How much are players worth?

Nothing like a rhetorical title to confuse everyone I like to think, but it's a question that every manager thinks about several times a session in FML? Why? Well maybe because FML has more in common with Command & Conquer or Warcraft III than Pro Evo or FIFA 09. It's a resource management game where you have two resources if you will; players and cash.

Lionel Messi (having slated him in the last article) has just been transferred for what I guess is a server record of £18m. Is he worth it? Well according to the in game banter and endless reply to alls on the discussion lists (and yes I know they have to be reply to alls) yes and/or no. Simple.

Some managers don't understand how the buying manager can afford £18m. A quick butchers at his transfers tabs will demonstrate a methodical approach (built up over shared beta worlds) where he generated as much cash as possible in the first week, then went on a focused trading strategy to generate our second resource from above, cash. He has now started to convert that cash into talent - namely Messi (plus others in his squad). Now obviously there are changes afoot in January to prevent this type of approach, and as realism goes it again demonstrates that FML is vastly different to FMxx. It's not a simulation, it's fantasy football, it's trading players like shares (or meat if you prefer), it's a RTS game.

But is Messi worth £18m? He's young, one of the top 5 players in the gameworld, has one of the highest if not the highest potential (197/200 in FM08) and if played correctly will obviously improve the quality of a team. He will obviously be an asset for a long time, and there is little chance that he would be sold for profit given the high cash figure. Yet to determine whether he is worth the money we must consider what alternatives are on offer.

Could two almost as good players be bought for the same amount? Almost definitely yes. An example of this would be if you compare the abilities of Messi and a bunch of random other good players purely by comparing their current abilities as per FM08 (and senior players don't change much year on year) you would see that Messi is 11% better than Breno, 11% better than Adrien, 6% better than Rooney, 26% better than Javi Martinez and 25% than Gareth Bale. I reckon any two of those players could be bought for £18m.

I'd like to return to an old article written about acquisition fees. AFs make good players look better than they are because the increments change in size on the scale. At the top end, increments change in units of £250,000, around the average level of £100,000 AF they move in blocks of £10,000. A change for Fabregas from £3.25m to £3.5m looks huge, but is in fact the same movement of £100k to £110k for Oliver Kapo. Is Fabregas worth 30 times the value of Kapo? No - he's 29% better (180 current ability / 140 current ability minus 1). The best value for money players are in the £150k to £350k range. A team full of £300k AF players would win most of their games. Purely looking at AF tends to give the impression that the good players are so much better than the above average players when it is just not true. Because the scale is not linear the better players get exponentially more expensive the higher you go up the scale. There are a bunch of average £1m AF players who are no better, and often if they have high reputation somewhat worse, than the best £250k players.

If it was me, I'd take £18m for Messi, I don't think I would bid that much for him. £18m for me would represent 4-5 first team players who would collectively improve my starting 11 and increase the standing of my club. Again, as mentioned in a previous article the best deal I saw struck in beta was Fabregas for Baylon, Caio, Javi Martinez, Alex Teixiera and £2m. Four first team players with lower wages than Cesc plus cash - improved the team, reduced the wage bill and increased the cash balance. That is the definition of a good deal and is hard to dispute. You can easily dispute the Messi deal. Personally I think that many of the top names are vanity buys - favourite players IRL, trophy players or commodities ready to be sold on for a profit.

FML is Command & Conquer or Warcraft III not Emlyn Hughes' Soccer, Sensible Soccer, Kick Off, Football Director or Match Day. What goes on off the pitch is not the prelude to what happens on the pitch, it's the vast majority of the game.

End of season player review and awards

So season one of Saunders is about to end and I thought I would take a look at the player statistics for the season. Any form of interpretation of analysis should focus on determining what is there that shouldn't be there and what isn't there that should be there. So are the usual suspects at the top of the average ratings? Or is there someone unfancied who crept in? And importantly who is missing?

Below are a number of lists featuring the leading players using different criteria. All players mentioned have at least 50 appearances to remove outliers. Where specific stats are looked at, a minimum number is applied as an addition feature. For example you can't look at crossing percentage and include DCs who have made only 1 cross in a season - so a minimum of 200 crosses was applied.

Highest average rating - The Lionel Messi Award

1. Kaka - 7.75
2. Cristiano Ronaldo - 7.67
3. Lucio - 7.57
4. Luca Toni - 7.49
5. Dani Alves - 7.46



No surprises with Kaka being top. 147 goals in 141 games suggests he is playing AMC and taking the set pieces. Lucio's goal every other game helps boost him to 3rd on the list - someone obviously knows how to use him at corners. And Dani Alves (my favourite player in FML) demonstrates a defender can make it right to the top. But where is Messi? He finished outside the top 50 with a still respectable 7.27 average rating.


Highest goals per game ratio - The Samuel Eto'o Award

1. Kaka - 1.04
2. Luca Toni - 0.97
3. Wayne Rooney - 0.91
4. Fernando Torres - 0.91
5. Didier Drogba - 0.85


Again few surprises, although Kaka has done well to outscore his illustrious company. I guess the lesson here is, regardless of cost, the best strikers will always get you goals. You have to drop to number 19 on the list to find a striker with an acquisition fee less than £500k, Aston Villa's veteran targetman John Carew who scored 310 in 411. The award was named after Eto'o, because even in his 'terrible' season last year he scored 16 in 17 for Barca in the league.


Highest average rating for an Under 19 - The Ian Olney Award

1. Gareth Bale
2. Miralem Pjanic
3. Gabriel Torje
4. Mario Balotelli
5. Toni Kroos


There is some real talent in this list. These players represent some of the most sought after in the game. Gareth Bale averaged 7.23 in senior football games, and that figure is not boosted by being the set piece taker. Right on his heals is Miralem Pjanic, the young Bosnian. As the old adage goes if you are good enough you are old enough. I doubt many regens will ever attain this level of excellence by the age of 18 or 19. Aside from Balotelli, all the others have multiple PPMs.


Highest avg rating - under £100k Acquisition Fee - The Eduardo Albacar Award

1. Alvaro Recoba
2. Marek Heinz
3. Walter Jimenez
4. Sebastian Abreu
5. Frode Johnsen


So yes, it is still worth buying Alvaro Recoba. 157 goals and 250 assists in 408 games and a chart topping rating of 7.32. All for an initial fee of £26k. Not many £26k players have wage demands of £12k a day but he is definitely worth it, and if you ever come across a player with high wages and low acquisition fee it's always worthwhile digging a bit deeper to see why. A year younger at 31, Heinz cost just £24k on his way to averaging 7.32 too. Special mention also goes to Sebastian Abreu who at 32, banged in 93 in 128 games.


Most tackles per game - The John Terry Award

1. James McEveley
2. Jose Buricaga Jr
3. Vitaliy Fedoriv
4. Sam Koskinen
5. Sebastien Pocognoli

Former Blackburn prospect James McEveley topped the average tackles per match rating - maybe helped by the work he had to get through for his 588th ranked manager. I sometimes think that having to make tackles means that players are out of position or you are not dominating possession enough. I personally prefer interceptions to tackles.

Most dribbles per game - The Robinho (at home) Award

1. Mauro Rosales
2. David Odonkor
3. Teo
4. Dani Alves
5. Maicon


Some more familiar names in this list - particularly arguably two of the best DRs in the game in Maicon and Alves. With an average of over 9 dribbles per match Rosales represents a real threat down the right flank and also rather worryingly for opposition managers has 17 for crossing. Some hard tackling and tight marking required for this guy I think.


There is a veritable treasure trove of information under the player statistics tab in All Players. Sensible managers should use it to inform their transfer policy. Any player that can average 7 without taking set pieces or be the dominant DC at corner time is worth consideration. Whilst the Acquisition Fee snobs only look at £1m+ players, a clever manager digs deeper and finds the bargains that can do a job for them.

Playing the futures market

When setting up your initial squad it's a good idea to buy a couple of the best teenagers you can find. Two is plenty because unless you are going down the road of youth development, young players won't contribute too much in the first season and if they are any good a significant amount of your initial £500,000 budget will be spent on them. Many managers start off with this strategy, but kind of give up after a week or two and sell these young wonderkids on for a quick buck.

The trouble with this strategy is nobody has any money in the first two weeks. Selling is the easy option. A much better strategy is to hold onto the player until the conditions are perfect to sell. I'll explain with an example.

I get probably two offers a day for Gai Assulin, the young Israeli Barca player (pictured). Best offer so far, and we're still in season one, is £1.5m. He cost me £85k in my initial squad (17% of my budget). But as someone so young, he is going to be popular with youth focused managers for a number of years yet. Yes I could cash in now, but £1.5m isn't buying much on the open market. Most £80k AF players are listed for £1m-£2m - not good value (12-25 times AF). However what if I find a youth manager who has two 21 year olds, oh say Ryan Babel and Christian Maidana for example. He could sell those guys at the end of the season because they can't play youth football next season. Or he could trade them to someone like me who is sitting on arguably one of the best 17/18 year olds in the game who will give him 3-4 more seasons at the U21 level. I get two ready made first teamers, who I could sell for even more money than Assulin if they don't work out - or more than likely I keep as first picks. Babel and Maidana are probably worth £1m in AFs, Assulin currently £130k - but 22 year olds are worth nothing to youth managers.

