I was starting to wonder if it was just me. My team, which has the highest rating in my league, is 4-1-3 and in eighth place. I attend every match, I train my guys diligently, I game-plan my formation against each opponent, my starting XI always have >90 Morale and >97 Condition... and then it's "[Midfielder] makes a mistake! He gives the ball away!"

Actually, my defense in today's league game came up with a new way to screw up: drawing a yellow card in the box in the 90th minute of a tied game. Oof.

I'm starting to suspect that Nordeus has increased the variance in the RNG engine. If it were just happening to me, I'd figure "Enh, bad luck, not my month," but when there's a multi-page thread about it, I think we're seeing fat tails on the random-number distribution. There's no way I should ever lose to cellar-dwellers whose players are 15 points worse than mine in a world where it's important that skill levels and formations and condition and morale are in my favor. So I think -- especially compared to previous seasons -- it's *not* as important, and the RNG has become a much bigger piece. In which case it's a lot less compelling to make sure I nurture a good team, and attend matches, and buy good players.

Or! Maybe we're just having a bad first third, and everything will straighten out soon. Fingers crossed, right?