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.