Player Skills

Have you ever heard, in the real world, anyone describe a young striker, say Michael Owen the Liverpool and England player, as having 16 goal scoring points, 18 speed points and 12 heading points?

No, of course not, nor have I. Yet that is how the traditional management game describes a player.

What you will hear in the real world are qualititive descriptions like - he's a young goal poacher, has frightening pace but is not much of a threat in the air. A real-world manager will hear opinions from coaches, scouts, fans, media commentators etc. He will see a player in matches and on the training pitch and will modify what he's heard by his own judgement of what he sees.

He will form, in his own mind, a rounded picture of the player's abilities, his form, fitness, confidence, commitment etc and his decisions about putting him in the team, buying him or introducing him into the national squad will be based on this mental picture he's created of the player.

SaaP attempts to reproduce this in the way it presents the characteristics of the players and expects the gamer-manager to use his experience and judgement to inform his decisions.

Coaches and scouts will compare players and they will give their opinion about relative skills. Your assistant coach will give you his assessment of a player's performance on the training ground and comment on a player's confidence. Your fitness coach will comment on a player's fitness, your captain will tell you about his commitment. Your reserve team coach will give his opinion of the performances of your reserve players in their reserve matches. Your physio will tell you if an injured player has returned to match fitness. Your youth coach will tell you if a young player is ready for the bigtime.

The match in SaaP has been specifically designed to maximise the information available to the manager to help him judge the performance of players and their influence on the game. Beside the collective possession statistics detailing the contribution of the various sections of the team their are individual performance bargraphs for each player.

Each time a player makes a successful pass or tackle, makes a save or blocks a shot, scores or assists a goal then his performance bargraph increaes. Each time he fails, a tackle or a pass etc. his bargraph decreases. The bargraph gives a continuous reading of his contribution to the game.

At the end of a game the local press picks a man of the match and assesses each player's performance with an overall performance rating. These are recorded, accumulated for the season and career statistics and available for viewing any day of the week and at team selection.

Apart from these press assessments there are never any numbers in all of this. Everything is verbal, it is all comparative, relative. SaaP encourages the gamer to think naturally, not numerically, about the players - to think of them as human beings not collections of numbers. Not only is this a more effective way to succeed, it is the way in which maximum enjoyment and involvement is taken from the game.