Football Manager 26 is a game about information and trying to have more of it than your opposition to outthink and outmaneuver them. One critical area for getting good information is in player acquisition and management. Understanding what your different players, and potential players, are capable of is necessary to get the most out of them.
One important factor is not directly displayed explicitly in the game’s UI but is still important to know about and pay attention to: Potential Ability. If you’re confused about how Potential Ability works and how to find it in-game, we’ve got you covered.
What Is Potential Ability?
Players’ Potential Ability rating does what it says on the tin, setting the expectations for how high a player is capable of climbing in their career. This is juxtaposed with their Current Ability rating, which shows what their current levels are. While not every player will reach their full potential, even when well managed, knowing the limit a player can reach is valuable information when making personnel decisions.
Players are generated with a Potential Ability rating at the start of a database, or at their insertion into the database as a NewGen, and this number remains in place for the duration of your save, whether the player reaches it or not. Some players have a defined Potential Ability, meaning you can develop the same amount in each save, while others have a range in which their Potential Ability will be created.
Visit Your Players’ Pages
The easiest way to check the potential of a player who is already on your team is to go to the player’s page. Because your club is already intimately familiar with the player, you’ll have detailed information on their skills, and as such, you are most likely to be able to trust the ratings displayed on the player page.
In the default skin, you will see star ratings in the upper right corner for both Current and Potential Ability. Stars may be gold, silver, or white, with silver stars used to represent a range of ratings below one gold star, and white stars showing a range of potential ratings for that attribute, with the gold or silver stars as a base and the white stars as a maximum.
Conduct Internal Assessments
A great way to quickly get a handle on the potential of the players at your club is to look at your team reports. Sorting your team roster by Current Ability is excellent for finding players to put into your lineup, and similarly, sorting by Potential Ability is excellent for finding players with a lot of room to grow into stars on your team.
An important thing to keep in mind with the star rating system, when applied to your own players or external players, is that it is a relative scale. Players are not displaying stars based on some larger objective rating, but instead based on their value relative to your current squad. This means that a four-star player for Accrington Stanley is not the same as a four-star player for Arsenal, for example.
Scout Opposing Players
Once you leave the friendly confines of your own changing room, it can become harder to identify and rate potential in other players, but it’s not impossible. All you need to do to get a better idea of an outside player’s potential is to get scouting on them. The more information you have on a player from scouting, the more informed your staff can be when assessing their potential to give you more accurate ratings.
An important thing to understand about scouting ratings is that, similar to internal ratings, they are being provided to you by the staff you hired. This means that the accuracy of your ratings will come down to how reliable the staff providing them is. A highly regarded scout with a lot of experience is more likely to give you an accurate potential assessment than a new scout with poor ratings.
Use The FM Editor
All the above methods are the best ways to learn about a player’s Potential Ability within the structure of Football Manager 26 and the more traditional approach to playing the game. What this means is the ability to see a player’s true Potential Ability rating is still hidden behind the mechanics of the game, and you are only able to work with the best estimates of the digital staff characters providing the assessments.
That doesn’t mean you can’t look up the exact numerical Potential Ability rating for one or more players, should you be interested, in which case all you need is the Football Manager 26 Editor. Using the editor, you can look at a database before you load it, or look at the database you know you used, and examine it to find players’ coded Potential Ability ratings.
This can give you an exact number for some players, but for those with a range, you will still only know that their Potential Ability sits somewhere in that range. For a more exact number, you will need to add the In-Game Editor to your collection, which allows you the same kind of database access for your active file, meaning you can see where all those ranged players actually ended up when database creation rolled the dice.
Get On FM Genie Scout
Finally, you may choose to use outside tools, with FM Genie Scout the most popular option and already running a beta for donors, with a public release planned for the end of November. FM Genie Scout gives you detailed information on assessed players, allowing you to pull up the player you’re interested in to check out what their Potential Ability rating is for your save.
Assessing players is an imperfect game (if you’re not using an editor), but it’s also one of the most important skills to develop. Get a staff you can trust and pay attention not just to what players can do for you now, but in the long term, too, and you’re in business.
