Weight -y Matters

Let’s get the important stuff out the way first for anyone who can’t be bothered to read too much.

  • I’m fine with there being delays to FM25 to get things right
  • I’m fine with omissions until a later edition if it means getting it done right.
  • I think the move to Unity must be a horrendous amount of work, and clearly lots of people are working really hard on it.
  • I have no issue with changes being made to weight to account for both male and female players.

I have tweeted about my issues with using usage percentages to set priorities and omissions. One of the things I also mentioned was about weight. And I have two issues here. One a little petty and one just practical.

Petty – I’m sure 99.9% of players have never used weight to make a decision. Transfer or otherwise. But I have. And I’m going to go through those reasons below. I don’t think me having used it is justification for it staying in, but I do get a bit tired of the “I can’t think of a use for it so nobody else needs it.” position that gets taken.

Practical – There are tons of solutions that would allow weight or similar information that fluctuates to remain. Outside a gaming context, they are easy. You can set them up with very basic knowledge of Excel and entry level stats. You could get a skin to represent them for you this way. I don’t know if they are hard to get in the game, but I’m struggling to see how they would be.

Weight a minute

Hold up a second. What’s the issue again? From SI:

As such, we can now share a change we’ve made to all FM25 player profiles: a player’s weight will no longer be visible. 

Through the creation of our Women’s Football database, we discovered that while the weight of male athletes can change a bit month to month, women’s body types are very different from men’s and their weight fluctuates a lot more, often weekly. 

This perspective encouraged us to review the wider game, much like we have with all other areas, and we’ve ultimately decided to no longer show weight for any players in FM25. A very basic measurement will still be included under the hood, but it won’t be visible on the front end anymore.

I’m totally fine with changing the approach to weight. I’m really pleased actually as it suggests a real effort is being made to incorporate the women’s game properly rather than forcing it to fit the template of the men’s. I don’t however think just removing it for the moment is the way forward. Because (petty) it can be used for things, and (practical) it’s a basic data visualisation problem with solutions.

So I’m going to go through why/how I use weight in my games, and then follow it up with some solutions. I know the SI team might already have these. I know maybe I’m missing something. And I know there are some sexist knobheads who have jumped on the changes to complain about the addition of women’s football in the game. It is still worth discussing though as it relates to two areas – what we understand about the game, and how we or more accurately SI could frame fixing things.

What is Weight For?

It’s not just for letting you know who has eaten all the pies. As is often stated by people, everything in the game has a purpose. It links to something, influences something, or does something. Weight is no different, and it’s not just a cosmetic influence over the visual avatars players have during a 3D match.

We know for example that Height is partially correlated with jumping reaching. Jumping reach isn’t simply how high can someone jump, but the max height they can reach factoring in their ability to jump and how lanky they are. Tall players have an edge because of that height.

Weight on the other hand correlates with strength. I’ve always assumed this. That the chunkier players with the Sunday league builds were more likely to be stronger than the slight and small players. That body mass means more force to exert.

I knew strength is a good predictor of certain key stats which is why it is part of my version of Fibra as can be seen here. But I’d not double-checked the link between weight and strength. I’d just made the assumption that one was a proxy for the other. Until this morning when I tested it out.

Weighing in with the Data

I got the weight and physical attributes data from approximately, 1350 players from Season 3 of my Huddersfield save. The weight ranged from 50kg to 110kg and was from across leagues. I just used my player search area in the transfer module with World Scouting on, and no other filters.

I then just ran a simple correlation for weight against each of the attributes. The only statistically significant (that p less than .05 for you nerds) finding that was revealed was for strength. There was a strong positive correlation (r=.76, p<.05). Again, for anyone with the stats knowledge, that is a huge correlation. It’s scored from -1 to 1. The closer to either end it is, the strong the relationship (the more associated or predictive if you like). We generally consider a strong relationship to be anything above .5.

There we have it. As weight increases, so generally does the strength attribute.

Why Weight?

Why does it even matter? You’ve got a strength attribute, just use that, right? Sure, but I don’t usually play with attribute masking off, and I usually play in the lower leagues where I either can’t scout, have shite scouts, or just don’t have the time and money to wait for a full report. I often have to make decisions when certain key attributes (and strength is for me) are still presented as a range.

But if I know their weight which is typically always available I can have a good guess at where on that range they are likely to be saving me time and giving me a better chance of getting a high strength player.

For example, if I’ve got a 65kg player on my radar with a strength range of 8-14, I know they are more likely to be on the single digit side of that range compared to if it was a 95kg player.

And again, I know for most players this just doesn’t matter. You can either see strength outright, have the time, or just don’t prioritise it. Which is why it’s not a big deal for 99% of people that it is missing. It does however matter to me and is one less trick I can use in FM25. I will live, but I do genuinely use it.

Solutions then?

I said I had solutions. Yeah, I do.

  1. Just update weight as much as it needs to be. If it updates weekly for female players and monthly, 6 monthly or whatever, for male players then just do that. Honestly, it’s just a change in how frequently an already stored and calculated data point is retrieved. Just have a tool tip that lets players know.
  2. Present it as a range. We have this for attributes we don’t have fully scouted, so presenting a range of values is not new to FM. If we know what the average fluctuation is as a percentage of body weight, then we can create a range where the upper and lower limit is set by that. For example, if we have a player that is 65kg, and we know (out of the air) a female player’s weight can fluctuate by up to 10% every week or over the course of a season then we can represent that as a range of 68.5 – 71.5kg in the profile. This can then just be updated at key points in the season.
  3. A shifting/rolling range. More complicated, but only just. As the season progresses, build a rolling average of weekly weight. Use that average and calculate the standard deviation from that average for the player. Use that standard deviation to set the limits of the range. For example, at week 10 let’s say our player’s average weight is 70kg, and the standard deviation (how much on average the weight differs from the average weight) is 4.2kg. We present it as a range of 65.8 – 74.3kg. At week 16 the average and SD might be different with the new data, so the range adjusts dynamically for that.
  4. Just add an approximate weight so we have a ballpark figure.

Options 1 and 4 are simple. Options 2 and 3 you can do in Excel. Which I think means you can probably (for FM24 anyway) skin them in. In fact, if FM25 allows us to access weight in some way we can probably skin it in any way so it’s not the end of the world.

It’s just concerning that either these options haven’t been considered, have but can’t be done for some reason, or have but there just isn’t time. None of those are great options.

TL;DR What’s that about Weight again?

Changes are fine. Delays are fine. Omissions are fine.

For 99% of players, weight won’t now or every make a difference. But it does correlate with an attribute, and I am nerdy and lower league enough to use that easily accessible information about weight to act as a predictor of harder to access information like strength. Like micro-moneyball.

There are solutions. All seem simple. I may be wrong.

Category: Bastard Coated Bastards: FM24, By The Numbers, Dafuge and Data, Dark Arts, DNA, FM24, Football Manager and Statistics