In my initial screening of potential striker targets I
arbitrarily chose to look only at strikers with composure and finishing scores
of at least 12. FM 2015 gives Juanmi an
11 in composure. As a result, I never
looked at him.
I went back and scouted him with the Manchester United
scouts in game and they rated him 1.5 stars in current ability and 2.5 in
potential. Again, this would have
prevented me from including him on my list.
Had I actually looked at him, I would have seen that he had
a CA of 129 and a PA of 161. The 129 is
lower than I would normally include in my possibilities, but only slightly and
the 161 would have made up for that. Nothing
on the internet from last month or before tells me that he would not have been
available for the right price so I undoubtedly would have left him on the final
list had he passed through all the earlier screenings. His release clause certainly would not have
been a barrier—although FM listed it as 13.75 million pounds so that might have
scared me off if I had not found different information elsewhere.
According to FM his best traits are his determination, acceleration,
agility, first touch, and technique. His
worst traits are his long throws, marking, tackling, jumping, aggression, and
positioning. In other words, he is not
very good defensively and does not head the ball well. If these statistics are accurate (a risky
assumption) he will need to work hard to improve his defensive skills to play
the way Koeman wants. On the other hand,
he may never have been called upon to play much defense so the ratings are
likely based upon inadequate information.
The question is what, if anything, I should learn from
this. That depends on what I am trying
to do. If I am trying to guess who
Southampton might sign, I need to expand my parameters. The problem is that if I had expanded the
system to include players with an 11 composure, I would have also included those
with an 11 finishing. If I included 1.5 star players with these
attributes (even excluding those for whom FM indicates no significant potential
for improvement), it would have more than doubled the number of players I had
to evaluate. I did not have twice as
much time to spend (or more accurately, I would still be working on the project
had I gone that direction).
On the other hand, if my goal is to spot players who would
do well for us, I simply need to wait and see how Juanmi turns out. If he is a flop, then my system was better
than the black box. If he does well, my
system mistakenly overlooked him and I can adjust in January.
I considered the possibility of modifying the system right
now to look for younger player with the potential to improve and favor them over
older more developed players. However,
that system would have overlooked Pelle last summer and, therefore, would have
been just as flawed if guessing actual signings was the goal.
I could stop working inside the game and download an editor
and search the database directly instead of using Manchester United’s large
scouting staff. I have been considering
that. I did not want to do it last year because
I have found that when I have an editor installed on my computer, I cannot
resist using it to scout players for my games.
However, this year I have been so busy that I have only used FM to
assist in my blogging so there were no games to ruin.
For now, I have started work on my defensive midfielder
report and I will continue it in the same way because it would waste even more
time to start over with a new system.
After that, we shall see.
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