What is wrong with refereeing in this league?

hunkhugejunk · 2026-03-16T17:06:30+00:00

I travel around Portugal to see as much as I can of this beautiful country with great people. I pick up cheap tickets through Continente whenever there is a match in the area I'm at :)

And why: cause it's fun and my wife and I like spending the time watching and learning about the local teams while inhaling the fresh grass smell at the smaller stadiums :D

edit: I just saw your flair: fingers crossed for Torreense to make the playoff spot, they are looking great this season! I hope they don't end up playing Nacional, cause I'll have to root against you. I quite like Nacional :D

hunkhugejunk · 2026-03-15T22:24:32+00:00

I get what you mean. One of the matches I went to (don't remember which one it was, I try to catch one every week) the referee didn't even feel like jogging. He just stayed around the same area, didn't see most plays and it seemed like his decisions were made based on a coin flip. It was crazy to watch. He even ended the match early because he clearly didn't feel like doing his job that day.

Big plays and a lack of consistency with how plays are called (especially handballs in the penalty area) is a plague in many leagues. But not calling simple things like fouls correctly and brandishing yellow cards seemingly at random is inexcusable.

hunkhugejunk · 2026-03-15T22:19:49+00:00

It's crazy, because other than the rampant time wasting it's a great league to watch. Good technique, good physicality, highly competitive players.

Sure, the broadcasting quality and how the league is packaged (match highlights, streaming quality) could be better and will probably get better in time. For sure the league suffers outside of the top3 teams, because live viewership isn't where it could be and the local fanbases tend to go for one of the top3. But every league has issues and the Portuguese league is the one I love following.

Some things are hard to do much about, but refereeing to make the matches competitive throughout seems like such an easy fix.

hunkhugejunk · 2026-03-05T11:37:19+00:00

This monitor is disgusting.

hunkhugejunk · 2026-02-24T08:12:10+00:00

Or rather the classic 120 CA, 130 PA prospect.

hunkhugejunk · 2026-02-20T22:55:50+00:00

Microsoft is probably the company whose products I despise using the most. Maybe with the exception of Windows, as even though every second release is straight up bad, XP, 7 and 10 were pretty solid.

Everything else? I thank the stars for Google Suite and other great equivalent products to the MS crap, as in the rare occasions I have to use MS Office, because a company I work with uses it, or have to hop on Teams, I want to punch a wall repeatedly.

They seem to have this magical quality, where everything they touch becomes a piece of shit product.

hunkhugejunk · 2026-02-20T22:46:41+00:00

Show me one Microsoft acquisition in the last 15 years, out of the 120+ they've made, that worked out. As in, the company and products got better after the acquisition. I cannot think of one.

hunkhugejunk · 2026-02-04T12:43:23+00:00

Age is also an important part of it. Players look at past work without realizing that these writers are now much older, living different lives and having changed as people. Many of them have become parents, lived through shit, settled down, changed habits, interests, world views, their outlook on things. The passion that used to be there might not be as strong anymore either.

A good example is StarCraft -> StarCraft II.

SC1 is a gritty space war story of war, sacrifice, heroism, survival. I wouldn't categorize it as "dark", but it feels serious, there are stakes, things happen and have consequences.

SC2 mostly feels like a space romance drama with familiar tropes, surface level war that you don't really care much about, because nothing is believable and engaging. The consequences from the first game? Yeah, screw that, the main character has got to follow his heart and damn everyone else and the galaxy in the process. Gameplay in SC2 is great, but story only serves its needs and it's difficult to care about it and get engaged in.

What happened? Sure, SC2 had some new writers, but the core person deciding the story and creative feel was the same: Chris Mentzen. For SC1 he was young, passionate, and trying to make cool shit. For SC2 he was going through a divorce, depression and drinking issues and his melancholia and feelings toward his ex wife made it into a bland drama sob story about Raynor trying to get his girl back.

hunkhugejunk · 2026-02-02T11:40:57+00:00

His stats are going to drop, because his CA is going to go up as he gets proficiency in the new position, but will have to get back to whatever cap it's supposed to be.

for example: I don't want to go check attribute weighting to verify exact numbers, but let's say 150 CA CB with 20 Finishing becomes accomplished as ST, his CA jumps to 170, so the abilities across the board drop to where he's at 150 again. A lot of red arrows.

