Angelski said: There are a lot of topics here, but I think managing newgens is the main focus to me. Do you have any deep-dive posts or research on newgens that I could read in the thread?
As I see it, there are two main development paths for promising newgens i use to follow:
Keep them in the first team: Use them as backups immediately. This gives you control over their setup, but you risk limiting their development if they don't get enough match context.
Send them out on loan: This gets them minutes, but you run the risk that the loan club won't play them enough or train them properly.
In rarest occassion, I've used the rest exploit combined with quickness individual training on youths while letting the U18 manager handle match time, and their attributes grew quickly. I read somewhere that a youth player's attributes can only grow by a maximum of 25 points per season, but when tracking some of my own wonderkids, I noticed their total attribute growth actually exceeded 25 points. It's not a single case, for a 10 season-long save i got like 4-5 players that became monsters in 2 season, even got first-team GK from youth team at age of 16 and at 18 i sold him to Chelsea. Expand So newgens are actually what I know best about.
My first thread here was actually about newgen mechanics, and I started looking deep into it many years ago now.
If you want to get really deep into it, I have explanations even of how newgens interact with geography in the game, and how that all of that complicated process is actually just superficial - it's all just in the end to set birth location and language and whatnot.
But you seem interested in specifically young player development. I have long posts that address in detail the questions you raise, but I'll just give a direct concise answer:
According to EBFM, and another youtuber who did data analysis of FM.. and I think HarvestGreen too.. CA growth is indeed capped at ~25 CA/season. You say you have exceeded that cap. It might be possible; we know there are exceptions that occur in regards to match fitness gains during matches, so CA growth could be the same. I'd doubt you got beyond say ~30 though.
The best way to handle young players is this: Keep at club until at least 19. 19-20, you can loan them out or keep them at club, both are fine. 21+ you have to loan out, or play at least 15 matches/season in first team. Matches are counted as 90 minutes, so a 80th minute substitution 15 times is going to count as less than 2 matches, not 15. It's best to loan to an inactive club if possible, because there is a coded bonus for it which just makes it superior, but the more important thing is that whatever club you loan to, you have to make sure they actually get matches. No matches, zero CA gain. Too low a league, and the CA gain will cap out at a certain CA level dependent on the league's reputation. Match rating makes no difference to their CA gain. So loans should be about playing at as high a level as possible, without risking them not starting matches.
Rather than read longwinded posts, you may be better off starting with, or simply viewing as an alternative, EBFM's youtube videos. There's a lot of great stuff there that largely remains valid and goes quite deep.
johnconnerson said: Do you plan to include these GK weightings into your latest Genie Scout file? Expand Yes, I'll be calling it Premier League 2.1
I'm thinking I might have a go at some further tests of players and adjustments first, particularly for players at the lower end, before I put it out in a day or two.
Angelski said: I won't comment on your manifesto—I really don't care about the nonsense. I shared my opinion, you shared yours, and that's it. I'm here for the game, so I'll stop the debate here. Tell me, what is the most optimal way of playing FM26? Let's discuss the actual game. Some people test C++ code and get results, others build tools like FM Super Scout, and you do research—everyone has their results. After 21 pages, I assume you've found the proper way FM26 should actually be played? (It's not irony, I'm not being rude, not trying to ruin the thread) Expand How you choose to play the game is up to you.
What I can tell you is:
1) What attributes to look for (what works, what doesnt) 2) What training to use 3) What leagues to load 4) What to do about loans 5) How to manage squad fitness 6) How to get the most out of newgens 7) How to manage morale 8) What weights to use in GS/FMST/FMSS
Most of it is in the OP.
I've also done some pretty deep research into the game that I can share - history, misc info, quirks of the game, etc. from Masonic ties the game has, to the state of Israel putting out a statement condemning Miles' politics-based decision of removing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel from the game, to the 3D newgen face modeler which you can download a usable demo of (they don't use an in-house program), to SI's inclusion of racist data and subsequent cover up, to somewhat obscure features such as searching for 'faceinthegame' to find all the newgens taking their details from SI staff/volunteers/etc in real life. Probably only a few people like me care about this extra stuff though.
Walter plays GK without reflexes. Nice one Walter.
I've got the GKs lining up quite nicely now, but there are some issues at the bottom end. Could be because of the sackings messing up the data, could be for other reasons.
I picked Walter Benitez to test because he had a high % score but only 15 reflexes, and he slots in between Oblak and ter Stegen, which is exactly what my draft set of new GK weightings predicted.
90% | Alisson - 6th, 3rd, 4th, 4th, 3rd = 4 position 87% | Thibaut Courtois - 3rd, 7th, 2nd, 5th, 8th = 5 position 85% | Jan Oblak - 5th, 8th, 6th, 4th, 3rd = 5.2 position 84% | Walter Benitez - 4th, 9th, 4th, 6th, 5th = 5.6 position 85% | Ugurcan Cakir GK - 7th, 9th, 2nd = 6 position 82% | Marc-Andre ter Stegen - 10th, 11th, 4th, 4th, 3rd = 6.4 position 80% | Anatolii Trubin - 15th (sacked), 6th, 4th (sacked), 5th = 7.5 position 61% | Jack Stevens - 13th (sacked), 4th, 9th (sacked), 8th (sacked), 8th (sacked) = 8.4 position 77% | Sinan Bolat - 4th, 2nd, 19th (sacked), 5th, 14th (sacked), 9th (sacked), 12th (sacked), 5th = 8.75 position 70% | Ben Winterbottom - 10th (sacked), 5th (sacked), 12th (sacked), 18th (sacked) = 11.25 position
To be honest though, reflexes seem to be making something of a comeback. As you'll see in my weightings below, I've had to set it very high to align the positions. Also surprising was that flair might possibly be an important attribute for GK. I derived this from player comparison, and was more willing to try it out because I know that technique is important for GK but not outfield. Concentration and determination also appear to be more critical than first thought. It could all just be confusion of attributes though, I'm just satisfied at the moment that I've got something that seems to line up most players well - it correctly predicted 2 goalkeepers I tested afterwards, which is promising.
Back to the reflexes matter though, what seems to be going on is this: Aerial Reach is crucial at the mid-high level. But once have the 15 aerial reach or around that, then reflexes become the pre-eminant consideration at the very high level (so 15 vs. 19 reflexes). As Benitez shows, you can still do very well without green reflexes, but the extra reflexes will push a player above and beyond to the very top if they have everything else that's required at a mid-high level. That's my reading of it. HarvestGreen's data also makes more sense in light of this hypothesis, because what that showed is that having all attributes at 20, and reducing an attribute to 1, reflexes showed a 12.8% difference.. which is what we see here is the difference between Benitez and Alisson (if we surmise the range is 4 to 11 position, then Alisson is 23% better than Benitez). Note that it remains true that green reflexes alone aren't sufficient for a GK, as evidenced by Bolat (16 ref) & ter Stegen (18 ref).
Angelski said: Giving advice on how to tweak FM26 files when you explicitly admit you don't even play or test the game makes zero sense. I wouldn't lecture someone on FC 26 based on secondhand findings from someone else. If you don't like FM26, just ignore it and let people who actively play and put thousands of hours into testing the current engine give proper feedback — like HarvestGreen does. Expand I think you're painting an inaccurate picture.
You mentioned in a post previously that I should do something actually useful, such as find the ultimate tactic. I actually have had a go at doing that once this year, and found that I couldn't beat Knap's tactic. I did test some other top FM24 tactics though, and found one or two that seemingly do better. I also had a go at set pieces. But I don't talk much about tactics at all really, because I have no real insight into it. So I don't just profess to know things willy nilly.
The specific areas I concentrate on are:
- Attributes - Training - Newgen generation
I can profess to know to a large extent about how attributes work in FM26 because it's clear nothing has changed fundamentally. The biggest difference is something like long shots going from completely useless to near useless. Sure, secondhand findings can be wrong, but based on doing a lot of testing myself, I have a reasonable amount of faith in HarvestGreen's findings because usually it aligns what what I find. And it depends on what it is - if HarvestGreen's talking about outfield attributes, I'll take his word. If it's GK, I'll ignore it because I know his methodology on GK is no good.
I could have chosen to simply put out FM26 files out there without mentioning that I can't verify the weightings. Who would be able to tell the difference?
The accurate picture is that I test FM24, and FM26 is largely the same to FM24 when it comes to attributes, and that I have always cautioned people that if I offer a FM26 file, it is the FM24 findings with perhaps some tweaks based on other's FM26 data added.
Angelski said: Every FM engine has its ups and downs, but systems evolve. SI has to try new mechanics for the game to move forward, even if people like you dismiss it as "garbage." Expand Another trigger point for me.
SI is an absolute disgrace, and I won't let this regurgitated marketing spiel get past me. If you choose to blow money on the broken game that is FM26, that's your problem. And my condolences to those who pre-ordered.
But I'm not going to sit here and listen to someone say SI is 'trying new mechanics' or that the game is simply going through 'ups and downs'. FM26 debuted as the 7th worst rated steam game in history and lost half of its users after the first month for a reason.
There are no new mechanics. I don't count OOP as a new mechanic, because it's placebo. The underlying match engine has simply been transposed with only the usual yearly tweaks of 'lets make long shots a little more important, and that a little less important'. That's why exploit tactics continue to destroy FM. Literally everything is the exact same, even the 3D graphics to me look roughly the same even though some people see it as some great improvement for whatever reason. The only substantive change has been the UI, and it's ruined the game.
The actual enjoyable parts of the game - newgen crafting, immersive narrative, attention to detail - have been methodically disassembled over the years, and FM26 represents a new low that is so bad it's literally intolerable to play for many to most. They replaced % with vague heart icons. Press conferences.. nuff said. They made transfer dealing a pain in the ass with Brexit before Brexit even happened in real life, and tedious agent, club and players interactions where they're not happy with anything - not even what sounds sensible to a reasonable person. We all know what happened to newgen faces. And they changed newgen generation so if you want to reload them, you have to go back months, and now in FM26 my initial impression having glanced through the demo is that the youth team is hidden behind so many mouse clicks that don't even want to bother dealing with newgens at all anymore - I heard that when FM26 was released, you literally couldn't even access the youth team properly!
And the heart of the game turns out to be a lie. For years we've been playing like some complex interplay between passing, decisions, vision, etc. is going on.. when in fact all of that is placebo not even taken into account by the match engine, and actually SI have deliberately been misleading its users - we know this because the players in the starting db have sets of attributes that just so happen to align perfectly with the reduced set of effectual attributes in my template. Exploit tactics put a stopper to much of the game's enjoyment years ago. The challenge is gone. I moved on to newgens, and discovered that a lot of the factors here are baloney too - for instance SI claim youth facilities affect PA; they simply don't. I still enjoy FM24 when I do play, mainly because I can raise up newgens from Div 7 to Div 1, but that seems pretty much dead now with FM26.
I could write a whole book on it. I basically already have here, but there's just so many bad things. The short of it is that the game has devolved into a mess that is too tedious to play, and in all likelihood could very well go broke and die off in the next year or two. But we'll see what FM27 looks like. Personally I expect a rehash of FM26 and further 'product diversification' as we see with the much more polished FMDB Pro they've evidently been spending a lot more of their time on, and I think shows their level of respect for you.
