.
For hitting the yearly CA cap, see my 'ideal growth' details. You won't need all of them to hit the cap. High professionalism can largely make up for lack of game time. Professionalism and game time are the two main contributors to growth. From memory, friendlies/youth matches will count as game time to some extent (maybe even 100% up to age 18, I can't recall exactly now), but after 18 proper first team matches is really whats needed. And the game measures the minutes rather than appearances, so putting on the player for last 10 minutes will count as 10 minutes towards the full 2520 minutes that's optimal. How many games will be 'adequate', once they're age 20 say? About half the optimum, say 15 full games. This is why loaning out at that age is so important if they can't get first team games, even if its at crappy clubs.
For those who are interested, I'll add some more detail about my methodology and thoughts.
I didn't just guess the ideal combo of attributes for each position, although it is very much just an approximation. Essentially what I did is I took HarvestGreen22's attribute performance data, the CA weightings for each position, and used ChatGPT to help me distribute attributes accordingly given a certain PA (for instance, 'long shots' is often high because its also often cheap yet performs well). This is a bit of an oversimplification though, because I have also taken into account the availability of attributes to some extent, and some squad-level adjustments (i.e. there should be a captain and ~2 backups). So for instance you will note that even in my 200 PA players, decisions is kept to just 12. This is because decisions does hardly anything (especially in situations where you already have 1 good decision maker it is suggested), yet it has very high CA cost for all positions. So I biased against 'decisions' specifically, and yet you will also notice that it isn't lower than 6 in the lower PA players - this is because few players will actually have decisions lower than 6. In fact in my filter you can see I suggest setting max 12<. The general idea is pick a player with high pace/acc/jump, and ~10 decisions, and then let the training get 'decisions' down closer to the ideal; maybe it will drop to 8 say. This frees up CA for more pace/acc/jump/drib, etc.
Some things need extra context
If you dig into HarvestGreen22's posts there are some things that turn up that aren't immediately obvious. For instance, it seemed that flair was a pure negative, but in another post he noted flair and certain other attributes can be positive, and what its about seems to be whether you have 1 high flair player (good) or 3 (ok) or 10 (bad).
Another trait that needs extra context is aggression. High aggression is good so long as there is low dirtiness, or if it is position where neither come much into play anyway (i.e. AMR). And this one isn't really a nothingburger either, as dirtiness is 10x more important than injury proneness. It can lead to conceded penalty or one man down with no sub which is worse than a mid-match injury.
Some attributes interact, such as finishing & composure, whereas others such as positioning & tackling don't. Pace/acc/drib/finish scale linearly; work rate scales massively from 1-6 but above 6 it doesn't matter so much.
At the end of the day, the main thing to keep in mind is that you want to look for players with decent starting pace/acc/jump/drib, but 5 'decisions' should also look like 20 pace to you because that's what its enabling you to get.
I would reiterate that position proficiency is a very important attribute, so pick players that have 20 natural proficiency, don't get one with '18' or try and train them into it from another position. Another reason not to do the latter is that there's very little leeway in tricking the CA weighting system. That is, you can't have your DC have high finishing and play them as 18 ST, it doesn't work that way. At best you can give your players a 12 proficiency for 'free', which is useful for saving a sub perhaps, but even this isn't really free because you're spending training time building it up to 12.
A few more tips/info I could have included:
Do not set a 'role' for position training of player, leave as default player position (i.e. AMR). Otherwise it will funnel CA gain to role attributes instead of proven winning attributes such as pace and acceleration. For example, DM 'enganche' role has no focus on physicals at all except agility. Assigning roles weight highlighted attributes a further ~3%. Roles reduce the training efficacy by ~3%.
Train weaker foot if it is 'very weak' (1-4 rating). This can get it up to 9, which is worth it in terms of CA cost/performance tradeoff. The performance/CA tradeoff is best at about ~6 I'd say (so proper dual-foot is a bit bad and certainly a waste of time to train).
CA gain cap per year is ~12.5 CA without matches. ~25.5 CA with matches.
Bill W said: I just wanted to be crystal clear here... So, if I'm filling in an average week of training with a game on Saturday... Your recommendation is basically:
Sun: Rest/travel x3 (assuming game day before) Mon: Quickness / recovery / rest Tues: match practice /recovery / rest Wed: Attacking / Recovery / Rest Thurs: match practice /recovery /rest Fri: rest / recovery/ match focus Sat: Match / rest x 2
Is this correct? Expand
So I had to look into this again to jog my memory, and it appears recovery isn't simply interchangeable with rest when it comes to attribute gain from training. And I should have been more clearer too. I will have to do some more research on rest vs. recovery and edit my post.
Regardless, the schedule is still:
[Quickness]+[Match Practice]+[Attacking]+[Double Intensity]+[Addtional Focus Quickness] I do 'no pitch or gym work' for first 3 health icons, and 'double intensity' for last 2
What I meant with rest/recovery mix was that you should mix it according to the condition & match fitness needs of your players. Match fitness is more important than condition, so I would lean towards more recovery sessions, or otherwise schedule more friendlies.
If you do use rest, I would try and make full days of rest where possible for the double rest effect, and have that rest immediately after the last match.
CryosFeron said: thanks for all your hard work - but how is it that people here seem to be happy and thankful rather than disenchanted and sad (like I am)? Expand
I 100% agree, and you've explained the problem with the game more succinctly than I've thought up. I don't bother posting that thought; I think it's better to just stick the SI simps and sycophants with the truth, which they'd rather silence and gloss over.
Really what motivates me though is that I enjoy much more working out the underlying mechanics than playing the game now. I started doing this with FM19, when I reverse-engineered the newgen mechanics. It turned out SI staff had been giving out a lot of false, even self-contradicting, information over the years, and their attitude when you try to share the data was 'I couldn't replicate that. Did you do 10,000 samples? You did? Well do you have a data science degree, otherwise how do you know what 'average' and 'mean' means?', etc., before closing the thread with 'If you think you've found something, you should email your save to our team for them to look at'.
Brexit rules, press conferences, horrendous newgen faces, health icons, and obfuscating newgen-maxxing in various ways ruined FM19-FM24 for me, but you could get around 90% of it with ~12 hours of custom editing and prep before playing. With knap tactics and now EBFM + HarvestGreen22's info, the game has lost a fair bit of its lustre, but its still playable. FM26 appears to have screwed the pooch.
I think what we need right now is a backport of the FM26 database to FM24. I'm not a believer in those projects that try to fix up the training system or match engine or even those 3rd-party DB updates, I think a big part of the enjoyment is in knowing other people are playing the exact same game as you. As custom skins show, the UI isn't really a necessary part of this shared enjoyment. And FM26 is even largely the same under the hood, so you could play FM26 database on FM24 and legitimately feel you're playing FM26 just with the old UI.
Not even sure I've done it right, trying to translate it to a 0-100 system confuses me, but I've done it comprehensively using careful guesstimates. Any math wizards welcome to critique.