Youth managers are often irrational in their pursuit of wonderkids. They will spend far more on potential ability than current ability. Will Assulin ever be better than Deco? Probably not. Is he worth more than Deco? Probably yes - if you are a youth manager. Our role is not to question the sanity of those youth managers but to make a tidy profit out of them.

My favourite time of the year

Gameworld Saunders is coming to the end of it's first season and we are three days away from the start of the first contract expiry period. Many managers who have not had the chance to play the beta will have never experienced one of these events before. I have written previously about how to approach this, but I think it's worthwhile going over the basics again. I also strongly advise any manager to read the relevant elements of the game guide (http://manual.fmlive.co.uk/?q=node/142 - which I wrote during beta).

Firstly, it's a really bad time to try to sell players. Managers are not going to pay over the odds for your players if there are cheaper alternatives available at Acquisition Fee. Equally, it's a pretty daft time to buy players on the auction too - if you can you find better alternatives for cheaper prices.

Secondly, if you are worried about your players being poached (and if they are any good they will be) - sell them before the chaos begins. As soon as you play your last official game, list the players you want to sell. I have three players from my initial squad who are up for renewal who I don't want to protect (because they are not good enough). Two of these guys are decent and will be bid on by someone else. The other player (Alessandro - currently serving a 5 match FA ban) I am hoping someone does bid for! So the first two are going to be listed asap because I can probably get 3 times AF now rather than 1 times AF next week when they leave.

Thirdly, avoid auctions with 20+ bids already made - your chances of winning are slim to none. Find players that nobody else rates; bid big and bid late.

Follow these three rules and you should start next season with more money, better players and a manageable wage bill.

Tough trading conditions

It's tough out there - ask Woolworths - nobody wants to buy but worse nobody wants to sell.

A few weeks into season one of Saunders and for the amount of active managers very few players are changing hands. I often count the number of players with an AF of over £100k on the auctions as an indicator of how liquid the market is at any one time (if the figure is low it's a good time to sell at a premium; if it's high there should be some bargains out there).

In a quiet market it's sometimes tempting to buy regardless of the quality available, but this is the wrong thing to do. The resale value of your potential targets is just as important as the job they can do for your team. If you are tempted to buy Marco Materazzi for £1m to sure up your defense, remember that he's probably only got one season left which means no time for anyone else to buy him from you before the 'R' of death icon appears next to his name. Only buy players who you know you can easily sell in a season's time. If they don't work out you get your money back - which is more Marks and Spencer than Woolsworths. And if you can be like John Lewis Partnership and never knowingly pay more for a player than you have to - you will do well in the long term.

I enquired about a former beta player of mine this week called Pablo Mouche. He was a super sub for me in GW15, great turn of pace, left footed, cool penalty taker and a penchant for supplying late goals with his drives to the byline. Given that very few people rate him I thought I could grab him for maybe £150-250k, given that he was previously listed at £300k and nobody bid. Unfortunately after my enquiry he was subsequently sold for £900k+. This tells me two things -1) my interest probably helped increase the price of any other offers out there and 2) the market must really be depressed if someone like him is going for nearly £1m.

You can often find absolute bargains like Mouche by filtering for key attributes and then combining the results with a low average rating. Strikers who make most of their appearances from the bench will struggle to average 6.7-6.8. This is not a problem - it's a massive opportunity. It's your negotiation point to bring up with the current manager and explain what a favour it is that you are prepared to take his rubbish player off his hands. Strikers are always without fail overpriced on auctions, so you are better off trying to negotiate private transfers for fringe players - especially from managers who prefer 451 and therefore are happy to sell their 2nd, 3rd or 4th ranked striker. I play with 3 strikers in my lineup, so unless I get a silly offer I wouldn't consider offers for my 4 playing strikers, only the 5th choice down. 451 guys are completely different. And I say fringe players because unless you have millions to spend nobody is going to sell you their best strikers.

Tough trading conditions require tough transfer negotiation styles. If in doubt, hold onto your money. Negotiation with managers for players they are underrating. Ignore average ratings for strikers - goals are far more important - especially for subs. If the auction market looks barren it's probably a good time to sell at inflated prices - but remember it's going to be difficult to replace anyone you sell - so only sell players who do not directly impact the quality of your team - like your reserve strikers.

Initial squad dilemmas

The Saunders gameworld kicked off on Friday evening and the servers performed better than I have ever seen them with such a large load. I somehow managed to be one of the first people into the world, so counting my good fortune I decided to sign a few players that will form the backbone of my new team.

I think the approach of signing a couple of decent players and then getting whatever you can with the rest of your money is better than get a well balanced squad. Most of your initial squad will have been dumped somewhere between season one and two. I decided to buy a striker, a playmaker and a central defender. Whilst I had a few lists from previous beta game world launches, I knew who I wanted the most.




Firstly I signed Daniel Montenegro, the Argentinian playmaker. Whilst he is already 29, he is one of the best cut price playmakers I have seen in the game. His shoots from distance and shoots with power PPMs, plus his set piece ability make him a real attacking force. Montenegro currently has 10 goals in 19 games. Signed for £110k Montenegro is now worth £190k.






Secondly I signed Asamoah the powerful Ghanian striker. He served me well in GW15 and was very popular with other managers. I played him slightly out of position then, preferring Wanderley in the key striker position which at the time I thought might have been a mistake. Asamoah currently has 17 goals in 18 games. He was signed for £130k and is currently worth £250k.



Thirdly I wanted a DC that could last throughout this season and single handedly hold my defensive line together. I was impressed by Oguchi Onyewu in a previous gameworld. He's a big American defender - very strong - but a bit slow. I signed him for £85k and he is now worth £130k.


So £325k spent on three players. I then signed two good youngsters in Gui Assulin and Alex Nimo. Both have high potential and can be protected under youth contracts at the end of the season. This cost me another £100k so I was left with £75k to sign 11 players. Tomi Petrescu apart - the other guys probably won't be around at the end of the season.

Yesterday I hastily signed Javier Pinola when I realised the left back I signed can't really play left back very well - he was a wing back only. Always a good idea to check the positions tab on any player you sign. I did the same thing with Lucas Trecarichi in GW15. Pinola is a solid left back and won't need replacing any time soon.

Before the season kicks off I am hoping to add a couple more faces to the squad - a striker and a central defender. Having signed Pinola yesterday I missed out on Upson - which in hindsight is another mistake because I think Upson is a better player - and has the pace to cover for Onyewu. I guess the point here is managers make mistakes all the time. It's not a problem making mistakes - it's how you react to them and what you do to correct things. Considering a restart every time you think something went wrong is not the right way to go. FML is a long term game, immediate success comes to very few managers - and even fewer good managers. It takes a couple of seasons to sort out the good from the great - so don't get put off by a few minor setbacks early doors - as Big Ron would have said.

First taste of retail

The volume of posts on the official FML forums has risen dramatically over the last week. Even experienced beta testers were getting the jitters as the launch of the game came closer. And whilst there were a few issues for some players, the servers launched pretty much on time. Lag was noticeably lower than at the launch of a beta gameworld.

Community is really important in FML, and beta testers have the opportunity to help those guys new to the game and lend the mods a hand in answering those same questions that keep coming up:

1. You have to play 10 games to get ranked
2. You don't get your full daily income allowance until you are ranked
3. No you can't cancel a bid. The reason is if you could cancel your bid, managers would put bids in to force the price up and then simply withdraw their bid.
4. It's considered bad manners not to talk to your opponent during a game. At least say gl (good luck) at the beginning and gg (good game) at the end - it's our culture
5. Yes the lobby is full of 14 year olds talking themselves up - give them a break they just don't know any better yet
6. If you have a question don't suffer in silence - type your question into the help chatroom - and many managers will be happy to help
7. Always be learning a skill - the next one doesn't start automatically

Which reminds me, I need to log in and start Finance level 3.

Great teams are built on defense

There is a reason why many world class players end up playing for teams ranked over 250. That's because the top teams take their defense very seriously and that's where they spend a great deal of their money. There is no point having Fernando Torres up front if you central defenders are going to get run a merry dance by a couple of mediocre opponents in their attack.

Central defenders are one of the most important positions in your team. You should aim for central defenders with a AF of over £200k each. Good central defenders have both high mental attributes and high physical attributes. Never buy a central defender with less than 11 (at an absolute minimum) pace. Having a left footed DC on the left of your pair can help you in possession - but it's no deal breaker. You should aim for one DC dominant in the air, and the other one fast and alert (anticipation).

To get the most out of your defensive unit you should learn a few tactical skills. Tackling, individual tackling, individual marking, tight marking, offside trap and show onto other foot can all help. The only problem being you will end up making a bunch of tactical changes at the start of every match to map out your individual marking plan. This will change depending on how the opposition line up looks when their team is first submitted. Here are few examples.

