Today marks the start of a new series of articles which will take a look at six of my first-team squad over the course of an entire season. This will include looking at the condition the players are in when they return from the short end of season break in Brazil and at the end of each subsequent month. The idea of the project is to look at how the players’ attributes change over the season and hopefully to assess how much impact injuries, training and the number of matches played can make on the players.

A lot of the project’s focus will be to look at the Physical attributes of the players, in particular the players’ weight, stamina, strength, pace and condition, but I’ll also be taking a broader view of the players’ profiles to include morale, form and their Technical and Mental attributes. Effectively, the idea is to examine a year in the life of these players.

The main decision involved in such a project is to choose which players to use. If the project was to have any chance of success I initially felt that they should all be players that would be in the team on a regular basis, however the more I thought about this, the more I decided that it didn’t necessarily have to be that way. Indeed I started to think that it was probably best if I included other players, as a player lacking match practise is just as likely to experience changing attributes as one who plays every match. With this in mind I’ve chosen to include one player who won’t play on a regular basis, a fringe player (bench-warmer, whatever your preferred term happens to be) in order that I can try to draw some conclusions about the differences between players who play almost every game (plus international call ups), those taking part in most games and those who make the occasional starting appearance plus some substitute appearances. I also felt that I should look at players from different areas of the team so my chosen six includes:

  • a goalkeeper;
  • two defenders (one being the fringe player);
  • a winger;
  • a central midfielder;
  • a striker.

I’ll introduce them in more depth in the next post of the series that will show the condition in which they returned for pre-season training.

It’s worth noting that players develop differently depending on their potential ability, current ability and the training schedules used. I use schedules that I created myself so my players will most likely develop differently from other peoples’ players and this experiment is representative of my game and may not reflect FM as a whole.