Genie Scout also doesn't always allow negative values, which would be good for attributes such as 'decisions' and 'technique'.
I also heavily buffed up some attributes like set pieces and leadership for certain positions - they hardly matter at all in terms of performance, but it wouldn't feel right for my captain to have 11 leadership.
Oh, this is for FM24 btw, but FM26 doesnt seem like it would be too much different.
This info is valid for FM24, and mostly valid for FM26.
Kudos to EBFM, HarvestGreen22, Orion, FMwithDataScience, FMProjects, Omega Luke, Zippo, and tam1236 for certain corrections.
I'll add Zealand because the poor dude has found himself blindsided on a lot of things in the past year or two whether it's on training, attributes or FM26, and seems to have been copping some flak for simply being wrong, but unlike the SI sycophants & shills & bumbling idiots he has embraced correcting himself instead of doubling down or being selectively silent, which I think people underestimate the difficulty and importance of.
Ideal growth:
High PA (realistically 130 min for premier league standard. 200 ideal.) High CA to PA difference (the more the better) 20 training facilities (17 max required) 25-30 matches/season (28 ideal. 30 safe. 36 max required. 15 min. 2520 min exactly. 36matches@70min.) 10+ ambition (6 min. 10-13 ideal. 16 max required.) 10+ determination (6 min. 13 ideal. 18 max required.) 20 professionalism (13 min. 15+ ideal.)
Training:
Quickness + 2 x Attacking + Match Practice + Quickness focus (Agility for GK) + Rest for all remaining periods
If your players are all professionalism ~16+, you may want to try the following instead:
Chance creation + Attacking + Aerial Defense + Handling + Defending from the front + Quickness + Quickness focus (Agility for GK) + Rest for all remaining periods
Pure rest + Quickness (Agility for GK) focus will grow pace/acc best, but technicals/mentals will suffer and will never fully recover. I recommend pure rest in scenarios where your player has very low CA-PA gap, or has inadequate starting physicals (less than 11 pace/acc), or you are playing in a low league level since technicals/mentals don't matter so much, or you need some wins ASAP.
I recommend ~3-5 weeks of pure rest in pre-season in all cases anyway, for a boost to pace/acc without the ill consequence of low match fitness throughout the competitive matches of the season.
In all cases, 'no pitch or gym work' for first 3 heart icons and double intensity for last 2 heart icons, should be used on the 'training' > 'rest' screen.
These weights have been tested in the English Premier League, and are centered around being efficient and realistic (i.e. no expectation of signing players with 16 dribbling or 18 pace/acc).
For better accuracy, use the weights in FM26 scoring system, as Genie Scout has calculation bugs. Ignore the two files below, they are outdated and left here in case people still need them.
Pace - 11 min. 14 ok. 16 ideal. Acceleration - 14 min. 15 ok. 18 ideal. Dribbling - 10 min. 13 ok. 19 ideal. Anticipation - 10 min. 13 ok. 19 ideal.
DC/DL/DR only:
Concentration - 10 min. 12 ok. 17 ideal.
GK only:
Agility - 10 min. 12 ok. 15 ideal. Aerial Reach - 12 min. 15 ok. 19 ideal. Reflexes - 16 min. 17 ok. 20 ideal.
Those minimums should also serve as your shortlist filter, and if you want to know what to look for beyond that then look at the templates and attribute guide below. Or you can just skip all that and use the Genie Scout Ratings file to find the best players.
Template ideal by position:
1 CA templates (best for seeing only the attributes that we know with 100% certainty matter)
Template test results (English Premier League):
1 CA template (best single result) - 91, +78 [Control] Outfield 20 acc/pace/jump/drib 12 other visible (133 CA outfield average) - 111, +138 115 CA template (118 CA outfield average) - 112, +198 | 109, +178 | 114, +169 | 114, +183 | 110, +183 [Control] Outfield 20 acc/pace/jump/drib 14 other visible (169 CA outfield average) - 114, +251 200 CA template - 114, +409
That's +25% performance with 11% less CA.
Attribute Guide (sorted by importance)
Pace, Acceleration - You need to reach a certain threshold in these two attributes to dominate your division, it's an all-or-nothing thing. For the English Premier League, the required minimum to dominate is ~17-18. Pace is probably slightly more important, but on the other hand acceleration is harder to train up.
Jumping Reach - Pace/acc is more important, even for DCs, but it would be the 3rd most impactful attribute if you can get it. Hard to train up, you need to just buy existing tall players without sacrificing pace/acc.
Pressure - Surprisingly a crucial attribute, with 57% performance difference between 1 and 20, which is more than even Professionalism.
Professionalism - Crucial for growth and performance.
Determination, Consistency - Fairly important, but even values as low as '1' have only -10% performance impact so you don't need to *only* have 15+ consistency players.
Dribbling - Important for all positions, except strikers. Difficult to find or train high, so worth searching for it to begin with.
Agility, Aerial Reach, Reflexes - The key three for GKs. Reflexes is very hard to train, so prioritize getting high reflexes to begin with, even though agility is slightly more relevant in terms of performance.
Temperament - Orion found it oddly performs best at 10, and 20 is worse than 1. Perhaps it just an erroneous finding, but in any case, it has moderate performance impact and you want to moderately favor it.
Anticipation - Important for all positions. I think of it as a lesser kind of acceleration.
Concentration - Important only on defenders (i.e. DC/DL/DR). This contributes significantly to goals scored, it's not just defensive.
Dirtiness - A mid-game injury you can replace, a red card you cannot. Low dirtiness is more important than you probably think it is, and should be at least inverse to your player's 'aggression'.
Loyalty - Not tested yet, but it surely benefits from better morale and simply being able to keep the player around makes it somewhat important to me.
Important matches - Relatively low performance impact, but it effects more games than you probably think - it will effect all high rep games which includes premier league games, not just champions cup finals. So it's overall somewhat important.
Ambition - Somewhat important for both growth and performance, but also carries an obvious downside. Best to look for around ~10-13.
Work Rate - You need a minimum of ~6-7, but the benefits tail off a lot beyond that. Easy to find, and can be slightly increased through training.
Natural fitness - Important to have for at least a few players, particularly if you have an oversized squad. These players will be able to sit out games occasionally without suffering a match sharpness spiral they'll never recover from. Additionally you probably want at least ~7 on all players for this, as otherwise they will simply match sharpness spiral downwards even if you play them every week. Probably most important on positions that often have rotation going on, such as DL/DR and AML/AMR, whereas GK and your key striker obviously don't need it much.
Aggression - Good to have, but this should be inverse to his 'dirtiness' stat, which you should fear more than injury proneness.
Composure - Good to have, but probably not as important as you think. Unlike low anticipation and concentration which will impact your results negatively with consistency, composure seems more like a 50/50 thing.
Positioning - Similar to anticipation, except probably made partially redundant by pace/acc. It nonetheless still matters somewhat.
Vision - Seems to be of minor, but consistent benefit.