Angelski said: And as for your "undeniable superiority" and "dominating the field" — you admitted yourself in Post #21 that you took HarvestGreen's data, fed it into ChatGPT, and had AI output an "approximation" of attribute distributions. Taking other people's hard work, running it through an AI engine and exporting a custom GS file for a game you don't even play isn't "dominating" anything. It's just prompt engineering. Expand I assume you are talking about a recent post, in which case I did not use HarvestGreen's data, but my own. And I ended up discarding what ChatGPT had to say, as I was getting better results alone.
If you're talking about something months ago, I can't recall, but sometimes I do use ChatGPT to do calculations. It often has errors with complicated calculations though, so usually I use it as one would a calculator - say I want to quickly calculate 15 rows of calculations instead of manually doing '(3x3.68)x110' myself.
So a dud argument from you here. Even if it was valid, say I used AI to get half of my insights.. would that even be a problem, if it was producing valid results? AI is obviously being used a lot now, even by big companies who pay people to do work for them. Overall I think you've chosen to make a very weak point to stand on.
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the work you're sharing here. I enjoy reading your results and testing your FM24 files (even if I'm using FM26), and I've found your contributions very useful.
Not everyone will agree with every method or conclusion, but I don't see the point of repeatedly criticizing something they could simply choose not to follow. If people don't enjoy the thread, they can always ignore it.
Please keep sharing your findings. There are definitely readers like me who appreciate the time and effort you put into this.
Quite a few people here seem to be having trouble communicating with me. I'm not particularly upset or dismayed. In fact I rather relish the opportunities to demonstrate my undeniable superiority. But I do somewhat wish there were more productive debates, which I know have occurred before at times and are therefore possible.
Here are a few suggestions I have for communicating with me:
1) Don't call me retarded, or praise those who call me retarded, if you want me to be pleasant instead of terse towards you. I enjoy 'FM Arena' living up to its name, but expect me to respond in kind, rather than expect me to submit to passive-aggressive shenanigans and the like.
2) Actually comprehend my claims before saying 'you're wrong'. I know I write a lot, I don't expect people to read everything, but you should at least have some awareness of what I'm actually claiming before attempting to prove it wrong. Sometimes people mischaracterize my ideas. I understand, naivety is innocent - if a person is initially polite to me, I give them 4 or 5 or 6 chances to take on board what I'm saying. If they persist with cherry picking or moving on to new points while ignoring the bulk of what I say, I generally start to assume they are being deliberately passive-aggressive and either have ill intent or are simply boneheaded. I have to draw the line somewhere.
3) Maybe, just maybe, do some actual testing yourself and come up with something to say of substance. I can think of two or three people in this thread who have so far. If nobody else is coming up with anything to show, how can you blame me for dominating the field?
Angelski said: You literally said yourself in previous posts that FM26 is "hot garbage" and that you don't even play it. I'll just leave that there so anyone reading this can decide for themselves how much weight to give your advice. Expand This shouldn't be news to anyone who has been following my posts here.
People have asked me for FM26 GS files over time, and I have to tell them that I don't really do FM26 files because I can't test FM26 and can only provide at best some sort of adjustment based on what HarvestGreen's findings are (now there are also FM Arena test results to go by). It does work though, I'm quite sure, because attributes/the match engine in FM26 hasn't really changed much. I just can't say anything with the same certainty in regards to FM26.
Pretty sure I've always made it clear that I test in FM24 only.
You've just rocked up and are claiming I'm wrong without reading anything I've actually written. I mean what kind of response from me did you expect?
Angelski said: And one more thing: if there's already a well-known attribute table showing how the match engine weighs everything, and the engine hasn't even changed, why are we even having this discussion? Expand That table refers to the CA weights. In this thread recently, we are talking about attribute weightings. They are two different things. CA weights largely determine the cost of an attribute in CA; attribute weightings reflect the importance of a particular attribute in terms of performance.
Angelski said: I came here hoping to actually learn something useful, but watching someone obsessively test a "garbage game" they claim not to play is certainly a choice. Expand There's plenty here that's useful, and much of it is derived from the extensive testing you deride. I test FM24, not FM26. I didn't say FM24 is a garbage game, even though it does have its shortcomings, I said FM26 is.
Angelski said: I was trying to be friendly and share a genuine player's perspective Expand Perhaps that was your intention, but I can't help but feel a bit miffed when I'm mischaracterized. Especially when you start by saying the guy who has been harassing me and lying about me for months on end, is 'totally right'. Hope you understand, if you ever do come back to read this.
Angelski said: A few quick points because you're completely contradicting yourself here:
FM26 & OOP Roles: You explicitly stated "I don't test FM26" and "I don't play FM26 because it's hot garbage." Calling the in-possession and out-of-possession mechanics "placebo" based on FM24 assumptions and second-hand opinions isn't data—it's guesswork. In FM26, if a player lacks positional discipline during phase transitions, they break the team's defensive structure, regardless of speed. Expand You don't trust FM Arena's testing on this? That's not a contradiction on my part, that's a disagreement between us.
Angelski said: "Roles Don't Exist": Claiming roles don't exist in FM ignores how the match engine assigns spatial duties, pressing triggers, and movement patterns. Attributes are processed through those role instructions—they don't operate in a vacuum. Expand Yes.. as you can see by the last edit time of the post you're responding to, I had a change of mind about which I submitted the same time you posted your response.
So I don't expect you to have seen it yet of course, but I'll restate the clarification I wish to make: Roles do exist as tactical differences, but you were denoting attributes which better fit roles, which is a different kettle of fish. Attributes do not fit certain roles better. I know this from experience testing, but I believe FM Arena has also tested this and I could dig it up if you like.
Angelski said: Off the Ball & CA Exploits: Calling Off the Ball "completely useless" and boasting about winning the Premier League with a 1 CA / 90 CA team proves @keithb's point: your setup is exploiting match engine pathfinding via broken tactics. When a tactic does 95% of the heavy lifting, claiming your changing attribute weights caused the win is pure confirmation bias. Expand You seem to have just completely ignored the first line of my response to you.
I'll state it again: It has been tested with default tactics.
..and to a precision of just 2% GS rating difference!
Angelski said: Templates & Balance: My point about CA balance still stands. My striker had 13–14 Pace/Acc and dominated in Europe because his high Mentals fit my tactic. Swapping him for a 19–20 Pace player with lower Off the Ball/Composure dropped performance—because raw physicals without tactical fit don't magically win matches in dynamic play. Expand And how do you that it was off the ball or composure specifically? Was the player identical, or even similar in every other respect?
I can tell you now that off the ball, or even composure, is not going to account for a 20 pace/acc player being worse than 13 pace/acc player.
But putting that aside, you're not proving anything. You're talking as though I have said 13-14 pace/acc players can't be near perfect players. I have stated the opposite of that, and if you actually took the time read the last 2 pages of this thread, you'd see I've been trying to make the specific point that I think the established narrative that pace/acc is everything should be regarded as outdated.
You've just barged in here and started yelling about how I'm wrong on the basis of claims I'm not even making. That's the part that gets me, not so much the naivety around the attributes, but castigating me when you clearly haven't even read what I've written. Bizarre!
Angelski said: Honestly, I came here hoping to learn something, but reading through all of this has completely killed my desire to stay in this thread or engage with the forum. It's exhausting trying to discuss normal, proper gameplay when someone running 50,000 automated holiday sims insists you're playing the wrong way unless you intentionally break the match engine. Expand Aw.. you poor thing.
Maybe I suggest r/footballmanagergames? Or perhaps more up your alley of falsehoods, sensitivity and low effort, the SI forums?
But if you do decide to stick around here, perhaps don't just go in bullheaded saying 'YOU'RE WRONG' with nothing to back up it but confabulations to the person you're choosing to address?
Testing players inside plug-and-play tactics proves the tactic is OP, not that attributes work like a magical spreadsheet. Expand It has been tested with default tactics.
Angelski said: High Pace looks great on paper, but role fit, mental attributes, and relative league quality matter far more in practice. Expand Roles do not exist. Even positions seem to have none or at most few attribute differences between each other, except for GK and position proficiency of course.
Edit: On reflection it might be an exaggeration to say that roles do not exist. But not by much. I guess you could point out that in meta tactics, roles are a part of it, and this not my domain. I guess what I really mean to say is that roles do not affect what attributes a player should get. So roles may have some tactical value, but you are clearly talking about getting players with attributes to fit roles, not tactical differences themselves.
Angelski said: Case in point: I used a striker with just 13–14 Pace/Acc in the Bulgarian league (where average CA starts around 95 and below). He scored 50+ goals a season, won 2 Ballon d'Ors, and helped me reach the Champions League every year—even winning it once. I eventually followed the popular advice to replace him with a 19–20 Pace/Acceleration player, and the speed replacement performed far worse overall simply because he didn't fit my tactic or have the same high Off the Ball and Composure. Expand The first part doesn't contradict my findings. In fact it is fully in line with my template which you can view on page 1, which shows 13-14 pace/acc is a viable minimum for the English Premier League, as exemplified by players such as Harry Kane and Robert Lewandowski.
The second part mistakes the causes. Unless you're simply playing a player completely out of position, tactics make use of all players the same way. Off the ball is a completely useless attribute that has been tested to have no effect, not just by me, but by both HarvestGreen and the FM Arena testing.
Angelski said: With FM26 introducing distinct in-possession and out-of-possession roles, the devs clearly made squad and tactical fit far more critical than just hoarding fast players to break the engine. It's about how a player fits your system across both phases, not how high their physical stats can grow. Expand I don't test FM26, but those who have tested it - HarvestGreen and FM Arena - have found that there are only a few minor differences in the effect of attributes, and that the new OOP thing is pretty much placebo. Again I haven't tested FM26 myself, but if the attributes effect remain largely the same as others have found, then 2/3rds of attributes remain completely useless and hoarding fast players to break the engine remains the way to go.. unless of course you prefer the more realistic and successful method, which is using my weights and following my templates. If anything, FM26 appears even more broken to me, as I notice all the top tactics are the same tactics that lack strikers and I've heard it said that they are, or at least were, more effective than Knap tactics in FM24. Maybe I'm wrong on that though, I don't play FM26 because it's hot garbage.
Angelski said: But I still don't believe that just stacking 5 attributes at 18–20 makes a player great. CA is capped at 200, so a player can't have half their stats maxed out and expect to be a complete monster without balance. Expand You should check out the thread where I have used a team of 1 CA players to consistently win the Premier League.
That was many months ago. Since then I've come up with a more realistic formula: No high pace/acc, no unrealistic attributes like say 16 dribbling, and a total of just ~90 CA on average. The template is on page 1, and yes, you can find similar players in the actual starting database to emulate the template - it would cost only a few mil to find and buy the right players straight off the bat to win the Premier League.
I don't know where you're getting this idea that I'm using attributes at 18-20. The template has no attribute above 15, and it's what I've been using in all my testing for ages now:
Angelski said: Even when precision is minimized down to 1–1.5%, you can never fully eliminate RNG. Focusing strictly on raw physical players just isn't the right way to look at the game. Expand Can't speak for you or anyone else, but 1% margin of error sounds good enough to me.
Please update yourself on the 'raw physical players' claim.
keithb said: You "test" using the best tactics and set pieces? You can get Darmstadt to win the bundesliga in the first season with that setup. Probably the double. You also take man city out of the picture. It's such an easy test, it barely proves anything. You don't even realise half the stuff you do is flawed. It's not even amateur.