451

Against 451 you central defenders only have one striker to mark. Remember the strong and fast DCs I mentioned earlier? This is why you need them. The strong DC marks the loan striker - change his marking to specific and click the striker (tight marking), the fast defender is switched to zonal marking with tight marking turned off. This will allow him to sweep and deal with onrushing midfielders who join the attack. Because there is less covering for your fullbacks in this formation, I favour switching them to tight, specific marking on their wingers too. If you are really anal (like me) you might also want to check out the play of the opposition fullbacks. If they are playing aggressively you could assign your strikers to closely mark them too. However this is will limit your ability to counter attack.

442

Against a flat 442, tight and specific marking on both strikers. Only if one is a known to drop deep (ie Totti or Rooney) or is being played deeper should you hold off this strategy. A DC following a striker into no mans land creates massive gaps in your defensive line. Your defensive minded midfielder should also track the opposition's most aggressive MC/AMC. Look at the attributes of their strikers. If they are both fast strikers set your d-line deep and ensure closing down is set to a minimum. If your defenders are roughly equal in pace - send your d-line up high.

Weird formations

Some managers play weird formations in an attempt to fool the match engine or you. One pain to play against is a formation with no striker. Somestimes this comes as a 4-6-0 formation that many claim that Man Utd played last year. Sometimes you see two wingers push right up to the top line and no striker with the AMC plus MCs breaking forward. Anyway - both are a pain because your DCs get confused about who they should be marking. Many standard formations make your DCs man mark. Against these formations make sure your marking is set to zonal for DCs and tight-specific man marking on the wingers with your fullbacks. Also ensure your fullbacks are set to forward runs rarely. Man marking fullbacks should not be given too much to do in possession - they need to find their man and stick with him. Sometimes it pays to keep attacking fullbacks and defending fullbacks in your squad and swap them against the right opponent.

Most of this advice is aimed at managers wanting to reach the top 50 and who want to compete in the premier leagues and cups. Speaking of which, congratulations to Jim Furlong and his wonderful This is Anfield team who beat me 1-0 in the All Evening FA Cup Final yesterday. Jim and I got promoted together in the first season to the All Evening Premiership so I knew what his team would bring - unfortunately I just couldn't enough about it. As the beta ends tomorrow I have closed the doors on beta. I was ranked 4 last night and have maintained a top 10 position for quite a while now - so I am confident for beta. I also had to switch from Blissett to Saunders due to the change in launch dates.

Understanding match stats

Don't you just hate it when you lose 0-1 despite having 70% of possession and creating 20 chances to 1? Those are the results that stick in the mind, but in reality there is probably nothing you could have done to change a result like that. However reviewing the match and player stats whilst the game is in progress are key to making those changes that can affect the result before the final whistle.


The match stats page contains the following statistics:

• Possession % - you should be aiming for 55-60% when playing attacking football
• Shots - you can't score if you don't shoot, but sometimes high shots are bad
• On target - 50%+ of all shots is good
• Off target - 50%+ of all shots is bad
• Blocked - due to good defending or poor decision making
• Long Range - the bane of most managers; you want to keep this figure low
• Clear Cut Chances - chances you 'should' have scored from - measure against your goals
• Corners - indicates the amount of pressure you are applying outside of your chances
• Free Kicks - how many times your players were fouled
• Throw Ins - ignore
• Fouls Committed - how many times your players foul - compare with Free Kicks
• Offsides - if it's high either the opposition push up or you have a culprit in your team
• Passes Completed % - below 75% is unacceptable unless you are a direct team
• Crosses Completed % - 25% is decent, 40% is outstanding
• Tackles Won - 75%+ is superb
• Headers Won - not as important as the individual player version
• Yellow Cards - self evident
• Red Cards - self evident
• Rating - again not as important as the individual player version

Goals win games but not all shots are good news. Many teams have high shot totals and managers get upset when the team with less shots wins. It's important to analyse two factors over time with your own team.

Firstly how accurate are your players at getting shots on target? Too low an accuracy rate may mean you are forcing or encouraging your players to take too many shots from very optimistic positions. Too high a setting for creative freedom, high attacking mentality and high tempo all contribute to taking too many shots. A more defensive, slower tempo, short passing game will result in less chances overall but chances of higher quality. The accuracy of your strikers is obviously a contributing factor too. Many managers (including myself) prefer fast strikers and then get upset when their 12 finishing 12 composure star striker can't find the bottom corners with any consistency or regularity.

If you find yourself creating loads of chances but not scoring many goals, try slowing things down, shorten up your passes and setting striker mentality lower.

Secondly, too many long shots flatter to deceive. It's wonderful if you have Wesley Sneijder in attacking midfield with 20 long shots, but most mortal players cannot regularly hit the back of the net from distance. If you set players' settings to frequent long shots, they will take more long shots than they are naturally inclined to do, a bit like Frank Lampard at the World Cup in 2006. If 50%+ of your overall shots are long shots you have got to reduce the amount of times you are asking your players to shoot from distance. However, if you are playing against a packed defence, without a world class playmaker to pick the lock your players will have to resort to shooting from distance. As a manager you need to decide when it's your settings that are causing this and when it's the style of the opposition.

The way I read Clear Cut Chances is, on another day the chance should have been a goal. The ratio of CCCs to Shots is a measure of the quality of your chances. The ratio of CCCs to Goals is how good your finishing is. It's kind of the opposite of mistakes leading to goals - because only defenders really commit these - this is the striker's version.

Passing completion percentage is also an important statistic. If you rate is 80%, there is a 50% chance you team will string 3 passes together (80%x80%x80%). If you pass completion rate is 70% there is a 34% chance your team will string 3 passes together. Defenders should be averaging 75% completion, midfielders anywhere from 75% to 85% and attackers 80%. Sometimes if you are very cautious with your play you can achieve high completion rates without ever creating a chance. Whilst technically defenders are not as good at passing as their colleagues in midfield, they shouldn't be under anywhere near the pressure your midfielders are under. Any defender who can't average 70% completion in passing is an accident waiting to happen in your team. Giving the ball away in your own half is a sin. You could also be contributing to a low completion rate by instructing your defenders to be too progressive with their passing. For example instructing low passing attritubes fullbacks to play through ball often is akin to just giving the ball to their goalkeeper. Goalkeepers themselves often have pass completion rates of 40%. If you are a passing team you should instruct your keeper to throw the ball out short.

Average rating can also sometimes be misleading. Ratings are massively boosted by assists and goals. Mistakes and penalties given away significantly reduce a player's rating. Your set piece taker's stats will look different to everybody else and you need to factor that into your calcluations too. Your job as manager is to see beyond the average rating of your players. My personal favourite stat is key passes. If your players are making key passes they are generating chances. Regardless of their rating if a player is making several key passes I would never take them off. Experienced managers will not look at average rating to judge a performance, they will look for the other signs mentioned above.

Understanding attributes

Every outfield player has 36 individual attributes that make up their player profile. That's a lot of data. They also have a number of hidden attributes that we can't see including dirtiness, consistency, important match temperament, injury proneness, sportsmanship, ability to handle pressure, loyalty and ambition to name a few.

Each player is practically unique, far more complicated an individual than any NPC from any RPG game. They are also constantly changing. Young players go through growth spurts; veteran players decline. They also have Player Preferred Moves (PPMs) which provide yet another level of sophistication to their unique identity.

So why do you let in so many late goals? Why is your shots to goals ratio so bad? Why does your star striker sulk on the half way line every other match? Why don't your players follow your instructions? Why does the atmosphere in your dressing room stink? The answers to all those questions and more can be revealed by examining a player's attributes.

Attributes are grouped by the game into Technical, Mental and Physical sections. There are 14 Technical attributes (including 3 set piece attributes), 14 Mental attributes and 8 Physical ones. The way they actually interact within the match engine is more complicated than those groupings and different groups of attributes overlap. Let's start by examining speed.

The speed of a player is directly influenced by pace (top speed), acceleration (rate of change of speed), agility (rate of change of direction) and stamina (ability to maintain high speed). It's also indirectly influenced by anticipation (off the mark speed), balance , strength and determination - without these a player can be stopped from fulfilling their top speed. I guess the point is, you can't just look at pace to determine how fast a player is around the park.

A player with great pace but low stamina will fade during a game and should be best used as an impact substitute. After 60-70 minutes of a game their speed will diminish. Henri Saivet, the much admired French youngster has 18 pace and 8 stamina in GW15. This explains why currently he averages 6.6 in senior football and is probably best used as a sub until his stamina improves. Sylvan Ebanks-Blake has pace 17 and agility 10 in GW15 - which maybe suggests that his running is a bit one dimensional and why he plays for Wolves and why Manchester Utd let him go. Even Gabriel Agbonlahor who has pace 20, has anticipation of 9 - which again suggests he doesn't always skin every defense he plays against. And spare a thought for the dribbler who doesn't possess these attributes.

What makes David Villa, Andrey Arshavin and even Andy Johnson deadly in FML is that they score consistently high across the majority of speed factors.

Anticipation, off the ball and positioning are the next three attributes that together form a compelling factor in a player's character. Maxi Rodriguez and Christian Poulsen are great examples of constructive players who are excellent at finding space - infuriatingly so. And it's interesting to talk about Poulsen in the week when Claudio Ranieri suggested that he preferred to buy Poulsen in the summer because Xabi Alsonso's movement was surprisingly slow. As a creative player Alsonso is one of the best pure MCs in the game - yet his low acceleration, off the ball and dribbling make him quite a static target.