Weak foot - 6 weak foot seems to be the sweet spot, as there is a modest performance gain but it comes at cost of significant CA. Favor 6 weak foot players slightly over others, but don't bother training up weak foot even if it is 1.
Finishing, first touch, long shots, heading, passing, tackling, bravery, off the ball, teamwork, balance, stamina, strength, GK attributes aside from the key three - These are of circumstantially minor benefit and generally whatever your player has in these is probably already going to be enough, whether it's a 6 or a 16.
Controversy, sportsmanship, versatility - Of very minor benefit, although I'm yet to properly test sportsmanship.
Flair - Debatable. Doesn't really matter in any case, but my impression is that flair is slightly beneficial, whereas HarvestGreen22's finding is that it's a negative.
Crossing, marking, agility - Near useless and often waste a fair chunk of CA
Set pieces - Pointless, but low CA cost so you could still choose them for roleplay reasons.
Decisions, technique - Near useless and waste a lot of CA, particularly decisions. However having a single high decisions player in your team, preferably DC or otherwise GK/DM, carries a modest benefit that may outweigh it's CA cost for that player. Aside from that, you actually want to find low decisions players, and you should think of -1 decisions as say +1 dribbling.
Dual position - Usually best ignored. You cannot trick the game using it, it wastes training time you could use to get higher pace/acc, and it can cost a little CA too. Most important thing to know is keep second position below 13 proficiency to avoid extra CA costs, you will also know this has occurred if your 'DM' becomes labelled 'DM/ST'.
Fitness Management
According to EBFM's testing, match sharpness impacts performance very significantly, condition moderately, and fatigue is something don't want to overdo but you shouldn't have to worry about.
As you can see from EBFM's chart, the difference between even 100% match sharpness and 90% match sharpness is a 33% drop in win rate. For comparison, this drop in win rate is not even possible with max fatigue.
The lower match sharpness is, the exponentially greater your number of injuries will also be, though this concern would be tempered by the low intensity meta training:
Morale Management
EBFM found the following win rates for morale (vs. okay morale team):
Perfect - 50.2% Very Good - 49.1% Okay - 38.7% Quite poor - 37.2% Abysmal - 33.0%
So morale does matter somewhat, roughly up to 12% difference in win rate in realistic play, which is the difference between 100% and 90% match sharpness, or consistency 8 vs consistency 20.
In my own testing, I've noticed that positive momentum is definitely a thing, and that player rotation is significantly detrimental to this.
Assistant manager exploit - Set up your training calendar for the season, then delegate 'general training' to a staff member. No more training unhappiness complaints.
It says which training regime as caption when you expand the image. That one is 'Walters_mixed = My dense but optimized regime based on theories above. 80 injuries.'
I can't remember what training schedule I used, but it doesn't matter because it was inferior to the HarvestGreen22 training regardless of whatever that image may indicate to you.
Now, the implications for squad composition. If you think about it, this is really something that hasn't been examined at all, in spite of how consequential we all know it to be - that ill-fated tendency of us to bloat our squads; what even is the actual optimal number of players for a first team squad?
In my view, the number is 20 outfield + 2 goalkeepers + the occasional promotion from reserve/youth squad or loan to cover an injury.
9 matches need sub replacements (10 x 9)
17/53 matches permit sub replacements (6 x 17)
26/53 matches permit sub replacements for high Nat players (4 x 26)
4 developing players (AML/AMR/DL/DR) get 35 matches
6 players (2 ST, 2 DM, 2 DC) get 26 matches
Remember that 25-30 matches/season is the ideal for player development. The reason why the wonderkids should typically be wingers not centre backs or strikers I would reason is that you don't want to interrupt your ST's bucketload of goals and young players aren't usually developed enough to fill the shoes of a proper DC, but also that wingers seem to tire fast and only have 1 of each position instead of 2 on the pitch.
It is definitely adjustable to some extent according to personal preference. Basically, for each wonderkid you add, make one of your starters a high Nat player so they can handle the reduced playing time.
Some extra info:
My figures are based on using the optimal HarvestGreen22 training regime, using rest not recovery. So it is safe to combine this info with those training regimes.
Stamina does NOT effect condition recovery post-match. It only affects condition usage during the match itself.
Having a physio reduces match sharpness decay significantly, but it doesn't matter how good the physio is or how many extra you have - you just need one for the benefit.
50% match sharpness or 1 natural fitness recovers condition to 66% vs 68% for 100% sharpness. 20 natural fitness recovers condition to 74%. I mention these select figures to illustrate that natural fitness is kind of important to condition recovery, and match sharpness less so, but overall condition recovery is pretty stable and predictable regardless of the player.
There is a way to kind of exploit match sharpness gain:
friendlies:
~10 minutes for 100 (1%) match sharpness gain
~25 minutes for 200 (2%) match sharpness gain
~43 minutes for 300 (3%) match sharpness gain
~60 minutes for 400 (4%) match sharpness gain
~78 minutes for 500 (5% - max) match sharpness gain
Source: EBFM
So if you want to play absolutely optimally, you could sub a player at 78 minutes in friendlies to maximize match fitness. And throwing a player on for 10 minutes gives the most efficient match sharpness boost, while you'd know not to do 7 minutes as it gives them nothing.
For competitive as I mentioned before, it's 9% max instead of 5% max. However, EBFM did find that sometimes players would inexplicably get 10-11% max for a reason he could not identify, but I would just treat this as a kind of bonus.
9% match sharpness gain per 90min competitive match @ 50-65% sharpness
8% match sharpness gain per 90min competitive match @ 70% sharpness
6% match sharpness gain per 90min competitive match @ 80% sharpness
2% match sharpness gain per 90min competitive match @ 90% sharpness
I feel like this topic deserves it's own thread and I've done some original research for it. And I think that in a way it's one of the last remaining actual challenges of the game to make it fun. If you don't use gegenpress tactic or pick/train high pace/acc then you lose a lot, simple as that. But even if you work out the mechanics of fitness management as I am trying to do, it remains a challenging and rewarding aspect of the game. In fact, just knowing how much it effects win rate to me brings back some significant enjoyment to the game.
My overall impression is that counter-intuitively to my mind, it's better to sacrifice condition for match sharpness. Maybe this is why the AI often/always plays players with 87% condition without any rotation. It's because low match sharp players suck in terms of performance, low condition not so much (injury risk is bigger downside here). The other thing about it is that you can deal pretty easily with the problems of low condition - rotate them, pick low injury proneness players, rest them. Match fitness is much trickier, there is only one modest offset for it (natural fitness), it also has a high injury downside, you have to pay the price of lower performance to get their match fitness up if you neglect it, and as I'll show below even friendlies have a limit to recovering match fitness so there's no get out of jail free card really.
I've taken this graph from EBFM's video on match sharpness. What it's telling you is that the difference between 90% and 100% match sharpness is 33% difference in win rate.
For comparison, the difference of pace/acc 10 > 18 is 23.5% win rate according to HarvestGreen22.
