Match Ratings In Football Manager
How do they work?
Match Ratings In Football Manager
Match ratings in Football Manager are a trap.
They always have been, really. It’s a simplistic way of telling you which player did well and which player performed poorly.
But the problem is that it doesn’t tell you much about why the players did what they did. For that bit of information, you unfortunately have to do a bunch of digging for yourself.
It’s been this way for a long time: in fact, I think it’s been this way since the beginning. You can see the bare (and mostly uninformative) match rating stats in this screenshot from FM15, for example:
Any of us can look at this and see that the West Brom players performed better on average. But did Gerard Moreno’s 9.2 rating really rank higher than Sergi Roberto’s 9.0? And should we be concerned that Lorenzo Cirsetig “only” got a 6.7 rating coming off the bench?
On the other side - what was it that Matt Besler did for West Ham that caused his rating to be so poor? We can’t figure that out unless we look deep at his match statistics — and even then we’ll be confused unless we have some statistical context.
While Football Manager’s data features can give you some of that important information, it still tends to be hidden, and it’s not as informative as it could be. In my experience, it usually results in simplistic charts telling me that one of my strikers is above average, or that one of my fullbacks is slightly below average. It’s something, but it’s usually not enough information for me to make a meaningful change to my side.
What do you think? Is there a good trick to making the match rating information more useful? Or would Sports Interactive be better off forgetting about the whole thing and starting over?