If you’ve not played Football Manager before, understanding the attributes can be slightly confusing.
Unlike FIFA, the stats aren’t rated 0-99, so it can be a little strange when trying to work out how good a player’s attribute can be.
In this guide, we’ll explain how to understand attribute ratings in FM.
How Players Attributes Are Rated
Football Manager attributes or stats are rated from 1 – 20. Having a 20 rated attribute is of course the best and highest rating on the game, however, this isn’t relevant for some of the attributes:
Aggression, bravery, and the goalkeeping eccentricity are all attributes in which it may be preferable to have a lower rating. For example, you may not want a player with 20 aggression who will be more likely to want to tackle the opposition with force, as it may risk more fouls which could mean more penalties given or red cards for that player.
To understand more about what each attribute means for a player’s actions on the pitch, read our player attributes guide.
Whilst you will only see a player’s whole number attribute on their attributes section within the player profile, they will actually have a decimal number within the code. For example, if Neymar has a 15 passing attribute, it may actually be 15.6.
When a player is developing an attribute within training, this decimal number will overtime get higher and higher. In our Neymar passing example, once Neymar’s passing rating has surpassed 15.9 to 16.0, his attribute will update on the attributes section within the player profile.
You’ll notice that when looking at other team’s player’s attributes, they can sometimes be a range of numbers rather than a specific rating. In the above image, some ratings are 9-11. This is because the player hasn’t been scouted enough and so there is a lack of knowledge on the player’s ability.
How Attributes Combine With Player Roles
I like to imagine that 20 ratings are almost impossible to reach in most attributes, and if you’re lucky enough to have a player that has multiple 20 rated attributes, they’ll no doubt be world class.
Players will perform better in a specific player role when they have higher rated attributes for that particular role. A false 9 striker will require better passing and off the ball movement ratings than a player suited to the advanced forward role that has high acceleration for getting in behind the back defensive line.
When players have high ratings in all of the right attributes that are suited to a specific role, they can excel, even if other attributes are poorly rated as it’s likely they won’t matter too much out on the pitch. Going back to the false 9 example, if they were rated a 2 in heading it wouldn’t really matter as heading isn’t required too much in the false 9 role, although obviously its nice to have highly rated attributes in every area.
Here are the ratings for Vincent Koziello who is a deep lying play-maker. He doesn’t have particularly great long shots or heading, but for the deep lying play-maker role he’s got high ratings in the right attributes, such as: first touch, passing, technique, vision and teamwork.
Using FIFA ratings to understand Football Manager ratings
If you’re like me and came to FM after being an avid FIFA player, it can be difficult to understand the difference in ratings.
FIFA players have overalls between around 45 all the way up to 99 in Ultimate Team, and each player’s individual stats can be from 0-99.
A simple way of comparing a player’s attributes in FM with those in FIFA is to multiply their FM rating by 5, although this is a very rough guide.
For example, if Neymar has a finishing rating of 18, multiply that by 5 to get 90.
Note that this will often make Football Manager attributes sound worse than what they actually are when thinking about their relation to FIFA.
Therefore, I have used my experience of playing both FIFA and Football Manager for the last 7 or so years to create a rough table that attempts to match FIFA attribute ratings with Football Manager ratings…
| FM Rating | FIFA Rating |
|---|---|
| 20 | 98+ |
| 19 | 95+ |
| 18 | 92+ |
| 17 | 89+ |
| 16 | 85+ |
| 15 | 81+ |
| 14 | 77+ |
| 13 | 73+ |
| 12 | 69+ |
| 11 | 65+ |
| 10 | 60+ |
| 9 | 55+ |
| 8 | 50+ |
| 7 | 45+ |
| 6 | 40+ |
| 5 | 35+ |
| 4 | 30+ |
| 3 | 25+ |
| 2 | 20+ |
| 1 | 15+ |
If any of you reading this have played both games, I hope you will agree that the table above gives a rough idea of how the attributes would compare.
I have made the 17-20 FM stats have smaller margins for their equivalent FIFA ratings as they tend to be harder to reach when developing a player. I imagine that it’s easier to train a stat from 10 to 11 than it is 19 to 20, but obviously player potential plays a massive part in this.
Understand By Playing
The best possible tip I can advise here is that you just sit and play Football Manager. The more you play, and the more you watch the highlights or perform analysis by reviewing stats, you’ll gather an understanding of how the attributes affect your individual player performances.
Remember that attributes combine together too, it’s no good a player having 20 vision and 1 passing. This means they’ll be able to constantly spot a pass, but very rarely actually pull the pass off.
You’ll get there eventually. Definitely read about how each attribute works within the match engine to better your understanding on how the ratings affect each attribute, check our guide on player attributes here.