We Were Wrong About Training
Less is more
We Were Wrong About Training
Well, it turns out that I stuck my foot in my mouth after all.
We were wrong about training. Like — we were really wrong.
In early November 2024, a Chinese poster, writing in English, wrote that Evidence Based Football Manager was actually wrong in his training experiment.
The problem? Max was playing the players in matches while he trained them. In other words, he wasn’t accounting for the impact that matches themselves has on how player ability grows in Football Manager.
And so the poster set up a basic test. He set each player to a professionalism level of 20, and calculated how their Pace, Acceleration, and Jumping Reach changed with various training schedules. And, importantly, he made sure to ban each of those players from match participation.
Around 500 people assisted him with this test — and this was the result:
Now, that’s a pretty big spreadsheet. The interesting part here, though, comes at the bottom:
Basically — it seems that not training players was more effective in getting pace, acceleration, and jumping reach to grow than any active training schedule.
Training, in other words, doesn’t do what we think it did.
A few of his findings include:
A player with a professionalism level of 20 will grow about twice as much per season as a player with a professionalism level of 10.
If your players don’t train at all, their physical attributes (i.e. pace and acceleration) will always naturally grow, and their mental and technical attributes will always naturally decline.
Repeated physical training at a massive level doesn’t cause players to improve quickly. This is a big blow to me, since that’s what I’ve been doing.
Repeated comprehensive training also doesn’t cause players to improve quickly.
Training appears to simply reassign current ability weight to certain attributes. It doesn’t add new current ability, but, rather, reassigns current ability.
Setting intensity to “double intensity,” however, does work.
His first recommended training schedule was this, combined with “double intensity:”
In other words — your players will meditate with double intensity, and will see tremendous attribute improvements as a result.
This isn’t a joke, by the way. It’s a bit long, but you should watch this Jayhuahua video for more evidence:
Now, this method won’t necessarily give you players with perfect 20 ratings for their physicals, like they do in this video. After all, you won’t play with a bunch of players with 200 Potential Ability and a 20 for Professionalism in your saves.
But it gives you an idea of what is actually happening in the game engine.