Osimhen would easily outscore and get a better rating than Maeda. Expand Darmstardt players have ~120 CA. The players I have added to Man City are ~90 CA. Most people use a top tactic I assume. But otherwise the 4 teams test (80%, 78%, 76%, 74%) suffices as proof of validity of the weightings whatever you take exception to, as no custom tactic, set pieces, nor custom players were used (completely default tactics, with squads of real players).
You are not even familiar with what you are arguing against.
I want to say one more thing on the randomness point.
I tested teams in one league together consisting of 80%, 78%, 76%, and 74% rated players primarily because I wanted to speed the verification process up, but I also had some other reasons in mind. One was to test the 'its too random' theory.
It's one thing to say that Haaland finishes 1st to 4th reliably as a sole player in a largely controlled team. What about when you have a whole squad of real players that's both more variable and realistic - what happens to these small % distinctions then?
You can go back a few pages and see the results, but basically it turned out that even under these conditions, the results were reliably predictable. More than even I thought they would be to be honest. I thought it's probably going to be impossible to distinguish below ~5% difference, but there were clear distinctions even with just 2% Genie Scout difference.
The randomness was seemingly too overwhelming for you to distinguish factors, because you were assessing by the wrong factors. You were looking at league points and passing ability, rather than league position and anticipation, so overall it appeared too random to you to pin down.
Yarema said: "We see that work rate reduces in-match condition % identically to stamina. So stamina cannot be more important than work rate, or at least not more than ~20% more important say."
And you have the weights at 18 and 12 respectively? This is why I always ask questions because you come out with statements like this where it's one way for a few days then it completely flips, but you are 100% certain each time. You had one set of weights one day, I found them strange and enquire about the reasoning behind them, then you completely switch the system with massive changes and somehow it's my fault for asking. The "truth" shouldn't switch around so much, sure there is some inaccuracy and with more data we can hone in better.
I generally like that you are pursuing these questions, but the attitude "I am right and everyone else is wrong and stupid" is kind of offputting, especially when you do 180 as often as you do. Like do the tests and lets discuss if it makes sense, what are the limitations, can you approach it differently etc. You've found some interesting stuff that is unfortunately the victim of the level of discussion in here. Expand I could be like those guys who put out one file, call it a day, and reap the patreon/'buy me a coffee' money for the next 2-3 years off various 'Ultimate FM26 Weightings Megapack' releases while vigorously defending the unalterable truth of my findings.
The god honest truth is that my releases are haphazard and change drastically because I actually put time and effort into finding new things and don't let myself fall into the trap of getting my knickers in a knot over 'b-but what will people think of me now'.
I don't know where you're getting this work rate 18 and stamina 12 thing from. The current weights have 63 work rate, 94 stamina.
Yarema said: Like do the tests and lets discuss if it makes sense, what are the limitations, can you approach it differently etc. Expand That is literally what I've been doing. It's people such as yourself and keithb who have been trying to interrupt and overwhelm things by constantly posting the same tired complaints of 'you're wrong.. you're just wrong, because I know you're wrong, okay?' over and over and over again. From my perspective, more posts in the thread draw more attention to it, and allows for a kind of dialetical process where I can address normal user's critiques that aren't voiced and also realize certain things I may have done mistakenly or glossed over on occasion. And it's a damn good feeling on those days when I can suddenly present solid data to blow the BS claims out of the water.
Here's a suggestion: Perhaps stop acting like you're the last thing standing between me and human decency, and instead start doing some testing of your own to either support your claims or otherwise complement my findings. Or if you're lazy or uninterested, which is perfectly fine, simply stop insisting on tired outdated BS like 'technicals still matter somewhat' or 'attributes are mostly linear'.
keithb said: You rated genie scout default ratings higher than several ratings files created by people in the last 2-4 years lol. Expand Yes, including one or two of my own you'll note.
It's literally just measuring the % disparity between two players where there shouldn't be one, and saying which has the largest or smallest error.
Testing shows that on average, Maeda finishes 3 position, Osimhen finishes 3.833 position. Yet your weights show Osimhen 88.50% FS 88.37% TS, Maeda 79.80% FS 69.06% TS.
That's embarrassing for someone who insists nothing has changed since they learned 'everything' 2 or 3 years ago. Or at least I'm embarrassed for you.
treath said: we want to know who is the best player, what if liverpool has a awesome season in a simulation and my position got lower than in another simulation, what this have to do with alisson be better thank ter stegen?
it's just randomness, that not prove nothing nothing nothing about atributes...c'mon einstein scientist (never wrong) get your scientific method together and don't do this bs
You are Just misguidind people for fun Expand I didn't mention it, because I thought the data self-evidently refuted the ol' 🤪 iTsAlLrAnDoMaNyWaY 🤪 argument.
As an aside, I'm enjoying these text color options.
We have heard it claimed for a long time that you cannot even measure, let alone employ, various factors in the game, because the inherent volatility is supposedly too great.
Yet observe the results I recorded: When I test Haaland, I don't have him suddenly finishing 9th or 16th. His lowest result in 6 samples taken is 4th. Doesn't seem very random to me. And it's precise enough to even distinguish clearly between him and Mbappe and various other contenders, who finish 2.5 or 3 instead of 1.666.
Now there is the valid point of seasonal variation throwing a spanner into the works, because realistically we're playing for each season, not waiting around for it to eventually get it right in season 2 or 3, even if season 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 are all correct.
But I have calculated that variation and taken into account in assessing what level of certainty we can reasonably hold. I've stated before that I asked ChatGPT to combine this seasonal volatility, and the the current degree of statistical error, and it said we can be reasonably confident that to the point of +/- 7.8%. In other words, when I'm looking at GS for the best ST, I can have reasonable confidence that the best ST is going to between 83% and 90%, rather than 67% and 90% for GS default weights, or 60% and 90% for keithb's weights. I don't know if this sounds useless to you, but it doesn't to me!
keithb said: You keep saying what others have said or thought and you're always wrong haha. Like Yarema said above. I set stamina higher for positions that lose more condition in matches. Thats it. But you still haven't worked out why its important.............. no surprise there.
More ground breaking results everyone; speed is important for centre backs as well as strikers!!
And there's more;
" 2/3rds of attributes continue to have zero effect on final season position" Who bloody knew!!
What are you even talking about when you say "The trouble with the 'pace/acc is everything' explanation is that it failed to account for players such as Kane and Lewandowski" What does that even mean?!?! They are accounted for lol.
More than half the stuff you say is just from your fantasy world. Its a complete fiction that you've created and then talk about. Its not real.
In your last testing you said jumping reach was super important for every position and now you've set it quite low. Before you said Mbappe was shit hahah. Now he's your 2nd best player lol. And lets not forget you said I was pissing in my own face for saying stamina was important haha. You said you didn't need it at all and now you say its 80%!! What level of reality are we supposed to be operating on? Because I cant operate on yours.
Keepers dont need technique
Forwards dont need concentration
Wingers and 10's can have jumping reach 1.
Centre backs dont need high stamina. Expand Rattling off a bunch of falsehoods doesn't make them true.
Unfortunately for you, EBFM's uploads on Youtube still exist there and can be referred to.
We see that work rate reduces in-match condition % identically to stamina. So stamina cannot be more important than work rate, or at least not more than ~20% more important say.
But the real showstopper to your argument is that in the video Max also states 'a player will use 15-20% OPC per half' while showing a match in progress that shows players that started with identical condition % and attributes, and the DL/DR condition % is indistinguishable from other positions.
That said, anecdotally I know that in standard play, fullbacks tend to use a bit more condition % than the other players. I suspect this is due to the 'best' fullbacks also tending to have high work rate. This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: People use GS weightings that select for high work rate on fullbacks, so they end up using more condition %, requiring higher stamina, and therefore favoring stamina too. But very high work rate on fullbacks isn't necessary to begin with. Testing shows that work rate above ~11-13 is largely superfluous.
We also see that 1 > 20 sta is equivalent to 100% vs 97% condition difference when starting match. We know that bad natural fitness will result in an inevitable condition difference of at least that, yet you have natural fitness weighted at 0.
In regards to jumping reach, it remains important for every player. I don't know how you consider '46' weighting low. It was in fact viable at lower values of ~20-30, but I thought 46 was more appropriate and it aligned fine. I haven't yet examined if extra jump reach is necessary on DC, which is an important remainder matter to clarify.
In your weightings, Vinicius Junior is no.1 FS, Mbappe is 2nd beating Haaland, while you have to scroll down to find Maeda below a 32-year-old colombian at Orlando City. Comparable analysis showed that your weightings have worse variance than the Genie Scout default values from a decade ago. The question I have is not how did you come up with those ratings, but how did you manage to get them to do worse than even the Genie Scout default??
Yarema said: I don't think it was stated that a GK is only 20% of an outfield player.
Why you keep using league position as the end point still baffles me. Yes it has less variance because there are only 20 possible spots compared to lets say 100 possible points. You have to go really out of your way not to be in a +-3 places range. Additionally there is a lot more volatility in the middle of the table than at very top or bottom.
There was decent data for GKs from FM Arena, Harvestgreen, Orion and probably others and they mostly match with what you found so it's not exactly groundbreaking. Still valuable additional data from a different approach. Expand Yeah.. look, I've heard so much rubbish from you that you're going in the keithb category for me now.
I feel like I've given you a fair go.
I responded to your claims several times with solid evidence to the contrary, whether it was about technical attributes (aside from drib) mattering at least somewhat as you insist they do when they don't, or your claim that attributes aside from work rate are 'pretty much linear', but you just ignored my responses - even when I reminded you that I had already responded to your claims.
It's understandable to not be in the know, or double down on something you've always believed in. I did that with personality distribution in FM. But I conceded the point after looking into it. You just seem intent to repeat the same spiel of 'you're wrong' over and over, and making claims that are easily refuted with a simple lookup of what I'm referring to:
harvestgreen22 said: 2.The goalkeeper is the least important person among the 11 players. The verification method is to select any one of the player on the field, change the given attribute, and observe the extent of the impact on the winning rate. The impact of the goalkeeper on the winning rate is roughly only one quarter or one fifth of that of the any one players on the field. Expand
'There was decent data for GKs from FM Arena, HarvestGreen, Orion, and probably others' - Where is it? I've addressed the HarvestGreen data in the post you're directly responding to. C'mon man.
I will address your other point for the benefit of those who are being fair-minded and just want to know the truth of how FM works.
As you state, I use league position to assess because it has much less variance than league points. It is also true that there is will be more position volatility in the mid-table than the top 6, because the quality gaps between the top 6 are likely wider than the mid-table. However, the implicit idea here that league position only seems more reliable because it compresses the volatility is misleading - what actually happens is that league position is the first outcome, and league points seems simply tacked on as a narrative for whatever reason (it is at least consistent with this hypothesis). So for instance, a team will finish 2nd most times, but one season it might get 64 points, the next it will be 84 points. One season it will be 2nd, 14 points behind, the next it's 2nd only on goal difference. And this is not just some miracle oddity, I've observed this myself literally hundreds of times. Hence, position is a much more accurate/less volatile measure of performance - and how can you argue the league position you finish in (i.e. 1st), isn't the primary goal of fiddling around with attribute distribution? Who wants to reach 80 league points and finish 7th, rather than finish 1st regardless of the league points tally?
For whatever reason it seems to me that people take FM Arena's testing rather than HarvestGreen's as a starting point, so I'll begin with that:
So we see here that stamina is moderately, not highly, important. Specifically it is 29.7% of either acceleration or pace.
