Current Ability

Please see the article here and feel free to respond. How will this affect your training and development plans?

Amazing!

Jervaj:

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Great work and study. The planned claculator looks like it would be quite useful. It would be good if it could include some way of evalauting different roles to account for the differences in exigency. As you mention and it was clear in game (sepcially in some cases) not all roles are equally demanding. Some are more specialized or focus on "cheaper" attributes which makes easier to get higher ratings on them with lower CA. A pretty notable case is complete forward due to been so generalist and demanding in varying areas, so for most players it gets notable lower ratings in such a role than in their "best" ones.
Where Im going with this, is that this may happen to some degree with other roles and it may be good to know how relativelly good a player is for a certain role where the game can be misleading. Like going back to the extreme example, one striker can be relativelly pretty good as a Complete Forward and worth using as such, but it may show ingame that you aren't using well his potential been only his 3rd/4th best role. But that may not be due to bad attribute alignment, just due to how demanding the role is.

It is certainly possible to do such things with the weights. For example, you can sum up all the weights required for a role e.g.

• Poacher: 12.875
• Advanced Forward: 18.125
• Complete Forward (Attack): 22.625

Clearly CF(A) is much more demanding that a Poacher.

Another thing you can do, is work out the total attribute points for each role (attribute value x weight). Then divide by the total weight for the role (as above). This gives you an average attribute value for that role (similar to the star rating in the game). Cavani for example:

• Poacher: 14.65 (3.5 Stars in game)
• Advanced Forward: 13.91 (3 Stars)
• Complete Forward (Attack): 14.22 (3 stars)

Jervaj:

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Also, does it seem from the study that some positions thesmelves are more demanding? As in needing higher CA overall to have good stats in that position? Or is that balanced out? Seems like it at first sight, but with so many numbers it may not.

You can simply add up all the weights. Most roles are pretty close together.

• Lowest: GK (24.625)
• Lowest Outfield: DRL/WBRL (26.75/26.375)
• Highest: AMC/SC (27.875)

Jervaj:

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Aside from this suggestion the study does pose me question. Until now I though CA was absolute given the game only has 1 value for each player, and then the quality on a given position depended on the spread of such CA. But with CA been calculated differently based on position, what CA does the game take then to interact with potential and development? Just the best possible for a given player even if its not the position he plays in? Will players whose potential has capped but are not at their max for the poistion they play in start to lose secondary attributes and gain on main ones as training continues?

Don't quite understand this sorry. The players CA is determined by his attributes and his position. As he develops (assuming he is not at his PA) his attributes will increase (influenced by training) and this will result in an increase in his CA.

I believe if someone is at his PA, and some attributes start to fall (e.g. pace/stamina due to age) then other attributes will increase. I imagine this is why more experienced players have high mental attributes as their declining physical attributes have been exchanged?

Jervaj:

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Also, would you conclude after this study that some attributes may be very worth it to look out for/develop because of their "cheapness" and the little opportunity cost in main attributes? Theres things like flair and agression that, while somewhat double edged, I belive are considered to be net positives by a fair margin, specially if the accompanying attributes for a gvien are good enough.
Then you have things like jumping reach and heading which are very cheap outside of SCT and CD, which may make them very good to have outside those position if you expect the player to use them at all. any kind of attacking midfielder that gets into the box seems great to make a header according to this as it wont cost him much in other attributes.

I'm not sure it is possible to increase flair and aggresion (or natural fitness). I know Detemination can increase thorugh mentoring, but not sure about those.

Yes, I think you are right, it should be easier to increase heading for an AMC rather than acceleration for example. However, jumping reach may also be limited by the player's height?

Jervaj:

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On a similar note, may this make some duty/role/position combinations more efficient? In the sense of behaving very similar on the field to another combination on a different position, yet been able to have higher attributes with less CA. Like, having a defensive oriented midfielder been cheaper as MC than as DM, or having a attacking oriented winback been cheaper if playing as DRL insted of WBRL.

That is my thought. DMC seems to be considered a defensive role e.g. tackling has a weight of 2.0. Whereas passing, first touch, technique, composure, vision are all much lower weighted compared to a MC. Therefore it seems it should be easier to develop a deep-lying playmaker at DMC rather than at MC.

However (and this is a big point!) if a player is natural at both i.e. DM/M(C) I do not believe this will hold as he will more than likely have the highest weight for each position. So he'll have the highest weight from DMC for tackling, decisions, marking etc. as well as the higher weight from MC for passing, first touch, technique, composure, vision etc.

If true (I've not finished investigating yet), it would be better to have a purely DMC or MC depending on what kind of role you wanted them to play. So a pure DMC as a playmaker alongside a ball-winning midfielder as a pure MC.

