On Pace and the SSL Meta

[Froste39]

Hello world!

The following is built upon a Discord discussion I recently had. I have been made aware that the topic has already been discussed in our community but I would like to bring it up again, since I see a lot of potential in it to improve the league for everyone involved, players, managers, board members.

This is not meant to be a whining post and I hope that my writing reflects that.

What I will be talking about is the dominant aspect of Pace/Speed in creating winning tactics and squads for the SSL.


Pace in FM


Speed/Pace has always been king in FM24 (and older versions) already, some people say it's a cheat code. 
I can sympathize as even in Singleplayer I usually target fast WB's and even if those suck everywhere else, they rake in 8's and 9's in grades every game. 
The only balance to it is that your players run out of stamina if they press like maniacs and run all the time.

In Single Player I would usually deploy strategies that limit running space, defending deep, banking on the opponent getting tired sooner or later, maybe even sub my faster players in late to capitalize on that.
Going against people on reddit who claim that you cannot strategize this, I have to say that I am able to play just fine into speedsters and countering opponents in Singleplayer saves.
I don't want to claim that the Match Engine is flawless here, but I also do not agree with people who say that adjustments and tactics are a giant placebo-scheme.

It certainly is a thin line if speedsters are more or less only kept in check through Stamina and you can still build/find players that skill Pace + Stamina and dominate with them, but they usually give up nearly everything else or cost 100 Million € which also is a way to balance them in "normal" playthroughs.


Pace in the SSL

However thereare several reasons why every problem speedsters or straegies that heavily rely on them have, is less meaningful or simply non-existent in our league:


1 - Stamina

The biggest reason is that everyone has a Stamina of 20 from the get-go.

A Stamina of 20 means players can keep their pace roughly till the ~80th minute, no problemo.

Tiring those players out now is no option anymore as they will not get tired nearly all game. They are free to run from offense to defense and back again over and over again which is frustrating as there is literally no tactical counter to this. In a normal playthrough this SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE. Maybe there is this one wonderkid who does it, but cannot do much else, okay.
Maybe that one player is a cheat code, maybe you are able to keep him in check with individual assignings, maybe not. But in the SSL there is high probability a whole offense of Barry Allen's is running at your defense, thanks to the way our player building works (which is apart from the Stamina thing not an issue imo).


2 - No mid-game adjustments

This is a very mild reason, because it is just a continuation of the Stamina problem. 
Yet, you are not able to make adjustments later in the game, for example subbing in your fast players to capitalize on a tired opposition. You cannot change your deep block to a high block to return the favor with high-speed pressing of their exhausted players, while yours are better rested due to a lower-intensity gameplan for the first ~60 minutes.


3 - No financial drawbacks

Speed needs money in FM. Usually your best graded players (which in most cases will be your Wingers/WB's) have the highest market value and become entitled to the biggest salary.
Since money is more or less a non-issue in the SSL we lose another self-regulating factor htat can keep teams in check that amass those types of players.


This means

Suddenly already dominant attributes become overpowered, because there is literally no counter to speedsters.
This means in my opinion that the only way to beat speedster teams is to stat check them.

This in return means the optimal way to be successful in this league is to invest in pace/speed, wether as a manager targeting these in the Draft/FA or as a player while building them, as there is literally no drawback.
You might argue that the teams on top of the league will always fluctuate due to the draft system that is established, but what keeps teams from drafting for speedsters and dominate the league after that? 
Isn't this just the same dominant strategy all the time, just switching out the names of the teams?

Is it really fun to base the leagues reward system on "Mom said it's my turn with the McGuffin now?"

There have been several job offerings for coaching positions in the near past and I would be interested into taking one, majorily for the tactical aspect of management. Being this limited in my teambuilding and strategy-crafting however, has kept me from applying so far.

Disclaimer:

I do not want to take away any credit the managers of the top teams in the SSL divisions rightfully deserve and I don't claim my opinion to be perfectly accurate, nevertheless I felt the need to voice it and opening it up for discussion.


