A Brief Introduction to Creating Training Schedules

One of the often most overlooked yet vitally important aspects of the Football Manager series is the player training section. Most players tend not to venture into this confusing and time consuming area, but should you choose to - particularly those of you who play longer games with the same team - the rewards can be astounding.

The goal of a training schedule depends almost entirely on the player's age. For young players the goal is to avoid serious injury and provide as large an increase in attributes as possible. For players in their prime, the goal is to redistribute their attributes to suit the role in which they play. For senior players, the aim is again to avoid injury and to prevent decreases in the areas appropriate to their position and role within your team. Below I'm going to introduce you to the basic principle behind creating your own position specific schedules; when it comes to weighing up where the individual player fits into such a training system, you're on your own!

Training Categories

In Football Manager training is split up into 9 categories, each of which deals with a number of trainable attributes. These categories are controlled via sliders, on each of which there are 25 points of intensity (0 to 24). The table below shows the relationship between the training categories and the relative attributes:

You'll notice there's an extra column in that table entitled "TSC". This is how we calculate how many clicks on each slider are required in your training schedule, but more on that later. First, let's walk through creating a training schedule for yourself. In this example, we'll be creating a youth schedule suited for a target man (using a player from my Tiller IL team called Jack Brynn, who frankly isn't very good!), so let's look at what's required for a target man:

As we can see, the key attributes required for an attacking target man are Finishing, First Touch, Heading, Anticipation, Bravery, Determination, Teamwork, Work Rate, Jumping and Strength. If we refer to the table above, we can determine which training categories are required to improve these attributes: Strength (Work Rate, Jumping & Strength), Tactics (Teamwork), Ball Control (First Touch & Heading) and Shooting (Finishing). The remaining attributes that make a good target man are either latent or will only improve with match practice, and are something you should look for in your youth players. Thankfully Jack has pretty decent latent attributes, at least for a youth player at a shitty little Norwegian side like mine, so let's move on.

Calculating Training Workloads

Now that we've discovered what categories require training, we can calculate exactly how high a workload we need to apply to each category. To do this, we refer to that mysterious "TSC" column. TSC (Training Slider Coefficient) is a tag I made up that refers to the relative value of training each attribute receives for every point (or click) on the appropriate slider. As we can't control which attributes increase individually, to ensure we see increases in the attributes that we wish to improve we use the following formula to work out just how many clicks are required to see attribute increases:

Workload / TSC = Clicks

The table at the top of this article conveniently provides us with the TSC, but before we can go any further we will need to determine the workload required. To do this, we use a rule of thumb:

To ensure an increase in an attribute, workload > 2

To ensure no loss in an attribute, workload > 1

These figures have been taken based purely on my experiences in training players and on articles written by other members of the Football Manager community, your mileage may very much vary depending on the quality of facilities, coaches and of course the potential ability of the players in training. Anyway, let's get started on building this training regime.

The most important part of a target man's training will be Strength, as this category contains the largest number of relevant attributes (3). As we wish to see improvements here, we multiply the workload by the number of relevant attributes in the category, then plug it into the formula:

6 / 0.2 = 30

Now this isn't possible, as there are only 25 points (including 0) on the slider to work with. As such, we simply max out the Strength training, whilst praying that he doesn't break every bone in his body.

Tactical training is vital in all players, but in this case we're looking to improve only one attribute:

2 / 0.2 = 10

Next up is Ball Control, which has two relevant attributes and so looks like this:

4 / 0.2 = 20

Finally an attacking target man requires Finishing, so we need to plug Shooting training in too:

2 / 0.5 = 4

Once we're finished, we end up with a schedule looking something like this:

Now this schedule will doubtless provide increases needed in the relevant areas, but at the detriment of all his other attributes. This really isn't something we want to see, so we must apply the formula once more to the remaining categories, omitting any attributes we deem expendable.

Balancing Your Training Schedules

Aerobic contains 4 attributes we don't want to lose any points in:

4 / 0.25 = 16

GK - Shot Stopping & GK - Handling aren't required at all (unless you run without a substitute goalkeeper, in which case they could actually come in quite handy as target men are usually quite physical, something that comes in handy for a keeper too!) and so are omitted. Likewise Defending doesn't contain anything we care about here and so we can skip it. Attacking on the other hand has attributes useful in any attacking player, and so we must put a few clicks on here too:

4 / 0.25 = 16

Now, if you're creating schedules whilst you read this, you may have just come across a little problem: Once we add in the additional training, we've far exceeded the amount of workload that can be put into any single youth training schedule. As such, we must "fudge" a little here to ensure we don't miss anything out. There's no right or wrong answer to what you cut to ensure that you can make the schedule fit, so simply knock a few clicks off of each category until you can get a decent amount in to the remaining sections, whilst still keeping the focus on the key attributes. When you're finished, you'll end up with something that looks a little like this:

Avoiding Injuries

There's no sure fire way of avoiding injuries, but if you read the injury reports sent by your physio, you'll begin to see a trend as to why players get injuries

"So-and-so has pulled his hamstring in training"

"Such-and-such has strained his wrist whilst lifting weights"

"Some idiot has broken a leg after a heavy tackle during training"

These three aren't the only reason why players get injured, but it's worth bearing in mind: Strength, Aerobic and Defending training categories seem to have a higher risk of injury than Tactics, Ball Control, Attacking & Shooting do. As such schedules with high workloads in these categories run a higher risk of injury, and players prone to injury should avoid them. The other main cause of injury is a high workload, and as such wherever possible you should endeavour to keep your schedules as light as possible. The final cause of injury is somewhat unavoidable, and that's match practice. The irony of course being that strong and fit players are far less likely to succumb to injury, but strength and fitness are earned through the harshest training regimes; Catch-22!

Conclusion

Before I get completely off on a tangent, I'll wrap up. I hope this has helped you understand how to create and gauge your own training schedules, and I look forward to hearing about your training successes in the future. If you have any questions, or any evidence to prove or disprove my above article, I would welcome your thoughts. I'd also like to reiterate that the above is simply my rendition of thoughts, articles and ramblings from other Football Manager players as my feeble mind has understood and implemented them over my 18 years playing the Championship Manager & Football Manager series of games, translated and shared here for your gain, enjoyment and pleasure.

Downloads

@SirCliveWolfe has kindly created an excel spreadsheet to do the calculations for you. Simply set the categories you wish to see improvements in and it will do the rest. If you use Microsoft Office 2007 and later, click here to download the file. If you use any other office suite, click here instead.

@Foxo has also created spreadsheets to enable tracking of your player's training progress. To download the version for Microsoft Office 2007 and later, click here. For every other office suite, click here.

Revision 0.3
Addition of tracking spreadsheets created by Foxo
Minor formatting correction

Revision 0.2
Spelling correction
Addition of calculation spreadsheets created by SirCliveWolfe

Revision 0.1
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