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.