If your current player is performing I will suggest you keep him because it's difficult to find reliable defenders. If he's not discard him and get the younger player
I agree with Bunzo , way too late in the season to buy players - you have maybe 4 or 5 games left if your in the CL/SL final so its a bit of a waste of time/money/ resources.
However your player de Costa would never get into my teams as he is. Far too slow for an outside defender ( remember he will be up against AML/R type players and most of them are trained to be fast. Speed kills in my mind and I wont have a player under 80 - 100 speed in my team in any position to start with , then I will train them to be faster. Also I find fitness relatively important for recovery from games which is important when you have 2-3 matches in a day.
I will sacrifice a little bit of attack/defence skills for superior physical/mental attributes early in development and then later once the P/M skills are to a decent standard I will extend the A/D attributes some more. It is a balancing act to be sure. I know some will say dont waste time and effort on gray skills , only train white , but what I am finding is that well rounded players are at least the equal to the few mutants I have seen and in most cases ( unless the mutant is high in fitness) will finish the game off more strongly than the mutant so the last 30 mins of a game are usually mine to control against tired opponents.
fullback need speed,
high fitness will make your player can perform well in 90 minutes with high pressing and man-to-man marking that usually drained your player fast.
Thanks for your thoughts and advises. I won't be getting now as it is a bit late in the season and I started training them also in Physical and Mental.
Its detailed enough of an observation from 15 seasons x 5 teams , so 75 seasons in effect is the sample. It is just an observation I have made about fitness relative to player drain during games and there seems to be a small bonus when training ie a 15% training session might only reduce the player by 14 or 13% , maybe more depending on what was in the 15% training session.
right, so it's not about recovery as you said first
now it's about "drain"?
can you please give same drill to players with large difference in fitness and try that several rounds - i, with my only team and on my low level can not replicate your results. players of same age and position, one with 190, other with 38 fitness have (on average, after enough repetitions) same loss of condition. and they recover at same rate. must be something I'm doing wrong.
correction:
just did test, (and not the first time)
drill set GK, GK, GK, GK, GK, PGS (-16.5)
on 2 players: player A is AMR with 189 fitness. B is AMC with 32. both 18yo.
got them up on 99 condition before test.
after 4 repetitions
A was at 28, loss of 71
B was at 34, loss of 65
got them back to 99, another 4 rounds
A-31
B-29
seems to be averaging, right? up to 99, and another 4x of same set
A-29
B-29
interesting... up to only 89 this time, and last 2 repetitions was a shock:
A- 61
B- 71
test aborted due to lack of time and greens.
but if anything, player A with 6 times more fitness was having greater condition loss.
I will not jump in conclusions why is that, but there is no obvious conection between fitness skill and condition loss or speed of recovery (which is fixed, unfortunately)