One of the most common things I hear about Football Manager is that it can often be difficult to analyse your tactics and/or your team's performance in a match. I have been thinking about this and I have a few ideas that I'd like to share with you. This links in to other areas of the game, including finances, and I'll detail my thoughts for each area:

ProZone

ProZone was used by 19 of the 20 Premiership clubs last season - Watford were the only club not to use it. For those of you that don't know about ProZone, it's a statistical analysis of your team - it includes lots of information such as the areas of the pitch your players have appeared in, the amount of distance they have run, the types of passes attempted (and success rate) and other stats of this nature. They use a tool called MatchViewer which shows pass maps, possession grids and other things with fancy names. So that's what ProZone is. Now, I don't know everything about it, but I should imagine it's quite expensive. I'd like this to be implemented into the game, but perhaps only offered to top flight clubs and the very best of the division below. It would need SI to research this better than I have, because I think it should have a financial impact on clubs, so you couldn't have, say, League One Gillingham implementing ProZone. This implementation could help us see exactly what's going on with our tactics and team. This option could be added to the boardroom menu - so you can request funds for ProZone (and it could be offered to you as well).

Scouting

One of the things I like about the current scouting model is that there is a clear difference in the level of scouting reports you get from a good scout vs a rubbish scout. I'd like to see this expanded upon in a major way. Remember that leaked scouting report from the Chelsea team when they scouted Newcastle? It was a four page dossier and contained lots of information on the players they were playing against. I couldn't find it, but here's some information on it. I'm thinking that in FM we could set a scouting budget - and this will allow us to bring in a scouting network of people. If our budget is large AND we have a world class scout in charge of scouting opposition, I'd like to see us have the opportunity to have an extremely detailed match report.

If we have this in place AND we have ProZone, we could potentially have the opportunity to have stats like this presented to us (on request). Again, this could help us plan our tactics more effectively.

Statistics

Just another thing to help you analyse how you're going to set your team up to play your defenders. I'd like to see statistics of the likes of Opta Stats and/or the Actim Index. Partly, this would be just for information (e.g. looking at how many goals are scored in the last 15 minutes), and partly this would be useful, for example, if you're playing the team who have the most shots on target, you might concentrate on closing them down. This is obviously something that would have no cost on the team, but perhaps the higher the league you play in, the more detailed the stats are that are available.

Finally

I think that these things would take a long time to consider, and there are licensing issues, I should imagine, with ProZone, and there is a worry that FM might be carrying too much information so that you need a super computer to make it run. But if it was done well, I think it could be a quality addition to the game. For those that just want to play the game quickly, you don't need to use the stats/prozone/scouting, and you can continue to play the game as you do now. But for those who want to micro manage every detail in its minutiae, this could be a valuable tool.

Does anyone think this is a good idea?

ProZone

As ProZone is used in CM, FM obviously couldn't use it under that name, unless the license was bought, but I definetley agree that an analysis tool is needed. I'm not sure I agree with it only being available to the bigger, more financialy sound clubs using it though. Whilst this would be more realistic, I don't think it would add to the game in restricting it to onlt those who choose to play as bigger clubs.

Scouting

I like the idea of a scouting budget. Unlike in FM, the top teams don't just have about 6 scouts, they have networks of scouts, so being able to have a proper network in place would surely only improve scouting.

I would also like to add that I think the scout report needs a slight adjustment. Rather then saying that player X could become a good premiership player, I feel they should say something along the lines of "has the potential to improve far beyond his current level", "has some room for improvement" and "unlikely to improve much in the future". I don't feel it's realistic for a scout to be making jusdgements on a likely level of play for a player until his age is increasing.

I won't comment on statistics much, as I don't really look at them a great deal, but I'm sure it won't do any harm having more.

I think it would add a lot of relaism to the game, but can't see SI putting it into FM anytime soon. Main thing is to get FM08 straight first before worrying about extras to add. I do think it would be a good feature to add though in the future.

Good Ideas :thup:

I do like your ideas, but am a bit worried of my playing time with such features.
I'm one of those players who can play for hours before pressing the continue button.
I don't see this happen soon but i am all for.
Scouting definitely could use much more info then what it is now.
More stats are always welcome with me, especially match stats.
You certainly thought well about this and i can only apologize that i have nothing more to add on your quality post then to agree 100%. :thup:

The more stats that you have at your disposal the better really so they are good ideas and very eloquently put if I may say so. Not sure if Prozone is an exclusive to CM or not, would SI want to be seen to be copying CM that much though??

Brilliant Gills!

