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+---- Thread: A newbie's thoughts on player creation (/showthread.php?tid=9209)
A newbie's thoughts on player creation - Haramcha - 2026-04-01
A beginning has a reason
When I first decided to create my first player here on SSL just a few days ago, it was mostly out of a desire to just give the whole thing a shot, and to see how it all works: what was the community like? How does one earn points to improve their player? How about the teams; do managers communicate much with their players, and how much do they manage the tactical side of the game? Are they just there for show? How much time must one invest? And finally, how active is the whole thing?
...and a reason may change
I will refrain from going down the road of “and once I learned more, it all turned out to be just so wonderful”, because frankly, I have yet to find out much about how things work around these parts. Work beckons, and there’s also a girlfriend with whom I would like to spend time. Rather, what I would like to write about is how quickly I went from “let’s find out what this thing is” to “wow, this is just so nostalgic! It feels just like the things I saw the older kids doing back in the 00’s, except much further developed!”
And so, I went from having made a throwaway player with a silly name of Joe Mormor (people from my part of the world will know what I mean – don’t worry, it’s nothing bad) to finding myself increasingly invested in the whole idea and wanting a proper interesting player. That’s the matter I actually wish to discuss here: what constitutes an “interesting player”, and how may it differ from person to person?
Optimisation and entertainment
Back in the olden days, video games were often played fairly intuitively. Not intuitively as in “the game had an intuitive path that I followed”, but rather “this seemed cool, so I tried it out”. Guides were not so easily accessible, and people tended to just go with their gut feelings. For the most part, players had no idea what was good and what wasn’t. Those days are long gone, and many a gamer now opts for whatever constitutes the meta at the time.
Many other aspects of life follow a similar pattern: if one person, company, or even country, does something in a particularly effective manner, everybody else must follow suit or risk being left behind, no matter how boring (or even destructive) it might be. This is very much also the case in both football and video games. Most of us are now aware that pace and acceleration are massively important in Football Manager (to be fair, isn’t that also the case in real life? It’s just that the difference between 20 and 10 pace in game is probably much larger than in real life, and much harder to deal with tactically), and if 5 players in a community game like SSL max out those attributes, as must the rest of us (or at least get close enough to not have our players get outmatched completely), or risk being left behind.
The user woog wrote a post the other day discussing the idea of lowering the max attributes, or making them much harder to acquire, especially at the higher end of things, and I am inclined to agree that this would make for more interesting gameplay, perhaps with certain attributes being pricier than others (physicals could be 3x that of technical/mental attributes, for example), but even that would not completely solve the problem, only widen the gap between the most active players and the rest (or between those who first solve the equation of most valuable attributes relative to their price on SSL).
So what did I want for Joe Mormor?
This really got me thinking about just what I want to do here: create an ultimate player with the strongest set of attributes available? Replicate a world class player, being the new Messi/Ronaldo/whomever? Remake a classic player?
For me, the solution was something else: I would go with a regen I had managed in FM. In fact, my next player (assuming I ever get that far) will likely be so inspired by a former favourite regen that I will name him after said regen (if I can decide which one that is to be!). But now we return to the beginning of this now-lengthy freestyle essay: I have already gone with a throwaway name, and set the attributes in such a fashion that the player would definitely not be too weak, in a position that is quite popular (although there seemed to be a lack of AMLs on here for some reason, if I understood the website correctly). So recreating a regen and giving him a brighter career is not quite on the cards for now. Instead, I will opt for a mix of a few favourites, and try to spice it up with a bit of a tale for anybody on here who might possess the patience to work their way through my lengthy writings based on my fictional character’s life. And then that crazy two-footed inverted wing back I got in a youth intake in Latvia on FM24 will have to wait for some other time.
And how about you?
We need not have a discussion about it here (although I would be delighted to hear about other player's experiences), but even if you choose not to post a response here, I hope that this post at least makes some of you out there reflect back on what motivated your player's profile, or to perhaps consider your next player's profile from a different perspective.
RE: A newbie's thoughts on player creation - roquefort - 2026-04-01
Nice essay, I enjoyed reading. Welcome to the SSL!