The star factor that separates the good from the great playmakers are a combination of passing, technique, creativity and first touch. Having these four attributes in abundence (16+) means you are sharing company with Kaka, Pirlo, Ronaldinho, Sneijder, Robben, Totti, Iniesta, Modric, van der Vaart and Montolivo - the best playmakers in the game. Only veterans like Kanu, Di Michele and Blanco possess these skills at the bargain end of the market (ok there are more but I won't list them all).

In terms of winning headers, jumping, heading, strength, determination, positioning and balance all come into the equation. I've talked about heading before and I think it's a straightforward area so I am going to pass on it for now.

But why do you let in all those late goals? Does one of your defenders have low concentration and low stamina? Well concentration is the attribute that plays a role in determining mistakes. Low stamina means concentration is further diminished late in a game. Bendtner, dos Santos (Gio) and Jair Baylon are all strikers who you may find under performing in the last 15 minutes of a match. At the other end of the pitch two low concentration Belgian stars, Vincent Kompany and Antony Vanden Borre both averaged 2.5 mistakes per game in season one of GW15.

What's the difference between John Utaka (75 goals in 275 games) and Fernando Torres (316 goals in 392 games? Is it something to do with the fact that Torres' workrate is 18 and Utaka 8? Do you ever notice that your strikers hardly ever touch the ball? Other high profile strikers with low workrate include Krisztian Nemeth and Daniel Carvalho. Workrate tells us how much work a player puts into a performance. But workrate also requires the necessary stamina to run around the pitch effectively. Ever Guzman is a good example of a bright young striker who's workrate is writing cheques his stamina can't cash. Workrate is almost a super attribute, if you are a great player with a great workrate you are probably a superstar. If you are a great player with a low workrate you are probably a luxury. All the technique in the world won't help you if you are stuck on the half way line staring at your new boots.

Another super attribute is teamwork. Get a unit of your team all with high teamwork (right side, left side or midfield for example) and watch them click. Teamwork also tells something about how likely the player is to follow your instructions. Quaresma is a fantastic player in FML, but don't ask him to play a specific role in your team with plenty of instructions. You are better off giving him a free role and letting him do whatever takes his fancy. Same goes for Giovinco, Vukcevic, dos Santos (Gio), Capel, Trezeguet and Menez. These guys don't need your managerial interference getting in the way of how they play. If you consider yourself something of a tactical genius you might want to consider how many low teamwork players you have, and how little they seem to care about your carefully laid out tactic.

I used to love high influence players, but then I realised making them unhappy makes the rest of the team unhappy. Be wary of buying high influence players unless you are going to keep them happy and play them in your team. Unhappy or sold high influence plays can destroy a dressing room.

Players in FML are fully formed NPCs with their own characters, idiosyncracies, likes, hates and bad habits like the rest of us. Spend some time getting to know your players. Go through all their attributes and see if you can understand the type of persona they are. What makes them good? What are their weaknesses? How do they complement their teammates? And is it worth persisting with that flawed genius of a goalscorer when every other game he is averaging 6.3?

Let battle commence

Ok, today is the first day of the end of season wage auctions bloodbath. After winning my AEFA league I received £630k in additional prize money. I sold Asamoah to Azazel for £1.45m following a longstanding agreement with their manager that he would have first refusal. I also sold the three first team players I had who's contracts were up.

All three went for their instant buy out amounts in a matter of hours. Whilst I was happy to receive the money - it probably means I under priced them. A good tip (which I didn't follow) is if you get an opening bid within minutes of an auction started increase your buy out amount - because the bid means that it will be a popular player. My 30 year old £26k right back when for £200k, my 30 year old £80k AF DC went for £300k and my £90k striker went for £450k. So I received £950k for players who would have only given me £196k if I lost them on wage auctions. Many managers get upset about losing their players - I see it as a way to make more money. So £630k+£1.45m+£950k means I now have £3m more in the bank than I did two days ago. Nobody in my senior squad is now available on wage auction.

However I only have 15 senior players left in my squad now. I have sold two starting strikers, a DC and a DR. I've also sold a couple of under 21s.

Today's auction highlights include Zarate, Agbonlahor and Essien. I don't think I will be able to win any of those auctions with my strict wage structure. Therefore I will be looking for value amongst the less popular players. Following my last post, I went to great lengths to stress you don't need world class players to be successful. So I will report back on how successful I have been in signing some hidden gems - but I can't really say who they are yet...

I have all but stopped playing games whilst I rebuild my squad. I fully expect to drop down the rankings from my peak of number 2 (currently 7), but I am not really bothered. I'd rather focus on scouting and practicing the wage auctions.

Transfer strategies

There are 2-3 days to go in season one on GW15. You'll be pleased to know that Wild Geese FC have done ok this season. After a slow start we're ranked number 2 in the senior rankings and number 8 in the U21s. If my academy team wasn't so poor I'd be about 3-4 in the youth rankings. Why did I enter that U18 league with a team of 15 and 16 year olds.

We play our last 4 league games today and are currently six points clear in the league. We've also got the 5th round of the GW Cup today. Unfortunately and unavoidably I think the other rounds, if I progress, will have to be handled by my AI. The tournament is backed up with every round going to AI rights at the moment. The play time is at midday, and I'll be at work from tomorrow. So I don't hold my hopes too high.

The end of the season is also contract renewal time. It's vital that you work out who you want to keep and who you don't mind losing. Anyone you can't protect you should sell before the end of their contract. A wage auction will result in you only receiving their acquisition fee as compensation. If you sell you should be able to get 2-3 times their AF. Because the beta is going to end shortly, I could just use my contract locks this season rather than saving them for better players next season. However, I am pretty skint at the moment so I could do with some cash coming in. There are potentially 2 of my first team that need to be sold. At this point in the game some people get upset about losing their starting players. You quickly need to realise that you will always lose 2-3 players a year, and this is an excellent opportunity to improve your squad.

I've started to run queries looking for the best players soon to be out of contract. There are lots of inactive players, and you can be sure that these guys won't protect their players at the last minute. Time spent scouting at this time of the season will really pay you back. There are plenty of bargains to be had. What you don't want to do is chase the 5-6 famous players that everybody else is trying to sign. Their wage will be £50k+ and limit your options on salaries going forward.

In getting to number 2 in the world I haven't bought any stars. In addition to my initial squad I have made the following purchases this year:

• Michalis Sifakis - GK - £75k, plays in Greece for Aris FC, avg rating 6.75
• Asamoah - ST -£117k, plays in France for Stade Rennais, avg rat=7.10
• Wanderley - ST - £133k, plays in Brazil for Cruzeiro, avg rat=7.00
• Hedwiges Maduro - DMC -£136k, plays in Spain for Valencia, avg rat=6.97
• Gabriel Pimba - MC - £260k, plays in Brazil for Atletico Paranaense, avg rat=6.96
• Federico Fazio - DC - £319k, plays in Spain for Sevilla, avg rat=7.21 (pictured below)
• Christiano Maidana - MC - £500k, plays in Russia for Spartak Moscow, avg rat=7.22
• Luciano Civelli - DL - £19k, plays in Argentina for Banfield, avg rat=7.09
• Olivier Kapo - MC - £64k, plays in England for Wigan, avg rat=7.00

So that's £1.62m for nine players of my first team. For the same money I could have bought Rooney or Torres. And unsurprisingly that is exactly what some managers do. My strategy helped me to number 2 in the GW. The owners of Kaka, Ronaldo, Torres and Villa are currently ranked 290, 496, 116 and 286. Two of them are paying £100k+ in wages too. You get diminishing returns for star players. Yes you can make money selling them, and yes they perform really well - but Torres is not 14 times better than Asamoah (which is how much more he costs - let alone wages). He's not even 2 times better. He's about 30% better in my estimation.

When buying players, I would recommend you consider the following:

1. Stay away from big one off purchases that bankrupt you and cost the earth in wages.
2. Think about the future saleability of the player you are signing. U21 eligibility, reputation, PPMs, attributes, wages and senior stats all affect the value of a player.
3. Don't pay over the odds for benchwarmers. You should pride yourself on how cheap your subs wages are.
4. In an ideal world, buy before you sell.
5. Versatile players who play in two or more positions help you keep a much smaller squad.
6. Your reserves should all be u21s and improving. Low wages, the chance for progression and again future value all dictate this is the right way to go.
7. I know it's tempting but buying famous old players is a short term solution. They cost too much in wages and have no future sales value. So bye bye Scholesy, Becks, Cannavaro and Zambrotta. You should be in it for the long term.
8. Give your youth players opportunities in your senior team. You will be surprised how well some of them can play - and it won't be just the guys with the best attributes.
9. When selling a player the perfect replacement will be better, younger, cheaper and more saleable. I take great pride in the fact that I can beat top 10 teams with three players worth less than £30k each in my team.
10. Don't pay high wages, ever. Don't get involved in popular wage auctions. Set yourself a limit. High wages are the number one factor for getting stuck in a rut. Nobody will buy David Villa off you for £10m if you are paying him £130k a day. The lower your wages, the more options you have. If you are near your wage cap, you are limited to who you can sign.

