our players' energy has a great impact on their performance during match. If they are tired they will run slower, pass less precisely and the dribbling and tackling abilities are weakened. Hence, you must understand how your players energy work during a match and how your choices influence how fast energy will drop.
In your players' profiles and in your physio department you can always check their current energy. These energy levels will be their initial level of energy at kick off.
Playing matches is of course exhausting. This means that your players during a match can become very tired. At the end of the match it is not unusual that a player will have lost 35% points of energy or more.
After the great effort players will quickly recover. Thus, the resulting loss of energy will be around 2%.
The rate of how rapidly players will lose energy depends of several things:
- Stamina: A player's stamina has a great influence on how fast the player loses their energy.
- Opponent's strength: If you play against a team that are stronger than yours, your players will use more energy.
- Offensive mentality: The more offensive tactic instructions, the higher energy loss.
- High tempo: If you've instructed your players to play at a high tempo, your players will lose energy more quickly. If your players' tempo is set to "extremely high", make sure you have set up some substitutions.
- Low tempo: If your players are instructed to play at a low tempo they will save their energy. This gives them an advantage later in matches where other players have become tired.
Burst energy
Players have 2 different kinds of energy in a match. Burst energy and "normal" energy.
The burst energy is included in the many factors which determine players' physical capabilities during a match. It decreases quickly during certain types of physical exertions and rises again when the player catches his breath.
The "normal" energy declines steadily throughout the match and acts as a ceiling for the burst energy. The burst energy can never exceed normal energy.
The actions which currently make burst energy deplete are:
- Running with the ball: For every second that a player runs with the ball, with opponents hot on his heels, he will lose 4 percentage points of burst energy.
- Tackling attempts: A tackling attempt costs 20 percentage points of burst energy.
- Dribbling: Trying to counter a tackling attempt costs 10 percentage points of burst energy.
When the player is not performing any of these actions, his burst energy rises by 0.2 + stamina / 260 percentage points per iteration (an iteration is a quarter of a second in real time)
That means that if a player has 10 stamina, then his burst energy will increase by 0.95 percentage points per second. If his stamina er 50, then it will rise by 1.57 percentage points per second, and 2.34 if his stamina is 100.
The reason we added burst energy is to prevent a player to run any and all things. It also gives the defensive players a better chance at stopping better players since every tackling attempt would drain his burst energy bit by bit. It also made passing much more important, since there is now an advantage to letting a less exhausted teammate take over.