Additionally, for the player side, this means that you are shoe-horned into skilling pace or be left behind. Since managers do not have flexible tactical options other than to overload on speedsters (if they want to win consistently) you either become one or are in trouble. In fact, I wouldn't even blame managers to nudge their players into building pace, even if that isn't what they intended to when building their player, because it wins them games.
Do not underestimate the roleplay-effect for sim leagues. It is a huge reason why these exist. You should be able to build what you want and have reasonable success with it, or at least earn yourself a spot in a team that is willing to dedicate a portion of their tactical approach to your style. (I am not talking about Strikers skilling Tackling and Marking here).

I want to compare this with other popular games and the "metagame". Any semi-competitive player will find a way to suck the fun out of a game for the sake of being sucessful. Popular examples are "hacking" in shooter games, only playing meta decks in card games, spamming infinite combos in fighting games.
Speed already is the "meta" in FM 24, but it has counters. We remove those counters, so you either embrace the "meta" and play for the cup or you don't which might lead to more happy players or LR in general, but you will not get a cup.

I would prefer that we try to reward buiild diversity more. Of course we will never be able to completely brush away any sort of "metagaming", since we are playing a game with alogrithms, not real life soccer, but we can strive to do the best we can.

But what can we do?

Now, there is only so much you can change in this league to keep it operational. 
It would for example be nonesense to force managers to be online/in-game during matchdays for adjustments as this is a hobby-league, not a full-time job. 

Additionally, touching the league's economy is also not something that I can see working, since we use our own "money" (TPE-system) to improve our players. Burdening managers to keep track of their ingame economy on top of all their other responsibilites is not recommended.

What we can change though is the most glaring issue, the Stamina.

Remove the 20 Stamina default option. 

The biggest counter-argument against this that I can currently think of, is that you will not see your player play for a whole game and that you have to rely on subs more as a manager.
Players might feel discouraged when they get drafted, but will either not play a game or only get subbed in.

However I think that this can also be a huge chance to improve the league and add more realism. How?

1. Dissolve the 2nd Division. 
2. Stock up the First one with 2-3 more teams
3. Establish an Academy again, completely autonomous from the league clubs with academy coaches and their own championship and events.
4. Let newgens play in the Academy even after being drafted like the SHL does it.
5. Newgens get called up automatically after some seasons or when their team needs them. They cannot be send down after that.

Of course new players might not get the chance to play in their first or second season, but here would be the chance to explore loans more, since managers will need to field a full roster to make use of subs.
This would also help to diversify teams more since there is a high chance the best team has to sub in some lower-end TPE subs. 

This can lead to whole new managemant strategies:
Do you explore a deep squad with a high average TPE? Do you go All-In and trade for high-TPE players, but lack depth?
With this, draft position and Free Agency become more important than ever and the management side of an Organization get's even more interactive than it already is.

As for the players themselves, I can only speak for me. I spend 1 season in Academy and 2 in the 2nd league, before I got called up.
In my case it was really motivating for me to become the best earner in my draft class and I was very happy when my efforts where recognized. 
If you got drafted as BPA and are a good earner, but your team won't call you up, e.g. because they are stacked at your position right now, this opens opportunities for loans or even transfers which boosts activity and engagement between the users further.

This is a win-win as the players get to see their dedication pay off with a starting gig, while the league is able to keep players invested in their created player, instead of retiring and starting over.
Additionally, with not having 20 Stamina guys everywhere, subs become more important (see above) which means everyone gets a time share and doesn't have to spend a whole matchday on the bench.
Also it creates motivation to keep updating as you have to fight for your starting job.

This also massively improves build diversity while not locking this option away entirely. (it is part of the game after all) You can still skill Stamina and Pace to 20, but you have to sacrifice other stuff to do so and it needs time, whichs means you have to stay engaged with the league to keep earning TPE.

Last words

I would really love to have a discussion on this and everybody chime in with their opinion. Again, I do not want to take any credit away from either managers, players or Board members, because all of you are amazing and you built something very special here. Exactly this is the reason why I want to preserve and improve on it, or at least provide some constructive input for future considerations regarding the league structure.

Obiligatory sorry for bad englando, not a native speaker

[Canadice]

I really appreciate the in-depth analysis in this article and the different thoughts regarding causes and effects of the system we use right now. I can try and give a rundown on what the league's thought processes has been.

Back in October of 2021 when the league started up, we decided to lock all the hidden attributes to values defined in the Rulebook and lock the attributes Stamina and Natural Fitness to 20. These two attributes were considered the most important in determining how well a player could play a full 90 minutes while both performing at a level determined by their other attributes and not succumbing to an injury.