To boot, match sharpness significantly impacts injury rate, even at 90%:
So how do we optimize for 100% match fitness of all players every match? And also, how to handle condition in concert with match fitness? There's a lot of variables to consider, it's fascinating to contemplate, but I will try and lay things out in the most straightforward way:
Starting at 100% condition, 90 minutes will reduce to 75% condition (typically).
Condition & match fitness update at midnight (00:00), starting the midnight that may be just a few hours after the match.
It takes 10 days for full recovery to 100% condition.
75% (day 1 - 16:00) > 83% (day 2 - 00:00) > 90% (day 3 - 00:00) > 93% (day 4) > 95% (day 5) > 96% (day 6) > 97% (day 7) > 98% (day 8) > 99% (day 9) > 100% (day 10)
In FM24, Man City (English Premier League) has the following schedule in a save I looked at:
67 games (excluding national games):
38 league
13 cup
16 continental
Total recovery days between matches:
53 x 7 days
4 x 3 days
5 x 2 days
1 x 16 days
2 x 13 days
1 x 11 days
1 x 9 days
So there are 9 matches where condition recovery will be insufficient, and another 53 which would be sub-optimal. With a weaker team with a less filled up schedule, such as Burnley, I found it could be as low as 6 + 35. In both cases, we would conclude a player should be ideally be rested every 2nd match.
But before we continue, let's look at the other half of the picture, match fitness:
after 3 weeks, match fitness dropped to 98% (recoverable in 1 game) (20 nat)
after 4 weeks, match fitness dropped to 94% (20 nat)
after 6 days, match fitness dropped by 1% (10-12 nat)
after 8 days, match fitness dropped by 2% (10 nat only)
after 9 days, match fitness dropped by 3% (10 nat only)
after 11 days, match fitness dropped by 4% (10 nat only)
after 12 days, match fitness dropped by 5% (10 nat only)
after 13 days, match fitness dropped by 6% (10 nat only)
after 14 days, match fitness dropped by 7% (10 nat only)
after 15 days, match fitness dropped by 8% (10 nat only) (99% > 91%)
after 18 days, match fitness dropped by 11% (10 nat only)
after 21 days, match fitness dropped by 15% (10 nat only)
after 4 weeks, match fitness dropped by 22% (10 nat only) (99% > 77%)
The gain rates are:
76% > 88% (1st friendly)
88% > 90% (2nd subsequent friendly)
90% > 91% (3rd subsequent friendly)
91% > 93% (subsequent competitive match)
Friendlies gain match fitness at 55% rate of competitive. As you can see, this is adequate for when the player has low match fitness, but once it hits around ~90% you run into the following complication: You can't have a friendly the day straight after the last one, so you are likely giving at least 2 days rest, yet only gaining 1% match fitness with the friendly.. so potentially you are losing 1% match fitness to later gain 1% match fitness. Hence, at 90%+ match fitness, competitive matches for gaining are recommended, and that means you have to consistently give players playing time - you'll note that the decay rate increases as a player becomes less match fit. Edit: On reflection and doing some testing, this part about friendlies hitting diminishing returns is in error. Unfortunately, I may have to re-evaluate certain conclusions I've drawn based on this presumption, which I'll revisit tomorrow.
If you do the math with the league schedule previously mentioned:
10 nat player needs to play every 8 days
12 nat player needs to play every 11 days (2 in 3 matches)
20 nat player needs to play every 21 days (1 in 3 matches)
So while for condition, a player should ideally play no more frequently than 1 in 2 matches, for match sharpness, a player typically needs to play either every match or 2 in 3 matches in most cases.
I accidentally pressed submit on this thread, so I will add more detail and my theory on squad composition in a followup post soon.
8 vs 20 drib, with 20 pace/acc/jump + 8 other attributes
8 drib:
+52, 83
+77, 90
+67, 92 (came 2nd)
+83, 92
20 drib:
+107, 97
+99, 95
+84, 97
+104, 100
Overall result: +30% goals, +10% points
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140 PA 'ideal' templates with 8 drib and freed up CA reassigned randomly to other attributes vs 10-18 drib in my templates. I consider this test a more realistic indication of what you will get if you favor or disfavor dribbling.
8 drib:
+127, 104
+110, 106
+119, 102
10-18 drib:
+121, 107
+146, 107
Overall result: +13% goals, +3% points
--------------
So dribbling is quite significant, even with high physicals.
Note that my tests for this were poorly controlled due to laziness, but I feel it's adequate as a general indication. So it might be +20% or +40% rather than +30% say, but it's clearly a sizable difference. Maybe in the future I will do some more proper testing, so I can present it alongside results of other attribute combos or whatnot.
Are U-18 leagues or custom made friendly tournaments enough matches for development? Or does the player have to play in the senior team’s league instead?
For age 14-18, no matches will cap growth at ~60% (~12 CA/season). 20-30 matches ~20 CA/season.
For age 19-20, no matches will cap growth at ~35% (~5 CA/season). 20-30 matches ~14 CA/season.
For age 21-26, no matches will cap growth at near 0% (0 CA). 20-30 matches ~12 CA/season.
For GK, no matches is viable 14-20, but growth will be capped at ~20-35% throughout.
Source: EBFM
For age 14-18, u18/u23 friendlies are worth ~75% of proper senior matches.
For age 19-20, it's ~64%.
For age 21-23, it's ~50%.
For age 24-26, it's ~30%.
At all ages, senior friendlies are actually a bit worse than u18/u23 friendlies.
So u18/u23 matches are fine up to age 18, even 20 is ok, but 21+ you should loan them out even if it's to a team with poor training facilities. If you can play your best youth player(s) every match in your first team, do so even at age 14.
Source: EBFM
Match winning rate does not matter at all for development
Source: EBFM
Subbing players in after 70th minute may actually make growth worse than no appearance, possibly due to foregone training. A crucial point I'll make here is that the game counts cumulative minutes played, not appearances.
Source: EBFM
For age 14-18, u18/u23/II squad placement is ~95% of senior placement.
For age 19-23, it's ~90%.
For age 24-26, it's ~55%.
I didn't look into what is going here, but I can only suspect it's due to difference in training rather than the squad placement itself.
Source: EBFM
As you can see, EBFM's videos have a ton of gold in them that isn't immediately obvious. I also recommend watching the second half of this video for anyone who wants all the precise detail on a bunch of other factors affecting player development. I'm surprised it only has 900 views still.
Age max 22, preferably only Striker position thats dark green.
Good Professionalism
Acceleration/Pace 14 min
Bal 12 min
Ant/Con 11 min
Fin/Head/Comp/OffBall/Work/Det/Aggro/Brave/Jump/Sta/Agil/Drib/Tech/Touch 10 min
Long/Pass/Vis/Team/Dec 9 min
Cross/Tack/Mark/Pos/Nat/Strenght 8 min
and preferably low on the rest of the stats like Pen/Corner/Free Kick etc..