I hope this article demonstrates that you don't need a team of superstars to win at FML. You don't need to log in within the first 15 minutes of the launch of a server. You don't need to sign a famous player. I'd never heard of most of my players before, and I think I've got a pretty good knowledge of football. Play for the long term, and remember that's not Fernando Torres you are watching on your screen, it's a bunch of 1's and 0's. Do that and you can see FML like Neo can see the Matrix.

Mid season review

It's been a funny first season back in a new gameworld. Things are significantly different this time around. Firstly, nothing was new and there was no novelty to the game. The mods didn't carry over their skills this time so everyone started on an even footing. However most managers have played in other gameworlds, so everyone knew what they were doing.

I made some mistakes on personnel in my initial squad. Whilst I met my financial objectives, £500k spend on AFs and £30k spend on wages, my squad was particularly inexperienced. My two biggest purchases were panicky as I tried to sign players from my shortlist during opening day lagfest. I didn't stop to notice that the GW15 version of Damian Le Tallec was randomly rubbish and Lucas Trecarichi can't play MC. That was £200k gone immediately. Of my initial squad only three play in my starting eleven at the moment, Ivan Lopez my right back, Simone Loria an experienced DC and Leonardo Ulloa, a decent Argentinian striker.

However, my transfer play in the next two weeks brought in Asamoah and Wanderley up front, Maduro and Kapo in midfield, Fazio and Civelli in defense. I've subsequently added Gabriel Pimba and Christian Maidana and feel pretty happy with my squad.

I had a really poor start to my league programme, losing five of my first eight games. I was too attacking in my play and was not playing to the strengths of my team. But the important thing was I saw what was going wrong and fixed it.

After correcting my tactics, and only signing a new keeper a few days later - Michalis Sifakis, the next 10 days have seen my ranking rise from 200 to 7. This improvement has largely been based on my league form. After losing 5 of my first 8 games, I have won 13 of the last 16 league games. With 10 games to go, it's close at the top of our league - and anyone could still win it. What's important is a top 5 finish - which should hopefully mean Premiership football next season.

Once the league programme finishes, thought will immediately turn to the end of season free for all and wage auction chaos. I need to start deciding now who I need to move on, and which areas of the squad need to be strengthened. My head says I need another quality DC to play alongside Fazio. My heart says get some attacking fullbacks like Royston Drenthe at £425k or Maicon or Dani Alves at much much more. After failing to sell Asamoah to raise money to improve the squad I have had several offers - one of which wanted to pay 90% of the money after beta is scheduled to end (which I thought was quite amusing). But the end of the season is not about how much cash you have, but how much room for high wages you can bear.

Reading the game

It strikes me as mildly amusing when I see people in the FML chat rooms bang on about how they have a tactic, which makes them a tactical genius. FML, like many games, is a glorified version of scissor, paper, stone - although some people have sharper scissors or bigger stones than others.

Having a basic tactic that gets the best out of your players is important. I prefer to play fast attacking football, maximise the chances I can make in a game, and accept that I will often make it hard for my defenders to keep a clean sheet. But I often make tweaks on the fly in reaction to what the opposition manager does. Here are a few tips that anyone could and should build into their matchday ritual; but remember too much tinkering is a bad idea.

1. When someone challenges you, ask yourself why they are challenging you? Are you just the next opponent on their list or have they targeted you? If they have targeted, why have they targeted you? Do you have a few injuries to key players? Do you have suspensions? Have you just sold a class player? As a general rule, strong teams challenge, weak teams wait to be challenged. If in doubt, put your DND until you are ready to play. This will block all challenges on matches before they are green or red flagged.
2. Quickly cast your eye over your opponent's squad. Look at their AFs. Does one player stand out - meaning that they have put all their money into one player? What's the value of their strikers versus their defenders or midfielders? Where is the weakness? Who is the cheapest player on the team? How does their squad compare to yours? If they are much stronger you should set up more defensively, maybe counter attack (counter attack beats attack in scissor-paper-stone).
3. Get your team submitted first, then wait for his team. As soon as his teamsheet is entered compare your formations and line-ups on the line-up screen. If he is playing two up front make sure your best DC is marking his best striker. If you have a fast striker match him up against the slowest DC. Is he playing an AMC? Is the AMC any good (ie Kaka or Robinho)? Do you need to drop one of your MCs into DMC and put him on man to man marking and hard tackling? Is he playing players in offset positions? e.g. one striker playing left of centre or one full back as a wing back. Do you need to move your players accordingly? A good tip is if the DMC is off centre, move your AMC to the other side. It's far more important for a DMC to mark the AMC than vice versa.
4. When the game kicks off, look for telling patterns. How deep is he playing his defensive line? Do his defenders chase the ball or back off into a tidy formation until their box. High defensive lines are usually used with high closing down. If that's the case you will have less time on the ball in midfield to play a short passing game - increase your through balls and increase the mentality of at least one striker and instruct him to make forward runs. If the defensive line drops quickly, you should focus passing through your midfield playmaker who will now have more time and space to pick the opponent apart; reduce through balls.
5. How wide does his formation look compared to yours? Do more passes go down the sides of your set up or through the middle. In attacking terms you want to be wider than the opponent but in defensive terms you want to be narrow and compact. Again scissor-paper-stone in effect.
6. Where are his chances starting from? Does all the play go through one player? Is one winger getting the better of your fullback? Adjust your tactics to stop the source of your problems. If he has a great striker up front the chances are he will score given enough opportunities.
7. At half time, review the team stats and player stats pages. What are the ratings for your players? Is anyone having a stinker? Who isn't getting into the game enough. If you wingers aren't being involved (say 6 passes or less at HT) it's probably not their fault - it's the fault of your MCs in not spreading the play enough (too short passing, too low a mentality, or they are being put under too much pressure). What's the ratio of long shots to shots - generally long shots are bad - you want clear cut chances. Who is having great success and how can you get more of the ball to them? Should you change your passing focus?
8. There is a bit of a fallacy amongst managers that bad things happen when you are in the lead. The opposition score when you are making a sub, if you are winning 2-0 at half time, you will probably lose. This is because managers who are winning rarely change things, and those that are losing realise they have to make changes. It takes a strong manager to make changes at half time from a winning position - but sometimes it's exactly the right thing to do.
9. You should have three basic formations up your sleeve - standard, attacking and defending. Switching between them depending on the scoreline via the click of one button is far easier than making the changes manually all the time. My attacking formation has a higher mentality, more players running forward, more direct passing, higher defensive line, wider and higher closing down. My defensive formation is low mentality, deep defensive line, low closing down, narrow, no forward runs, no running with the ball, very short passing (ie I am trying to keep possession rather than collapse onto my own area as soon as the ball is lost). 1-0 and 10 minutes to go? Click on defensive formation. Sometimes if you are being dominated or finding chances hard to come by, switching to defensive will give you more of the ball and more chances, whereas switching to attacking will make it worse.
10. Don't start giving up and find fault with everyone else and the match engine. You can't win every game. Sometimes you lose through bad luck; an early sending off or two penalties in the same match. Sometimes you get played off the park - no harm in that. But sometimes you lose because of something that you did, or even worse something you didn't do - because you couldn't recognise the signs in front of your eyes. If their striker gets free and blasts it over the bar, we all relax and count our blessings when you should be thinking about how you can stop that kind of chance happening again.

If you can improve your chances of winning a game from 50:50 to 55:45 through observation of what is happening right in front of your eyes (let along building a successful squad and underlying tactic) you are going to be a successful FML manager.

Understanding Acquisition Fee

Jim Furlong of This Is Anfield is currently advertising Simao for sale on GW15. Simao's Acquisition Fee (AF) is £850,000. Jim wants an equivalent value player or two players who's AFs add up to £850k. Sounds simple doesn't it?

Well, there is a slight problem here that few managers understand (and maybe Jim does because it's in his advantage). You cannot simply add the AFs of players to equal another player. What the hell are you talking about I hear you ask?


The problem with comparing players using AF is that the scale is inconsistent. Let's say player A is worth £20k in terms of AF. If he improves his attributes there is a chance his AF will improve to £22k. It will make that change because £22k is the next band of AF. If player B is worth £500k and improves the same amount, his AF will increase to £525k. Here one step increase in AF is worth £25k. It doesn't mean that player A only improved a 10th of the level player B did - it just reflects the sliding scale used in calculating AF. If we create our own scale, let's say called rank where 0 is the lowest possible AF, 1 is the next highest AF, 2 is the next and so forth until we run out of AF values, we can determine the real relative value of players on our own scale. In fact using GW15 data the highest AF in the world at present is the free agent Cristiano Ronaldo - who hasn't been bought yet. £3,250,000 has a rank score of 100, it's the 101st step in the progression from £1,500, the lowest AF possible to £3,250,000 the current highest.

Rank 0 = £1,500, rank 1=£2,000...rank 99 = £3,000,000 and rank 100 = £3,250,000 (the current highest value). Rank is my translation of the real value of the player on a linear scale.