Seeing as this league is a sim league with managers having limited to no control of what happens in a game, the league started off without allowing any substitutions whatsoever, hence the need for players being able to play 90+ minutes a game. As the player base grew, we decided to allow two substitutions to give teams a chance to field more than 11 players on a roster. Still the majority of players would be required to play 90 minutes and we kept the locked attributes.

The SSL "meta" has in some capacity always been focused on the physical attributes, the same as most of FM has been, but as knowledge of the sim engine and the amount of TPE available has increased during the past couple of seasons we have seen a very big focus on speed (pace + acceleration). I personally agree with your assessment that "forcing" players to go for speed or get left behind is an issue and you covered some great options that we as a BoD could move forward with.

Another aspect of these attributes are that we reset the player fitness prior to every game, thereby giving all players the ability to perform from a perfect form. Maybe another alternative to "unlocking" the stamina attribute would be to not reset the fitness (only remove injuries and reset morale) prior to every game, making teams more reliant on roster rotation or substitutions during a game to not risk a player running ragged. Of course there are other factors tied to the fitness of a player, the amount days since the last game, the training schedule chosen by the FM assistant manager (I'm not sure if we can completely remove or copy schedules for all teams) that would provide a randomness to the fitness. Some randomness might be manageable but if it becomes too much it might be seen as another issue.

I would love to hear more opinions or ideas on this topic!

[FuriousChicken]

Just as a little addition, I think we can set-up a basic schedule for every single team in terms of training, but you also have the distance between teams, which can impact the amount of training slots to be used for travelling to/from an away game, and I am not sure if all teams currently in the SSL count as the 2-slots "long" travel time (I think it is either 1 slot short, or 2 slots long travel time before and after the match). I also think not resetting the stamina might also provide a problem as we have multiple games in 1 tactic session, and with some things like small knocks/small injuries during a match and/or after a match it can be really difficult to determine who is/isnt fit for the 2nd match in a tactics windows (maybe some way to fix this is let the manager(s) of a team know about the fitness prior to a match, but that could get really difficult with right now up to 3 matches every tactics window, if we go to 1 league this might drop down to 2 every tactics window).

Also don't think I am the biggest fan of incentivizing substitutions too much as it would mean you have I think between 1-3 players a team (so 2-6 in total) who will only be playing half-matches, and it wouldn't switch around like in "normal" FM (at least I would personally prefer to play 90 minutes in the minor league, than 45 in the major league, but of course would like to know how other players think about this). Of course this would have the benefit of having a lesser randomness and more tactical look into the form factor of a player, as you could have someone on form only playing 45, and maybe someone out of form playing 90, and you could decide to switch who plays 45 and who plays 90. Looking as the head of the award committee I also think this might make awards a bit more “boring” as likely only the 90min/match players would make a chance for most awards, but that is pure guessing at this point. However I do see a point that needs to be made in that low/medium earners might have a hard time getting into the major league squads right now (already heard this complaint 1 time when initially going to the franchise route), and by adding subs and making stamina a by TPE increasable resource it could mean  that high/max earners spend TPE on stamina and play 90 minutes, while low/medium earners can spend this TPE (or at least the big cost levels) elsewhere and stay a bit closer to high-earners in terms to other stats, and still make it into the major league (maybe this would require even more strict inactive rules, but I don’t have actual data on that). I do think this would require a change to the wages structure (for example a separate “pot” for 45-minute players and/or sub players, or just an increase for each player you have over 11, but you would need to find a way to make this not abusable, for example minimum amount of games played per player).

 

For the get rid of minor league, and add 2/3 more teams into the at this point only league left. While I personally would think this could be a good change (even though I would like to see an even number of teams in each league, so every team plays every matchday), doing this would require a bigger amount of managers, which has been a difficulty for a few seasons already, and I think a lower reliance of IA players (although keeping the rule of max 3 inactives, combined with the subs mentioned above could fix this problem quite a bit, but maybe it should go down to 1/2 max inactives, or even no “long” inactives, but only count the “long” inactives after a certain amount of off-seasons of inactivity (for example 2/3 seasons of inactivity)). Expanding the academy to what I would call a league of its own would mean you can probably keep the inactive rule the same, but it would worsen the problem of not having enough managers, as you would probably need to have some kind of manager onto these more long-term teams (looking at the SHJML in the SHL I really feel like those are more actual teams, than the more temporary academy teams we see in the SSL).

