Career Scratch and the Double Terrible - On Hold

[Scratch]

A while back I asked whether I should post a career on here: 

 

The response was overwhelmingly in favour of me posting it and including the details.

I've been playing the career for a little while now, very slowly. It's serving it's main purpose, in that I've fixed several major bugs with my scouting app, and added in a bunch of new features to make it more useful.

 

To recap, I am going to try to do the DT with two strikers who have a PA of under 100. I'll be doing it with Oxford United, starting in League 1 and hopefully working my way up to the EPL. This will not be an actual DT that qualifies for the leaderboard, as the use of a scouting app is not allowed under the rules. 

Here are the 2 lads that I will be using:

And here's what they look like under the hood:

Spoiler

 

Hmm.... I've seen better. I'm particularly worried about their Work Rate, which is very low, and they are both a little more injury prone than I would like. I'm also worried about Smith's consistency which is way too low.

Still, beggars can't be choosers, and this pair were a lot better than the others I found. They have also been specifically chosen because of the large gap between CA and PA. Bloxham should get 13 updates, and Smith should get 14, so even though they have terrible starting attributes and low PA, they'll probably turn out half-decent just thanks to the number of updates they get.

 

As for the team, they aren't in much better shape:

And these are the best players at the club:

Spoiler

Not too bad for League 1, but it drops off steeply after those players. I thought I had a screenshot of the worst players, but it seems I don't. However there were plenty of players who in the 80 to 100 range.

Not to worry, because my favourite part of the game is overhauling the squad, and now I can actually use my scouting app to do it. There will definitely be a major upgrade in personnel.

 

As for the tactics, I'll be using the following formation (although I later dropped the CAM back to an AP in the CM line):

It's basically my TT tactic, but with one of the strikers dropped back into central midfield so that the two lads are upfront by themselves. I found the central TM and the offset P worked well with my aging strikers in my 3x1KC, so I'm hoping it will work for these two lads.

Because the squad is going to need some time to level up, I'll be going with a balanced approach rather than an attacking or overload one at this point.

 

And that's where I think I will leave it for now. I'll be back with more in the next day or so. This write-up might be a little bit different, especially in the first season or two, as I plan to screenshot every update for the lads, so we'll have to see how it works out.

Thanks for reading.

 

Edited June 29, 2021 by Scratch

[geordiekrispy]

Looks good. Both the players and the scouting app.

It's one of the things that's always bothered me is the whole potential thing and how it equates to actually values. Plus the combined attributes in fmm compared to full fat FM on the PC.

[Albionic]

Very interested to see how this one goes, particularly how the PA and CA values, plus the other hidden attributes, translate into performance and other attributes.

[Rich]

Awesome! I can’t wait to see how this pans out Scratch, should be a great follow 😁

[Scratch]

On 14/06/2021 at 21:38, geordiekrispy said:

Looks good. Both the players and the scouting app.

It's one of the things that's always bothered me is the whole potential thing and how it equates to actually values. Plus the combined attributes in fmm compared to full fat FM on the PC.

Thanks. Yeah looking behind the scenes is interesting alright. There's no 100% answer for anything though. Sometimes I see players with great attributes but less CA/PA than you'd expect and vice versa. I generally go on attributes rather than CA/PA, but I'd rather have a player with both! 🙂

[Scratch]

On 15/06/2021 at 03:30, Albionic said:

Very interested to see how this one goes, particularly how the PA and CA values, plus the other hidden attributes, translate into performance and other attributes.

Thanks. I've been looking at them on and off for a while and I'm not sure how much difference any of it makes! But it's still interesting to see.

added 0 minutes later

On 15/06/2021 at 18:37, Rich said:

Awesome! I can’t wait to see how this pans out Scratch, should be a great follow 😁

Thanks mate. I'm into season 2 now, pretty behind on writing this up...

[Scratch]

Season 1 - Preseason

The team I inherited wasn't in the best shape - decent for League 1, but this team is going all the way to the top of the tree and these players won't cut it. So... it's transfer time! 😄

Money was very tight however. I had to sell as many players as I could and send back any loanees whose wage we were paying. I did turn down a £10M offer for Brannagan - he's one of the few original players I wanted to keep. As it turns out, that would have almost doubled the amount of money I had to work with, as you can see from our outgoing transfers:

Not a lot of money there. As a result, I was restricted in who I could bring in. Many good players won't come to League 1 in the first place, but of those who would, many cost more than I could afford.

