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Training is at times one of the most difficult concepts to get to grips with in the game, so much so that often the entire training aspect of the game is wholly avoided; either by making no changes or by downloading someone else's training schedule to use on their own team. It is understandable, mainly because it's time consuming, I can sympathize with that, but really if you want to become a better manager you must learn the basic concepts of how to correctly manage your team's training.
The major thing you need to overcome when you try and create your own training schedules is the fear of failure. Its endemic of this kind of game, a game based around personal success, that you don't want to fail at anything, but really you need to learn the positive and negative effects your management efforts have on your team to truly create a successful ethos. In training this is a lot simpler than it is made out to be. There is a tendency to ignore the whole concept entirely, to download someone else's schedules and to leave it at that. But the really you aren't getting the most out of the training system by doing this because every player is different.
That's something that needs to be stressed; every player is different. This means that every player responds differently to training schedules, which means downloading a schedule that's been tried and tested with a different set of players, whilst being moderately effective with your own, is not the most effective schedule for your own players. To understand this we need to look at the attributes that determine a player's response to a training program:
Professionalism – This is related to how committed a player is to his role. A less professional player will not be as committed in training.
Morale – A player lacking in morale is obviously going to be less enthused about performing well in training.
Work rate – A player with a higher work rate will be able to train at higher levels consistently
Natural fitness – Players with high levels of natural fitness will be able to endure higher levels of training intensity
Determination – Simply a measure of a player's willingness to train
I think the first thing you realise is that some of these factors are fairly similar, particularly determination and professionalism. Professionalism is a hidden attribute that can sometimes be determined via a player's personality, but often you'll need to get to know the player over time to determine a fairly accurate opinion of him. The other aspect that effects how much a player can improve is his age. Young players improve faster than, when they reach the age of twenty four they generally slow down the improvement rate, before they reach their peak age and their attributes begin to decline. You don't know the ages these players being tested on where at, which could mean the median results are skewed if the tester has a younger or older squad.
The lesson to be learnt is that the training schedules you may plan on using were tested on players with different affectivity attributes. They'll have responded in a more favourable manner to the training because it was aligned to their abilities. We'll talk more about coaches later but the quality of your coaching staff may not be as good as the coaches the training schedule was tested on and the same thing goes for the quality of your training facilities. This is why its very important to understand how to cater training towards your players. If you read this and then decide you don't want to spend time creating your own schedules then that is your own choice, but I can honestly say that simple micromanagement of your players' training will be a more effective method.
What we'll look at now is how to approach the training of a player. There are nine different areas you can train a player in. Each category trains a different set of attributes. As you read earlier in the guide, different attributes are more relevant to different player roles, so knowing the consequences of each category is an absolute necessity. The categories are as follows:
Strength: Natural Fitness, Stamina, Strength, Work Rate,
Aerobic: Acceleration, Agility, Balance, Jumping, Pace, Reflexes
Goalkeeping: Aerial Ability, Handling, Kicking, Throwing, One on Ones
Tactics: Anticipation, Decisions, Positioning, Teamwork, Command of Area
Ball Control: Dribbling, First Touch, Technique, Flair, Heading
Defending: Tackling, Marking, Concentration
Attacking: Passing, Vision, creativity
Shooting: Finishing, Long Shots, Composure
Set Pieces: Crossing, Corners, Free Kicks, Penalties, Long Throws
I'm sure you'll have looked at that and already formulated a basic opinion of which positions require which category of training. Technically speaking your assumptions would be correct. The categories are unilateral (strength, aerobic, tactics), unique (goalkeeping), specific (defending, attacking, shooting) and discretionary (ball control, set pieces). What you need to do as a manager is decide where best to train your players. For this we'll need to look at the player's personal screen.
For the example I'm going to be using Matt Bloomfield. Matt has a very high work rate, average determination and average natural fitness. His personality says he's fairly ambitious, from that I would deduce him to be a player who wants to do well, a double edged sword because that's also a player who will be more tempted by the lure of clubs with a higher reputation. What you need to look at when approaching how to begin training a player is, first and foremost, his position. Matt's a midfielder, we know he's going to be a player who will be operating, for the most part, in the middle third of the pitch. He'll need to have a decent grasp of attributes such as passing, positioning, stamina, dribbling and decisions. What you then need to do is click on his coaching tab and look at his overview. This will bring up a screen like this:
The key pieces of information listed in the player's overview you need to pay attention to are the two graphs (training progress and training levels), the player's happiness with his schedule and the schedule itself.