For the 20 stamina question, I do think a good first step would be lowering the stamina to for example 15 (not upgradable), as I do think having players play 90 minutes is preferable, I do think the current 20 is a bit too much, tried using the current North Shore tactic in my own FM save, and players who played the full 90 minutes were just dead tired at the end of the match, and that was with Ajax, which is not some lower-league team with like 6 stamina a player. Although having stamina be a stat that starts at 5, and can be increased by spending TPE could find a system coming on where max/high earners invest into stamina and play 90 minutes, while lower/mid earners semi-ignore stamina and play 45 minutes, but can invest the not spend on stamina TPE onto increasing other stats and be more on-par with the high/max earners.

TLDR of my opinion:

* I personally think with the manager problems of recent season, which already caused us to switch back to going the franchise route, adding more teams (and making the academy teams more real teams) would not be manageable (of course I don’t know how the current situation of managers look like, so maybe it would be manageable as I am not part of the BoD ? ).

* I am not the biggest fan of not resetting fitness in between matches because of random stuff that can happen, on top of this being kind of unpredictable.

* Personally I would prefer 90 minutes in the minor league until I can play 90 minutes in the major league, instead of playing 45 minutes in the major league. But this might be because I am a max/high earner. I could see this method of using subs more, together with needing to spend TPE on stamina as a nice way for low/medium earners to get into the major league, by not “needing” to spend TPE on stamina, having stats closer to high/max earners who do, and playing 45 minutes a match.

* I am a big fan of going away from the 20 default, either going to a spend TPE on the stat, or a for example 15 default stamina stat, as you can go some crazy tiring strategies right now.

[Froste39]

@Commish:

Thanks! Glad to be appreciated! Also thanks for outlining the thought process behind the current system. For me this reads like it just might need a fresh coat of paint, so to speak, to bring it up to speed (haha) with the meta. Like a patch.

If you need more input or want me to help, let me know.


@FuriousChicken

I agree on the fact that we already have a hard time finding managers and creating more teams. I am not per se against the Major/Minor solution we currently have, but I would like to create more opportunities for Minor league players to jump into Majors teams faster. The best way for this would be encourage more loaning or taking a risk and having low TPE people on your squad. In FM24 I also sometimes play my youth palyers in my first team, because I need the depth and want them to develop. Here it is the same. By giving people the opportunity to play in the majos, they will be more motivated to stay active and earn TPE, rather than playing in Minors.

How do we encourage this? By having more open spots in the Majors due to more teams and ~5 subs.
In return we definetely need a strategy to convince more people to take a management position.

Of the top of my head I have several ideas:

- Improving tactical flexibility will nudge users that are on the fence, because of the currently more limited tactical flexibility (Need for Speed), more into taking these jobs. I count myself among those. If I manage an org I want my tactical decisions to matter, not meta-chase.
- Maybe allowing managers to create their own organization (while staying inside the regulations of the league ofc) is a factor. I can see for example someone who wants to create a french org be more open into joining, when they have more freedom regarding the location, logo and so on.
- Maybe a higher "pay" is a good incentive.
- Do we currently have people doing "commercials and PR"? Like posting this on reddit and elsewhere. That way I got recruited into the SHL. Make it paid royally and have some people spread the word.

I have no idea if making 15 the new Stamina threshold is going to cut it. Would require testing. In my opinion just unlocking that attribute at 5 and raising base TPE to counterbalance the loss of the 20 Stamina TPE would be optimal and allows for the most flexibility.

I am not sure if this 45/90 minutes kind of player builds will be the way to go. This mainly depends on the users and on the positions imo. A Central Defender will not really need 20 Stamina either way. They can play a whole game with ~12 usually as long as they are not heavily involved in running shenanigans. For Wingers or Strikers this opens up more build diversity as there might indeed be a possibility to build some sort of "Joker"-type striker who runs fast, but burns out twice as fast, so you might only want to sub them in. This allows for some fine roleplay if you ask me.