Cant beleive this has had such little response, its a well thoughtout structured thread, of which i know i have(amongst others) been plugging these features for years.

My only concern with the depth is that it would take an eternity to setup your team which may affect the inexperienced, but then you can use as much or as little of the infor as you want - or perhaps you could ask the assman for a summary with a little more detail than we currently get.

I have been meaning to get my finger out and structure a post about the training side of things - i have it all planned out! And its threads like these that make me at least think about it...

I used to work for ProZone.

It costs around 250k/yr for clubs, who have it on a year-to-year contract (because not every manager used/wanted it). We did majority of the Premiership, most of the Championship and two League 1 clubs. We also did the Qatar and Greek leagues (nightmares for us, who had to identify players all the time) and also the odd 'scouting' game for clubs.

Allardyce swore by it when at Bolton, and we'd get thank you letters from his staff

But you don't need it on FM. I don't know what it would add. It's to generally number crunch and to see who's being lazy, who's not been making the runs or running as fast as they can over certain distances etc.

Would people use this every game? And is the match engine good enough to generate this? I'm not so sure tbh.

:thup: GillsMan for the effort and quality of the post.

Re ProZone suggestion:-

With FM I think SI strive to have a level playing field (others may disagree on this and argue that at the moment the AI knows more about the implication of tactical changes than Human managers but that in itself is a separate issue). If you introduce a Pro Zone type analysis then this would offer an advantage to the Human manager as I doubt current AI allows for AI managers to be analytical to the same level a human manager can.

Or maybe they haven’t implemented a ProZone type of analysis tool because of potential legal issues?

Or maybe they prefer that FM gamers do it the hard way? In other words watch a full match after the fact and do your own analysis. If that is the case then surely they should introduce the ability to watch a match (after it’s been played) in the same way you would a dvd/video of it i.e. allow us to fast forward/rewind and select any moment in time that we choose to analyse. As it stands it can be bloody tedious if you do like to go in depth and analyse your tactics as you have to watch it once, remember the timing of the mistake/issue, and then watch it again to reach that point in the match.

In any case I am with you that if they can introduce similar stats like Prozone without there being legal issues/processing crunches/save game size inflation then I am all for it. Give me a graphical display that shows me what I want to see:-

- individual passing (direction, accuracy)
- where shots are taken and by who
- crossing (completed vs blocked by location on pitch and player)
- etc., etc.

Why should I have to go through a match taking screenshots to see this type of information (if that’s what I want to do) when a computer could do this for me with relative ease? If SI want the game to focus on tactics then give me the tools to make figuring them out less of a struggle, unless of course SI consider this struggle to be part of the gaming experience.

With regards to the availability of Prozone based on financial resources that depends on what SI’s intentions would be if they were to implement such a system. If it were to assist the user in getting to grips with the tactical system then there wouldn’t be any restrictions. If it were to reflect the tools a modern manager has at their disposal then there would be restrictions. Personally I agree with Bongo-Bongo and believe if it were introduced it should be available to those who choose to use it.

Re Scouting suggestions:-

I applaud your ideas and your vision for what the game could be, but I think your expectations might be a bit far fetched within the current constraints of AI (I base this not on any knowledge but from watching how the FM players behave, and also my experience of AI behaviour in other sports based games and FPSs).

To create intelligent, specific scout reports on a team requires analysis of a match that said team played in. The AI in FM just isn’t at that level (whether or not that is possible within current technology I can’t say). As it stands as far as I can tell the scouting report is just a reference to particular stored values in the game:-

- manager’s preferred formation
- manager’s hidden attributes that determine how they set up a formation
- pitch dimensions
- dangermen based on CA, and the specifics of the threat they pose based on attributes

The difference between a good scout and a rubbish scout is how much information is actually revealed to you as the manager (how many matches the scout has ‘seen’ the team play also affects this). So I think a ‘Mourinho Team’ type analysis like you linked to is unlikely in the near future.

But if we had the Prozone type analysis tool then this is something we could do ourselves if we wanted to.

Re Statistics suggestion:-

I agree with you on this. Since it is all on the gamer’s head to figure what is going wrong and where, then the more information we have at our disposal to help us decide what to do then the better the gaming experience will be. To be honest I’ve often wondered why SI have never implemented cumulative Team Statistics as surely it would just be a case of adding up the individual player statistics that already exist.

I would love some answers from SI on the questions that your post brings up:-

1. Why no Prozone like tool?
2. Why can’t we fast forward/rewind a previous match?
3. Why have statistics not been made more in depth (cumulative team statistics) and varied (e.g. position specific, particularly goalkeepers)?