Topluluk » Hattrick Gazetesi

Effective training for a stable team - a managers tool

Yazan Luckeh

Imagine you are training defending for the week, have an upcoming friendly and a single training spot left. For this spot, you have to decide between a 30 year old keeper with a current magnificent (12) defending, or a 27 year old midfielder that currently has solid (7) defending. Which of these two players will give you the biggest boost in your team's ratings?

Effective training for a stable team - a managers tool

Imagine you are training defending for the week, have an upcoming friendly and a single training spot left. For this spot, you have to decide between a 30 year old keeper with a current magnificent (12) defending, or a 27 year old midfielder that currently has solid (7) defending. Which of these two players will give you the biggest boost in your team's ratings?

In this article I will explain a method that I have developed to make line-up and training decisions for my teams. In particular it’s interesting for teams that keep a stable selection and want to optimize their overall ratings with the team they currently have.

In the example above, the midfielder turns out to be the best choice. The total effective contribution is significantly higher, with roughly 30% in favor of the midfielder. I will explain the results in the below paragraph - and the underlying logic below that.

Picking the keeper for the spot will result in in the contribution:
★ Has 2.0% effective contribution for side defense (for each side)
★ Has 2.7% effective contribution for central defense.
★ Total effective contribution: 2% + 2% + 2.7% = 6.7%

Picking the Inner Midfielder:
★ Has 1.6% effective contribution for side defense (also for each side) when played as a normal midfield.
★ Has 6.9% effective contribution to the central defense when played as a normal midfielder.
★ Total effective contribution: 1.6% + 1.6% + 6.9% = 10.1%

How did we get to these numbers?
The generated numbers are the result of looking at relative contributions of players and combining this with the knowledge of the training speed of players.

What are relative contributions? There is an excellent topic on the Global (English) forum by Alpa (7514635) called “[HT] The Unwritten Manual”. The link to the current active thread (at the time of writing this article) is here: (17572304.1).

On the 8-11th posts of this topic (17572304.8) you can find the relative contribution of a player. The data shown there shows that a keeper uses:
★ 35% of his Defending skill to the Central Defence rating
★ 25% of his Defending skill to the Side Defence ratings.

And for the a Inner midfielder, playing normal this data is:
★ 40% of his Defending skill for Central Defence
★ 9% of his Defending skill for Side Defence

The interesting bit comes when you also take training speed into account. The training speed is depending on the age and the current skill level. So training a player that is 30 years old is slower than a 27 year old, and training from solid (7) to excellent (8) is faster than from magnificent (12) to world class (13). I’ve used the HT Utilities site (https://ht.8ic.ro/training) as my source for training speed.

So we need to combine the relative contributions together with the training speed. And I’ve made a handy Google sheet that just does that. The only thing you need to enter is the player age and the current skill level that you want to train. Here is the link: (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LOUL67KE40qyBAPFLF31XAUkSWb3W8xzNm_WPJt5NbI/edit#gid=266144105)

The tool works as following:
★ 1) You select the tab that contains the training you are planning for the week.
★ 2) You put in the 2 player ages and their current skill level. As soon as you put the numbers in the percentages will update immediately.
★ 3) Compare the results!

When you do the above three steps, some logic in the Google sheet file pulls in the training speed for the players that are provided (basically the minutes needed to go from the current skill level to the next skill level) and weighs this against the relative contribution from the Unwritten Manual. Some math is then applied to get to a scoring. The percentage shown is calculated roughly as the minutes it needs to level up a skill - multiplied with the relative contributions.

Interpreting the results
A higher number means more contributions to your overall ratings. The numbers are comparable - so a number twice as high means that training is twice as effective.
Compare the results by looking for both players in their Position column. So for the comparison at the start of the article, look for player 1 at the Goalkeeper position. For player two look at the percentages for fielding a player as “Inner Midfield” with the order “Normal”.
The example at the start of the article can be seen here: (https://imgur.com/a/7TK8eiJ)

Another example to illustrate:
Given we have to players
★ A 24 year old central defender that currently has solid (7) playmaking
★ A 30 year old midfielder that currently has extra-terrestrial (16) playmaking
Put the data in the sheet, and you’ll see that training the defender on playmaking is 4.8% effective versus 4.5% for the 30 year old midfielder. So if you field both players in their normal positions - it is more effective to train the younger central defender than the older midfielder.

If you have questions, feel free to leave a comment below or to drop me a DM. The Google sheet is protected in such a way that you can only add player age and current skill level. If you want an unprotected copy of the file for your own use, please drop me a DM.