Guide: How to make a budget on the cost to develop a player?

[Al Svanberg]

This is the first result of a basic study I did. Zero conclusions so far, only results.



To explain the table, the circled numbers are -- from the left -- the avg Fitness ability of my players, my Condition Bonus, the Avg. Condition Loss in the game and lastly the TEF in the game compared to the TEF had the same condition loss been put into LVL 4 Drills.

Understanding the Condition Loss in a Game

I did put quite a lot of thought into understanding the condition loss numbers, but I haven't really come close to anything. Thinking this can be pretty hard to figure out, but probably doable if we put some time into it. But it is a bit worrying that the actual numbers seem to vary as much as they do. Right? Like why do some players loose 22 and other 15? Like compare Daily's and Zinidizu's data, that diff is a bit worrying. But lets just keep working those numbers and see what comes out of it.

First of all, my initial assumption is that the Fitness Ability of a player affects how much conditioning he losses in a game. What do you guys think? This is not a given, but it would seem logical. How else would the fitness ability work? Well one alternative could for example be that a player with high fitness ability play better with low conditioning, but I don't really buy the logic behind that. But can't leave any stones unturned so I will try to look at this.

If it does, I think it works something like this. You have a starting point, a presumtive condition loss in a game. Lets call it X, for some reason I think X could be 24 but that is just a hunch. Then X is lowered and made higher by a bunch of factors, and at the end you get the actual condition loss in the game.

I don't really think there is much of a random factor in there, wasn't in training so why should it be one here? But for sure, there could be a lot of factors that are very hard/impossible to track (like does going down one flank affects the condition loss of the players on that flank? Maybe wing-backs always loose more fitness than a striker. Does the opponent's formation/order matter? Possession? Stuff like that). But I am not sure if there are that many factors that extremely hard to establish.

Further to this, the Condition Loss vary, but not 1:1 in relation to Fitness Ability. Like the Condition Loss for a player with 100% in Fitness Ability is not twice as high as the Condition Loss for a player with 200% in Fitness Ability. So there is some kind of artificial reduction of the impact of the Fitness Ability on the Condition Loss in this regard.

One thing I tried was like this (Formula is 24 (The starting point for the conditioning loss) minus 3 (artificial factor reducing the impact of the fitness ability) * Fitness ability = Condition Loss in a Game):
24-(3*1.75)=18.75

It was just one of the formulas that potentially could explain why my players lost the conditioning they did.

With a team with the avg Fitness ability of 200%, you would get:
24-(3*2)=18

With a team with the avg Fitness ability of 100%, you would get:
24-(3*1)=21

The math behind it could be a bit easier like this. Or it can be a lot more complicated. And of course other factors matters, but I do think/hope that some kind of raw fundamental math/pattern can be drawn from only looking at fitness ability and conditioning loss. But more data is a must.

With more factors it could be like:
24 - (3*1) * 1.1 (Hard Press) * 0.9 (Con.Bonus) = 21


I am definitely going to put a lot more time into getting a bigger sample size, because this is only from one game and any random factor could really throw you.

Also, if anyone have a account at hand with -- low -- avg fitness ability, preferbly down towards 100% or lower, 30-50% would be awesome, it would be very helpful if you can dump screen shots of the conditioning loss from a game. Two dumps like this, one right before and one right after the game:


Also, if anyone ever plays an association game with stacked conditioning bonus, it would be very interesting to see the results.

Understanding the TEF in Games

The TEF in this game certainly matched up very well to the TEF from a LVL 4 drill. But, with the filling up a container logic, the TEF in a single game can be very misleading. So need more numbers to establish this, but it looks promising.