The schedule each player is set to train to, by default, is either general (for outfield players) or goalkeeper (for the obvious). The schedule contains sliders you can move left to right to dictate the level of training you want your player to focus on in each area. The further to the right you move the slider, the higher the intensity of it and, quite importantly, the cumulative increase it will have on his overall workload. In an ideal world we'd train our players intensively in each category but this isn't possible for two reasons, the player would become too tired and it would directly affect his fitness levels and you also run the risk of injuring your players. This is why the attribute natural fitness is so important, the higher a player's natural fitness the higher the level of workload he can commit to without negatively impacting him.
The two graphs are the second things you should be looking at. From the start the training levels graph will have bars in it. As you can see with Matt's they are generally around the same area, about halfway up. The training levels indicate how much a player can improve or decline in a certain field. If the bar is at the bottom of then the player can get no worse in that area, if it is at the top then he can no longer improve himself in that area. The bars do actually represent a numerical figure, they represent, depending on the player himself, between four to six attribute points. So if a player's set pieces bar is at the bottom then you can hope to train him four to six points better in attributes in that category. In Matt's case, as his is almost dead on the middle, I'd be hoping, if I trained him intensively in set pieces, to see his attributes rise by two or three points. Unfortunately you won't know exactly how much the bar represents, but you don't need to, you just need to know that if you want to; you can make improvements.
The training progress graph is related to how well a player has trained over the previous months. As you read earlier, the different training attributes (work rate, professionalism, and determination) will affect how well your player approaches his training. As with all aspects of football, there are variables out of your control, just as sometimes you will concede a goal at the most inopportune of times, you may find a player not improving despite you have an excellent training schedule. That's why factors such as a players training abilities and others like morale and jadedness are very important to take into consideration. That links in with your player's happiness with his training schedule. If he is happy then all is well, he will improve generally as the training and coaching dictates, but if he feels he isn't receiving enough training or worse being overworked then it will have a doubly worse effect on his training because he is not improving and he probably isn't even utilising the poor schedules effectively.
As we know, Matt is a midfielder, so given the attributes I listed that I felt he should be trained in (passing, positioning, stamina, dribbling and decisions) I'll try and come to a logical decision as to where to train him, bearing in mind that I can only train him up to a certain cumulative amount before his workload becomes unbearable. When you come to choosing where to train players its important to remember to choose the categories based on your own opinions and how that player fits into your team. If Matt was an attacking midfield player then I would more than likely shun the more defensive aspects of training, such as marking, tackling, in favour of attacking options and ball control. The same way if a striker is going to be used as a foil for another striker you'll want to make sure he's strong, creative and able to find his partner with telling balls, That would mean possible training him more in the attacking and ball control areas of his game rather than intensely training shooting. Its all about common sense, thinking about what your players will do, what attributes that requires and therefore which categories to train him in. A simple three step process.
I envisage Matt taking up a role as a kind of playmaker of the team. He already has a high passing attribute therefore it'll be good to improve his all round game, i.e. in that middle third, but maybe eschew his training slightly on the more attacking side so that I can hopefully increase his passing attribute a couple of points to make him especially deadly on the ball at this level. He's going to need to maintain fitness, that's a given, which is why strength and aerobic are considered unilateral categories that all players need to be trained to at least a medium level. Some more, such as midfielders and some less, such as centre backs. Categories like shooting and set pieces I can cut down on significantly because I don't feel, with his current set of skills it would be worthwhile improving his finishing, long shots, penalty taking or crossing, as they are significantly low enough to be virtually useless.
A lot of downloaded schedules will cover areas your players, individually don't need, but cover the whole spectrum of a certain position. For instance if I'm developing an attacking minded midfielder such as Matt, the schedule covering his type of position would include a good amount of shooting training and set piece training, but using simple logic we've easily identified that would be useless. If you are going to use someone else's work then at the very least you must set about tweaking the schedules to suit your own players, which is why understanding all of these concepts is vital, whichever path you choose.
Back to our example, I want Matt to be an attack minded midfield player, so starting with the general schedule, I'll push his strength up. As a rule, the general schedule will maintain a player's attributes, so as long as you keep the slide above its original setting then you will maintain or improve the ability depending on how far you push it. I'll also push his aerobic up a notch or two, just to keep his physical side of things in check also. I'll push his tactics slider up. As we know, tactics governs attributes such as decision making and positioning, particularly key for what I want him to do. His ball control and attacking are going to be set to heavy, I really want to develop a player who can be an attacking lynchpin, so developing aspects such as dribbling, passing, creativity will mean he will be reliable in creating chances and being involved in our attacking process. The defending category I want to maintain, Matt isn't too bad at defending, and I don't want him to get worse so I'll push it up a little bit. His shooting, as we discussed, is a bit of a non entity as far as what I want him to do, so I'll drop that a bit and his set piece attributes are so poor already there really isn't any need, in my eyes, to waste training time for him in these areas.