2 Edits: Spelling and added thoughts on incentives for new managers

[FuriousChicken]

@Commish:

Thanks! Glad to be appreciated! Also thanks for outlining the thought process behind the current system. For me this reads like it just might need a fresh coat of paint, so to speak, to bring it up to speed (haha) with the meta. Like a patch.

If you need more input or want me to help, let me know.


@FuriousChicken

I agree on the fact that we already have a hard time finding managers and creating more teams. I am not per se against the Major/Minor solution we currently have, but I would like to create more opportunities for Minor league players to jump into Majors teams faster. The best way for this would be encourage more loaning or taking a risk and having low TPE people on your squad. In FM24 I also sometimes play my youth palyers in my first team, because I need the depth and want them to develop. Here it is the same. By giving people the opportunity to play in the majos, they will be more motivated to stay active and earn TPE, rather than playing in Minors.

How do we encourage this? By having more open spots in the Majors due to more teams and ~5 subs.
In return we definetely need a strategy to convince more people to take a management position.

Of the top of my head I have several ideas:

- Improving tactical flexibility will nudge users that are on the fence, because of the currently more limited tactical flexibility (Need for Speed), more into taking these jobs. I count myself among those. If I manage an org I want my tactical decisions to matter, not meta-chase.
- Maybe allowing managers to create their own organization (while staying inside the regulations of the league ofc) is a factor. I can see for example someone who wants to create a french org be more open into joining, when they have more freedom regarding the location, logo and so on.
- Maybe a higher "pay" is a good incentive.
- Do we currently have people doing "commercials and PR"? Like posting this on reddit and elsewhere. That way I got recruited into the SHL. Make it paid royally and have some people spread the word.

I have no idea if making 15 the new Stamina threshold is going to cut it. Would require testing. In my opinion just unlocking that attribute at 5 and raising base TPE to counterbalance the loss of the 20 Stamina TPE would be optimal and allows for the most flexibility.

I am not sure if this 45/90 minutes kind of player builds will be the way to go. This mainly depends on the users and on the positions imo. A Central Defender will not really need 20 Stamina either way. They can play a whole game with ~12 usually as long as they are not heavily involved in running shenanigans. For Wingers or Strikers this opens up more build diversity as there might indeed be a possibility to build some sort of "Joker"-type striker who runs fast, but burns out twice as fast, so you might only want to sub them in. This allows for some fine roleplay if you ask me.

2 Edits: Spelling and added thoughts on incentives for new managers

Thinking back on the 45/90 minute thing, might indeed not be the best way to go, maybe making the regression earlier and/or harder might be more useful to get the same effect of more player throughput in the major league.

About the PR, I do know we had a reddit recruitment for the last draft.

About the 15 stamina, the 15 was just an example amount, the reason i didnt go for the 5 and then be able to spend TPE on it is because I am not sure how people feel about not playing 90 minutes, maybe something to ask to the players in a poll or something from the BoD?

[Canadice]

Recruitment exists albeit very slow and tough to break through into the FM groups on the internet due to the novelty of the league. If anyone has an "in" anywhere, let me know!

I think the main difference between normal FM and this league is that all players are real users behind the screen. This makes it a bit more difficult to keep youth players on the main roster while giving them sparse playing time. They would most likely want to play more often than one half ever week (assuming they are used as subs for one of the 2-3 games every team plays in a normal week).

One option would be to allow younger players to play on multiple rosters but then we run into an issue with stat tracking. Exporting stats from FM is horrible and having players eligible for multiple teams messes with that a lot. Having different files for every league would be a solution but comes with its own issues, such as doubling file update work, reworking of the cup etc. Probably not feasible.

As for incentives, we did recently increase the pay for all jobs to essentially the double of what we had. We've seen some improvement but not as much as we've hoped.

We have also gone with a "reward" based system for rebrands, allowing managers to apply for a rebranding or relocation after we have seen them keep at it for a couple of seasons in an organization (see SFV from Accra after 3 seasons and North Shore from Laos after a similar amount of time). There is a whole lot of work tied to these moves behind the scenes that take a lot of time to get going which is why we want to have stable management at those positions before allocating that workload. So yes that incentive is possible but will take some time and effort by any interested party.

I'll definitely try and look more into the stamina aspect and bring some data to either here or the Board. Might be a while before I have the free time to do it so if anyone beats me to it, please share the results.