The chart shows that at the bottom end of the scale, every increase in rank is worth very little in AF change, whereas at the top end every increase in rank is worth a great deal in AF terms. Only if the line on the chart is a straight line can be safe in adding player AFs together to calculate player exchanges. In Jim's example at the top, he wants two players who's combined AF is £850k. If he receives that he is actually getting better value out of the deal than the other manager. I'll explain how:

£850k is rank 76 on our scale. If we swapped Simao for a £500k and a £350k player we would be giving him 62 (score for £500k) and 56 (score for £350k) = 118 worth of players. That's about 50% more than the value of Simao on my scale. It's also interesting to note that £350k is 70% of the value of £500k, but 56 is 90% of 62 - so a £350k player is 90% of the value of a £500k not 70%. So basically if Jim get's what he is asking for he will be 50% better off than he should be.

There was an example of a deal like this in GW10. Kernow 1497 sold Cesc Fabregas to the number one ranked team in the world AZ Bruntsfield for £2m plus Caio, Jair Baylon, Javi Garcia and Alex Teixeira. Those four players combined AF was worth about £1.3m. Fabregas was worth £3.25m in AF terms, so on paper the deal looked fair to both sides. But each one of those players was worth 50-60% of Fabregas on their own. So Kernow 1497 probably received 2 more players plus £2m that Cesc was worth on paper. Now it's not often you can prise a star player off anyone, so you may be perfectly happy to pay top whack for your favourite world beater. Nick at AZ already had a world class team, so he was probably happy to trophy hunt Fabregas too, and his continued domination of the rankings condones his strategy. What would you have done?

When evaluating swap deals you should also consider the difference in quality between the players you already have and the players you receive in part exchange. Let's say all the players in Jim's team are worth £850k AF each. If he was to sign two £400,000 players in return, neither player would improve his side - in fact his side's quality would be worse. So even though we can prove that he got 50% more value than he should, it didn't benefit him because the rest of his squad was already at a higher level.

This is a complex subject and one I don't recommend you worry about too much unless you are interested in the real detail of the game. But the lesson here is that you must understand the value of all your players, and if you sell one, it should only be for the sole aim of improving the quality of your team.

Return to PPMs

There was a debate on the tactics chat room today about what exactly PPMs do. I've never read anything official explaining exactly what they are, but I thought I'd share my personal opinions and welcome any debate if anyone can put me straight.

Most PPMs are neither absolutely positive or negative - most are situational, and describe actions a player might make to overrule your personal instructions to them. So here goes:

1. Moves into channels - will look for space in wide areas if a striker - harder to mark but will make runs even if you set to rarely
2. Plays with back to goal - don't put through balls ahead of him, also don't tell him to make loads of runs because he would prefer to receive the ball with his back to goal. Even if you put his mentality to the max he will struggle to play on the last shoulder of the defense.
3. Shoots with power - you will see the shots fly in faster than normal - so higher percentage of shots on target will probably beat the keeper but ratio of shots on goal maybe lower
4. Places shots - opposite of above - higher accuracy, lower percentage of on target shots beating the keeper - but probably marginal if at all
5. Shoots from distance - will take plenty of long shots regardless of his long shot instructions
6. Runs with ball (left, right, centre) - will run with the ball a lot regardless of your run with ball setting
7. Likes to beat man repeatedly - over indulges in dribbling - good at beating players but likes to take it past them again rather whipping in an end product
8. Tries killer balls often - will play plenty of through balls whether you instruct him to or not
9. Tries long range passes - will play long passes even if you set passing to really short
10. Hugs line - will play wide even if you set your formation to narrow - this could be problem in defensive formations where you don't want gaps on the inside of your formation
11. Cuts inside - most players cut inside to shoot rather than cross - normally the sign of a winger who players on the side of his weaker foot - Joe Cole, Ashley Young etc...
12. Knocks ball past opponent - backs their pace to beat players - obviously works much better against a high defensive line
13. Likes to try to beat the offside trap - will play on last shoulder - regardless of mentality - just check the level of offsides they get and adjust accordingly
14. Gets forward whenever possible - will ignore forward runs instruction and make plenty of them
15. Curls ball - a skill that most players can't do - good for free kicks and ranged shooting - pretty positive
16. Dwells on ball - not good for two touch fast passing teams - maybe helps with decision making - but I would say negative overall - seen Moutinho give away so many chances by being caught in possession
17. Avoids using weaker foot - don't play these guys on the wrong side - ie if you play 3xMC don't play a left footed player on the right with this PPM
18. Moves ball to other foot - makes it easier for a tight maker to win the ball
19. Switches play - good unless you are focusing passing down the that wing
20. Arrives late in opposition area - pretty good to me - hard to mark
21. Plays one-twos - good for MCs and slow build ups or pass and go with good off the ball attributes
22. Dictates tempo - when two conflicting styles come into contact the game is more likely to be played in your style with one of these guys pulling the strings
23. Doesn't dive into tackles - great - especially for DCs, for other players - put them on hard tackling with little fear of yellow cards
24. Dives into tackles - don't set their tackling to hard
25. Plays no through balls - don't set through balls to high - they just won't play them
26. Plays short simple passes - great for a DMC - don't tell the player to play long and through balls - they won't like doing it
27. Tries tricks - good for flair players - will create chances if it comes off - but will surrender possession if it doesn't cheaply
28. Looks for pass rather than shot - pretty self explanatory - unlikely to shoot unless there are no other options
29. Likes ball played to feet - if you use this person as a target man - set targetman supply to the correct option and you will benefit
30. Winds up opponents - liable to get opponents yellow or red carded - watch out for reactions in the commentary
31. Gets crowd going - don't know if this works in FML, but I would guess if there is a home advantage coefficient, I guess it might effect it positively - but total conjecture

There are 48 PPMs I think - so this is a good spread, but as I said these are just my opinions. Key thing to remember is PPMs give players character rather than absolute advantages.

Early season transfer strategy

The first few days of the 1st season in a gameworld are indeed a strange time. The first week in a gameworld representing pre-season and lots of desparate attempts to sign players. Many players bolster their squads with trial signings.

When the 1st season begins in the second week, things change. Firstly you get about £300k of media money. Secondly you have to play some official games, with far more ranking points on offer. It is really important that you get your transfer strategy correct in this week. You will see all the best players under £600k start to get signed up in rapid time. You have to make this period count and get the players you need to bolster your squad.

So - be honest about your squad. Where are the weak links? I'd focus on making sure you have the best striker, playmaker and central defender you can sign. Minor positions can take a back seat for now. You could either spend your entire transfer fund on one player - or spread it across 2 or 3. However how you bid for players is vital to your success. I recommend following this approach:

1. Write down your team on a piece of paper and put tick, question mark or cross against each of your starting 11. Tick the ones you think are strong enough for the league, question mark those you are not sure, cross the ones you know are too weak. Which positions are the crosses in? Are they concentrated in one area? Congratulations you have just prioritised your targets by position.

2. Create a shortlist of players who fit your positional, value and attribute parameters. Check each on to see if he is on a trial, is currently being bid on or is currently idle. If someone else has bid, the clock is already ticking.

3. Don't bid on the player you want. Draw up a list of players you want and check out when their trials expire, or their auctions end. I wanted a DC or a MC yesterday.

4. The strategy you should follow is to put all your money into one bid to get the best player possible. You never start a bid unless a trial is about to end. That means you have tied up all your money for 24 hours and have no flexibility. Don't spread your money thin by bidding on average players. You will outgrow average players and nobody wants to buy them from you. My strategy is to sign the first person on my list, and everytime I miss out I move onto the next target. It guarantees me one good player, and then I start again with however much money I have left.

Here is my list, along with auction time and who started the auction:

Pique 22:42 - KadowMeaw 31th - bid £24k =bank limit, lost

Davies 01:00 - AZ Bruntsfield - passed - not good enough

Fazio 17:28 - Phantoms - bid £26.9k, won £20k

David Luiz 19:29 - KadowMeaw 31th - went for £8k

De la Red 20:01 -Busted Flush

Taylor 20:05 - Maceys Magicians

Naldo 20:12 - Gesh Utd

Burdisso 20:24 - JuJu FC

Sobis - 23:58 - mighty magpies - went cheap

Martinez 01:01 - AZ Bruntsfield - went for £37.5k wages

So I started with bidding on Pique, lost him and then went all in for Fazio. Luckily I won him, I think he is an excellent player and still 21. If I had lost him, 2 hours later I had a chance with David Luiz, another great DC. Had I missed him I would have gone for De la Red (I like his PPMs), then maybe Steven Taylor (but I am not convinced on him) then Naldo, Burdisso, Sobis or Javi Martinez.

Notice how Nick from AZ Bruntsfield started auctions exactly 24 hours apart. He is following a similar strategy but he is starting auctions because he has clear targets in his mind. He had Martinez in GW10 and he was a legend (I would not have bid £37.5k wages for him). Also notice mighty magpies starting an auction at 23:58. This is very clever because it means the auction ends just before everybody gets paid their daily money - and stops new bidders coming into the race.