Am I doing this right or am I dead wrong? Haha!
So what I wrote is the nitty gritty of it all, but really you can reduce it to these general principles:
1. It doesn't matter much what player you sign, because even a low PA 8 pace/acc player can still become a beast with HarvestGreen22's training regimes.
2. What will matter is training progress rate. So sign young players with at least decent professionalism and give them 15-30 matches/season or loan them out.
3. If you want extra performance and/or more rounded players, sign players with mid/high mentals/technicals to begin with. These mostly stagnate or drop with HarvestGreen22 training.
4. Sign players with low 'decisions'. 'Decisions' is a very costly attribute in terms of CA for all positions, yet it's performance impact is negligible. Low decisions frees up CA for better attributes like pace/acc/drib/jump.
5. Sign 'natural' (20) position players only. They have the equivalent of a starting +2 pace advantage over 'accomplished' (18) players, and 18 cannot even be later trained to 20.
6. Try to sign or train up players in line with the ~140 PA ideal attribute templates if really want to optimize things.
7. Avoid dirty players. Worry less about consistency, injury proneness, set pieces. Get a captain GK.
So let's look at 2 examples:
Both of these players will do good when paired with HarvestGreen22 training, but if I had the choice I would choose the second player because he has decent to strong starting technicals/mentals, whereas the first player will always be stuck with his ~3 long shots and whatnot.
Neither player would pass your filter, and this is why you need to be careful about setting filter attributes too high or having too many. If you do use a filter, something as low and simple as 8 pace/acc min can be enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, then just do an overall visual judgement of the attributes.
It's "off-the-ball".
I was curious about this so I did a test
20 pace/acc/jump/drib/pass + 8 others = +100, 96
2nd sample = +96, 95
Above + 20 off the ball (for 2 strikers) = +93, 93
2nd sample = +92, 90
Looking at the striker stats specifically, there was no improvement, taken together they were overall slightly worse in line with the overall team result.
what do you think about the find that CA can win games? as mentioned i increased my player’s CA and PA (but not the attributes) directly before a match (so that everything stayed unchanged) and suddenly i started winning against the same team I always lost against (reloaded a savegame many times)
it would mean that mental and technical attributes can make a difference because the game assigns CA to them.
maybe this is sports interactives trick to make attributes matter - even if they cannot show things like passing in the match engine (pace / acceleration are very easy to show in the match engine) they just generally change the odds of winning 😀
that’s why i made another small experiment, i gave a player a 20 in passing/technique/vision/flair and compared this to him having a 1 in these attributes. My team won more games because of higher CA but the “passing match stats” like “passes completed” or “key passes” did not change at all
I did a few tests
---------------
(All outfield) 20 pace/acc/jump/drib + 8 other attributes:
+96, 93
+71, 92 (2nd sample)
(All outfield) 20 passing + technique + decisions + composure + decisions + first touch:
+96, 103
+107, 107 (2nd sample)
(1 DM only) 20 passing + technique + decisions + composure + decisions + first touch:
+127, 102
+55, 85 (2nd sample)
+94, 98 (3rd sample)
(All outfield) 20 passing:
+100, 96
+96, 95 (2nd sample)
---------------
I didn't isolate things 100% or take many samples, but I think it's good enough to draw a few key conclusions.
Those technical/mental attributes don't do much, even in combination. And the extra cost is ~40 CA, which is really the nail in the coffin. ~40% extra cost for ~18% extra performance.
It's more difficult to draw a conclusion about whether attribute combos compound performance, but I would say it doesn't seem so. HarvestGreen22's data showing effect of 12 > 18 of each attribute has ~2-3% increased win rate for each of these attributes I boosted. 5x2.5% = 12.5%. I boosted from 8 to 20 and got ~14%-21% extra depending on how you look at it, which is about the same as you'd expect from each attribute alone.
Also it shows that its not just judging based on CA, and my ideal 140 CA templates which are around about the same CA did significantly better
(EF 424 IF HP V2 P101 AC) very attacking + shorter passing + work ball into box, GK 200 CA, other adjustments + 9 subs = +339, 114
20 pace/acc/jump/drib, 8 rest (~100 CA) - 1st, 86 Points, +82
20 pace/acc/jump/drib, 12 rest (~150 CA) - 1st, 107 points, +151
Low (~140 CA) Ideal Template - 1st, 108 points, +132
20 pace/acc/jump/drib, 14 rest (~180 CA) - 1st, 109 points, +162
20 pace/acc/jump/drib, 16 rest (~200 CA) - 1st, 112 points, +214
High (~200 CA) Ideal Template - 1st, 114 points, +268
very attacking + shorter passing + be more expressive + shoot on sight = +259, 114
very attacking = +270, 112
very attacking + shorter passing = +286, 114
very attacking + shorter passing, other adjustments + 9 subs = +306, 114
very attacking + shorter passing + work into box, other adjustments + 9 subs = +309, 114
very attacking + shorter passing, other adjustments + 9 subs = +312, 114
attacking + shorter passing, other adjustments + 9 subs = +312, 114
very attacking + shorter passing + work ball into box, other adjustments + 9 subs = +339, 114
Some observations:
The +339 result was not from the test with the most optimizations. So training schedule, pre-season team talk morale boost, match plans, all that mustn't have mattered much. I'm guessing what made the key difference was match fitness. A repeat of the same settings produced +309.
The changes to the tactic of 'very attacking', 'shorter passing' and 'work ball into box' seemed to produce slightly better results, or at least they weren't worse, whereas some others obviously were.
Biggest premier league game win I saw was 23-0.
I realized that penalty taking, and other set pieces, for goalkeeper has 0 weighting. This is potentially useful. I've said before that set piece attributes are not worth picking for. But you may as well select a goalkeeper with decent penalty taking and composure (which there are quite a few of), and make them your penalty taker. It will also have the satisfying effect of making your GK a goalscorer.
Have you came up with a rating system for those ideal players to implement on GenieScout?
Yes, here
However I think I created this before I created my templates so it will be a little different perhaps, and GenieScout also doesn't allow negative weighting for certain attributes. But overall it should be close enough.
Also is there any way to get player faces in-match (so rather than seeing player shirt numbers you see the player faces?). Thanks
For face size:
WTCS Gold 24 1.3.1 - 9
Sas2025Final-Hidden - 4 (what brought this skin down from no. 1 for me)
Dark Polish FM24 Skins v7 - 6
FusionDB FM24 Classic Dark v1.1 - 9
Chove Skin for FM24 - 9
Tato is a popular skin I didn't rate highly, I gave it 5 for face size.
In my view, WTCS 'profile' page for viewing attributes is usable as your default attribute view page, unlike many skins were its just too cluttered. And I like that it gives you 4 different options (i.e. face with kit behind, or just face, etc.)
Chove has perhaps the biggest face for attribute + profile pages (and its centered on profile page), but its quite non-vanilla.
FusionDB is smallish on profile page, but large on attribute page.
