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Cheers - I have (as always) considered lots from this thread which is always a massive help, so thank you all again. I never mean to come across defensive in my replies - I love the debate and will always try and fight my corner as we are instructed to do on the more subjective stuff, but I am certainly no expert nor are my opinions gospel! With Bertrand and Vestergaard it is just too early to take the dagger to them - we have hardly seen either in the league to make a consistent judgement, but they are clearly well off the level of Amartey and Thomas who have been given boosts in the other direction so that they are favoured by the AI instead. Ricardo is unlucky but he has been back for long enough now for me to say he is not quite yet at the elite level he was pre-lockdown, imo. Pleased to have given a fair rise to several younger players as you say - it's important to be careful with new intakes and players given early chances up the age groups, but I have seen enough of Alves, Braybrooke, Nelson etc. to agree with the consensus that this is a really special bunch. Worth mentioning I have all of this week's contract news in hand (Ricardo, Justin, youth players) but it was too late to make the cut for this update. I am not 100% sure if it will make the later update (we have been told high profile changes only) but all of that info has been dealt with by SI so we will see. Cheers!

I think the CAM discussion is interesting, particularly because I'm of the view playing a proper no.10 inside the striker has pretty much died out in the last few years in football IRL - most of the top teams play 4-3-3 with deeper creative players and three 'forwards'. Even Leicester under Rodgers played our best football in Rodgers' first 12 months at the club when it was 4-3-3 with Maddison and Tielemans in roughly that same 'strata' rather than a pair in deep-lying midfield and Maddison 20 yards upfield. A lot of the big names of the early-mid 2010s have found it extremely difficult to adapt to modern systems (Coutinho, Isco, Rodriguez, Ozil, Mkhitaryan, Alli), or have dropped deeper to influence games (De Bruyne, Wijnaldum, Silva). So to me, I quite like the fact that FM makes it difficult for that position to work. In my saves Maddison does seem to work well for me if I play him a bit deeper in that mezzala role.

I'm pretty much responsible for everything City-wise on the data side yeah, so I do create the kits in the DB. I'm not responsible however for setting when we play in each kit, but I do know that very issue is logged and so I imagine in the next update we'll have it fixed. Cheers

I think you're completely misjudging my tone - apologies if you think I'm being defensive. I'm not taking any of this personally, I love a good debate. Delap isn't on par with Daka by CA, and by some distance too. Spikiness? Do point me to where I was at all spiky, please. I joined because people on here gave me such abuse that I was apparently 'on smack' and that I don't watch us play. I have been remarkably tame in comparison, I think. I really disagree we pander to the big clubs - we are very, very good on this year's game, for example. Ultimately Arsenal, Spurs and Man United should be pretty strong because on paper they have lots of talented players. I probably could've worded things a bit better to make myself not look so defensive, but ultimately as you say all I want is constructive criticism, that's how we can get the best data possible.

As you will undoubtedly know Daka's ratings will be bound by the fact he's come from the Austrian league - I haven't touched his subjective stats since he signed. He is a perfectly good Premier League striker in the game and has some excellent potential too. You are not going to notice the difference between 14 and 15 finishing. I have mentioned before that CA constraints by club are no longer arbitrarily plucked from thin air (it was more complicated than that, but there was no mathematical substance behind it). We now use a system reliant on betting odds for each team, which present a really decent balance between teams. It's absolutely no use to just have a moan that 'X player is not as good as he should be' and 'Y player is far too good'. Jones and Greenwood are playing regularly for Champions League football clubs at the top end of the Premier League - if they were rated as bang average mid-table players, the AI of both teams would sell them and that would be an obvious bug. Daka is sat on our bench and deputising for two players with very good CAs and attributes in the game.

I think you're right in that Fofana's injury shouldn't show if you start your game in pre-season, because the Villarreal game was after that date. I've had a query on that on the forums so I'm going to have a look at it later today to make sure. I've started test games on the season start date (early August) and Fofana's injury does correctly show, so I'm hoping it's set right.