A really important point here is that if you want to be successful in FML, you should forget about signing an individual player and be prepared to sign one of a handful of players who fit your requirements. At the end of the day, I didn't really mind whether I won Pique, Fazio, Burdisso or Luiz - I just wanted one of them.

Don't tie all your money up for 24 hours, bid late and bid aggressively on wages. There is no prizes for coming second, and if you are prepared to pay £19.5k wages, you should be prepared to pay £20.5k and beat all the guys bidding round numbers like £20k.

Luckily for me I had enough money left to buy another £150k player, so I quickly moved former Dutch U21 Ajax player Hewiges Maduro - who has locked down my midfield quite nicely. However I still need an authentic playermaker, but that can wait for now. Just need to sell Lucas Trecarichi to fund the move!

Jumping and regens

Jumping and heading as attributes are sometimes mixed up.

Heading dictates how accurate a player's headers are. Players with high heading score from corners and their clearing headers are more likely to fall to safety or their teammates.

Jumping dictates (amongst other things like positiong, strength, aggression and determination) whether a player will win an aerial challenge. A striker with a higher jumping will win more goalkick and long balls thrown forward to him. A striker with a higher heading ability will score more goals from crosses.

A central defender with a higher jumping ability will win more defensive headers or at least do enough to put the striker under pressure. A central defender with high heading ability will score a great deal of goals from corners.

So jumping doesn't equal leaping ability - it's leaping plus physical size. And here is the interesting part, height directly influences jumping - it's built in. To prove this point I created an FM08 game with only regens. After 5 years the game had generated over 32,000 regens. The analysis has to be calculated from regens because regens are pure - not biased by the researchers at SI. Biases blur the underlying patterns in the data.

Anyway of the 32,000 regens only 125 have a jumping attribute of 16+. 124 out of 125 of those players were 1.92m to 1.98m tall - or 6 feet 3 inches to 6 feet 6 inches. The 125th, well he was 1.89m. There is nobody below 6 feet 2 inches with a jumping attribute of 16 to 20.

This doesn't mean all tall players have high jumping, but it does mean that all high jumping attribute players are tall in regens. This is important when you judge regens in FML. If you are looking at a target man or a central defender, check out their height - because their jumping ability may never get over 15 if they are too short. And jumping is a vital attribute for both those positions.

Some people say height is a cosmetic attribute. This analysis proves otherwise. The match engine may not use height to determine who wins headers, but the jumping attribute is directly influenced by it - so in a way, it does.

First days of GW15

So a new GW ushers in Wild Geese FC 2.0. I had a shortlist of players I wanted, but found most of them not available - which I think is a sign that the game does a great job of spreading out the talent at the start of the game. If the first manager could just go in and sign their favourite 16 players then there problems for everyone else.



I made a shortlist of young players who can improve drastically. In my mind I had a team of young starlets; Pichu at the back, Alberto Bueno up front, Buonanette pulling the strings. I looked for Eden Hazard, Kermit Erasmus and the other known 5 star futures. I ended up with 5 from my list plus a few of randoms:



1. Lucas Trecarichi - tricky Argentinian left winger
2. Oguz Sabankay - purely because I mentioned him in the blog last week
3. Pedro Mosquera - a Real Madrid youngster - good technique, dribbling and flair
4. Tacio - former Brazil u17 player - is averaging 80-90 attempted passes a game at the moment
5. Enrico Alfonso - Italian U21 keeper
6. Leo Schwechlen - young Monaco DC
7. Dimitriu Copil - the new Hagi?
8. Damien Le Tallec - French youth international
9. Sabrin Sburlea - Romanian U21

So the team is pretty weak, but my wages are only £30k a day - although I did meet a manager with wages of £20k a day - which makes me sound expensive. I've taken the finance package for starting skills - 10% off transfer fees makes a significant difference at the start of the game.

I made £70k profit on the first day and I didn't sign any trialists -preferring to save my money for purchases. One trick to use on players with trialists is to bid on the trialist just before the 24 hour trial is up. Rather than kick off a 24 hour wage auction - the auction ends when the trial ends. I bid for Asamoah, the Udinese Ghanian striker with 3 minutes to go on his trial. Needless to say nobody else bid and I got him for the minimum £9k a day. So now I only make £60k a day profit. But I do have a striker with 18+ for pace and acceleration, and 16 for dribbling, finishing, heading and off the ball - all vital forward stats.

I am currently swapping between 451 and 433. I started off with my trusty almost all out attack 433 (3 MCs and 3 STs) and got beaten in 8 out of my first 10 games. So I switched to 451 with neutral mentality and now I am on a 5 game unbeaten run, with my midfield dominating possession in most matches. Tacio is getting hold of the ball all the time. With Asamoah I now have the pace up front to stretch and overload a 2 DC formation so I will slowly reintroduce my narrow 433. One more target to sign tomorrow and then I will think about more mundane tasks like getting a reserve keeper and reinforcing the 5 defenders I have in the squad. Current rank is 294 with 1.5 stars.

There's only one Toni Kroos

Comparing notes with a friend last night we came across this strange fact about Toni Kroos, the young Bayern player. Kroos is highly sought after in FML because he is a 5 star prospect with a potential ability of 195+, one of the highest in the game.

Gw15 Toni Kroos has an acquisition fee of £325k and GW14 Toni Kroos has an acquisition fee of £1,000,000. (GW15 is top on the image, GW14 is bottom)

Why is one worth £325,000 and one worth £1,000,000 when their stats are so consistent? The answer surely lies in one has a much higher potential ability than the other - and proof that the same players on different servers are different due to some random element - potentially more pronounced than the differences between FMxx games.

PPM Guide part 2

The last PPM article featured an introduction to PPMs and a shortlist of a few traditional back to goal target men (you can find it here).

Today I am going to look for the kind of player you want in an attacking formation, the kind of player England could do with - an MC who has the "likes to run with the ball through the middle". Being a good dribbler (I used 14+ as a filter for this analysis) and prefering to do it through the middle of the pitch commits defenders. As soon as you begin to commit defenders you midfielders will find it very easy to complete key passes. Key passes create goal chances.

The best players in the world at doing this are Diego, Matais Ferndandez, Daniel Carvalho, Lulinha, Anderson and Sergio Aguero. But you knew that, right? If you are looking for a cheaper option, I'd recommend the following (in no particular order):

(filter= dribbling >13, PPM="run with ball through centre" and position=MC)

1. Willian - ok not much of a hidden gem, but the Brazil U20 and Shaktar player has a great future ahead of him. High technique, creative, quick and an excellent dribbler - my kind of MC.

2. Oguz Sabankay - when will Galatasaray give him his chance? Turkey U20 player who has great technical skills - similar to Willian.

3. Anton Putsilo (really spelt Putsila) - another young player - this time Belarussian - plenty of room for improvement - with good base stats

4. Igor Burzanovic (pictured right), Red Star and Montenegro star. Also likes to try killer balls and knocks balls past opponents. A real handful.

5. Elton - plays for Al-Nassr in Saudi Arabia. Probably the worst character of any player you are likely to see, but highly technical and very quick.

If you don't like your MCs playing dribbling all the time you could go for the quarterback (surely Beckham's future position for England?) role. Toulalan, Arsenal's Denilson and a young Brazilian called Ananias from Bahia all have the wicked combination of PMMs - attempts killer balls often and attempts long range passes. Don't bother instructing these guys to keep it short and simple. You just might find they prefer make 'hollywood' passes over their striker's shoulder all the time. It should result in high key passes - but their completion rates, and your attempts to play a control-possession may go out the window.

PPM Guide part 1

Player preferred moves (PPM) are an important but often forgotten part of FML. To some they represent just a superficial colouring of a player's character, but having observed many PPMs in effect I think there is a great opportunity to use them to your advantage.

Some PPMs are negative, some are mostly negative, some are kind of neutral and just add character, some are good and some are extremely effective.

Negative PPMs include diving into tackles, tries to play their way out of trouble, dwells on the ball for example. Having a deep lying midfielder who dwells on the ball and likes to play their way out of trouble will lead to giving the ball away in your own third of the pitch - which often gets punished in FML. Some PPMs are bad in certain situations. That Brazilian DC who likes to get forward often is going to get caught out of poisition more often that hit 30 yard screamers.

Some PPMs will overrule your specific instructions. A midfielder who likes to shoot from distance will still shoot from distance even if you set his long shots to rarely. The key to getting the best out of your players, just like management in business, is to give people roles they enjoy doing. If a player likes to run with the ball down the left, put him on the left wing and set the run with the ball option to often. It's not rocket science. The match engine doesn't like conflicting signals, so make sure you are not setting tactics that contradict themselves.

Unfortunately there is no way to search for players with certain PPMs, so we have to rely on FM08 to create a shortlist of players you might want to sign in FML season one. Today I am going to focus on target men. What PPMs should target men have and who are the best prospects?

