Introduction
New and in collaboration with FM Scout, I’d like to introduce you to the FM23 Player Performance Calculator.
An intuitive web-based Football Manager analytical tool which introduces three new metrics which enable you to better compare player performances. Free and easy to use.
I’ve previously written at length about performance metrics and analysis in Football Manager 2023, most recently in my ‘What Does Good Look Like?’ post here.
Back in FM22, I released a post introducing various additional performance statistics that could be calculated to better compare player’s performances by combining relevant player numbers. I’d like to borrow a bit of content from my old post below, as it serves as a great introduction to this new tool for FM23.
Where did this idea come from?
I’ve recently been getting into baseball sabermetrics. Now whether or not you follow baseball is irrelevant as the only reason I mention it is that something that baseball does really well but football does not is combine various performance statistics to create a singular number that indicates something fundamental about that player’s performance level. A number that is quicker to glance at than to read a sheet full of individual statistics. It is also easier to digest than a long read article from a sports journalist about why a particular player is useful to a specific team.
A common example of this in baseball is ‘OBP’ or ‘on-base percentage.’ This isn’t just the number of times a player got on base, but rather a calculation that considers and cleverly combines a number of relevant actions. Hits, walks, hit by pitch etc.
Putting the specifics aside, the point is that it’s all boiled down into a single number that allows you to more easily compare multiple players side by side on a major element of their game.
The new metrics explained
I decided to create a few new combined football metrics of my own, for use when comparing players in Football Manager. I know that these may not be truly unique ideas and some of these may even have existing names, but bear in mind I’m having fun playing a computer game, not applying to be the head of Opta or brokering the next deal between the Premier League and Oracle.
Once I created these three new performance metrics loosely covering arguably the three main facets of football player performance – Defensive Performance (DP), Creative Output (CO) and Striking Threat (ST). I then created a calculator in Microsoft Excel that could compare the performance of players in either your own squad or from a shortlist of potential transfer targets exported from the Players in Range page in the Scouting section in FM23. Then the wonderful talents of FM Scout converted this into a fully-functional and easy to use web-based tool that you can now use too.
The logic here is simple – while a high ‘Interceptions per 90’ might tell you that a defender is good at defending, what will give you a much more rounded view of his defensive performances overall is to combine this with other key metrics from his game – namely pressures, blocks and headers.
Similarly with creative output and striking threat. Looking at assists for creators, or goals for strikers, is a decent metric to compare players on, but combining multiple on-pitch actions typical of what you would want from a creative or goalscoring member of your squad gives a much more holistic performance comparison point to look at when considering different options.
How to use the Player Performance Calculator
- Go to the Player Performance Calculator page on FM Scout. Bookmark it too!
- Download the two custom views and put them in your Views folder – usually C:\Users\username\Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2023\views. If you are on Windows 11, there may be a OneDrive folder in there as part of that location.
- Open FM23 and load the custom views – one on the Squad screen, and the other on the Scouting > Players In Range screen.
- While using either of these views, get the list of players you would like to compare onscreen. If it’s your own squad, that’s easy. Just click on your Squad screen. If it’s potential transfer targets, make sure the list of players in the list are appropriate for what you want to compare. I.E. Make sure you have the Interested In Transfer option ticked at the top, and perhaps filter the results to only strikers with a weekly wage under £10k a week if scouting on a budget, or for a central midfielder with a World Reputation of at least ‘Good,’ or perhaps right-backs with high Acceleration and with less than a year left on their contract. Whatever you want. How you filter your scouting results down to a list is entirely up to you and how you usually like to filter/scout in the Players in Range page in FM.
- If you want to keep your own players in the results, so you can compare their performances to their rivals, simply remember to click the Exclude button in the Edit Search area and untick the box which excludes your own players from the results by default.
- Select the top row (player) in the results, then click Ctrl + A to select all, then Ctrl + P to print screen and save it as a webpage. This will save a .html file of your results on your computer.
- Simply click the big ‘Select HTML file’ button on the Player Performance Calculator page on FM Scout then ‘Upload and Calculate’ and upload the file you just saved.
Now that your results are onscreen, it’s simply a case of clicking either DP, CO or ST to sort the results best to worst from your list in terms of their performances against those metrics in comparison to the other players on the list.
Whether you are looking to compare the creative output of a list of fullbacks you wish to scout, the defensive performances of your own central midfielders or simply the strikers are in the big five leagues with the highest striking threat score, you can now do it all. Just use the custom views, filter your results to see what you want to see in FM, export, upload and it’s done!
Helpful information
The Wages column on the Calculator results is there so that you can compare value for money. For example – The player ranked first in your list of targets for ST (Striking Threat) might be on £100k a week, but the player in second place is on £10k a week. Now there are two ways to think about that, depending on the size of club you are and what type of player you are in the market for. An elite striker or perhaps a bargain? The first way is that the top player quite simply has a higher Striking Threat score than the player in second, so he’s performing better as a striker. He also gets paid a lot more than the player in second, so he should have a higher reputation and probably plays for a bigger club or in a bigger division. The other way to think about it is that the player in second is performing nearly as well as the player in first and could cost 10% as much in wages so could represent better value for money, as long as he is still subjectively ‘good’ enough for your level.
The Minutes column is there because ideally you want the biggest sample size possible when evaluating your players. This is logical. A player’s numbers who has played 150 minutes all season, especially per 90, will be oddly skewed as the sample size is so small. Whereas looking at a player with 1,500 minutes or more (for example), the metrics will have levelled out and give a clearer picture of a player’s true performance level. Think about it – if you started scouting using statistics three games into the season and you saw a striker with three goals in three games, it’s possible that he might be a good goalscorer. If you scout a player who has scored 30 in 30 by the end of the season, he most definitely is.
This is why it’s important to filter your Players in Range results as appropriately as possible before exporting your HTML file. It’s all fair and well someone appearing near the top of the list with an amazing Creative Output score while you manage Real Madrid, only for you to realise that he’s on £20 a week and plays in the 12th tier in Lithuania (no offence to the 12th tier in Lithuania) and is only appears as performing highly because he is playing at a really low level and has only played 200 minutes. So isn’t really a suitable transfer target after all. Filter out those who are definitely unsuitable (wages too high/low or too few minutes, for example) before you export your results to get the best out of this.
The same caveats need to be expressed for any statistic used anywhere for anything. I don’t believe that any singular number tells the whole story. Now to pre-empt any feedback regarding the usefulness of statistics, I believe they provide a guide. They can identify players you may never normally consider, sometimes highlighting diamonds in the rough. For me, the numbers are an invitation to inspect further and look at the minutiae of the individual, the team he is playing for and the league he is playing in. It’s all about context and further scouting.
Daft and obvious example – A player scores 100 goals in a single season in the Malaysian Super League so he appears highly on our tool for Striking Threat. Does that number alone mean he is going to do the exact same when you sign him for your Newcastle side in the Premier League? Of course not. The gulf in class will probably swallow him up. FM Old Timer flagged some great work he found on Twitter by Tony El Habr which brings to life the relative increase in ‘difficulty level’ between many different leagues. It illustrates the point effectively. This is why filtering your list of potential targets in Football Manager before selecting all and exporting the HTML file is so important.
That’s all there is to it!
No longer do you need to simply compare star ratings, average match ratings or just goals or tackles to measure player performance when defending, creating or shooting. You can compare players on a much broader and complex range of on-pitch actions, simplified into an easy list, all from your web browser without the need for Microsoft Excel or any calculations yourself.
How will you use the Player Performance Calculator? Let me know on Twitter.
Thanks for reading and using the tool.
FM Stag