Two important things to note are that points is used a measurement rather than league position, and that we are measuring from 8 > 20 stamina. It's not clear what the makeup of the team or opposition is, but at least it's giving us a fair idea of what to expect in any case.
We see here in HarvestGreen's latest result for stamina that is it 27.1% of acceleration or pace going from 1 > 18.
For 6 > 18 it is 14.1% of acceleration or pace. In other words, stamina is never critical, but becomes even less important beyond '6'. He also has 1 > 6 results showing this.
In his initial attribute test shown here, stamina 10 > 20 is 30.9% of acceleration, which in my view is the most important result in regards to application to the Premier League.
In keithb's GS weightings, stamina is weighted at 60 for DLR/WBLR/DM/MC, 20 for AMLR/ST, and 0 for DC.
What this no doubt reflects is the now outdated myth that different positions require different sets of attributes. This is not an article of faith for me; I myself used to believe in, and initially employed, weightings that varied per position. Partly this was because each position has different CA weightings for attributes, and so high stamina for low CA cost on fullbacks seemed like a boon. I suspect that the myth has been generally perpetuated throughout the years with the CA weightings as a primary impetus, and that keithb isn't even aware of this - he seems to just think that stamina is what's necessary to win, simple as that. My mind was changed by the test results.
What my test results found, and seemingly implicitly HarvestGreen's & FM Arena's too, is that pace/acc is just as critical on DC as it is on ST, many attributes such as 'tackling' or 'passing' don't matter at all for any position, and if you try to test for positional differences, there doesn't appear to be any, or at least many. There might be still be some differences - I'm still wondering if pace & acc are of equal importance across all positions for instance, but overall we're talking small differences, not major ones.
Through brute force testing, I found that stamina of 13 is the essential requirement for the Premier League, while pace/acc is 15:
However, you can get away with as low as ~13 pace/acc (think Harry Kane, or Lewandowski), so long as stamina is ~15 or higher. Conversely, a 20 pace/acc player has less need of stamina, and can get away with 12 and no doubt lower.
So if you put all that together, basically stamina should be weighted at ~33% of pace/acc, is what I found.
So you can think of it as either 33% or 86% of acc, perhaps somewhere inbetween. So ~50% roughly. This was a change from the ~15% I previously used, which was primarily based on HarvestGreen's 14.1% 10 > 20 finding.
With my latest weightings, which wipe the slate clean of assumptions and simply try to align weightings with actual real player rankings supported by test results as evidence, I found that only somewhere around ~90% weighting for stamina worked - or ~90-110% of acc. This is far more than even keithb's 60% weighting for sta on fullbacks.
But why is that necessary, and why does it work if so? It is necessary because someone such as Maeda or Furuhashi has very few green attributes, yet ranks above the likes of both all-rounders such as Lewandowski and fairly well rounded high pace/acc players such as Osimhen. If you analyze it carefully (you need to compare multiple players in conjunction to find out it can't be his high work rate, det, aggression, etc.), the only way to make the rankings align seems to be to boost stamina to such a high weight. Perhaps I've missed some other option, but this where I'm at. As to the explanation as to why it is so, it makes more sense once you realize that stamina is preserving both pace and acc, so its value is doubled, and it is preserving the two most valuable attributes.
No one that I'm aware of has previously come to these conclusions about stamina. Even the overlap between this and the old 'stamina for fullbacks' myth doesn't extend this far. And it puts a big dent I reckon in the general pervading view that pace/acc is everything, which was always sort of heard of, but never really solid fact until HarvestGreen's findings. The trouble with the 'pace/acc is everything' explanation is that it failed to account for players such as Kane and Lewandowski. It would be (and still is by some even on this forum!) explained away as compensated by high technical skill such as passing, etc. which is a red herring - these technical skills really are completely useless, and the differences lie in other areas such as stamina, work rate, anticipation, and a handful of select others. 2/3rds of attributes continue to have zero effect on final season position.
I wasn't going to respond but I guess it's good to take stock of where we're at from where we've come from. Instead of vaguely telling a narrative of progress, I'll be presenting precise data for a clear comparison.
Let's start with GKs:
HarvestGreen did 2 seperate tests on GKs.
December 2024:
April 2026:
The first thing I'll draw your attention to is that the results seemingly contradict each other. In the 1st test, acceleration does little to nothing. In the 2nd, it is the third most important attribute, above aerial reach which got a tick in the 1st test. Vision got 2 ticks in the first test, but does nothing in the 2nd test. There are more examples like this.
In skawkclsrn's case the issue is lack of samples, but here the issue is the methodology:
- The 1st test is using a team with 10 in every attribute, and increasing a single GK attribute to 20, then measuring the goals conceded. The first two aspects underlined are potential problematic factors, for instance what if a GK needs better reflexes and agility because the outfield is deficient in speed - perhaps with a speedy team, a GK only needs aerial reach to handle potshots he can see coming from afar. That is just a minor critique to show even solid tests can have pitfalls. The real problem is measuring the goals conceded, because as shown in my testing results, goals conceded is not at all a consistent measure of success, similar to how league points is all over the place compared to final league position. It will give some correlation, hence why agility, reflexes, and aerial reach all correctly have ticks, but that is just because teams who finish 1st obviously concede less goals than teams that finish 20th.
- The 2nd test is starting with the GK at '20' in all attributes and setting 1 attribute to '1'. This is different to how HarvestGreen does his outfield tests, which increase/decrease from '10'/'12' for all attributes, and it's obviously less realistic to begin with. But the main issue, only evidenced by my own testing later, is that having all attributes at '20' is likely compensating for and obscuring certain deficiencies. So we see that reflexes and agility are pretty much the only 2 attributes that matter, and even then, their individual impact is fairly minimal (12.8% at most).
HarvestGreen also stated that his observation is that GK is 20% of effect of an outfield player, if I remember correctly, which is basically saying the GK should be an afterthought and not really worth worrying about.
All of his tests also carry the same caveat that he is testing against opposition that has identical attributes. For some attributes, such as Jumping Reach, Aerial Reach, Strength, etc. I hope it's obvious how this could constitute a problem when it comes to translating to how things work in real leagues.
Now, coming to my tests. I brute force tested individual attributes for GK until I got a solid picture of what an optimal GK looks like. So what I would do is I would start with all attributes at 1, except a few obviously necessary ones like agil, aer, ref, etc. and measure the position. The initial result might be 13th. Then I would increase each attribute from '1' to '20' and measure the improvement. If no improvement in position, ignore it going forward. After learning what attributes matter and which don't, I would begin refinement, seeing how low I could get an attribute to find the 'sweet spot'. And I also start testing those attributes I took for granted at the start: agil, aer, ref. I would test a few potential combos (i.e. does aer only matter if jump is high?), but obviously it can't be an exhaustive search. Now what I would most often find is something like this:
Usually I would choose 14 to settle on. But if '13' is relegated, or '18' is 1st, then obviously I would likely change that to a '15' - while also considering realistic availability in the game.
Now these are the essential GK attributes I ended up with:
We see from my latest comparative testing of real players within the game, that this player would constitute something of a middling Premier League team GK. This GK finishes ~7th, the best finishes 4th, Barcelona's finishes 6.4, and a League 1 GK finishes 8.4.
One key attribute that is hidden from that screenshot is technique, which turns out to be quite critical for GK. You can also see this reflected in the database data for GKs - the better the GK, the higher technique he is generally given. I actually notice for the first time now that HarvestGreen actually gave a tick next to technique in his 1st test, though in the 2nd it is listed as 0.0%.
It's not clear yet exactly how much a GK accounts for as a % of a team's overall performance, but we can see the GK is more critical to success than HarvestGreen gave the GK credit for. My current estimation is somewhere around ~66-100% of an outfield player.
So we know my template works. Let's compare to what we 'knew 2 years ago', which is HarvestGreen's data and nothing else:
- HarvestGreen found vision and pace, and later reflexes, to be the most important attributes. I found vision '1', pace '13', and reflexes '11' are adequate, while aerial reach is the most essential attribute. - HarvestGreen summed up that GK is has 20% impact of outfield player. My evidence shows it's much more than that, even the difference between relegation and a top 5 finish at times. - Generally speaking, there was no solid data on GK at all previously. Now I've provided you with a precise template for GK that is backed by solid evidence in the form of testing both real & artificial players in a real and popular league (English Premier League).
If I've missed anyone else's findings on GKs, that was any good, let me know.
Alisson - 6th, 3rd, 4th, 4th, 3rd = 4 position Thibaut Courtois - 3rd, 7th, 2nd, 5th, 8th = 5 position Jan Oblak - 5th, 8th, 6th, 4th, 3rd = 5.2 position Marc-Andre ter Stegen - 10th, 11th, 4th, 4th, 3rd = 6.4 position Anatolii Trubin - 15th (sacked), 6th, 4th (sacked), 5th = 7.5 position Jack Stevens - 13th (sacked), 4th, 9th (sacked), 8th (sacked), 8th (sacked) = 8.4 position Sinan Bolat - 4th, 2nd, 19th (sacked), 5th, 14th (sacked), 9th (sacked), 12th (sacked), 5th = 8.75 position
I removed Courtois' starting injury to test him.
It shows that GK does in fact matter, though it does seem a lot more variable - in the downwards direction.
So although a GK can't really make your team win much more, they can in fact make or break your team.
Observations through player comparison:
- Jack Stevens is a mediocre all rounder who normally plays for Cambridge, and show you can't really get away with playing mediocre GKs - Bolat is interesting.. he is like Stevens, but a tier above, but has green reflexes and jumping reach. Shows good reflexes aren't sufficient. - Trubin, like Bolat, also significantly underperforms. He has green Aer, Jump and Handling. None of these are sufficient alone therefore, even with seemingly above average values in all other areas.
We know that the following GK finishes ~5th and with good consistency too:
This GK finished 7th:
It seems like only a select few of real GKs can do better than the above players.
If I filter for attributes of that second GK (excluding natural fitness), no players come up.
It seems that GK is about what is the least worst deficiency do they have. I suspect it is this way so that, unlike the outfield, you don't get great GKs who make teams come 1st by the mere addition of themselves. Perhaps this also explains why GKs can't get really high match ratings, because their best is merely adequate.
Trubin has a slightly deficiency in determination, pace, acceleration. Alisson is only lacking 1 pace. Oblak slightly lacks first touch, acceleration, and agility.
To verify the theory, I reduced the filter by 1 for the attributes and tested the worst one of the 4 players that turned up (1 was Ederson @ Man City, 2 were Alisson and his backup GK @ Liverpool, and the worst was Davy Roef from AA Gent).
High variation, but the average result aligns with extra 1 in key attributes finishing ~7th
BTW it's stuff like Alisson's backup GK just coincidentally having exactly the right set of meta attributes that shows me SI are aware of and intentionally making most attributes useless and misleading. If it was an oversight, players that look like duds but nonetheless perform well and are placed in the top teams wouldn't be an identifiable pattern.