If you are looking for a traditional target man, you don't need to know anything about FML or FMxx to compile a decent list of target men. Mine would be:

1. Drogba

2. Berbatov

3. Adebayor

But, pretty much everyone on your gameworld will know those players and want to sign them - even if they don't appreciate their strengths as a target man. In FML a target man will receive the ball in non scoring positions more often and be the literal target of longer passes from teammates. You can supply a targetman via his head, feet or into space ahead of him. The most important thing is that he does something useful with it once he gets it - which means we are looking for something beyond pure finishing.

200-300 players in a 50,000 player gameworld will begin with the 'likes to play with back to goal' PPM. This is a great trait for the 4-5-1 loan striker. The ability to hold the ball up and give the time for supporting midfielders to arrive in the box is vital for this formation to work.

Given that everyone can work out who the best back to goal targetmen are, I have developed a shortlist of less well known, younger players with high potential to develop but who start the game as pretty average players. I suggest you keep these players in mind if you are thinking of developing a tactic that needs a target man and want to invest in underdeveloped youth players.

1. Evandro Brandao - Man Utd academy player and Portugal U17 international. Terrible stats - he is pretty awful at the start of the game, but he has the potential to be a very good player - if you have the patience.

2. Edgar Cani - Palermo have recently loaned him to Ascoli in Serie B. Better starting point than Brandao, but very undeveloped at the start of the game.

3. Sebastian Ribas - young striker from PAOK with plenty of potential to develop. Just needs a few green arrows in his physical stats to turn him into a real handful.

4. Artem Dzyuba - Russian U21 striker, great strength and heading - will only improve with the right training

5. Loris Arnaud (right) - young French player at PSG - again great strength and heading - plus long shots too

None of these guys will probably ever reach the heights of Berbatov or Drogba, but they do provide cheap alternatives with the potential to grow and therefore either play in your team or be sold for a healthy profit. Anyone can make a list of dead cert superstars - I think uncovering rough diamonds is far more rewarding.

Reading between the lines

Some people say the judging potential (JP) skill is a waste of time. The thinking being that some managers don't need it. They can tell a great player just by looking at their attributes.

The way that works is based on a couple of factors:

1. The older the player the better they should be. If you see a 5 star potential youngster with a bunch of single figure attributes at the age of 19 he is probably not going to become a world beater. If you see a 14 year old player with 14s and 15s he is probably going to become a star.


2. Key attributes in the right positions hint at the players potential - or more accurately hint at the player's current ability - and given the same level of development, they will judge the youngster to have potential.

Obviously any manager with JP has an advantage over anyone who doesn't because they have one more piece of information. If nothing else it's worth buying 5 star potentials because they sell for such high amounts - far more than 4 or 4.5 star youngers. If someone ever tells you one of your youngsters is a 5 star, remember that and adjust your expected price accordingly if you ever sell.

Anyway, using a data set from FM08 using only the initial players, no regens, I have attempted to see how accurate it is to use attribute scores to predict a players current ability (CA) rather than their potential ability. The test I ran was on almost 8,000 players who can only play in the striker role (STs). This prevents contamination of the sample set by hybrid players - who represent two or more positions.

My analysis was to determine how accurately I can predict current ability by reading a striker's attributes. Many of the input variables are highly correlated, so overfit is always going to be a problem. What this means is that generally, the better the player, the higher their attributes are. However, some variables are more important than others.

Firstly I stripped out the attributes that are not correlated with CA for strikers to remove some background noise from the model. These include marking, tackling and positioning for example (I first tested these variables to prove they had no effect on the model - so don't worry that I missed something). I loaded the data into SPSS, a stats package, and ran a linear regression model on the data. After a few iterations I found a model that explains 91% of variance in the data. The predicted value has a 0.951 correlation with current ability. So it's pretty accurate, and I think with some tweaking I could improve the fit much more (run separate models for young and old players; split strikers into target men and fast strikers).

So if you want to know what the approximate current ability of a player is, you have to multiply each attribute coefficient (numbers below) by the value the player currently has and then add them up and then add the constant (which is a negative number so it actually reduces the overall). The variables in desecnding order of importance are:

Pace 2.407
Acceleration 2.248
Strength 1.114
Finishing 1.057
Off The Ball 0.885
Decisions 0.779
Jumping 0.773
Heading 0.772
Balance 0.740
Concentration 0.719
Technique 0.664
Anticipation 0.627
First Touch 0.562
Composure 0.560
Passing 0.505
Dribbling 0.502
Long Shots 0.459
Stamina 0.411
Creativity 0.387
Agility 0.359
Crossing 0.205
Constant -92.09

So basically, Current ability = 2.407xPace + 2.248xAcceleration + 1.114xStrength + 1.057xFinishing... ...+ -92.09.

Below is a random sample of players with their predicted and actual current ability and the difference between them.

Name Pre CA Act CA Diff
Willock, Calum 63 62 1
Fleita, Juan Ramón 121 111 10
Crawford, Brian 36 21 15
Akinfenwa, Adebayo 86 81 5
Kornilenko, Syargey 101 120 -19
Solodukhin, Vladimir 47 41 6
Davydov, Sergey 59 64 -5
Mazilu, Ionut 135 135 0
Cadikovski, Dragan 115 110 5
Sturm, Jani 82 87 -5
Lavric, Klemen 122 124 -2
Andersson, John 40 35 5
Waldh, Daniel 27 30 -3
Arthuro 100 107 -7
Birchall, Adam 55 74 -19
Harris, Neil 82 93 -11
Demouge, Frank 124 110 14
Offiong, Richard 103 105 -2
Skjøth, Peter 73 73 0
Bymar, Jacob 50 54 -4
Viale, Julien 130 117 13
Manchev, Vladimir 118 118 0
Bibishkov, Krum 106 112 -6
Vittek, Robert 124 147 -23 (pictured right)
Nikolaou, Giorgos 102 100 2
Nenadic, Vladimir 70 77 -7
Vagner, Robert 73 89 -16


So not perfect, but about 91% accurate, which is more accurate than the JP lvl4 skill for judging potential! I've also built similar models for MCs and DCs - which obviously have different attributes at the top. If you want to read more about linear regression you can find the basics on Wiki.


I think a purer test would be to conduct the same analysis on regens only. Regens don't possess the biases of the SI researchers, and should be easier to build a model of. This article fits nicely with the guide I wrote on strikers last month - although that analysis included strikers with other positions (FC, AMC/FC etc). It's interesting that pace and acceleration come top of the variables. There is a high correlation between the two - in the normal scheme of thing you would only use one of them in a model because of colinearity. In game everyone talks about the importance of pace in strikers and maybe this model backs that up.

Thanks for the guys on the FM08 forum (tactics) who inspired this piece of analysis with their previous work on free attributes from training.

It's all in the head

Many years ago Michael Duff was the first player I tried to buy in the then Championship Manager. The young Cheltenham (as was) right back was the model of consistency and could play at every league on the way up to the top flight. Given that his attributes were not earth shattering, I always wondered why players like Duff (now at Burnley) always performed 'above' their level. I think one of the reasons must of been high attribute scores for his character. Character attributes normally come to light when your want away striker wants to leave and stamps his foot, or a loyal old pro decides to fight for his first team place rather than leave the club.

I've called this branch of attributes psychology. These attributes are normally hidden in a game but we all know Craig Bellamy doesn't get 20 out of 20 for sportsmanship, Pascal Chimbonda doesn't quite get 20 out of 20 for loyalty and Adriano may struggle with double digits for professionalism.

I've conducted some analysis from a saved game of FM08 to identify which players have the best scores for Psychology in my quest to determine whether this element represents the hidden variable that make journeyman pros play above the level their other attributes would suggest they could achieve (like Michael Duff). The score is calculated by adding Ambition, Loyalty, Pressure, Professionalism, Sportsmanship, Temperament, Consistency and Important Matches. Under normal circumstances the last two are grouped under the mental attributes. And please bear in mind that nobody is saying 20 out of 20 for ambition is necessarily always a good thing.

So caveats out the way, here are my top 10:

1. Gianluigi Buffon, the legendary Juventus keeper, - 146 / 160
2. Eugenio Corini, veteran Torino MC - 145
3. Oleg Husyev, Dinamo Kiev DR - 144 - this guy is very popular in FML
4. Bernd Schneider, former German international - 144
5. Andrea Barzagli(right), former Palermo DC - 143 - one of the best DCs in FML
6. Cristain Zaccardo, moved with Barzagli to VfL Wolfsburg DR, - 142
7. Miroslav Klose, top German international - good targetman - 142
8. Truls Zachariassen, Norwegian keeper - the weird one on the list - 141
9. Michael Ballack, lives round the corner from me, MC - 141
10. Iliasu Shilla, Ghanian DC plays in Russia - 140


Just bubbling under are Xavi, Raul, Zapater, Brighi, FM favourite Per Ciljan Skjelbred, Speed, Zambrotta, Henrik Larsson and Michael Cia (a good FML prospect). 11 of the top 25 are Italians, demonstrating perhaps a higher psychological ability amongst those denizens of Serie A. I was hoping the top ten might flag up a few more surprise inclusions, but the former Palermo pair are perhaps the ones I would recommend for your FML team. Both possess plenty of time to progress, have great innate ability - and now we know they have a superb psychological approach to the game. Put them on your shortlist because they cost too much for your initial squad.