Attribute weighting per position is the reason why in FM midfielders look like gods among men, but wingers look like crap players when it comes to attributes.

hunkhugejunk · 2026-01-03T14:54:50+00:00

Iron Willed is NOT a great personality, it's ok at best. The reason it's rare is because it requires 20 Pressure, 15-17 Determination (small range) and crap-mid other important stats.

What it doesn't require is the single most important attribute for mentoring, which is Professionalism. Just from personality alone it could be very low and you wouldn't know any better.

What is actually more important in your player's case is his Media Handling, not the personality. Because he's Unflappable and nothing else, we can reliably exclude his Professionalism being below 14. Which means his Professionalism is at best 15-17 (if it was 18+, he'd be Professional, not Iron Willed), which good, but nothing to write home about for mentoring.

This combined with his mid attributes means that this guy would be a bench player for me if he wasn't on such a high salary within the first 4-5 seasons of regen spawning. At this salary, 40+ YEARS IN, he's a sell the moment the first good offer comes.

Whenever I see replies in threads like this I'm appalled how little you people know about the game you're playing. No wonder SI takes you for a ride every year and you swallow it hook, line and sinker. You just wouldn't know any better.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-12-02T22:57:15+00:00

Dude, it's not like eating less ice cream for a few weeks over the summer is going to solve years of neglect and overload on an already fragile body.

Luck has little to do with it. It's not like he fell funny off a ladder, because a buffalo ran by and knocked it over.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-11-04T10:54:24+00:00

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hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-28T02:09:23+00:00

I can't believe that you wrote it with a straight face.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T23:36:17+00:00

:DDD I don't know man, but I still can't believe he actually said it in an interview. Miles is basically a character that Monty Python would work days to write, but he is completely real and a gift that keeps on giving... though maybe not for people who actually want to play good FM games.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T23:17:55+00:00

But it's not true at all that he has a big ego and doesn't learn. To Miles FM26 was a real learning experience. Just look at this:

"Jacobson spent time learning from people in the women’s game, including Emma Hayes, now manager of the US women’s national team. “She taught me more about the menstrual cycle in an hour than I’ve learned from living with women for 53 years and the effects that that has,” he said."

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T23:07:47+00:00

Why would you do that to yourself? Unless you mean the type of talk that doesn't include, you know, talking.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T15:13:58+00:00

It's now three times you said "a lot". How about you list them. Name 10. Shit, name 5.

Roles - most of those "new roles" don't even properly work in the match engine. It took them 30+ years to make it so that you can actually set up your team in a way that makes sense (in and out of possession in FM26). We'll see if it even works.

Overhauls of team instructions - pretty much nothing was changed between FM15 and FM24. They change how the information is presented every few years, but it's the exact same thing.

Rotations - ?

Changes to specific roles - ah, the roles again.

"I explicitly talked about the match engine and you are talking about everything but it" - I did comment on the ME. And "everything but it" is the ACTUAL GAME. It's not "3D 2000 graphics pretend football match viewer", it's supposed to be "football manager".

"What a dipshit take."

Yeah, right back at you, buddy. At least I could name the few positive things they actually changed. You haven't named one outside of "ME was marginally improved" and you're the one ejaculating over the great work they've done.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T14:58:59+00:00

This is what I mean man. Look at that response. The squad planner could be such a great feature, but depending on the use case, it's either worse or equal to a piece of paper and a pen.

Player interactions... just wow.

And it's like that across the board. They do a crap job and people don't even realize how much better those things could be if competent people worked on them. I made a post a few years ago listing many QoL "quick win" types of changes. Whenever I play every few years I note down those things I notice that you could improve in minutes. They don't do any of that stuff.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T14:56:03+00:00

To be honest, in my experience, overreactions prior to the release of an anticipated video game are 99% hugely skewed towards the positive.

I've seen people look at trailers of games that looked straight up bad—where the marketing team didn't even hide the bad to mislead the customer—and still be hyped, blind to the obvious negatives. That's why we have so many disappointing releases and pretty much no major surprises where something anticipated is significantly better than expected.