Now I know quite a few people are also interested in what kind of GK gives the most clean sheets, or lowest goals conceded. So here are those stats:
Alisson - 13 cln, 48 con | 14 cln, 39 con | 15 cln, 40 con | 14 cln, 36 con | 11 cln, 44 con = 13.4 cln, 41.4 con Thibaut Courtois - 9 cln, 41 con | 12 cln, 48 con | 10 cln, 56 con | 10 cln, 45 con | 11 cln, 50 con = 10.4 cln, 48 con Jan Oblak - 8 cln, 49 con | 11 cln, 43 con | 10 cln, 59 con | 14 cln, 34 con | 15 cln, 40 con = 11.6 cln, 45 con Marc-Andre ter Stegen - 4 cln, 58 con | 10 cln, 53 con | 11 cln, 52 con | 13 cln, 44 con | 14 cln, 46 con = 10.4 cln, 50.6 con Anatolii Trubin - 10 cln, 46 con Davy Roef - 14 cln, 45 con | 13 cln, 44 con = 13.5 cln, 44.5 con Jack Stevens - 16 cln, 41 con Sinan Bolat - 14 cln, 50 con | 10 cln, 52 con | 9 cln, 53 con | 8 cln, 54 con = 10.25 cln, 52.25 con
I only took stats from samples where there was no interruption by sacking.
As I see it, there are two main development paths for promising newgens i use to follow:
Keep them in the first team: Use them as backups immediately. This gives you control over their setup, but you risk limiting their development if they don't get enough match context.
Send them out on loan: This gets them minutes, but you run the risk that the loan club won't play them enough or train them properly.
In rarest occassion, I've used the rest exploit combined with quickness individual training on youths while letting the U18 manager handle match time, and their attributes grew quickly. I read somewhere that a youth player's attributes can only grow by a maximum of 25 points per season, but when tracking some of my own wonderkids, I noticed their total attribute growth actually exceeded 25 points. It's not a single case, for a 10 season-long save i got like 4-5 players that became monsters in 2 season, even got first-team GK from youth team at age of 16 and at 18 i sold him to Chelsea.
So newgens are actually what I know best about.
My first thread here was actually about newgen mechanics, and I started looking deep into it many years ago now.
If you want to get really deep into it, I have explanations even of how newgens interact with geography in the game, and how that all of that complicated process is actually just superficial - it's all just in the end to set birth location and language and whatnot.
But you seem interested in specifically young player development. I have long posts that address in detail the questions you raise, but I'll just give a direct concise answer:
According to EBFM, and another youtuber who did data analysis of FM.. and I think HarvestGreen too.. CA growth is indeed capped at ~25 CA/season. You say you have exceeded that cap. It might be possible; we know there are exceptions that occur in regards to match fitness gains during matches, so CA growth could be the same. I'd doubt you got beyond say ~30 though.
The best way to handle young players is this: Keep at club until at least 19. 19-20, you can loan them out or keep them at club, both are fine. 21+ you have to loan out, or play at least 15 matches/season in first team. Matches are counted as 90 minutes, so a 80th minute substitution 15 times is going to count as less than 2 matches, not 15. It's best to loan to an inactive club if possible, because there is a coded bonus for it which just makes it superior, but the more important thing is that whatever club you loan to, you have to make sure they actually get matches. No matches, zero CA gain. Too low a league, and the CA gain will cap out at a certain CA level dependent on the league's reputation. Match rating makes no difference to their CA gain. So loans should be about playing at as high a level as possible, without risking them not starting matches.
Rather than read longwinded posts, you may be better off starting with, or simply viewing as an alternative, EBFM's youtube videos. There's a lot of great stuff there that largely remains valid and goes quite deep.
Yes, I'll be calling it Premier League 2.1
I'm thinking I might have a go at some further tests of players and adjustments first, particularly for players at the lower end, before I put it out in a day or two.
Tell me, what is the most optimal way of playing FM26? Let's discuss the actual game. Some people test C++ code and get results, others build tools like FM Super Scout, and you do research—everyone has their results. After 21 pages, I assume you've found the proper way FM26 should actually be played? (It's not irony, I'm not being rude, not trying to ruin the thread)
How you choose to play the game is up to you.
What I can tell you is:
1) What attributes to look for (what works, what doesnt)
2) What training to use
3) What leagues to load
4) What to do about loans
5) How to manage squad fitness
6) How to get the most out of newgens
7) How to manage morale
8) What weights to use in GS/FMST/FMSS
Most of it is in the OP.
I've also done some pretty deep research into the game that I can share - history, misc info, quirks of the game, etc. from Masonic ties the game has, to the state of Israel putting out a statement condemning Miles' politics-based decision of removing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel from the game, to the 3D newgen face modeler which you can download a usable demo of (they don't use an in-house program), to SI's inclusion of racist data and subsequent cover up, to somewhat obscure features such as searching for 'faceinthegame' to find all the newgens taking their details from SI staff/volunteers/etc in real life. Probably only a few people like me care about this extra stuff though.
Walter plays GK without reflexes.
Nice one Walter.
I've got the GKs lining up quite nicely now, but there are some issues at the bottom end. Could be because of the sackings messing up the data, could be for other reasons.
I picked Walter Benitez to test because he had a high % score but only 15 reflexes, and he slots in between Oblak and ter Stegen, which is exactly what my draft set of new GK weightings predicted.
90% | Alisson - 6th, 3rd, 4th, 4th, 3rd = 4 position
87% | Thibaut Courtois - 3rd, 7th, 2nd, 5th, 8th = 5 position
85% | Jan Oblak - 5th, 8th, 6th, 4th, 3rd = 5.2 position
84% | Walter Benitez - 4th, 9th, 4th, 6th, 5th = 5.6 position
85% | Ugurcan Cakir GK - 7th, 9th, 2nd = 6 position
82% | Marc-Andre ter Stegen - 10th, 11th, 4th, 4th, 3rd = 6.4 position
80% | Anatolii Trubin - 15th (sacked), 6th, 4th (sacked), 5th = 7.5 position
61% | Jack Stevens - 13th (sacked), 4th, 9th (sacked), 8th (sacked), 8th (sacked) = 8.4 position
77% | Sinan Bolat - 4th, 2nd, 19th (sacked), 5th, 14th (sacked), 9th (sacked), 12th (sacked), 5th = 8.75 position
70% | Ben Winterbottom - 10th (sacked), 5th (sacked), 12th (sacked), 18th (sacked) = 11.25 position
To be honest though, reflexes seem to be making something of a comeback. As you'll see in my weightings below, I've had to set it very high to align the positions. Also surprising was that flair might possibly be an important attribute for GK. I derived this from player comparison, and was more willing to try it out because I know that technique is important for GK but not outfield. Concentration and determination also appear to be more critical than first thought. It could all just be confusion of attributes though, I'm just satisfied at the moment that I've got something that seems to line up most players well - it correctly predicted 2 goalkeepers I tested afterwards, which is promising.
Back to the reflexes matter though, what seems to be going on is this: Aerial Reach is crucial at the mid-high level. But once have the 15 aerial reach or around that, then reflexes become the pre-eminant consideration at the very high level (so 15 vs. 19 reflexes). As Benitez shows, you can still do very well without green reflexes, but the extra reflexes will push a player above and beyond to the very top if they have everything else that's required at a mid-high level. That's my reading of it. HarvestGreen's data also makes more sense in light of this hypothesis, because what that showed is that having all attributes at 20, and reducing an attribute to 1, reflexes showed a 12.8% difference.. which is what we see here is the difference between Benitez and Alisson (if we surmise the range is 4 to 11 position, then Alisson is 23% better than Benitez). Note that it remains true that green reflexes alone aren't sufficient for a GK, as evidenced by Bolat (16 ref) & ter Stegen (18 ref).
So here are the GK weightings for FMST26:
((aerial_reach * 100 + command_of_area * 48 + first_touch * 52 + passing * 32 + reflexes * 306 + concentration * 152 + determination * 172 + work_rate * 100 + acceleration * 46 + balance * 32 + agility * 100 + jumping_reach * 56 + natural_fitness * 32 + pace * 56 + stamina * 100 + strength * 32 + technique * 48 + pressure * 46 + professionalism * 30 + flair * 150 - injury_proneness * 150 - dirtiness * 50 - ca * 30)) / 214
I think you're painting an inaccurate picture.
You mentioned in a post previously that I should do something actually useful, such as find the ultimate tactic. I actually have had a go at doing that once this year, and found that I couldn't beat Knap's tactic. I did test some other top FM24 tactics though, and found one or two that seemingly do better. I also had a go at set pieces. But I don't talk much about tactics at all really, because I have no real insight into it. So I don't just profess to know things willy nilly.
The specific areas I concentrate on are:
- Attributes
- Training
- Newgen generation
I can profess to know to a large extent about how attributes work in FM26 because it's clear nothing has changed fundamentally. The biggest difference is something like long shots going from completely useless to near useless. Sure, secondhand findings can be wrong, but based on doing a lot of testing myself, I have a reasonable amount of faith in HarvestGreen's findings because usually it aligns what what I find. And it depends on what it is - if HarvestGreen's talking about outfield attributes, I'll take his word. If it's GK, I'll ignore it because I know his methodology on GK is no good.
I could have chosen to simply put out FM26 files out there without mentioning that I can't verify the weightings. Who would be able to tell the difference?
The accurate picture is that I test FM24, and FM26 is largely the same to FM24 when it comes to attributes, and that I have always cautioned people that if I offer a FM26 file, it is the FM24 findings with perhaps some tweaks based on other's FM26 data added.
Angelski said: Every FM engine has its ups and downs, but systems evolve. SI has to try new mechanics for the game to move forward, even if people like you dismiss it as "garbage."
Another trigger point for me.
SI is an absolute disgrace, and I won't let this regurgitated marketing spiel get past me. If you choose to blow money on the broken game that is FM26, that's your problem. And my condolences to those who pre-ordered.
But I'm not going to sit here and listen to someone say SI is 'trying new mechanics' or that the game is simply going through 'ups and downs'. FM26 debuted as the 7th worst rated steam game in history and lost half of its users after the first month for a reason.
There are no new mechanics. I don't count OOP as a new mechanic, because it's placebo. The underlying match engine has simply been transposed with only the usual yearly tweaks of 'lets make long shots a little more important, and that a little less important'. That's why exploit tactics continue to destroy FM. Literally everything is the exact same, even the 3D graphics to me look roughly the same even though some people see it as some great improvement for whatever reason. The only substantive change has been the UI, and it's ruined the game.
The actual enjoyable parts of the game - newgen crafting, immersive narrative, attention to detail - have been methodically disassembled over the years, and FM26 represents a new low that is so bad it's literally intolerable to play for many to most. They replaced % with vague heart icons. Press conferences.. nuff said. They made transfer dealing a pain in the ass with Brexit before Brexit even happened in real life, and tedious agent, club and players interactions where they're not happy with anything - not even what sounds sensible to a reasonable person. We all know what happened to newgen faces. And they changed newgen generation so if you want to reload them, you have to go back months, and now in FM26 my initial impression having glanced through the demo is that the youth team is hidden behind so many mouse clicks that don't even want to bother dealing with newgens at all anymore - I heard that when FM26 was released, you literally couldn't even access the youth team properly!
And the heart of the game turns out to be a lie. For years we've been playing like some complex interplay between passing, decisions, vision, etc. is going on.. when in fact all of that is placebo not even taken into account by the match engine, and actually SI have deliberately been misleading its users - we know this because the players in the starting db have sets of attributes that just so happen to align perfectly with the reduced set of effectual attributes in my template. Exploit tactics put a stopper to much of the game's enjoyment years ago. The challenge is gone. I moved on to newgens, and discovered that a lot of the factors here are baloney too - for instance SI claim youth facilities affect PA; they simply don't. I still enjoy FM24 when I do play, mainly because I can raise up newgens from Div 7 to Div 1, but that seems pretty much dead now with FM26.