[Metafiction]

Before I give my thoughts, I'd like to weigh in on a couple things that have been brought up already.

Remove the 20 Stamina default option. 

The biggest counter-argument against this that I can currently think of, is that you will not see your player play for a whole game and that you have to rely on subs more as a manager.
Players might feel discouraged when they get drafted, but will either not play a game or only get subbed in.

I like this idea in theory; it makes substitutions more important and hews a bit closer to real life where rotation is a key component of management. In practice, though, as you say, not seeing your player on the pitch or only getting limited minutes can be disheartening, especially when you've just joined the league and have been drafted for the first time. I think that a lot of people would be willing to accept not playing in every game for the sake of realism and/or roleplay reasons (after all, even, say, James Milner in his prime had to take a match off every now and then), but there's also a significant group that's in it to see their player play every opportunity they can and ultimately become one of the greatest in the league. I do think this is a viable option, though, and ultimately it may just come down to that latter group having to learn to live with it.

However I think that this can also be a huge chance to improve the league and add more realism. How?

1. Dissolve the 2nd Division. 
2. Stock up the First one with 2-3 more teams
3. Establish an Academy again, completely autonomous from the league clubs with academy coaches and their own championship and events.
4. Let newgens play in the Academy even after being drafted like the SHL does it.
5. Newgens get called up automatically after some seasons or when their team needs them. They cannot be send down after that.

Again, I see the appeal of this idea, but as others have pointed out, the current manager shortage has me a little skeptical of whether we'd be able to fill out those extra team slots. While collapsing the 16 different rosters down to, say, 10 would greatly increase the depth across each remaining roster, it also means two new managers, four new assistant managers, and a whole different logistical setup. (Not to mention the inevitable Black Friday-esque melee over which teams are contracted and who gets which players, which has potential to be a whole new level of forum and/or Discord drama that could turn a lot of people off the league entirely, myself included. Most of us are reasonably rational people, I assume, but the human brain has a tendency to inflate innocuous things into huge ordeals.) That said, I think the league did used to allow draftees to be optioned back to the Academy for a year, before the big merger just before S12. I don't hate the idea of going back to that if we do drop the Majors/Minors setup at some point in the future.

Another aspect of these attributes are that we reset the player fitness prior to every game, thereby giving all players the ability to perform from a perfect form. Maybe another alternative to "unlocking" the stamina attribute would be to not reset the fitness (only remove injuries and reset morale) prior to every game, making teams more reliant on roster rotation or substitutions during a game to not risk a player running ragged. Of course there are other factors tied to the fitness of a player, the amount days since the last game, the training schedule chosen by the FM assistant manager (I'm not sure if we can completely remove or copy schedules for all teams) that would provide a randomness to the fitness. Some randomness might be manageable but if it becomes too much it might be seen as another issue.

I think this would make for a more subtle change, one that might not have an impact at first but would gradually become more noticeable later in the season. If I'm not mistaken, FM does take travel time and distance into account for matches (North Shore's strong home form but somewhat tepid away performances in S13 seem to bear this out), so it might be interesting to see if it impacts player fitness as well. Incidentally, I think equalizing teams' training schedules would be pretty simple; you could save a custom training schedule, import it for each team and then just replace every week's training with that schedule. If it's saved locally, you should be able to pull it into any save with any manager; I have distinct memories of borrowing training schedules from one save and using them in another back in FM22.

---

With all that out of the way, I don't have a ton of new material to add, so I'll keep my contribution brief for now. I think that ultimately, the best solution might be some form of middle ground between multiple different tactics, such that no one idea is overbearing and everything meshes together. To that end, I propose the following:

-We could lower new players' starting stamina to 15 going forward, but still allow them to upgrade to 20 at the normal TPE rates. That way we keep players at a fairly high standard, allowing those who want to invest into Stamina to do so without handicapping those who don't.

-For existing players, it might be necessary to adjust players' stamina to 15 across the board for balance reasons, although players past a certain threshold could potentially be grandfathered in. For argument's sake, let's suggest that any player who is currently required to undergo regression before the beginning of next season (S15) would remain at 20, while all newer players would drop to 15. That way we don't kneecap players that are already losing attribute points while also ensuring that those 20 Stamina players do gradually phase out in favor of the new standard.