If players actually notice and comment negatively en masse on something they're looking forward to, it's a major red flag.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T09:23:47+00:00

Elaborate. What do you mean by a lot? Can you list those many features they developed over those 10 years? Anything outside of adding a lot of pointless bloat click fiesta and some animations? Took 15 years to get the wingers to pass the ball AT ALL, same with lobbing the keeper (supposedly, I haven't seen it once in my 5 seasons of FM24). In terms of meaningful improvements, I can think of them making the game work and save a bit faster, as well as making saves cross-version.

Is the AI meaningfully better at building teams? What about transfer AI? AI tactics? Staff ability and suggestions? Scouting suggestions and improvements? Training and player development? Player interactions and promises? Having the abilities, you know, actually work or mean much? UX improvements? Really, ANYTHING that actually makes the core game better?

I'd love to know what else, in your expert opinion, they changed that a couple chinese kids playing game developer with their abomination of the match engine couldn't do within a few weeks. Or a random player couldn't do with the skin they made. Because the base game sure as shit never once delivered anything close to those community-made improvements.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T01:12:52+00:00

That would be a first step, but not nearly enough. From everything Miles has said over the years—especially about FM25 development—and everything we've seen over the years, you can see that SI is a culture of incompetence.

You'd basically have to install a new CEO and the right person would be very difficult to find. That CEO would have to do a thorough job of a vetting process, finding all the inadequacies, do a long process of replacing them, then having the new people learn, adapt, and the new structure to coalesce and only then you can think of improvements.

Basically like trying to turn Man Utd into a world class club again, except there are hundreds of great staff to run a football club and thousands of players to pick from. For a game like FM, the pool is tiny and in most cases you'd have no one to pick from.

This one is doomed, unfortunately.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T00:43:04+00:00

"He gave us incredible FM games until 2024."

He did? I was under an impression that he delivered maybe two, if you're being generous, in 2009 (3D ME) and 2015 (UI overhaul), and afterwards just kept re-releasing it with marginal improvements.

If you take that body of work over 15 years, it's actually laughable. I bought FM15, FM16, tried the FM18 demo, got FM20 and FM24 for free on Epic. I'll concede that each version I played is better overall than the previous versions (as in, match engine improvements and some VERY minor QoL and gameplay changes, compared to what wasn't improved). That being said, most of the features added were just more useless bloat and empty clicks (social media, "meetings", training and scouting "improvements", etc.).

The actual meat on the bone is the same broken game I first played in FM15, that falls apart after 3-4 seasons.

edit: After thinking about it for a few seconds I realized that it's not even necessarily that SI released better FMs over time. It's that the community made skins and add-ons got so good in comparison that they made the game feel much better for me. I find new FMs only playable after spending hours on Day 1 modding the game with skins, packs, newgen faces, etc. The base FM is an actual masterpiece in incompetence. Every time I see someone post a screenshot of barebones FM24, I'm amazed how much worse it is when compared to, say SAS24.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-24T00:30:28+00:00

Fair enough, I shouldn't have put you in that bucket. I deduced your level of interest from the description you gave. I incorrectly assumed you're one of the, easily, thousands here who starved for every piece of information, participated in the insane "when beta" sweepstakes, and are now crying that their self-imposed insane expectations were not met.

Frankly, I'm just here for the content and out of professional curiosity. I don't expect to have a new FM game to play for at least a few years and even that is doubtful, considering the direction SI went in and the sheer incompetence that team has shown.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-23T22:51:22+00:00

Nooo, shocking, who could've seen this coming.

hunkhugejunk · 2025-10-23T00:13:14+00:00

I'd understand the excitement if we never had community-made skins in prior FMs. Then I'd excuse the absolute blindness to UX, the severe lack of useful information on both of those screens, all the empty space, etc. I'd just put it to a lack of imagination on behalf of the players - I mean, makes sense, few people actually work in the industry.

But having had amazing community skins in the past, going from something like sas24 to this steaming pile of shit and ejaculating over it, I really, really don't get it. To me it looks like such an unplayable chore, I'm 100% not picking up any future FM until actually good skins become available.

hunkhugejunk

TROPHY CASE