I definitely didn't see any skin with full body, and to me face pic can be too big because it just stretches it too big at a certain point (though I only used the sortitoutsi pack).
I took into account 2 other minor face things when giving my overall score btw, which is face icons on squad list screen, and big photos of the board members on the club vision screen. Many skins don't have either of these at all.
5 or above is good/playable
3-4 may even be great in some ways but has serious issues
1-2 trash
I am strongly inclined towards a default-style skin, but I've tried to be somewhat open-minded.
My criteria is:
font
clarity
responsiveness
hidden attributes (footedness, CA/PA, personality, instant result, fitness %, etc.)
lack of crowdedness
stadium imagery
info/data
lack of logo intrusiveness
comfyness
face size
lack of bugs
For score 6 or less, I just went with overall initial impressions, with the criteria in mind.
WTCS Gold 24 1.3.1 - 7.64
Sas2025Final-Hidden - 7.09
Dark Polish FM24 Skins v7 - 7.09
Chove Skin for FM24 - 7.09
FusionDB FM24 Classic Dark v1.1 - 7.00
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Make FM24 Better Skin v2.5 Desktop - 6
FM.Zweierkette Skin v24.0.55 - 6
Kojuro Skin v6.2.0 - 6
Cheetah Skin 24.1.3 - 6
FM24 Light Skin - 5 or 6 (with fixes)
Tato24 FM24 Skin 2.0 - 5
Classics24 1.3 - 5
Classics24 Dark Version 1.4 - 5
DoubleX Skin - 5
Vincechup FM24 Skin - 5
LIVID 24 - 5
Zealand Skin FM24 - 5
Default skin - 5
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Trung FM24 Skin v1.7 - 4
Jimbo Skin 3.0.1 - 4
Rensie Dark FM24 Skin - 4
NY Light FM24 - 4
Electric Panther - Mustermann Edition - v1.2.0 - 4
Echo Skin for FM24 - 4
OPZ Elite 2024 Blackout 2k (for 1440p) 19.3.0 - 3
Vince Skin 1.2 - 3
Mixed Skin 24.4.1 - 3
Statman FM24 Skin v1.5 - 3
TangFu Skin V24.3.0 - 3
Statman - NUMBERLESS v1.02 - 3
JMFM Base Skin24 2.0 - 3
Royal Crown Skin by Vasf 2025-04-13 - 3
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No, I will eventually but they're not very useful anyway; it would give you a better idea of what attributes are realistic I guess. It would be basically an in-between of the shortlist filter and the template ideals.
The Genie Scout ratings I posted in the other thread would be a more useful method, as it accounts for all the attributes in its rating system, but doesn't rule out anyone.
The problem with shortlist filters is that the more attributes requirements you add, exponentially fewer players match them. To make this more concrete, here are a few stats in my data:
~20% of players have 8+ long shots
~17% of players have 10+ dribbling
~27% of STs have 12+ finishing
~25% of AMRs have 10+ finishing
~5.4% of STs have 12+ finishing, 10+ dribbling, 8+ long shots
~12.8% of AMRs have 10+ finishing, 10+ dribbling, 8+ long shots
~4.5% of CBs have 8+ long shots, 8+ dribbling
You can see the problem here with my ~140 DC 'ideal template' having 14 long shots; this would be reduced to say ~6-8 in my 'in depth filter', whereas my 'shortlist filter' doesn't set a minimum on long shots at all.
Ensure they're natural in both tactical positions?
Ensure they're natural in at least the IP tactic? The OoP tactic?
Break the above rule and ensure they're like 18 in both instead of 20 in one?
Also. In that last line, what's considered the minimum conditions to hit the 12.5 and 25.5 CA gains in a year?
As someone said in another thread, it may be that having IP and OoP tactic be the same will be the meta due to the player proficiency downside. But who knows at this point.
Roughly speaking, 18 vs 20 proficiency is around -1.5 pace.
For hitting the yearly CA cap, see my 'ideal growth' details. You won't need all of them to hit the cap. High professionalism can largely make up for lack of game time. Professionalism and game time are the two main contributors to growth. From memory, friendlies/youth matches will count as game time to some extent (maybe even 100% up to age 18, I can't recall exactly now), but after 18 proper first team matches is really whats needed. And the game measures the minutes rather than appearances, so putting on the player for last 10 minutes will count as 10 minutes towards the full 2520 minutes that's optimal. How many games will be 'adequate', once they're age 20 say? About half the optimum, say 15 full games. This is why loaning out at that age is so important if they can't get first team games, even if its at crappy clubs.
I didn't just guess the ideal combo of attributes for each position, although it is very much just an approximation. Essentially what I did is I took HarvestGreen22's attribute performance data, the CA weightings for each position, and used ChatGPT to help me distribute attributes accordingly given a certain PA (for instance, 'long shots' is often high because its also often cheap yet performs well). This is a bit of an oversimplification though, because I have also taken into account the availability of attributes to some extent, and some squad-level adjustments (i.e. there should be a captain and ~2 backups). So for instance you will note that even in my 200 PA players, decisions is kept to just 12. This is because decisions does hardly anything (especially in situations where you already have 1 good decision maker it is suggested), yet it has very high CA cost for all positions. So I biased against 'decisions' specifically, and yet you will also notice that it isn't lower than 6 in the lower PA players - this is because few players will actually have decisions lower than 6. In fact in my filter you can see I suggest setting max 12<. The general idea is pick a player with high pace/acc/jump, and ~10 decisions, and then let the training get 'decisions' down closer to the ideal; maybe it will drop to 8 say. This frees up CA for more pace/acc/jump/drib, etc.
Some things need extra context
If you dig into HarvestGreen22's posts there are some things that turn up that aren't immediately obvious. For instance, it seemed that flair was a pure negative, but in another post he noted flair and certain other attributes can be positive, and what its about seems to be whether you have 1 high flair player (good) or 3 (ok) or 10 (bad).
Another trait that needs extra context is aggression. High aggression is good so long as there is low dirtiness, or if it is position where neither come much into play anyway (i.e. AMR). And this one isn't really a nothingburger either, as dirtiness is 10x more important than injury proneness. It can lead to conceded penalty or one man down with no sub which is worse than a mid-match injury.
Some attributes interact, such as finishing & composure, whereas others such as positioning & tackling don't. Pace/acc/drib/finish scale linearly; work rate scales massively from 1-6 but above 6 it doesn't matter so much.
At the end of the day, the main thing to keep in mind is that you want to look for players with decent starting pace/acc/jump/drib, but 5 'decisions' should also look like 20 pace to you because that's what its enabling you to get.
I would reiterate that position proficiency is a very important attribute, so pick players that have 20 natural proficiency, don't get one with '18' or try and train them into it from another position. Another reason not to do the latter is that there's very little leeway in tricking the CA weighting system. That is, you can't have your DC have high finishing and play them as 18 ST, it doesn't work that way. At best you can give your players a 12 proficiency for 'free', which is useful for saving a sub perhaps, but even this isn't really free because you're spending training time building it up to 12.
