In Football Manager 26, it’s important to understand all the assessment tools at your disposal to make the right choices for your club from match to match. If you’re new to Football Manager, you may not be used to the match rating system, however, particularly the way the system is highly compressed around just a few numbers. One point of movement in a player’s rating can be the difference between an early hook and being one good play from a Player of the Match-winning performance. If you have questions about how to use match rating effectively as a manager, we’ve got answers.
What Do Different Match Ratings Mean?
Although match ratings are assigned on a ten-point scale, the majority of the scale is not in use. Instead, the vast majority of ratings fall between a 6 and an 8, with only extreme outliers in one direction or the other breaking free. Here is what it means when your players carry the different ratings most commonly earned:
- Excellent (8+)
- Good (7)
- Mediocre (6.5)
- Poor (6)
- Terrible (5.X or less)
How To Use Match Ratings In Your Football Manager Decision Making Process
Now that you understand what the different ratings mean, it’s time to use them effectively. Here’s what you should know about ratings to maximize their utility:
- Trust the Ratings: The first thing to understand about match ratings is that they are a valuable tool for tracking your team’s performance. Football Manager compresses the game to just the big moments, with the majority of the game progressing at high speed, learning to read the numbers available to you to understand things is crucial. A player’s match rating can show you the little things they are doing well or poorly that you are not seeing in highlights or aren’t showing up in the stats to help you understand their game.
- Trust Your Eyes: With that noted, it’s important to remember that your match ratings are just one tool at your disposal. The coding in place to raise and lower a player’s rating over the course of the game is designed to be an accurate representation, but in a sport with so many variables, there is only so much that can be perfectly quantified. If you have a player whose match rating is mediocre, but every time your team is doing something good, they seem to be at the heart of it, this may be a sign that the rating is failing to accurately convey their performance. By combining what you see and what the game says is happening, you can get a fuller understanding of a player’s performance and what, if anything, you need to tweak to get more performance.
- Consider Roles and Responsibilities: Sometimes, the performance of a player in a match has less to do with them and more to do with what you are telling them to do. If a player is being used out of position, their performance may suffer. Another important consideration for a role is the long-term trend at the position, particularly if you have similar results with multiple players. If no matter who you plug into a position in your tactic, they tend to hand in the same 6.5-adjacent performance over and over, it’s likely an issue of the tactic, not the players. Consider whether you can tweak things to accommodate the position better, or if you even need to, as you may decide that a hard-rated role is the price to pay for a dominant tactic.
- Look At The Big Picture: A player’s match rating is about them, but that doesn’t mean they are the only ones responsible for how that match rating turns out. As with the way your tactic can impact how a player rates, so too can the talent or tactic of the opposition. If you’re a non-league team who drew top-flight opposition in the cup, your players are likely to struggle even if they’re playing pretty well, because a good day for an amateur is still pretty bad when the player opposite is a World Cup winner.
- Watch For Trends: Individual match ratings are highly variable. A player on a bad game can instantly see their number go olive green with a single goal, while a single error can significantly drop a player’s rating. Match ratings are useful for in-game decisions as they can show who is playing well and who is struggling. For long-term decision making, like reordering the depth-chart, don’t get too wedded to a single match rating result. Instead, look to both a player’s overall rating for the year and their recent rating form for a better read on their capabilities and their current trend.
Match ratings are just another tool to help you make more informed decisions about your club. Use it wisely, and you’ll guide your team to a great season!