That said, I did make a couple of good signings:

Most are youngsters, but 3 in particular stood out to me:

• Simunovic - one of the players I always try to sell at Celtic, but he'll be a legend in L1. 
• Cottrell - a young star who could go far. And...
• Mikey Dutch Sandwich Johnston!! 

I had agreed for Pipi to join, but he couldn't get a work permit. 

Anyway, its a decent squad, although they all need to grow a bit. You can see the whole squad's CA/PA here:

Spoiler

Simunovic and Mikey are unlikely to be long term solutions, but they are going to be great at this level. Most of this lot will be good for a couple of years, but will ultimately be replaced as we go. Only Cottrell and Chin are likely to last longer.

As an aside, I added a temporary feature to my scouting app to show the average CA and PA for the players selected. I'm not sure yet where to fit it into the app proper, but here are the averages for our first team before and after the transfer window:

Spoiler

As you can see, I've improved the average PA by 9 points, but the average CA has decreased by 9 points! However we now have a lot of young players who will improve greatly over the course of the season.

Other stuff:

In goal scoring challenges I normally buy Carrillo and get him to mentor my strikers in Aerial, but of course there's no way I was going to get him in League 1. Instead I settled for a poor man's version:

Spoiler alert: it didn't work out. I did see nice improvements in Aerial for Bloxham, but it wasn't to do with Bennett. Both players got tired of him after a month or two and I had to cancel the mentoring. Still, Bennett did act as our most reliable goal scorer for the year, so it wasn't a total loss.

Finally, you'd think that having a scouting app would make it quicker to put together a squad, right? Umm, not for me! 

Over 7 hours before we even kicked a ball! It seem that the more data points there are, the longer it takes me to pick players! I did add some new features to help speed it up in future though (eg exporting the currently showed list of players to a shortlist in FMM so you can use the Interested option to find players who'll actually sign for you).

Anyway, thanks for reading. I'll be back with some actual games sometime soon.

 

Edited June 17, 2021 by Scratch

[geordiekrispy]

Lol nice transfers and a good overall squad rebuild I reckon.

4 minutes ago, Scratch said:

I did add some new features to help speed it up in future though (eg exporting the currently showed list of players to a shortlist in FMM so you can use the Interested option to find players who'll actually sign for you).

That sounds like a really nice feature! If you can do "better" searching in the scout app it'll definitely be easier than doing it in the game.

[Rich]

That’s a strong rebuild even if it did take you 7 hours 😂Love the write up, can’t wait to see how they got on and how players develop.

[Scratch]

1 hour ago, geordiekrispy said:

Lol nice transfers and a good overall squad rebuild I reckon.

That sounds like a really nice feature! If you can do "better" searching in the scout app it'll definitely be easier than doing it in the game.

Yeah, I think it will make things easier as you can include players in a certain PA range or with high Professionalism or Work Rate and then import the shortlist and then you know that everyone you see there is going to be in that range. I often spend a lot of time trying to track down some of that info through the in game signals which are hard to search for. 

Of course you can't do that for challenges, but I'll probably swap around the types of saves I'm playing (some challenges, some not).

[Scratch]

53 minutes ago, Rich said:

That’s a strong rebuild even if it did take you 7 hours 😂Love the write up, can’t wait to see how they got on and how players develop.

They are coming along alright, especially the main two, but it's taking some of the others a while to develop. I think L1 is too low to get them much higher than 110 / 120. I expect they will develop quicker in the Championship (if we get promotion)

[broodje kip]

Best piece of transfers there Scratchy mate! I hope you win the league and both lads score 40+ at least. 🙏

[Scratch]

5 minutes ago, broodje kip said:

Best piece of transfers there Scratchy mate! I hope you win the league and both lads score 40+ at least. 🙏

Thanks mate, thought you'd like it! 😄 Though I'm sad to say the next update will let you down if those are you're expectations! 🤣

[broodje kip]

1 hour ago, Scratch said:

Thanks mate, thought you'd like it! 😄 Though I'm sad to say the next update will let you down if those are you're expectations! 🤣

As long you’re yet to sell him, I don’t mind failing any predictions 😂

[Scratch]

Season 1 

Not quite sure how to structure this update. I've already shown the transfers and the tactics, so I guess let's just jump straight into team results.

