Lord Reliant

So, you can't train players to be natural. That's fine. And the highest you can train players to is Accomplished. That's fine, too. But this spurs three questions:

1. How long, typically, does it take for a player to train up to Accomplished from Ineffectual (a season, or longer) if they don't play in that position?

2. More importantly, what difference does it make if a player plays in Natural vs. Accomplished? Do players play with some sort of penalty at Accomplished? For instance, are all attributes are only at 90% of regular?

3. What about other levels of play? How does that impact stats/performance? I've seen the rankings, but how does it actually impact things in game?

cobalt272

2. it would only affect mental attributes. this would be a very slight difference though

ubos

1. Depends. If you only train the player at that position but you don't play that player in that position in matches or if he doesn't get to play much, it will take longer. I once trained a winger with super striker attributes and was ineffectual at striker and I played him in my first team. Took me 2 and a half seasons for him to go from Ineffectual to Accomplished iirc.

2. Wouldn't say the attributes suffer. Just don't play that well. Like Michael Essien. Absolute machine at midfield but doesn't impose the same kind of authority at CB/DR.

3. What do you mean by other levels of play?

Lord Reliant

Thanks for the responses so far!

To expand follow-up on those questions:

1. That's good to know it take a long time to train a player in a new position. I've been taking my young, under 23 players and training them in a new position just so they have more diversity. I assume this doesn't impact their current stats, just effectiveness in the new position, right?

2. So, it seems like there is only a minor penalty to playing in an Accomplished position instead of Natural.

3. I was curious if you went down from Natural (to Accomplished through Ineffectual) how that impacted stats (mental/physical) while playing.

Overall, it seems like playing in anything other than Natural takes some sort of in-game performance drop, but we can't say (Accomplished reduces stats by 5%, whereas Ineffectual reduces them by 30%). I was sort of hoping for a more formulaeic answer, but an intangible one is fine.

AwardedMostImproved

Players with low adaptability can also loose the new postion if you don't play them in that position regualty or keep up with training I have found.

skip spence

How about players who are natural AM or DM but can't play MC? For example, if you play an AMR at MR he realisticly should do alright as those positions are very similar. This seems to be the case too looking at the team reports where the ass man often recommends putting good AMs at MC positions.

Does anyone know about this?

skip spence

And yeah, to answer your first question, it varies very much how long it takes to retrain players. Some are very versetile and can go to accomplished in less than a season, others can never completely retrain.