I could write a whole book on it. I basically already have here, but there's just so many bad things. The short of it is that the game has devolved into a mess that is too tedious to play, and in all likelihood could very well go broke and die off in the next year or two. But we'll see what FM27 looks like. Personally I expect a rehash of FM26 and further 'product diversification' as we see with the much more polished FMDB Pro they've evidently been spending a lot more of their time on, and I think shows their level of respect for you.
Angelski said: And as for your "undeniable superiority" and "dominating the field" — you admitted yourself in Post #21 that you took HarvestGreen's data, fed it into ChatGPT, and had AI output an "approximation" of attribute distributions. Taking other people's hard work, running it through an AI engine and exporting a custom GS file for a game you don't even play isn't "dominating" anything. It's just prompt engineering.
I assume you are talking about a recent post, in which case I did not use HarvestGreen's data, but my own. And I ended up discarding what ChatGPT had to say, as I was getting better results alone.
If you're talking about something months ago, I can't recall, but sometimes I do use ChatGPT to do calculations. It often has errors with complicated calculations though, so usually I use it as one would a calculator - say I want to quickly calculate 15 rows of calculations instead of manually doing '(3x3.68)x110' myself.
So a dud argument from you here. Even if it was valid, say I used AI to get half of my insights.. would that even be a problem, if it was producing valid results? AI is obviously being used a lot now, even by big companies who pay people to do work for them. Overall I think you've chosen to make a very weak point to stand on.
Kriek said: Hi George,
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the work you're sharing here. I enjoy reading your results and testing your FM24 files (even if I'm using FM26), and I've found your contributions very useful.
Not everyone will agree with every method or conclusion, but I don't see the point of repeatedly criticizing something they could simply choose not to follow. If people don't enjoy the thread, they can always ignore it.
Please keep sharing your findings. There are definitely readers like me who appreciate the time and effort you put into this.
Thanks!
Appreciate it
Here are a few suggestions I have for communicating with me:
1) Don't call me retarded, or praise those who call me retarded, if you want me to be pleasant instead of terse towards you. I enjoy 'FM Arena' living up to its name, but expect me to respond in kind, rather than expect me to submit to passive-aggressive shenanigans and the like.
2) Actually comprehend my claims before saying 'you're wrong'. I know I write a lot, I don't expect people to read everything, but you should at least have some awareness of what I'm actually claiming before attempting to prove it wrong. Sometimes people mischaracterize my ideas. I understand, naivety is innocent - if a person is initially polite to me, I give them 4 or 5 or 6 chances to take on board what I'm saying. If they persist with cherry picking or moving on to new points while ignoring the bulk of what I say, I generally start to assume they are being deliberately passive-aggressive and either have ill intent or are simply boneheaded. I have to draw the line somewhere.
3) Maybe, just maybe, do some actual testing yourself and come up with something to say of substance. I can think of two or three people in this thread who have so far. If nobody else is coming up with anything to show, how can you blame me for dominating the field?
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
This shouldn't be news to anyone who has been following my posts here.
People have asked me for FM26 GS files over time, and I have to tell them that I don't really do FM26 files because I can't test FM26 and can only provide at best some sort of adjustment based on what HarvestGreen's findings are (now there are also FM Arena test results to go by). It does work though, I'm quite sure, because attributes/the match engine in FM26 hasn't really changed much. I just can't say anything with the same certainty in regards to FM26.
Pretty sure I've always made it clear that I test in FM24 only.
You've just rocked up and are claiming I'm wrong without reading anything I've actually written. I mean what kind of response from me did you expect?
That table refers to the CA weights. In this thread recently, we are talking about attribute weightings. They are two different things. CA weights largely determine the cost of an attribute in CA; attribute weightings reflect the importance of a particular attribute in terms of performance.
Angelski said: I came here hoping to actually learn something useful, but watching someone obsessively test a "garbage game" they claim not to play is certainly a choice.
There's plenty here that's useful, and much of it is derived from the extensive testing you deride. I test FM24, not FM26. I didn't say FM24 is a garbage game, even though it does have its shortcomings, I said FM26 is.
Angelski said: I was trying to be friendly and share a genuine player's perspective
Perhaps that was your intention, but I can't help but feel a bit miffed when I'm mischaracterized. Especially when you start by saying the guy who has been harassing me and lying about me for months on end, is 'totally right'. Hope you understand, if you ever do come back to read this.
FM26 & OOP Roles: You explicitly stated "I don't test FM26" and "I don't play FM26 because it's hot garbage." Calling the in-possession and out-of-possession mechanics "placebo" based on FM24 assumptions and second-hand opinions isn't data—it's guesswork. In FM26, if a player lacks positional discipline during phase transitions, they break the team's defensive structure, regardless of speed.
You don't trust FM Arena's testing on this?
That's not a contradiction on my part, that's a disagreement between us.
Angelski said: "Roles Don't Exist": Claiming roles don't exist in FM ignores how the match engine assigns spatial duties, pressing triggers, and movement patterns. Attributes are processed through those role instructions—they don't operate in a vacuum.
Yes.. as you can see by the last edit time of the post you're responding to, I had a change of mind about which I submitted the same time you posted your response.
So I don't expect you to have seen it yet of course, but I'll restate the clarification I wish to make: Roles do exist as tactical differences, but you were denoting attributes which better fit roles, which is a different kettle of fish. Attributes do not fit certain roles better. I know this from experience testing, but I believe FM Arena has also tested this and I could dig it up if you like.
Angelski said: Off the Ball & CA Exploits: Calling Off the Ball "completely useless" and boasting about winning the Premier League with a 1 CA / 90 CA team proves @keithb's point: your setup is exploiting match engine pathfinding via broken tactics. When a tactic does 95% of the heavy lifting, claiming your changing attribute weights caused the win is pure confirmation bias.
You seem to have just completely ignored the first line of my response to you.
I'll state it again: It has been tested with default tactics.
..and to a precision of just 2% GS rating difference!
Angelski said: Templates & Balance: My point about CA balance still stands. My striker had 13–14 Pace/Acc and dominated in Europe because his high Mentals fit my tactic. Swapping him for a 19–20 Pace player with lower Off the Ball/Composure dropped performance—because raw physicals without tactical fit don't magically win matches in dynamic play.
And how do you that it was off the ball or composure specifically? Was the player identical, or even similar in every other respect?
I can tell you now that off the ball, or even composure, is not going to account for a 20 pace/acc player being worse than 13 pace/acc player.
But putting that aside, you're not proving anything. You're talking as though I have said 13-14 pace/acc players can't be near perfect players. I have stated the opposite of that, and if you actually took the time read the last 2 pages of this thread, you'd see I've been trying to make the specific point that I think the established narrative that pace/acc is everything should be regarded as outdated.
You've just barged in here and started yelling about how I'm wrong on the basis of claims I'm not even making. That's the part that gets me, not so much the naivety around the attributes, but castigating me when you clearly haven't even read what I've written. Bizarre!
Angelski said: Honestly, I came here hoping to learn something, but reading through all of this has completely killed my desire to stay in this thread or engage with the forum. It's exhausting trying to discuss normal, proper gameplay when someone running 50,000 automated holiday sims insists you're playing the wrong way unless you intentionally break the match engine.
Aw.. you poor thing.
Maybe I suggest r/footballmanagergames? Or perhaps more up your alley of falsehoods, sensitivity and low effort, the SI forums?
But if you do decide to stick around here, perhaps don't just go in bullheaded saying 'YOU'RE WRONG' with nothing to back up it but confabulations to the person you're choosing to address?
Testing players inside plug-and-play tactics proves the tactic is OP, not that attributes work like a magical spreadsheet.
It has been tested with default tactics.
Angelski said: High Pace looks great on paper, but role fit, mental attributes, and relative league quality matter far more in practice.
Roles do not exist. Even positions seem to have none or at most few attribute differences between each other, except for GK and position proficiency of course.
Edit: On reflection it might be an exaggeration to say that roles do not exist. But not by much. I guess you could point out that in meta tactics, roles are a part of it, and this not my domain. I guess what I really mean to say is that roles do not affect what attributes a player should get. So roles may have some tactical value, but you are clearly talking about getting players with attributes to fit roles, not tactical differences themselves.
Angelski said: Case in point: I used a striker with just 13–14 Pace/Acc in the Bulgarian league (where average CA starts around 95 and below). He scored 50+ goals a season, won 2 Ballon d'Ors, and helped me reach the Champions League every year—even winning it once. I eventually followed the popular advice to replace him with a 19–20 Pace/Acceleration player, and the speed replacement performed far worse overall simply because he didn't fit my tactic or have the same high Off the Ball and Composure.
The first part doesn't contradict my findings. In fact it is fully in line with my template which you can view on page 1, which shows 13-14 pace/acc is a viable minimum for the English Premier League, as exemplified by players such as Harry Kane and Robert Lewandowski.
The second part mistakes the causes. Unless you're simply playing a player completely out of position, tactics make use of all players the same way. Off the ball is a completely useless attribute that has been tested to have no effect, not just by me, but by both HarvestGreen and the FM Arena testing.
Angelski said: With FM26 introducing distinct in-possession and out-of-possession roles, the devs clearly made squad and tactical fit far more critical than just hoarding fast players to break the engine. It's about how a player fits your system across both phases, not how high their physical stats can grow.
I don't test FM26, but those who have tested it - HarvestGreen and FM Arena - have found that there are only a few minor differences in the effect of attributes, and that the new OOP thing is pretty much placebo. Again I haven't tested FM26 myself, but if the attributes effect remain largely the same as others have found, then 2/3rds of attributes remain completely useless and hoarding fast players to break the engine remains the way to go.. unless of course you prefer the more realistic and successful method, which is using my weights and following my templates. If anything, FM26 appears even more broken to me, as I notice all the top tactics are the same tactics that lack strikers and I've heard it said that they are, or at least were, more effective than Knap tactics in FM24. Maybe I'm wrong on that though, I don't play FM26 because it's hot garbage.
Angelski said: But I still don't believe that just stacking 5 attributes at 18–20 makes a player great. CA is capped at 200, so a player can't have half their stats maxed out and expect to be a complete monster without balance.
You should check out the thread where I have used a team of 1 CA players to consistently win the Premier League.
That was many months ago. Since then I've come up with a more realistic formula: No high pace/acc, no unrealistic attributes like say 16 dribbling, and a total of just ~90 CA on average. The template is on page 1, and yes, you can find similar players in the actual starting database to emulate the template - it would cost only a few mil to find and buy the right players straight off the bat to win the Premier League.
I don't know where you're getting this idea that I'm using attributes at 18-20. The template has no attribute above 15, and it's what I've been using in all my testing for ages now:
Angelski said: Even when precision is minimized down to 1–1.5%, you can never fully eliminate RNG. Focusing strictly on raw physical players just isn't the right way to look at the game.
Can't speak for you or anyone else, but 1% margin of error sounds good enough to me.
Please update yourself on the 'raw physical players' claim.
Osimhen would easily outscore and get a better rating than Maeda.
Darmstardt players have ~120 CA. The players I have added to Man City are ~90 CA. Most people use a top tactic I assume. But otherwise the 4 teams test (80%, 78%, 76%, 74%) suffices as proof of validity of the weightings whatever you take exception to, as no custom tactic, set pieces, nor custom players were used (completely default tactics, with squads of real players).
