Defender attributes against fast attackers (speed or not?)???

[Al Svanberg]

Extremely interesting topic!

I have observed these issues very closely, and I have very few answers.

I have made some observations though. I have an attacker that has 260% in sped. It is a fairly new account at lvl 3 and often my opponent are downright weak. Still, he very rarely get away from defenders in foot races. 1 of 10 times maybe. Since many opponents has avg abilities of around 30-40%, he must have an edge of like 200% in speed at times, and sure he does great but you very rarely see him leave someone in the dust.

I think in whole, the biggest factor is the overall quality of your teams vs the team's you face. I think the engine works so that if you have a better team you get a lot of chances, different type of scenarios. In those scenarios a lot of abilities matter at different extents. each scenario can play out in a number of ways, if your player is good the odds for a successful outcome increase. In other soccer games I think it's different, like you have a striker that has speed 100 and a D with speed 50, if the D and the striker chases the same ball, the striker gets a breakaway. I don't think TE works like that. I think it's more like, let's say you have a 100% team and face a 60% opponent. Based upon formations and orders, you will get maybe 30 offensive situations and your opponent will get like 12. All scenarios maybe can have like maybe 4 different outcomes. Like let's say one scenario is that your winger has the ball:
(i) The D can take the ball from him (very rare),
(ii) he can manage to cross the ball and its cleared by the defender,
(iii) he can cross the ball and the striker gets to it but miss the net/the ball is saved,
(iv) he cross the ball and the striker scores.

If the winger and striker has like an avg of 150% in the abilities that matters, and the defenders has the avg ability of 75% int he abilities hat matters for him,, the odds of the different outcomes can maybe be something like this:
(i) 1%
(ii) 60%
(iii) 29%
(iv) 10%

The reason I think this is because what I have observed when I am playing but also when playing friendlies against -- much -- better teams. Like against teams with maybe ten times the ability of my team, if the game was mechanical the better players in those games would just blow past the Ds. That don't happen. Like a defender with a raw ability of 25 can still keep up with and successfully tackle a forward with the raw ability of 225.

With this said, I do think that how the ability is distributed matters a lot. I have like an AMC with 170% attacking ability that I've had for 3 years, you can tell that he handles offensive situations really well, and that he does it better now at age 21 then he did at age 19 even if his avg ability was as high when he was 19.