RSL in the WSL Part 10

Signing Tricks

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RSL in the WSL Part 10

We’ve talked in previous posts about Squad DNA, as well as the importance of Determination, Professionalism, and Ambition.

I’ve got something interesting to share with you today – a small bug in the game that could revolutionize the way you sign players.

Bad Traits

First, though, there are a few player traits that you should be wary of.

Football Manager players don’t just come with numbers and personalities.  They also come with these funny looking player traits that show up on the coach’s report.  This will tell you a thing or two about the player you’re looking at that you won’t find anywhere else.

There are too many of these to list here.  However, there are three in particular that we need to be wary of if we’re going to have success.  These three are:

• Consistency

• Injury susceptibility

• Big matches

Consistency

Consistency is a hidden attribute in Football Manager.  You can’t see it, but it’s there.  This attitude determines whether your player will play to his full ability on a game-by-game basis.

Naturally, you want players who are highly consistent.  It’s not hard to spot them – they have a green target like this:

You want to stay away from players that are inconsistent.  They might give you a good game now and then, but will frustrate you to no end with their poor performances.  They have a target that looks something like this:

A deep green consistent target means the player is extremely consistent.  In contrast, one that is deep red means that the player is extremely inconsistent.

In theory, there are ways to coach players to be more consistent.  Most online guides will tell you to warn or fine inconsistent players for poor performances.  However, in my experience, this will only slightly nudge that consistency attribute forward.  Sadly, a highly inconsistent player is likely to never live up to his potential.

As a result, we want to avoid inconsistent players at all cost.

Injury Susceptibility

I’m not aware of a positive version of this attribute marker.  The negative one looks like this:

Stay away from any young players who “might have a problem with injuries” or who are listed as “injury prone.”  They will likely be injured more often than they are healthy, and their injuries will likely prevent them from ever coming close to their full potential.

Big Matches

We want to hire players who enjoy playing in big matches, and not players who hide away when the pressure is on.

We’re looking for this symbol:

Likewise, we want to avoid this one:

Again – in theory, we can move this slider around a little bit by playing these players in more big matches.  However, the process is extremely time consuming and is not much fun.

Note that the Big Match indicator usually doesn’t appear until a player is 21 years old.  Keep an eye out for it, and don’t be afraid to sell off your high potential young players when this one shows up.  Better to reinvest that profit into the club than hold on to a player who isn’t going to perform to his potential when it really counts.

The Trick

Okay – now we know what warning signs we’re looking out for.  How do we spot them?

The first thing we can do is scout players.  That takes a lot of time, however, and can be very difficult to do if you have a small budget.  If you’re trying to overhaul your entire squad, the slow scouting game likely will not work for you.

We do have something else on our side, though.  We have a thing called “trials.”

In Football Manager, you are allowed to bring up to 30 players into your club on a trial basis at one time.  It doesn’t take much in-game time for players to arrive on trial, either – even if they are located on the other side of the world.

Interestingly enough, you can find out a lot about a player right after he comes into your club on trial.  For our purposes, the most important thing you can learn is what his personality is.

There’s also a trick that will show you all of the other stuff that we usually have to wait for a scouting report to see.  It works better than you think.

Free Agent Trialists

Let’s go through an example together.

I received a scouting email the other day about a North Korean striker named Kim Kang-Song, who just happens to be a free agent.

Naturally, I pulled him in on trial.

This is what he looks like on the squad screen:

Notice that his personality is listed as “unknown.”  I have an idea of what some of his attribute ratings are, but it’s just a vague idea right now.

But, if we click in and look at his profile screen, we’ll see that his personality is already showing:

Now – at this stage, we don’t know about his consistency or injury susceptibility.  My cursor is hiding that section – but, trust me, we don’t know.

Let’s say that I want to hire this player.  I know, he’s got one of those bad Balanced personalities – but let’s give it a try anyway.

If you look at the right side of the screen, you can see the same coach report information that I mentioned a second ago.  We know nothing about his consistency at this stage.

Once we offer him a contract, we can terminate the trial:

Technically, we could also terminate the trial before making the contract offer – it’s up to you.

Now comes the trick.  Advance the game one step, and then click on “Transfers” on the left menu.  You’ll see a page like this:

Now we can click on Kim Kang-Song’s profile, where we’ll see this:

Notice anything different?  Look at that big inconsistent symbol in the coach’s report.

That’s the trick.  Once you’ve made an offer and advanced the game once, the entire coach report will suddenly appear.

It works for any player you’ve had in on trial.  It doesn’t matter how long the trial lasts.  I tend to have players in on trial for a single in-game turn, and then let them loose.

As you can see, this method allows you to hunt through hundreds of players systematically, capturing only the good ones and letting the rest free.  It doesn’t take as much time as you’d think, either.

Now, I don’t want to sign an inconsistent North Korean striker, so I’m going to simply cancel this offer:

And that’s it – you’re done.  There is no in-game penalty for doing this.  Most of the time the media won’t even ask you about why the deal didn’t go through.

Trialists Under Contract

Sometimes you want to sign a player who is under contract with another club.  In most cases, the other club won’t let you take the player in on a trial.  However, players who only have youth contracts are usually an exception.

The same trick I mentioned above works in this scenario.  Let’s see an example.

I’ve brought in 4 16-year-old players on trial this time around:

We can see their personalities right away.  This is probably because I had them in as trialists earlier this season.

Now, these are all balanced players, which I think are awful.  However, for the sake of learning, let’s pretend that I want to sign Muhammed Ayhan:

He doesn’t look too bad, right?  Looks like he’s got some promise, pretty good determination, and seems to be somewhat cheap.  Let’s move forward with signing him.

We can’t sign him directly because he is already under contract.  Therefore, we’ve offered Kayserispor a small fee for him.

I would normally negotiate this fee.  Usually you can get rid of the “additional fees” and cut the fee itself down to just over 50% of the original asking price.  Of course, this is just an example, so we’ll forget about all that and will move forward instead.

Now we terminate the trials.

After advancing the game once, this screen will pop up:

We can now negotiate Muhammed Ayhan’s contract directly.  And, surprise surprise, all of that hidden information about him is going to pop right up.

Look at the right hand side of the screen.  We see that he is extremely inconsistent.

At this point I usually just walk away from negotiations.  There’s no point in going through with a contract for a player who is this inconsistent, no matter how young he is.

You can also see the same information on his player profile screen:

As I said, the right choice here is to simply walk away.

Min / Max

If you really get serious about this – if you really push to min/max your Football Manager save, you’ll eventually discover that you can perform this trick on each team’s youth intake as soon as the new players are created.  This is the most surefire way to sign young wonderkids for cheap.

Note that this doesn’t mean you can forget about scouting.  You need a high scouting budget and the best scouting package to see as many of these young players as possible.  The more you scout, the more information you’ll have – and the easier it will be to get this system to work.

We’ll see more of this in future posts.