You are not even familiar with what you are arguing against.
I tested teams in one league together consisting of 80%, 78%, 76%, and 74% rated players primarily because I wanted to speed the verification process up, but I also had some other reasons in mind. One was to test the 'its too random' theory.
It's one thing to say that Haaland finishes 1st to 4th reliably as a sole player in a largely controlled team. What about when you have a whole squad of real players that's both more variable and realistic - what happens to these small % distinctions then?
You can go back a few pages and see the results, but basically it turned out that even under these conditions, the results were reliably predictable. More than even I thought they would be to be honest. I thought it's probably going to be impossible to distinguish below ~5% difference, but there were clear distinctions even with just 2% Genie Scout difference.
The randomness was seemingly too overwhelming for you to distinguish factors, because you were assessing by the wrong factors. You were looking at league points and passing ability, rather than league position and anticipation, so overall it appeared too random to you to pin down.
And you have the weights at 18 and 12 respectively? This is why I always ask questions because you come out with statements like this where it's one way for a few days then it completely flips, but you are 100% certain each time. You had one set of weights one day, I found them strange and enquire about the reasoning behind them, then you completely switch the system with massive changes and somehow it's my fault for asking. The "truth" shouldn't switch around so much, sure there is some inaccuracy and with more data we can hone in better.
I generally like that you are pursuing these questions, but the attitude "I am right and everyone else is wrong and stupid" is kind of offputting, especially when you do 180 as often as you do. Like do the tests and lets discuss if it makes sense, what are the limitations, can you approach it differently etc. You've found some interesting stuff that is unfortunately the victim of the level of discussion in here.
I could be like those guys who put out one file, call it a day, and reap the patreon/'buy me a coffee' money for the next 2-3 years off various 'Ultimate FM26 Weightings Megapack' releases while vigorously defending the unalterable truth of my findings.
The god honest truth is that my releases are haphazard and change drastically because I actually put time and effort into finding new things and don't let myself fall into the trap of getting my knickers in a knot over 'b-but what will people think of me now'.
I don't know where you're getting this work rate 18 and stamina 12 thing from. The current weights have 63 work rate, 94 stamina.
Yarema said: Like do the tests and lets discuss if it makes sense, what are the limitations, can you approach it differently etc.
That is literally what I've been doing. It's people such as yourself and keithb who have been trying to interrupt and overwhelm things by constantly posting the same tired complaints of 'you're wrong.. you're just wrong, because I know you're wrong, okay?' over and over and over again. From my perspective, more posts in the thread draw more attention to it, and allows for a kind of dialetical process where I can address normal user's critiques that aren't voiced and also realize certain things I may have done mistakenly or glossed over on occasion. And it's a damn good feeling on those days when I can suddenly present solid data to blow the BS claims out of the water.
Here's a suggestion: Perhaps stop acting like you're the last thing standing between me and human decency, and instead start doing some testing of your own to either support your claims or otherwise complement my findings. Or if you're lazy or uninterested, which is perfectly fine, simply stop insisting on tired outdated BS like 'technicals still matter somewhat' or 'attributes are mostly linear'.
Yes, including one or two of my own you'll note.
It's literally just measuring the % disparity between two players where there shouldn't be one, and saying which has the largest or smallest error.
Testing shows that on average, Maeda finishes 3 position, Osimhen finishes 3.833 position. Yet your weights show Osimhen 88.50% FS 88.37% TS, Maeda 79.80% FS 69.06% TS.
That's embarrassing for someone who insists nothing has changed since they learned 'everything' 2 or 3 years ago. Or at least I'm embarrassed for you.
it's just randomness, that not prove nothing nothing nothing about atributes...c'mon einstein scientist (never wrong) get your scientific method together and don't do this bs
You are Just misguidind people for fun
I didn't mention it, because I thought the data self-evidently refuted the ol' 🤪 iTs AlL rAnDoM aNyWaY 🤪 argument.
As an aside, I'm enjoying these text color options.
We have heard it claimed for a long time that you cannot even measure, let alone employ, various factors in the game, because the inherent volatility is supposedly too great.
Yet observe the results I recorded: When I test Haaland, I don't have him suddenly finishing 9th or 16th. His lowest result in 6 samples taken is 4th. Doesn't seem very random to me. And it's precise enough to even distinguish clearly between him and Mbappe and various other contenders, who finish 2.5 or 3 instead of 1.666.
Now there is the valid point of seasonal variation throwing a spanner into the works, because realistically we're playing for each season, not waiting around for it to eventually get it right in season 2 or 3, even if season 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 are all correct.
But I have calculated that variation and taken into account in assessing what level of certainty we can reasonably hold. I've stated before that I asked ChatGPT to combine this seasonal volatility, and the the current degree of statistical error, and it said we can be reasonably confident that to the point of +/- 7.8%. In other words, when I'm looking at GS for the best ST, I can have reasonable confidence that the best ST is going to between 83% and 90%, rather than 67% and 90% for GS default weights, or 60% and 90% for keithb's weights. I don't know if this sounds useless to you, but it doesn't to me!
More ground breaking results everyone; speed is important for centre backs as well as strikers!!
And there's more;
" 2/3rds of attributes continue to have zero effect on final season position" Who bloody knew!!
What are you even talking about when you say "The trouble with the 'pace/acc is everything' explanation is that it failed to account for players such as Kane and Lewandowski" What does that even mean?!?! They are accounted for lol.
More than half the stuff you say is just from your fantasy world. Its a complete fiction that you've created and then talk about. Its not real.
In your last testing you said jumping reach was super important for every position and now you've set it quite low. Before you said Mbappe was shit hahah. Now he's your 2nd best player lol. And lets not forget you said I was pissing in my own face for saying stamina was important haha. You said you didn't need it at all and now you say its 80%!! What level of reality are we supposed to be operating on? Because I cant operate on yours.
Keepers dont need technique
Forwards dont need concentration
Wingers and 10's can have jumping reach 1.
Centre backs dont need high stamina.
Rattling off a bunch of falsehoods doesn't make them true.
Unfortunately for you, EBFM's uploads on Youtube still exist there and can be referred to.
We see that work rate reduces in-match condition % identically to stamina. So stamina cannot be more important than work rate, or at least not more than ~20% more important say.
But the real showstopper to your argument is that in the video Max also states 'a player will use 15-20% OPC per half' while showing a match in progress that shows players that started with identical condition % and attributes, and the DL/DR condition % is indistinguishable from other positions.
That said, anecdotally I know that in standard play, fullbacks tend to use a bit more condition % than the other players. I suspect this is due to the 'best' fullbacks also tending to have high work rate. This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: People use GS weightings that select for high work rate on fullbacks, so they end up using more condition %, requiring higher stamina, and therefore favoring stamina too. But very high work rate on fullbacks isn't necessary to begin with. Testing shows that work rate above ~11-13 is largely superfluous.
We also see that 1 > 20 sta is equivalent to 100% vs 97% condition difference when starting match. We know that bad natural fitness will result in an inevitable condition difference of at least that, yet you have natural fitness weighted at 0.
In regards to jumping reach, it remains important for every player. I don't know how you consider '46' weighting low. It was in fact viable at lower values of ~20-30, but I thought 46 was more appropriate and it aligned fine. I haven't yet examined if extra jump reach is necessary on DC, which is an important remainder matter to clarify.
In your weightings, Vinicius Junior is no.1 FS, Mbappe is 2nd beating Haaland, while you have to scroll down to find Maeda below a 32-year-old colombian at Orlando City. Comparable analysis showed that your weightings have worse variance than the Genie Scout default values from a decade ago. The question I have is not how did you come up with those ratings, but how did you manage to get them to do worse than even the Genie Scout default??
Why you keep using league position as the end point still baffles me. Yes it has less variance because there are only 20 possible spots compared to lets say 100 possible points. You have to go really out of your way not to be in a +-3 places range. Additionally there is a lot more volatility in the middle of the table than at very top or bottom.
There was decent data for GKs from FM Arena, Harvestgreen, Orion and probably others and they mostly match with what you found so it's not exactly groundbreaking. Still valuable additional data from a different approach.
Yeah.. look, I've heard so much rubbish from you that you're going in the keithb category for me now.
I feel like I've given you a fair go.
I responded to your claims several times with solid evidence to the contrary, whether it was about technical attributes (aside from drib) mattering at least somewhat as you insist they do when they don't, or your claim that attributes aside from work rate are 'pretty much linear', but you just ignored my responses - even when I reminded you that I had already responded to your claims.
It's understandable to not be in the know, or double down on something you've always believed in. I did that with personality distribution in FM. But I conceded the point after looking into it. You just seem intent to repeat the same spiel of 'you're wrong' over and over, and making claims that are easily refuted with a simple lookup of what I'm referring to:
harvestgreen22 said: 2.The goalkeeper is the least important person among the 11 players.
The verification method is to select any one of the player on the field, change the given attribute, and observe the extent of the impact on the winning rate.
The impact of the goalkeeper on the winning rate is roughly only one quarter or one fifth of that of the any one players on the field.
'There was decent data for GKs from FM Arena, HarvestGreen, Orion, and probably others' - Where is it? I've addressed the HarvestGreen data in the post you're directly responding to. C'mon man.
I will address your other point for the benefit of those who are being fair-minded and just want to know the truth of how FM works.
As you state, I use league position to assess because it has much less variance than league points. It is also true that there is will be more position volatility in the mid-table than the top 6, because the quality gaps between the top 6 are likely wider than the mid-table. However, the implicit idea here that league position only seems more reliable because it compresses the volatility is misleading - what actually happens is that league position is the first outcome, and league points seems simply tacked on as a narrative for whatever reason (it is at least consistent with this hypothesis). So for instance, a team will finish 2nd most times, but one season it might get 64 points, the next it will be 84 points. One season it will be 2nd, 14 points behind, the next it's 2nd only on goal difference. And this is not just some miracle oddity, I've observed this myself literally hundreds of times. Hence, position is a much more accurate/less volatile measure of performance - and how can you argue the league position you finish in (i.e. 1st), isn't the primary goal of fiddling around with attribute distribution? Who wants to reach 80 league points and finish 7th, rather than finish 1st regardless of the league points tally?
For whatever reason it seems to me that people take FM Arena's testing rather than HarvestGreen's as a starting point, so I'll begin with that:
So we see here that stamina is moderately, not highly, important. Specifically it is 29.7% of either acceleration or pace.
Two important things to note are that points is used a measurement rather than league position, and that we are measuring from 8 > 20 stamina. It's not clear what the makeup of the team or opposition is, but at least it's giving us a fair idea of what to expect in any case.
We see here in HarvestGreen's latest result for stamina that is it 27.1% of acceleration or pace going from 1 > 18.
For 6 > 18 it is 14.1% of acceleration or pace. In other words, stamina is never critical, but becomes even less important beyond '6'. He also has 1 > 6 results showing this.
In his initial attribute test shown here, stamina 10 > 20 is 30.9% of acceleration, which in my view is the most important result in regards to application to the Premier League.
In keithb's GS weightings, stamina is weighted at 60 for DLR/WBLR/DM/MC, 20 for AMLR/ST, and 0 for DC.