 

Wait... That says we won the league, which is a total lie:

 

We should have won the league mind you. We started off fairly poorly with so many young players, spending the first few months in the bottom half. Then as the players improved, so did the team. We hit 1st place by February (with 18 games to go) and even went a couple of games clear before hitting a bad patch that dropped us back to 2nd. We stabilized and went into the final game in first position thanks to goal difference (+10), but couldn't beat 17th place Burton at home on the final day...

Didn't do much in the cups, getting knocked out of the Carabao Cup 1-0 by Bristol Rovers in the first round, the FA Cup 4-2 by Newcastle in the 4th round, and the Papa John's Trophy 2-1 by Wigan in the Quarter Final:

Spoiler

 

As for the two lads, Bloxham went from this (35 CA out of 98 PA): 

To this (75 CA out of 103 PA):

While Smith went from this (31 CA out of 97 PA):

To this (71 CA out of 97 PA):

I'm pretty happy with that, especially Bloxham's Aerial. They both still have 5 or 6 updates to go, so should end up as fairly handy players even if they are a fair bit short of the players I normally work with. 

But... if you read that carefully, you would have noticed something strange: a very very very rare occurrence where a player's PA increases - in this case a 5 point increase for Bloxham. I've only seen that twice and up until a year or so ago I would have said that was impossible. The first time I saw it I didn't believe it! Both previous cases were a young player getting a 5 point bump, and so was this, so I guess that's a thing...

It sort of spoils the target of this save - a DT using two players with a PA under 100 - but there's not much I can do about it, so I'll carry on.

 

Now, I recorded every single update for both players - both the FMM screenshot showing the attribute changes and the app screenshot showing their CA had increased (every single time it was +5). I was originally going to update as I went along, with little bits of commentary, but that didn't happen, so now I have a LOT of screenshots for this. I guess I'm just going to dump them in a spoiler and if you want to look you can.

First here's Bloxham:

Spoiler

 

And here's Smith's:

Spoiler

 

We also improved Bloxham's terrible Work Rate a little with some fining etc:

Spoiler

 

So there you go. No clever analysis of any of that sorry. Well except for Bloxham's Aerial: it mostly didn't move at all, despite training as a TM all the way through and having Aerial as a focus about 50% of the time. but he got two big jumps of 4, along with one of 2 and one of 1. I've had those big jumps before, but it's been a long time since I've had two of 4 for one player. Bloxham was also lucky to get a +3 for Pace in the first update (he was training for that).

All in all Bloxham seemed very lucky with his updates, whereas Smith's were more pedestrian.

 

Where does that leave us with goal scoring? 

The lads got off to a decent start all things considered:

• Bloxham: 27 goals from 43 games
• Smith: 25 goals from 43 games

Happy with that given their age and their starting condition. It'll probably improve next season, but they'll have Championship defenders to contend with. I almost wish we hadn't won promotion so they could have another season at the lower level...

Finally here are the assists for anyone who's interested:

Forde and Mikey leading the way from the right wing, Cottrell doing well from the AP role in the CM line. 

Anyway, thanks for reading.

 

Edited June 19, 2021 by Scratch

[Rob]

Really interesting career this and one I’m glad you posted. 

[Scratch]

Season 2

After winning promotion to the Championship, the first thing we needed to do was upgrade the squad. Most of our weaker players were good enough to be squad players, but we don't want to just survive in the Championship, we want to get promoted again. Let's look at that a little more closely.

 

Squad Strength

For those who remember the screenshots above, the squad I inherited on joining the club averaged 102 CA and 121 PA. After my pre-season work in season 1, those averages had moved to 93 and 130, meaning I'd made the squad worse for game 1, but with more room to grow. 

By the end of Season 1, the averages were 110 CA and 131 PA:

Spoiler

A nice improvement, but with plenty of room to grow.

We had a number of players maxing out in the 110 to 130 range and these were the ones I wanted to move on:

Spoiler

Most of these left, but I hung on to Clare and McNally because they were still significantly better than my other options. 

Rob Hall deserves a special mention. because in many ways his is the exact type of player I'm talking about here - a great player for L1, a good option in the Championship, but ultimately not going to take us where we need to go:

Spoiler

I started shopping him around in the off-season, but couldn't get a good offer for him, so held on to him. A good offer came in for him in October, so I agreed it and parked him on the bench until January, even though he was still better than the people who replaced him (but they will be better than him one day).