Hope everyone enjoys it this year, as always. Any data issues for City that we can either get fixed for release or the next update, let me know here or on the SI forums thread and I'll get them sorted

I'd prefer it too especially on a registration point and with AFCON. But I thought Mendy had already travelled to Senegal for their international camp so it would be some going for a deal to get done there you'd think

Oh that's strange because one poster told me he 'knows it to be true' that he's on peanuts Surely someone can't be spouting bullsh*t on FoxesTalk, can they?

We didn't sign a £32m player from a Russian-backed club in a tax haven to pay him less than a large proportion of the Championship. The vast majority of those numbers are way, way out. Barnes has an England cap and people genuinely believe he's on 10k? Utter nonsense

If anyone seriously thinks Hamza Choudhury is on anything close to £10k a week they need a massive, massive reality check.

There is absolutely no chance a player started the first three Premier League games of a season, having already been part of the first team group for 8 months, and then 6 days later signed a contract on a wage that some fourth division players are on. The total club wage bill for 18-19 was £128.2m - that's in the financial accounts published in March. Even if the 301 non-playing staff were on an average of £80k/year (highly unlikely), and the 37 non-first team players on an average of £4k/week (again highly unlikely), the first team average wage would be £75k based on some back of cigarette packet maths. We're not a bottom half side anymore!

I can't name the source but Barnes is one of the figures I am most confident about - he and Iversen are the only two I happen to have private information about - up to you if you choose to believe me. And yes, I would imagine he will get one and he will probably will double 60k anyway - the club will be well aware of how their wage bill will increase as they continue to improve.

I think you are misremembering 2018-19. He performed admirably over Christmas for Puel and then at the end of the season for Rodgers. The club likes to tie its young players down early where possible - I recall Chilwell was given a substantial new contract in the summer of 2016 despite having played only once for us. If you'd like one small piece of ITK info from a source I trust, Dan Iversen's new deal, signed when on loan in League One, is worth at least £20k/week to him as I understand it - Luke Thomas and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall signed similar terms last summer I would imagine, and neither were as integrated into the first team as Choudhury was that summer I do recommend having a look at who Choudhury's agents are and who his other clients are, by the way. These things go deeper than one individual player and agent at one time. There are senior players in League One and the bottom six of the Championship on 35k+ and they are not isolated cases, I can assure you. Is 60k/week too high? Perhaps. But it is certainly not far off, especially 2 years on with year-on-year rises.

I've said before, all of the figures you see on these websites are estimates, largely ripped from Football Manager and mostly outdated. I have done the FM research for us for the last 3-and-a-bit years so most of the contract data at City is my estimates. And even estimates is pushing it - in most cases it is guesswork. I did a better explanation here of the process, and in the same thread spoke about Choudhury: It's been suggested to me before that the football media on the continent is far more agent-reliant for its information than in the UK, hence why you often see foreign press reporting more detailed contract information and the British press usually just report transfer fees before the clubs announce the deals themselves. But just like in Football Manager contracts are not as as simple as basic wages, and one of the most obvious things that is never reported is what the agreed year-on-year wage rise is, or whether there have been private renegotiations without any change to the contract length. I also mentioned the Global Sports Salaries Survey in that thread - in 2019 my figures were about £5k/week off their total for the first team squad (Sporting Intelligence wouldn't give me a breakdown of how they worked out their figures, despite me asking). Their average first team wage for us was £64,480 - puts into perspective what Choudhury's agent will have been asking for around that time of him signing that new deal...