What this no doubt reflects is the now outdated myth that different positions require different sets of attributes. This is not an article of faith for me; I myself used to believe in, and initially employed, weightings that varied per position. Partly this was because each position has different CA weightings for attributes, and so high stamina for low CA cost on fullbacks seemed like a boon. I suspect that the myth has been generally perpetuated throughout the years with the CA weightings as a primary impetus, and that keithb isn't even aware of this - he seems to just think that stamina is what's necessary to win, simple as that. My mind was changed by the test results.
What my test results found, and seemingly implicitly HarvestGreen's & FM Arena's too, is that pace/acc is just as critical on DC as it is on ST, many attributes such as 'tackling' or 'passing' don't matter at all for any position, and if you try to test for positional differences, there doesn't appear to be any, or at least many. There might be still be some differences - I'm still wondering if pace & acc are of equal importance across all positions for instance, but overall we're talking small differences, not major ones.
Through brute force testing, I found that stamina of 13 is the essential requirement for the Premier League, while pace/acc is 15:
However, you can get away with as low as ~13 pace/acc (think Harry Kane, or Lewandowski), so long as stamina is ~15 or higher. Conversely, a 20 pace/acc player has less need of stamina, and can get away with 12 and no doubt lower.
So if you put all that together, basically stamina should be weighted at ~33% of pace/acc, is what I found.
So you can think of it as either 33% or 86% of acc, perhaps somewhere inbetween. So ~50% roughly. This was a change from the ~15% I previously used, which was primarily based on HarvestGreen's 14.1% 10 > 20 finding.
With my latest weightings, which wipe the slate clean of assumptions and simply try to align weightings with actual real player rankings supported by test results as evidence, I found that only somewhere around ~90% weighting for stamina worked - or ~90-110% of acc. This is far more than even keithb's 60% weighting for sta on fullbacks.
But why is that necessary, and why does it work if so? It is necessary because someone such as Maeda or Furuhashi has very few green attributes, yet ranks above the likes of both all-rounders such as Lewandowski and fairly well rounded high pace/acc players such as Osimhen. If you analyze it carefully (you need to compare multiple players in conjunction to find out it can't be his high work rate, det, aggression, etc.), the only way to make the rankings align seems to be to boost stamina to such a high weight. Perhaps I've missed some other option, but this where I'm at. As to the explanation as to why it is so, it makes more sense once you realize that stamina is preserving both pace and acc, so its value is doubled, and it is preserving the two most valuable attributes.
No one that I'm aware of has previously come to these conclusions about stamina. Even the overlap between this and the old 'stamina for fullbacks' myth doesn't extend this far. And it puts a big dent I reckon in the general pervading view that pace/acc is everything, which was always sort of heard of, but never really solid fact until HarvestGreen's findings. The trouble with the 'pace/acc is everything' explanation is that it failed to account for players such as Kane and Lewandowski. It would be (and still is by some even on this forum!) explained away as compensated by high technical skill such as passing, etc. which is a red herring - these technical skills really are completely useless, and the differences lie in other areas such as stamina, work rate, anticipation, and a handful of select others. 2/3rds of attributes continue to have zero effect on final season position.
Let's start with GKs:
HarvestGreen did 2 seperate tests on GKs.
December 2024:
April 2026:
The first thing I'll draw your attention to is that the results seemingly contradict each other. In the 1st test, acceleration does little to nothing. In the 2nd, it is the third most important attribute, above aerial reach which got a tick in the 1st test. Vision got 2 ticks in the first test, but does nothing in the 2nd test. There are more examples like this.
In skawkclsrn's case the issue is lack of samples, but here the issue is the methodology:
- The 1st test is using a team with 10 in every attribute, and increasing a single GK attribute to 20, then measuring the goals conceded. The first two aspects underlined are potential problematic factors, for instance what if a GK needs better reflexes and agility because the outfield is deficient in speed - perhaps with a speedy team, a GK only needs aerial reach to handle potshots he can see coming from afar. That is just a minor critique to show even solid tests can have pitfalls. The real problem is measuring the goals conceded, because as shown in my testing results, goals conceded is not at all a consistent measure of success, similar to how league points is all over the place compared to final league position. It will give some correlation, hence why agility, reflexes, and aerial reach all correctly have ticks, but that is just because teams who finish 1st obviously concede less goals than teams that finish 20th.
- The 2nd test is starting with the GK at '20' in all attributes and setting 1 attribute to '1'. This is different to how HarvestGreen does his outfield tests, which increase/decrease from '10'/'12' for all attributes, and it's obviously less realistic to begin with. But the main issue, only evidenced by my own testing later, is that having all attributes at '20' is likely compensating for and obscuring certain deficiencies. So we see that reflexes and agility are pretty much the only 2 attributes that matter, and even then, their individual impact is fairly minimal (12.8% at most).
HarvestGreen also stated that his observation is that GK is 20% of effect of an outfield player, if I remember correctly, which is basically saying the GK should be an afterthought and not really worth worrying about.
All of his tests also carry the same caveat that he is testing against opposition that has identical attributes. For some attributes, such as Jumping Reach, Aerial Reach, Strength, etc. I hope it's obvious how this could constitute a problem when it comes to translating to how things work in real leagues.
Now, coming to my tests. I brute force tested individual attributes for GK until I got a solid picture of what an optimal GK looks like. So what I would do is I would start with all attributes at 1, except a few obviously necessary ones like agil, aer, ref, etc. and measure the position. The initial result might be 13th. Then I would increase each attribute from '1' to '20' and measure the improvement. If no improvement in position, ignore it going forward. After learning what attributes matter and which don't, I would begin refinement, seeing how low I could get an attribute to find the 'sweet spot'. And I also start testing those attributes I took for granted at the start: agil, aer, ref. I would test a few potential combos (i.e. does aer only matter if jump is high?), but obviously it can't be an exhaustive search. Now what I would most often find is something like this:
'10' = relegated
'12' = relegated
'13' = 8th
'14' = 5th
'15' = 4th
'16' = 4th
'18' = 3rd
'20' = 3rd
Usually I would choose 14 to settle on. But if '13' is relegated, or '18' is 1st, then obviously I would likely change that to a '15' - while also considering realistic availability in the game.
Now these are the essential GK attributes I ended up with:
We see from my latest comparative testing of real players within the game, that this player would constitute something of a middling Premier League team GK. This GK finishes ~7th, the best finishes 4th, Barcelona's finishes 6.4, and a League 1 GK finishes 8.4.
One key attribute that is hidden from that screenshot is technique, which turns out to be quite critical for GK. You can also see this reflected in the database data for GKs - the better the GK, the higher technique he is generally given. I actually notice for the first time now that HarvestGreen actually gave a tick next to technique in his 1st test, though in the 2nd it is listed as 0.0%.
It's not clear yet exactly how much a GK accounts for as a % of a team's overall performance, but we can see the GK is more critical to success than HarvestGreen gave the GK credit for. My current estimation is somewhere around ~66-100% of an outfield player.
So we know my template works. Let's compare to what we 'knew 2 years ago', which is HarvestGreen's data and nothing else:
- HarvestGreen found vision and pace, and later reflexes, to be the most important attributes. I found vision '1', pace '13', and reflexes '11' are adequate, while aerial reach is the most essential attribute.
- HarvestGreen summed up that GK is has 20% impact of outfield player. My evidence shows it's much more than that, even the difference between relegation and a top 5 finish at times.
- Generally speaking, there was no solid data on GK at all previously. Now I've provided you with a precise template for GK that is backed by solid evidence in the form of testing both real & artificial players in a real and popular league (English Premier League).
If I've missed anyone else's findings on GKs, that was any good, let me know.
Alisson - 6th, 3rd, 4th, 4th, 3rd = 4 position
Thibaut Courtois - 3rd, 7th, 2nd, 5th, 8th = 5 position
Jan Oblak - 5th, 8th, 6th, 4th, 3rd = 5.2 position
Marc-Andre ter Stegen - 10th, 11th, 4th, 4th, 3rd = 6.4 position
Anatolii Trubin - 15th (sacked), 6th, 4th (sacked), 5th = 7.5 position
Jack Stevens - 13th (sacked), 4th, 9th (sacked), 8th (sacked), 8th (sacked) = 8.4 position
Sinan Bolat - 4th, 2nd, 19th (sacked), 5th, 14th (sacked), 9th (sacked), 12th (sacked), 5th = 8.75 position
I removed Courtois' starting injury to test him.
It shows that GK does in fact matter, though it does seem a lot more variable - in the downwards direction.
So although a GK can't really make your team win much more, they can in fact make or break your team.
Observations through player comparison:
- Jack Stevens is a mediocre all rounder who normally plays for Cambridge, and show you can't really get away with playing mediocre GKs
- Bolat is interesting.. he is like Stevens, but a tier above, but has green reflexes and jumping reach. Shows good reflexes aren't sufficient.
- Trubin, like Bolat, also significantly underperforms. He has green Aer, Jump and Handling. None of these are sufficient alone therefore, even with seemingly above average values in all other areas.
We know that the following GK finishes ~5th and with good consistency too:
This GK finished 7th:
It seems like only a select few of real GKs can do better than the above players.
If I filter for attributes of that second GK (excluding natural fitness), no players come up.
It seems that GK is about what is the least worst deficiency do they have. I suspect it is this way so that, unlike the outfield, you don't get great GKs who make teams come 1st by the mere addition of themselves. Perhaps this also explains why GKs can't get really high match ratings, because their best is merely adequate.
Trubin has a slightly deficiency in determination, pace, acceleration. Alisson is only lacking 1 pace. Oblak slightly lacks first touch, acceleration, and agility.
To verify the theory, I reduced the filter by 1 for the attributes and tested the worst one of the 4 players that turned up (1 was Ederson @ Man City, 2 were Alisson and his backup GK @ Liverpool, and the worst was Davy Roef from AA Gent).
Davy Roef - 13th (sacked), 4th, 14th (sacked), 6th (sacked), 1st = 7.6 position
High variation, but the average result aligns with extra 1 in key attributes finishing ~7th
BTW it's stuff like Alisson's backup GK just coincidentally having exactly the right set of meta attributes that shows me SI are aware of and intentionally making most attributes useless and misleading. If it was an oversight, players that look like duds but nonetheless perform well and are placed in the top teams wouldn't be an identifiable pattern.
Now I know quite a few people are also interested in what kind of GK gives the most clean sheets, or lowest goals conceded. So here are those stats:
Alisson - 13 cln, 48 con | 14 cln, 39 con | 15 cln, 40 con | 14 cln, 36 con | 11 cln, 44 con = 13.4 cln, 41.4 con
Thibaut Courtois - 9 cln, 41 con | 12 cln, 48 con | 10 cln, 56 con | 10 cln, 45 con | 11 cln, 50 con = 10.4 cln, 48 con
Jan Oblak - 8 cln, 49 con | 11 cln, 43 con | 10 cln, 59 con | 14 cln, 34 con | 15 cln, 40 con = 11.6 cln, 45 con
Marc-Andre ter Stegen - 4 cln, 58 con | 10 cln, 53 con | 11 cln, 52 con | 13 cln, 44 con | 14 cln, 46 con = 10.4 cln, 50.6 con
Anatolii Trubin - 10 cln, 46 con
Davy Roef - 14 cln, 45 con | 13 cln, 44 con = 13.5 cln, 44.5 con
Jack Stevens - 16 cln, 41 con
Sinan Bolat - 14 cln, 50 con | 10 cln, 52 con | 9 cln, 53 con | 8 cln, 54 con = 10.25 cln, 52.25 con
I only took stats from samples where there was no interruption by sacking.