Football Manager 2011 Guide: How To Look After Your ‘Golden Oldies’

Hi there! Let me introduce myself, I am Fanty the author of the FM Touchline blog and I have joined FootballManagerStories to share some unique tips and ideas to help you on your way to being a successful manager!

So without further ado…

So what is a ‘Golden Oldie‘ as i put it? It is simply a player of the age 31+ in my book! and in this post I will be sharing my tips as keep your best ageing players, playing at the top of their game for as long as possible. The first thing you need to take into account straight away with ‘older’ players is not the technical attributes but the physical attributes but the physical attributes…

As a reminder these consist of..

1. Acceleration
2. Agility
3. Balance
4. Jumping
5. Natural Fitness
6. Pace
7. Stamina
8. Strength

The key thing here is not to let these stats decline and keep them at a consistent level rather than improve them. Straight away you need to rule out Acceleration and Pace out of the equation because no matter what your older players will start to lose the extra yards they used to provide. Balance and Jumping never really decline or increase but there have been exceptions to the rule but the main stats you need to really pay the attention to, in order of importance is Stamina, Natural Fitness and Strength.

The Stamina stat will indicate how long they can last on the pitch for and if the player have outstanding play-making or finishing you’ll want him to keep being the game changer for as long a possible so the first thing you want to do is set an individual training focus on Stamina and also if you notice your player getting tired around the 60 minute mark substitute him immediately as you don’t want to over work him and potentially causing an injury. If he is tired a lot more than the other players consider setting his training schedule to rest for as you see fit (either 1,2, or 3 days or even a week.)

Moving onto Natural Fitness, this stat slightly goes hand in hand with Stamina and it indicates how prone your player is to injury and this stat will never change, so if this stat is low you will need to be very conservative in the way you use this player and there is no way to change how the often a player will get injured so rotating is a better option in this scenario.

And fianlly, Strength, the last thing you want is your player to become weak on the ball and have to protect him from the bigger and badder defenders that await of course if he gets clattered by  players like Ryan Shawcross who throws themselves into tackles so for this you can set an individual training focus for strength to maintain the stat.

If you decide to use a custom training schedules for your Golden Oldies don’t overwork them or try to improve the stat or this will make the decline happen even quicker!

A well looked after player could have Physical stats that look like this and my my players can still follow it up with the immense Technical and Mental ability like Juninho Pernambucano in my At. Madrid save. So far he has scored 5 and assisted 8 from central midfield and doesn’t look like stopping. His Stamina is 12 his Natural Fitness is 12 and his Strength is 13, and at the age of 35 this is remarkable but it shows how all this pays off, but if they start to go below 10 then you are in trouble and you should consider the future of the player, maybe even offering them a backroom role by suggesting it to them in private chat!

If your players stats are looking like Rivaldo or Ronaldo’s (shown below) stats then you have a problem on your hand but with this in-depth guide I hope I have helped even a minority of Managers!

Thank you for reading and also don’t forget to checkout my blog FM Touchline if you liked what you have read today :)

Fanty