A few more tips/info I could have included:
Do not set a 'role' for position training of player, leave as default player position (i.e. AMR). Otherwise it will funnel CA gain to role attributes instead of proven winning attributes such as pace and acceleration. For example, DM 'enganche' role has no focus on physicals at all except agility. Assigning roles weight highlighted attributes a further ~3%. Roles reduce the training efficacy by ~3%.
Train weaker foot if it is 'very weak' (1-4 rating). This can get it up to 9, which is worth it in terms of CA cost/performance tradeoff. The performance/CA tradeoff is best at about ~6 I'd say (so proper dual-foot is a bit bad and certainly a waste of time to train).
CA gain cap per year is ~12.5 CA without matches. ~25.5 CA with matches.
So, if I'm filling in an average week of training with a game on Saturday...
Your recommendation is basically:
Sun: Rest/travel x3 (assuming game day before)
Mon: Quickness / recovery / rest
Tues: match practice /recovery / rest
Wed: Attacking / Recovery / Rest
Thurs: match practice /recovery /rest
Fri: rest / recovery/ match focus
Sat: Match / rest x 2
Is this correct?
So I had to look into this again to jog my memory, and it appears recovery isn't simply interchangeable with rest when it comes to attribute gain from training. And I should have been more clearer too. I will have to do some more research on rest vs. recovery and edit my post.
Regardless, the schedule is still:
[Quickness]+[Match Practice]+[Attacking]+[Double Intensity]+[Addtional Focus Quickness]
I do 'no pitch or gym work' for first 3 health icons, and 'double intensity' for last 2
What I meant with rest/recovery mix was that you should mix it according to the condition & match fitness needs of your players. Match fitness is more important than condition, so I would lean towards more recovery sessions, or otherwise schedule more friendlies.
If you do use rest, I would try and make full days of rest where possible for the double rest effect, and have that rest immediately after the last match.
CryosFeron said: thanks for all your hard work - but how is it that people here seem to be happy and thankful rather than disenchanted and sad (like I am)?
I 100% agree, and you've explained the problem with the game more succinctly than I've thought up. I don't bother posting that thought; I think it's better to just stick the SI simps and sycophants with the truth, which they'd rather silence and gloss over.
Really what motivates me though is that I enjoy much more working out the underlying mechanics than playing the game now. I started doing this with FM19, when I reverse-engineered the newgen mechanics. It turned out SI staff had been giving out a lot of false, even self-contradicting, information over the years, and their attitude when you try to share the data was 'I couldn't replicate that. Did you do 10,000 samples? You did? Well do you have a data science degree, otherwise how do you know what 'average' and 'mean' means?', etc., before closing the thread with 'If you think you've found something, you should email your save to our team for them to look at'.
Brexit rules, press conferences, horrendous newgen faces, health icons, and obfuscating newgen-maxxing in various ways ruined FM19-FM24 for me, but you could get around 90% of it with ~12 hours of custom editing and prep before playing. With knap tactics and now EBFM + HarvestGreen22's info, the game has lost a fair bit of its lustre, but its still playable. FM26 appears to have screwed the pooch.
I think what we need right now is a backport of the FM26 database to FM24. I'm not a believer in those projects that try to fix up the training system or match engine or even those 3rd-party DB updates, I think a big part of the enjoyment is in knowing other people are playing the exact same game as you. As custom skins show, the UI isn't really a necessary part of this shared enjoyment. And FM26 is even largely the same under the hood, so you could play FM26 database on FM24 and legitimately feel you're playing FM26 just with the old UI.
The old ones were too small, I couldn’t really see the numbers.
Just right click it and open it in new tab, it will show it in full
I would, but I'm too paranoid that there might be some identifier of me in the file. I'm 99% sure there isn't, but it's a needless risk for me.
Someone here could enter in the numbers and upload the file if they want to.
Not even sure I've done it right, trying to translate it to a 0-100 system confuses me, but I've done it comprehensively using careful guesstimates. Any math wizards welcome to critique.
Genie Scout also doesn't always allow negative values, which would be good for attributes such as 'decisions' and 'technique'.
I also heavily buffed up some attributes like set pieces and leadership for certain positions - they hardly matter at all in terms of performance, but it wouldn't feel right for my captain to have 11 leadership.
Oh, this is for FM24 btw, but FM26 doesnt seem like it would be too much different.
Kudos to EBFM, HarvestGreen22, Orion, FMwithDataScience, FMProjects, Omega Luke, Zippo, and tam1236 for certain corrections.
I'll add Zealand because the poor dude has found himself blindsided on a lot of things in the past year or two whether it's on training, attributes or FM26, and seems to have been copping some flak for simply being wrong, but unlike the SI sycophants & shills & bumbling idiots he has embraced correcting himself instead of doubling down or being selectively silent, which I think people underestimate the difficulty and importance of.
Ideal growth:
High PA (realistically 130 min for premier league standard. 200 ideal.)
High CA to PA difference (the more the better)
20 training facilities (17 max required)
25-30 matches/season (28 ideal. 30 safe. 36 max required. 15 min. 2520 min exactly. 36matches@70min.)
10+ ambition (6 min. 10-13 ideal. 16 max required.)
10+ determination (6 min. 13 ideal. 18 max required.)
20 professionalism (13 min. 15+ ideal.)
Training:
Quickness + 2 x Attacking + Match Practice + Quickness focus (Agility for GK) + Rest for all remaining periods
If your players are all professionalism ~16+, you may want to try the following instead:
Chance creation + Attacking + Aerial Defense + Handling + Defending from the front + Quickness + Quickness focus (Agility for GK) + Rest for all remaining periods
Pure rest + Quickness (Agility for GK) focus will grow pace/acc best, but technicals/mentals will suffer and will never fully recover. I recommend pure rest in scenarios where your player has very low CA-PA gap, or has inadequate starting physicals (less than 11 pace/acc), or you are playing in a low league level since technicals/mentals don't matter so much, or you need some wins ASAP.
I recommend ~3-5 weeks of pure rest in pre-season in all cases anyway, for a boost to pace/acc without the ill consequence of low match fitness throughout the competitive matches of the season.
In all cases, 'no pitch or gym work' for first 3 heart icons and double intensity for last 2 heart icons, should be used on the 'training' > 'rest' screen.
Premier League 1.0 Genie Scout ratings file (use for both FM24 and FM26):
https://files.catbox.moe/zhf2yl.grf
These weights have been tested in the English Premier League, and are centered around being efficient and realistic (i.e. no expectation of signing players with 16 dribbling or 18 pace/acc).
For better accuracy, use the weights in FM26 scoring system, as Genie Scout has calculation bugs. Ignore the two files below, they are outdated and left here in case people still need them.