-Next, continue resetting player injuries and morale, but not fitness. This allows for the natural wear and tear of a season to have a more realistic effect on teams, resulting (hopefully) in more judicious substitute use and long-term planning. (It also might make injuries during matches a bit more of an issue, since picking up a knock also results in a hit to fitness that could have knock-on effects for the next match or two, but imo that seems like a fair concession.)

-My last suggestion is a bit more of a stretch, but seems like it goes with the above: allow three substitutions per match. My initial thought would be to allow more windows for substitutions, i.e. allow teams to sub players on at 60 or 75 minutes rather than all at halftime, but that would require putting an extra burden on the sim team, and they're overloaded as it is. So this seemed like a decent plan B. After all, if players get tired more easily, it makes sense to give managers more tools to keep their players as close to fighting fit as they can. Not only that, but it may also give managers a bit more incentive to stock their subs bench.

Hope all, or any, of this made sense. This is all kind of off the top of my head, so feel free to lampoon and/or viciously deconstruct these opinions and suggestions as necessary.

[FuriousChicken]

I think going to 3 substitutions will do less than maybe expected, 2 subs is already allowed, and barely any team uses these, on top of this comes the chance of completely destabilizing your team during a close match that you can't really factor in with just testing, which I think will likely make using 3 subs rather ineffective (plus if we aren't using 2 substitutions, why would 3 be used without any other changes?). I think the not resetting fitness will have a lower effect than maybe expected, with 14 league matches, potentially 1 shield match, 2 friendlies, and 3-8 cup matches a season you will at most have 25 matches over the course of a season, this will barely have an effect on fitness without small in between injuries (that are healed before the match goes on, so won't be reset), and this last thing would be really difficult to calculate into creating tactics for the team as you often have a cup+league, or 2 league games in 1 tactics submissions (plus the files received are often after the last match, instead of before the next one). I do also believe one important thing of this all is how willing are people to only play let's say on a high note 45 minutes a match every match, as one of these substitutions? (maybe a nice thing to get a poll about during the off-season happening soon, as I think most players would prefer 90 minutes minor league, rather than 45 minutes major league, but maybe this isn't the case).

[Nhamlet]

For me I think I'd see a hard cap of pace/accel in some form.

Whether the cumulative total maximum the attribute could be at is something like 32 (16/16 for example) or just a maximum of x value that you can naturally reach with TPE. The attribute itself inherently has too much value that in trying to mess around with other things like Stamina/Injuries/substitutions will result in unintended consequences that don't address the heart of the problem.

As a way around it, maybe you allow a pathway for upgrade accel/pace further through money in a way that a peak earner in typical situation would maybe get to 18/18 or so at best just to strongly encourage the diversification of other attribute developments and allow those who want to build towards that specific role to do so at a cost that isn't overwhelming or detrimental to the health of the league. For example a purchase at the bank for $10m or whatever.

[woog]

If pace is more valuable, it should cost more.

Maybe pace scores should be set to 2 higher in the SSL player update as compared with FM24 (i.e. if you have your pace at 15 in the updater, it translates to your player having a 13 pace in the FM file). Why? it makes it more expensive. If upgrading to 20 in the updater gets you 18 in the FM file, you've spend just as much TPE, but you're a little slower. And you could pay (33 TPE, say?) to upgrade from 20 to 21, or 21 to 22 - but it really costs.

Another possibility, but it invites more complexity that some may dislike: let both stamina and pace be upgradeable stats, but bind them to each other. For every point your stamina is above 10, upgrading your pace costs 1 more TPE, and vice-versa. So: you have a stamina of 12, let's say, and you want to increase your pace from 12 to 13. In normal attributes, that would cost 6. But since pace and stamina aren't normal, we add 2 to the cost because your stamina is 2 higher than 10. Upgrading pace from 12 to 13 - when you have a stamina of 12 - would then cost 8.
Testing could determine the threshold at which to make the extra cost for upgrading each to kick in, and how much extra TPE a starting player should receive to ensure they don't start any weaker overall.
The virtue of this system is that it responds to @Froste39 's concern that our "free" 20 stamina aggravates FM24's pace meta. Players can invest in pace or stamina easily, but investing in both at once gets harder - encouraging players to diversify their TPE investment in other, cheaper attributes.