Exclusive FM2011 blog with Miles Jacobson day 12: the new training regimes revealed!

Training is now split into two different areas – general training, and match day preparation. Today, I’m going to blog about the general training area.

Whilst the training screen might look similar to last year's, albeit prettier and with a few new options, this is not just a cosmetic change. Everything under the hood has also been improved, meaning a much more realistic result from training not just for your team, but for all the other teams in the football world that exists in your game too.

One of the first things long term players of our games will notice is that that coaches are now auto-assigned at the start of the game to optimum assignments, so a more attacking based coach would be set to attacking tasks, and a tactics specialist would be assigned there. This also happens if you sign a new coach as he will be automatically assigned to a training category most suitable for him.

Also, when a coach leaves the club and the departure leaves a training category without a coach, the coaching assignments are automatically adjusted to make sure all areas of training are still covered. You can, of course, change these assignments yourself to have the coaches looking after the areas that you want them to, but the default assignments act as a guide.

You’ll also see that there are more default training schedules in the game too, with general, goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, forwards, and youth general and youth goalkeeping. The more specialized default training schedules allow players to focus on developing the skills needed for their position in the long run.

We’ve done an overhaul of the training categories as well, for example splitting the generic goalkeeping category into two separate ones for shot stopping and handling, and also reviewing and re-arranging the attributes affected by each category.

It’s really easy to assign players to specific training schedules, as it’s all done by a simple drop down button by the player’s name, and you can chop and change these at any time.

You can, of course, change any of the training schedules should you want to, or create your own, by going to the schedules section and tweaking away like before.

Aside from the regular training schedules, there are the options to rest players from training for one, two, three or seven days. And in the player profile training section, we’ve got the ability for training evaluations to be done by the coach of your choice, rather than just the assistant manager.

The training section of the player profile now also features all the key information about the player training and his attribute development on the main view, with an attribute history chart that tracks the changes more detailed than before. There is also a more detailed breakdown of the training workload for the player, so you can see how much of the training is spent on different assignments.

Another major improvement in training is the chance to get players to train in specific areas which include quickness, strength, stamina, jumping, finishing, freekicks, corners, taking and saving penalties, long throws, dribbling, technique, agility, balance, heading, agility, crossing, passing and kicking and handling (for goalkeepers, obviously). And don’t worry if that seems overwhelming – your staff will give you advice in the staff meetings, and suggestions of which players should be concentrating on which areas.

The individual training assignments allow you to hone your players and help them improve any areas of their game that might be keeping them from being the impact player they could be, or to simply further improve the key areas of their game.

That’s it for now – tomorrow I’ll be looking at the match preparation area, and what it adds to the Football Manager series.