FM24 Genie Scout ratings file:
https://files.catbox.moe/hrvdl8.grf
FM26 Genie Scout Ratings file:
https://files.catbox.moe/r5xm3t.grf
Ideal wonderkid to train up (4 years training):
Pace - 11 min. 14 ok. 16 ideal.
Acceleration - 14 min. 15 ok. 18 ideal.
Dribbling - 10 min. 13 ok. 19 ideal.
Anticipation - 10 min. 13 ok. 19 ideal.
DC/DL/DR only:
Concentration - 10 min. 12 ok. 17 ideal.
GK only:
Agility - 10 min. 12 ok. 15 ideal.
Aerial Reach - 12 min. 15 ok. 19 ideal.
Reflexes - 16 min. 17 ok. 20 ideal.
Those minimums should also serve as your shortlist filter, and if you want to know what to look for beyond that then look at the templates and attribute guide below. Or you can just skip all that and use the Genie Scout Ratings file to find the best players.
Template ideal by position:
1 CA templates (best for seeing only the attributes that we know with 100% certainty matter)
Template test results (English Premier League):
1 CA template (best single result) - 91, +78
[Control] Outfield 20 acc/pace/jump/drib 12 other visible (133 CA outfield average) - 111, +138
115 CA template (118 CA outfield average) - 112, +198 | 109, +178 | 114, +169 | 114, +183 | 110, +183
[Control] Outfield 20 acc/pace/jump/drib 14 other visible (169 CA outfield average) - 114, +251
200 CA template - 114, +409
That's +25% performance with 11% less CA.
Attribute Guide (sorted by importance)
Pace, Acceleration - You need to reach a certain threshold in these two attributes to dominate your division, it's an all-or-nothing thing. For the English Premier League, the required minimum to dominate is ~17-18. Pace is probably slightly more important, but on the other hand acceleration is harder to train up.
Jumping Reach - Pace/acc is more important, even for DCs, but it would be the 3rd most impactful attribute if you can get it. Hard to train up, you need to just buy existing tall players without sacrificing pace/acc.
Pressure - Surprisingly a crucial attribute, with 57% performance difference between 1 and 20, which is more than even Professionalism.
Professionalism - Crucial for growth and performance.
Determination, Consistency - Fairly important, but even values as low as '1' have only -10% performance impact so you don't need to *only* have 15+ consistency players.
Dribbling - Important for all positions, except strikers. Difficult to find or train high, so worth searching for it to begin with.
Agility, Aerial Reach, Reflexes - The key three for GKs. Reflexes is very hard to train, so prioritize getting high reflexes to begin with, even though agility is slightly more relevant in terms of performance.
Temperament - Orion found it oddly performs best at 10, and 20 is worse than 1. Perhaps it just an erroneous finding, but in any case, it has moderate performance impact and you want to moderately favor it.
Anticipation - Important for all positions. I think of it as a lesser kind of acceleration.
Concentration - Important only on defenders (i.e. DC/DL/DR). This contributes significantly to goals scored, it's not just defensive.
Dirtiness - A mid-game injury you can replace, a red card you cannot. Low dirtiness is more important than you probably think it is, and should be at least inverse to your player's 'aggression'.
Loyalty - Not tested yet, but it surely benefits from better morale and simply being able to keep the player around makes it somewhat important to me.
Important matches - Relatively low performance impact, but it effects more games than you probably think - it will effect all high rep games which includes premier league games, not just champions cup finals. So it's overall somewhat important.
Ambition - Somewhat important for both growth and performance, but also carries an obvious downside. Best to look for around ~10-13.
Work Rate - You need a minimum of ~6-7, but the benefits tail off a lot beyond that. Easy to find, and can be slightly increased through training.
Natural fitness - Important to have for at least a few players, particularly if you have an oversized squad. These players will be able to sit out games occasionally without suffering a match sharpness spiral they'll never recover from. Additionally you probably want at least ~7 on all players for this, as otherwise they will simply match sharpness spiral downwards even if you play them every week. Probably most important on positions that often have rotation going on, such as DL/DR and AML/AMR, whereas GK and your key striker obviously don't need it much.
Aggression - Good to have, but this should be inverse to his 'dirtiness' stat, which you should fear more than injury proneness.
Composure - Good to have, but probably not as important as you think. Unlike low anticipation and concentration which will impact your results negatively with consistency, composure seems more like a 50/50 thing.
Positioning - Similar to anticipation, except probably made partially redundant by pace/acc. It nonetheless still matters somewhat.
Vision - Seems to be of minor, but consistent benefit.
Weak foot - 6 weak foot seems to be the sweet spot, as there is a modest performance gain but it comes at cost of significant CA. Favor 6 weak foot players slightly over others, but don't bother training up weak foot even if it is 1.
Finishing, first touch, long shots, heading, passing, tackling, bravery, off the ball, teamwork, balance, stamina, strength, GK attributes aside from the key three - These are of circumstantially minor benefit and generally whatever your player has in these is probably already going to be enough, whether it's a 6 or a 16.
Controversy, sportsmanship, versatility - Of very minor benefit, although I'm yet to properly test sportsmanship.
Flair - Debatable. Doesn't really matter in any case, but my impression is that flair is slightly beneficial, whereas HarvestGreen22's finding is that it's a negative.
Crossing, marking, agility - Near useless and often waste a fair chunk of CA
Set pieces - Pointless, but low CA cost so you could still choose them for roleplay reasons.
Decisions, technique - Near useless and waste a lot of CA, particularly decisions. However having a single high decisions player in your team, preferably DC or otherwise GK/DM, carries a modest benefit that may outweigh it's CA cost for that player. Aside from that, you actually want to find low decisions players, and you should think of -1 decisions as say +1 dribbling.
Dual position - Usually best ignored. You cannot trick the game using it, it wastes training time you could use to get higher pace/acc, and it can cost a little CA too. Most important thing to know is keep second position below 13 proficiency to avoid extra CA costs, you will also know this has occurred if your 'DM' becomes labelled 'DM/ST'.
Fitness Management
According to EBFM's testing, match sharpness impacts performance very significantly, condition moderately, and fatigue is something don't want to overdo but you shouldn't have to worry about.
As you can see from EBFM's chart, the difference between even 100% match sharpness and 90% match sharpness is a 33% drop in win rate. For comparison, this drop in win rate is not even possible with max fatigue.
The lower match sharpness is, the exponentially greater your number of injuries will also be, though this concern would be tempered by the low intensity meta training:
Morale Management
EBFM found the following win rates for morale (vs. okay morale team):
Perfect - 50.2%
Very Good - 49.1%
Okay - 38.7%
Quite poor - 37.2%
Abysmal - 33.0%
So morale does matter somewhat, roughly up to 12% difference in win rate in realistic play, which is the difference between 100% and 90% match sharpness, or consistency 8 vs consistency 20.
In my own testing, I've noticed that positive momentum is definitely a thing, and that player rotation is significantly detrimental to this.
Assistant manager exploit - Set up your training calendar for the season, then delegate 'general training' to a staff member. No more training unhappiness complaints.