Just a suggestion for reference.

Players quality, when significantly better than most teammates, would play a part in positively affecting team performance on top of player performance.

Our own players positioning, player mentality (arrows), team passing focus, our own formation setup, opposition players’ positioning, particular area dominance, etc. will directly influence how certain key players perform and much more so than player quality itself.

Eg. 4-5v-1 formation via both flanks. Wingers will always score more than the ST because of the way the team is both set up and organises attacks, even if ST may be 20, 30 or even 40% better than the wingers in quality. Hence, in this particular setup, and with limited resources, we’d rather have a stronger winger than ST for max efficiency on taking chances. ST’s role in this setup is to pull away as many defenders as possible to create space for both wingers to cut in or shoot from range, and so having a high * ST in this setup is not as good as having a high * winger.

And that’s why we always need to learn and master a few well-understood and well-worked formations as our base formations (aggressive, neutral and defensive counter), then we spend our limited T and money onto our key players and use our precious greens to boost the most influential players in all our base formations and its variations for best results. With more experience, we may change to improving our other key players which reflect on our possible switch to another favourite formation.

Hope this helps.