Anyway, lets look at the actual transfers
 

Transfers 

Spoiler

There were a lot of players I would have liked to have brought to the club, but we just didn't have the money and weren't attractive enough for most of them. Still I was pretty happy with some of the signings we made - Henrique, Henderson and our first regen (only 4 star, not sure who):

Spoiler

It will take him a couple of years to be ready to help out, but he should be good eventually. 

We had a serious bid of £23.5M for Mikey, but I couldn't sell him because @broodje kip would stop reading! LoL, I will sell him at some point and probably not get this much:

Spoiler

Anyway, by the end of the season our averages were 121 CA and 139 PA (an improvement over last season of 11 and 8 respectively):

Spoiler

Getting better, but once again - I'd be happy with that for the Championship, not so much for the EPL, so if we go up, we'll continue to build the squad. 

 

Evidence Of An Oddity

Something that comes up on the forums every so often is the anomaly of the young player who just doesn't improve anymore. Take young Sean Clare for example:

Looks good! And my coach says he still has some potential to improve: 

Great! And he's not showing an orange bar in the training screen, so he doesn't seem to be blocked in any way:

But his green bar just never increases. What's wrong? Well, I'll tell you what's wrong:

Spoiler

He's maxed out! That's it for him, he's as good as he's ever going to get. But the game doesn't want to tell you that yet. He's a bit too young to say he's peaked and it doesn't want to say he's unlikely to improve yet, so ... you get this. 

 

Results

This time we did win the league! EPL here we come! But we had early exits in the two cups, courtesy of a 3-2 defeat to WBA and a 2-0 defeat to Liverpool:

More screenshots:

Spoiler

 

Injuries

After being almost injury free in season one, their luck vanished and they had the following injuries:

• Smith: 2 weeks, 10 days, 1 month
• Bloxham: 10 days, 1 month

Spoiler

 

Development - Adam Smith

Here's what Adam looks like at the end of the season:

And here are the upgrades he got (let me know if you don't like the gif approach):

I have to say it's a little underwhelming: 5 updates resulting in +3 Shooting, +2 Movement, +2 Decisions, +2 Stamina, +2 Strength and absolutely no improvement in Aerial. It definitely felt to me like the game was holding him back a little, maybe because it doesn't want him to be too good for a 97 PA player?

I have screenshots of his CA in the app for each upgrade, but it seems pointless to post them - it just increased by 5 each time, leaving him at 91 CA out of 97 PA by the end of the season. 

But wait... Smith was just returning from the month long injury when we played the last game and when I next checked the app, I got a nasty surprise:

Spoiler

Although he'd been 91 out of 97 after our last game, he was now 91 out of 92. So the injury cost him 5 PA. And that means he has 1 tiny partial update to come before he's maxed out. He won't be as good as I wanted, but I'll have to make the most of it.

On the plus side, I managed to fine him into a slightly better Work Rate:

Spoiler

 

Development - Tom Bloxham

Here's what Tom looks like at the end of the season (actually after an update a little way into the off season):

And here are his progress steps:

Once again a lot of those updates were a little underwhelming. Over the course of 8 updates, he had the following improvements: +3 Movement, +2 Shooting, +1 in Aerial, +1 Decisions, +5 Stamina, +4 Strength. He's up to 100 CA out of 103 PA and pretty decent now, good enough for this, but once again, it feels like the game has held him back a little compared to other (better) strikers I've had in the past.

 

Goals

We didn't see the increase I was looking for, maybe because we stepped up a division, maybe because they are still quite young, or maybe because of the injuries: - or maybe because of all three:

• Bloxham: 33 goals from 35 games
• Smith: 24 goals from 37 games

Spoiler

We're up to 109 goals combined so far, not travelling too badly, but next season will be a massive step up to the EPL. 

 

Thanks for reading! 

 

 

 

Edited June 24, 2021 by Scratch

[Rich]

Great write up Scratch and that’s a great season, really looking forward to seeing what the end product will look like for the two boys.

[Scratch]

Just now, Rich said:

Great write up Scratch and that’s a great season, really looking forward to seeing what the end product will look like for the two boys.

Thanks mate - neither will get much better now, but the squad around them will slowly turn first class and then we'll see how many they can put away... 🙂

[broodje kip]

This looks very interesting especially with all the hidden attributes there. That’s a very tempting offer tbf. My highest was back in Augusta when AC Milan bought him for £40M

[Scratch]

7 minutes ago, broodje kip said:

This looks very interesting especially with all the hidden attributes there. That’s a very tempting offer tbf. My highest was back in Augusta when AC Milan bought him for £40M

I thought about it - but he's still my best option by some way. Once I get a youngsters starting to get close, I'll probably do it, but doesn't make sense right now...