2020-12-11 19:44#279840 CAE :

Jervaj:

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Also, would you conclude after this study that some attributes may be very worth it to look out for/develop because of their "cheapness" and the little opportunity cost in main attributes? Theres things like flair and agression that, while somewhat double edged, I belive are considered to be net positives by a fair margin, specially if the accompanying attributes for a gvien are good enough.
Then you have things like jumping reach and heading which are very cheap outside of SCT and CD, which may make them very good to have outside those position if you expect the player to use them at all. any kind of attacking midfielder that gets into the box seems great to make a header according to this as it wont cost him much in other attributes.

I'm not sure it is possible to increase flair and aggresion (or natural fitness). I know Detemination can increase thorugh mentoring, but not sure about those.

Yes, I think you are right, it should be easier to increase heading for an AMC rather than acceleration for example. However, jumping reach may also be limited by the player's height?

I think those 3 can indeed be increase. Im pretty sure that I have seen natural fitness increases (with the arrow showing) and theres individual trainings that do target agression and/or flair. I think one player started with around 15 and after one season he was at 17-18.

2020-12-11 19:50#279841 CAE :

Jervaj:

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On a similar note, may this make some duty/role/position combinations more efficient? In the sense of behaving very similar on the field to another combination on a different position, yet been able to have higher attributes with less CA. Like, having a defensive oriented midfielder been cheaper as MC than as DM, or having a attacking oriented winback been cheaper if playing as DRL insted of WBRL.

That is my thought. DMC seems to be considered a defensive role e.g. tackling has a weight of 2.0. Whereas passing, first touch, technique, composure, vision are all much lower weighted compared to a MC. Therefore it seems it should be easier to develop a deep-lying playmaker at DMC rather than at MC.

However (and this is a big point!) if a player is natural at both i.e. DM/M(C) I do not believe this will hold as he will more than likely have the highest weight for each position. So he'll have the highest weight from DMC for tackling, decisions, marking etc. as well as the higher weight from MC for passing, first touch, technique, composure, vision etc.

If true (I've not finished investigating yet), it would be better to have a purely DMC or MC depending on what kind of role you wanted them to play. So a pure DMC as a playmaker alongside a ball-winning midfielder as a pure MC.

This relates to the part you didnt understood from my comment. What I meant is that I thought was that CA was independent of position, but you showed in your study that there is a weight system in place that varies from one position to the next. So my point was precisely how the game calculates the actual CA of the player, as in what weight it uses, if whatever position yields the highest, main psoition or what.

If it truly uses the max for every position the player can play in, then it would be a bit unfair for those players honestly. I guess it could be a price to pay for versatility, but still could be quite a high price, making you aim to look only for players that either have a single position or have just both sides of the same.

This is very cool. Awesome work! I'm still playing FM19, and am wondering if there is a way to get the tool to work with 19 instead of 21.

I first tried to put the custom squad view in the folder for my FM19 game, but it doesn't seem to be able to be imported in FM19. I then tried to create my own custom view with all the attributes in the order shown here, but when I save that off as a web page for my team and upload to the calculator I get a bunch of errors. I'm guessing there is something missing from my view that needs to be there.

Any chance this could work for older version of the game? Is it as simple as making sure all the right fields are in the customer squad view? And if so, can I get the whole list and order please?

Thanks for all the good work here. Even without the tool for the whole squad, I manually entered a few players and found that I have a 199 CA central defender! And the star attacker I've been focusing on is only 167!

@stanielwhale

Thanks for your comments!

The tool simply accepts an HTML document so if it's in the same format then I don't see why it won't work. I'll send you a FM21 HTML file so you can see the order.

However, there is no saying the weights are the same as FM21 (but I imagine they are similar).

For calibration purposes, would you mind sending a screenshot of the CA199 defender?

I have this problem again and again:

Warning: Division by zero in /home/fmscout/public_html/datas/inc/current-ability-calculator.php on line 358

Does anyone know why?

Thanks

@Killkenny Do you play in English language? The positions and attributes won’t work in other languages.

Also, it sometimes trips up on strange position combinations. Players it couldn’t extract the position for will usually appear on the top-left on the pitch and there’ll be a message about a position.

2020-12-31 08:31#280336 CAE : @Killkenny Do you play in English language? The positions and attributes won’t work in other languages.

Also, it sometimes trips up on strange position combinations. Players it couldn’t extract the position for will usually appear on the top-left on the pitch and there’ll be a message about a position.

Correct! The language was the problem. I switched the language to English and then it worked.

Thank you very much.

@stanielwhale Someone created a FM19 screen view and posted on the YouTube video comments.