DHSC published a study this week saying quite the opposite - a longer dosing interval is much better at generating a sustained antibody and T cell response than a shorter interval I take your point re: exposure to the virus especially at the moment, but the whole point of vaccinating young people is not to simply get through this current wave, but providing more medium-to-long term protection. If the UK can avoid having to hand out a third dose to everyone this winter that would be ideal

I'd love to know how your son had his second a week ago - the gap is supposed to be 8 weeks and the NHS has cracked down hard on any clinics and centres going earlier than that because of both supply constraints and efficacy reasons. If he had his first 8 weeks before then that implies he had it on or before 23 May - for context the NHS booking site soft-launched to U20s on the evening of 17 June (I'd know, I spent most of the day refreshing every hour or so) and launched officially on the morning of the 18th. The evidence is there that getting your second early drastically reduces efficacy especially against Delta, so rushing it is pointless. 8 weeks after my first on 27 June is 22 August, which is exactly the earliest I can book on the online system. I will not be looking to have it any earlier Don't call people out on 'sitting and waiting' when there is an obvious reason for it

Barnes looked well out of his depth returning from loan, and Choudhury had already had a big part to play in big games in 18-19. If anything you'd have expected it to be the other way around

Perhaps not, but given he had established himself in the first team by the end of 2018-19, he really ought to have been commanding at least £50kpw I would expect. And likewise for Barnes, when he signed his last one. Nobody would have anticipated that their trajectories have been in rather opposite directions since, I suppose.

But it's never that simple that 'X player is better than Y player, so X player earns more'. You are offered a contract at a certain stage, whether you have just broken into the team or are nearing the end of your current deal. Amartey signed one at the same time as we gave some big renewals out to Ndidi, Schmeichel, Vardy, Chilwell, Maguire and Albrighton - that was at the time when Puel clearly rated him and expected him back in the first team. Fofana was 19 and had played 30 odd senior matches of football. It's never as clear cut as it seems.

I'm always a bit wary - there is a lot of focus among supporters on a player's base wages, when in actual fact you see contracts have varying degrees of performance-based incentives - if you've got a player with a poor injury record you are far more likely to see a lower 'basic wage' and greater bonuses in terms of appearances or other things. Contract clauses don't even have to be that simple, there are dozens of crazy things written into player contracts that we'll never hear of. Here is what we have at the moment for the 25 first team players at the club, anyway: £160kpw - Vardy £130kpw - Schmeichel £120kpw - Tielemans £110kpw - Maddison £100kpw - Evans £90kpw - Iheanacho £80kpw - Ndidi, Perez £75kpw - Praet, Under £70kpw - Ricardo, Albrighton, Castagne £60kpw - Choudhury, Barnes £55kpw - Amartey, Fofana £50kpw - Mendy, Morgan £45kpw - Fuchs, Soyuncu £35kpw - Ward £25kpw - Justin, Jakupovic, Thomas Some of them will look off because they haven't signed contracts recently (Soyuncu and Justin the most obvious two examples), but again there are likely to be clauses to increase wages after certain numbers of appearances or even a year-on-year increase well above inflation. It is largely guesswork and that is why I choose to not place much focus on it - the main focus as a supporter for me should always be how long the player has left - a wage is now pretty irrelevant even in terms of commanding a transfer fee these days.

As @pleatout rightly says, much of the figures used on sites like Spotrac are actually lifted straight from Football Manager among other sources - those figures are at best estimates, and at worst good guesses. I've been setting our wage figures in FM for the last 3 years - there was no media source that claimed Schmeichel and Vardy were on 140k/week, that was a stab in the dark by me, and only me! There are some that do have grounding in good sources - foreign press are much better at reporting wages - Wesley Fofana is in fact on around £55kpw because he admitted as such in his interview to L'Equipe just before signing, for example. To be fair, though, our figures as a whole are fairly accurate - we were about £6k/week off from the total first team squad value published in the Global Sports Salaries Survey last year. I can publish our current estimates for the entire first team squad here, if that would be of use to anyone - Spotrac's numbers there are mostly outdated now.

That's actually incorrect - never played in the Extra Preliminary Round

I make it 3 wins (WBA, Man City, Brighton) and 1 draw (Everton) from four games. Given our only two away games before the final are Southampton and Man United (will wear blue for both), seems likely we'll go into the game unbeaten in maroon

One stat that I didn't see get a mention (it might be wrong!) - as far as I can see, we'd never kept a clean sheet at Wembley (old or new) until Sunday