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.