[geordiekrispy]

That's a pretty good season. Shame the injury caused Smith to lose some PA.

It'll be interesting to see how you go in the Premiership.

I love that we're kind of "peaking under the hood" as it were in terms of what the coaches are saying and what the game is actually showing in the background. Could it be that with better coaches Sean Clare would improve a bit? Or maybe just shuffle round his stats?

How did you do the gif? Just select them all and combine in photos? Or something fancier? I'm still undecided to do them or not in my York save.

[Scratch]

55 minutes ago, geordiekrispy said:

That's a pretty good season. Shame the injury caused Smith to lose some PA.

It'll be interesting to see how you go in the Premiership.

I love that we're kind of "peaking under the hood" as it were in terms of what the coaches are saying and what the game is actually showing in the background. Could it be that with better coaches Sean Clare would improve a bit? Or maybe just shuffle round his stats?

How did you do the gif? Just select them all and combine in photos? Or something fancier? I'm still undecided to do them or not in my York save.

Thanks. I wasn't happy about the lost PA because he didn't have much to spare and I really thought having that many updates would mean he'd turn out better than you'd expect for his PA. But I guess I got the extra 5 for Bloxham so it evens out.

Not very far into the next season, but holding our own - currently 12th in October. I did rip up the team a bit, replaced a lot of solid players with youngsters who'll be a lot better a year or two down the track, so will need them to kick on a bit.

With Clare, once his CA has reached his PA, then that's mostly it. From what I can tell retraining in different position might change the shape of how the points are distributed so you might see a slight shift in some attributes (some go up, some go down), but that doesn't always happen. Then sometimes younger players get bonus points around their birthday (it's looks like the game reduces their attribute points a little because they are young, then turns that off slowly as they age). Then they can get points from mentoring or a boost from a coach (fairly rare).

Sa far as Clare goes, given he's 25 already, he won't get mentoring or any birthday gifts, so he wouldn't change much. So as good as he's been, it make sense to sell him and re-invest the money in a youngster with 30 points higher PA than him!  

Gif: I tried Google Photos but couldn't control the speed (way too fast). I have a Samsung and their gallery app on the phone lets me do it and control the speed - but these ones were on my computer. I found some crappy free software to do it: http://www.onyxbits.de/giftedmotion - crappy in the sense that it looks like it's from the 90s! It does the job okay. 

[Scratch]

1 hour ago, geordiekrispy said:

That's a pretty good season. Shame the injury caused Smith to lose some PA.

It'll be interesting to see how you go in the Premiership.

I love that we're kind of "peaking under the hood" as it were in terms of what the coaches are saying and what the game is actually showing in the background. Could it be that with better coaches Sean Clare would improve a bit? Or maybe just shuffle round his stats?

How did you do the gif? Just select them all and combine in photos? Or something fancier? I'm still undecided to do them or not in my York save.

Oh, I'm just reading your York career now and I see you are going to make GIFs too! I think it's a good idea. I was going to do one of the table in the last 7 rounds, but turns out we won too easily and it wasn't worth it!

[Scratch]

Well that was surprising:

[Scratch]

Don't worry Wales, I have it on good authority you'll claim your revenge in next year's World Cup:

[Scratch]

ITN Job

I normally walk past the ITN jobs these days as it's too much hassle... That said, I thought it would be cool to give these two lads some England caps that they'd otherwise never experience. 

When the World Cup rolled around, it looked like I might have enough credit to get a decent ITN job, with Belgium outright offering me their manager position and the media speculating that I might be in the frame for the Spanish job.

Spoiler

 

Sadly, it looked like there'd be no change of manager for England, as they went all the way to the final, where Italy beat them:

 

They surely wouldn't sack the manager for that. Would they? Wait... 

 

They did! That's a bit harsh. But still good news for me and, better yet, apparently I'm linked with the job! It must be mine, right? 

Spoiler

 

 

[Rich]

What a nightmare mate, really thought you were going to get it then, shame, would have been nice to see them both playing international football, after next tournament now hopefully 🤞🏻

[Rob]

Gutted about the England job - always goes to Gerrard in mine too!

Really interesting stuff so far. Thanks.

[Albionic]

Hopefully the job comes back soon, enjoying this so far!