Of course you may see differently to me, you may be saying that given Matt's attributes you think he should improve his defending or you want to improve his long shots so you can make him more lethal as a goal threat. These are all good suggestions and all vindication of why you should be creating your own schedules so that you can effectively institute your opinions of players into how they develop.
In around two months I will begin to see signs of my training having an effect. Below is a screenshot of Matt's progress six months on with his schedule since I started him on it:
As you can see, categories I chose to focus on heavily, ball control and attacking, have resulted in increases in his passing, dribbling, first touch, heading (not necessary but it comes with ball control), creativity, however the areas I shunned, shooting and set pieces have meant his finishing, corners, free kicks and penalties have either not improved or gone down.
This is the trade off. It is your decision on how to approach training your players. If you train them in groups you will have to decide, based upon a group's position, which area are necessary to them or you can specialise all players or do what I do, which is have some players train on their own, some similar players train in small groups, based upon similar attributes and position, and then goalkeepers training in a large group. If I had used a downloaded schedule I would not have been able to achieve that level of progress from Matt Bloomfield, I'm sure his attributes would have gone up but not as much if I had not paid as much focus and attention as to how I wanted to develop him.
Finally we need to speak briefly about coaches. Coaches are one of the deciding factors in how well a player can improve in training. If you have poor coaches then your players will not improve much or if they do at a slow rate. Coaches' have attributes in coaching categories and then have their own determination, adaptability, man management, motivation and level of discipline attributes which are similar to the player training attributes in that these affect how well they can put their skill to use over time in training.
You assign coaches in the training overview screen to the different categories. As with players, the more categories you assign a coach to, the higher his workload and thus the less effective he will be in that category. Here's the example:
Junior Lewis is currently assigned to all categories. He's given a rating out of seven stars as to how productive he is being assigned to each category. If I remove him from all and just assign him to train just tactics his effectiveness increases massively to a six star level, however, as you can imagine, this means the areas he no longer coaches in will go down in effectiveness.
Your ultimate goal is to achieve seven stars in every coaching category. At smaller clubs this will be impossible as you can only have a limited number of staff so being average in most areas is a necessity, but as time goes on and hopefully as your stature grows, you will be able to recruit more staff and specialise more in each area. To attain seven stars in each category, a coach must possess:
Key: ddm = determination + discipline + motivating
Stength, Aerobics
fit * 9 + ddm * 2
>= 270 -> 7
>= 240 -> 6
>= 210 -> 5
Goalkeeping
gk * 2 + ddm
>=90 -> 7
>=80 -> 6
>=70 -> 5
Tactics
tac * 2 + ddm
>=90 -> 7
>=80 -> 6
>=70 -> 5
Ball Control
tec * 6 + men * 3 + ddm * 2
>=270 -> 7
>=240 -> 6
>=210 -> 5
Defending
def * 8 + (tac + ddm) * 3
>=360 -> 7
>=320 -> 6
>=280 -> 5
Attacking
att * 6 + tac * 3 + ddm * 2
>=270 -> 7
>=240 -> 6
>=210 -> 5
Shooting
tec * 6 + att * 3 + ddm * 2
>=270 -> 7
>=240 -> 6
>=210 -> 5
Set Pieces
(att + men + tec) * 3 + ddm * 2
>=270 -> 7
>=240 -> 6
>=210 -> 5
You're coaching will be graded downwards from there on if the coach doesn't meet the seven star requirement.
Your coaches are highly essential to the affectivity of the training schedules you make. As I said, if you're at a smaller club, try and focus on making sure your all round coaching rating out of seven stars is equal across the board or better, its much more effective than plumping for a great attacking coach if it means your fitness coaching is not at the same standard as the rest.
Training can be a very rewarding process, its just a shame that along with tactics it is the hardest aspect of the game to master. With that said, reading through this outline and explanation can hopefully give you enough understanding and confidence to know how to attempt the process of training and from then on you learn by doing. You understand now that there is no perfect way to train a player, no absolute pinnacle and therefore you know that if you want to get the most out of your players you'll need to learn by doing.
(Done by request)
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