Player tutoring involves a senior player (a tutor) and a young player (a tutee) being paired, with the tutee shadowing his tutor for a period of time (a tutoring session).
Player tutoring can be used to:
- Improve a young player’s Determination mental attribute, and Ambition and Professionalism personality attributes – improving the player’s ratings in these attributes directly benefits his training progression. Improving his Determination and Professionalism directly benefits his match performances (and, therefore, indirectly benefits his match progression). Improving his Professionalism makes him more likely to have a later natural decline and less likely to complain that his individual training workload is too heavy.
- Improve a young player’s personality as a whole – improving the player’s personality directly benefits his match performances and makes him easier to man manage, both of which help his morale. It therefore indirectly benefits his training progression (as he is more likely to have good morale) and match progression (as he is more likely to give good match performances, due to both his positive personality and his good morale).
- Teach a young player useful traits – tutoring is the most efficient method of teaching a player traits as, unlike trait training, it does not add to the player’s individual training workload and it can potentially enable him to learn more than one trait at a time, while it is also the only way to teach those player traits that cannot be trained.
- Develop good relationships between players in your squad – improvements in player relationships can help player morale and therefore indirectly benefit match performances, training progression and match progression.
Tutoring is therefore a particularly effective method of developing young players and comes at no cost (unless experienced players are signed especially for their use as tutors).
Furthermore, tutoring can be an ongoing cycle in which you develop the personalities and traits of young players who later pass these on to your club’s future young players when they become tutors themselves.
How Tutoring Works
What Happens During Tutoring
During a tutoring session the tutee’s personality attributes (Ambition, Controversy, Loyalty, Pressure, Professionalism, Sportsmanship and Temperament) and Determination mental attribute (and, therefore, his personality description and media handling style description) change to more closely match those of the tutor. Depending on the tutoring option chosen (as detailed below), the tutee may also learn some of the tutor’s player traits.
If the tutor and tutee get on well (and if the tutoring session is not cancelled) then the session lasts for 180 days (approximately six months) and the relationship between the two players improves. Relationships between players in a squad may also improve over time as an indirect result of players developing similar personalities through tutoring.
However, the tutor and tutee may fall out with each other during the tutoring session due to a personality clash or personal differences, in which case the session ends early and their relationship worsens. Despite this, the tutee’s personality attributes and Determination still change over the period of the session and he may also learn player traits. Although the shorter time of the tutoring session means that the attribute changes are smaller and the tutee has less opportunity to learn any traits.
Therefore, as long as tutees are paired with tutors who have good personality attributes and good Determination (relative to the tutee), tutoring can almost always be viewed as being beneficial.
Starting Tutoring
You can start a tutoring session by selecting a prospective tutee from the Interaction > Request Tutoring drop-down of the prospective tutor and then selecting one of the two tutoring options on the Tutoring Private Chat screen.
Alternatively, you can go to the Development > Tutoring screen of either player but these only list three pairings each.
If you are not able to find the pairing that you want after trying both of the above methods then you could try starting separate tutoring sessions for the other players on your intended tutor’s Interaction > Request Tutoring drop-down to see if your desired tutee then appears on the drop-down.
After you select one of the tutoring options on the Tutoring Private Chat screen the tutor or tutee may refuse to be paired with the other player. If this happens then it may be partly because of the refusing player’s personality. However, he may still agree to be paired with a different player.
Tutoring Options
On the Tutoring Private Chat screen it is important that you select the appropriate option for the type of tutoring that you want to happen.
The options are:
- I’d like you to tutor [the tutee] as I feel you can help improve his game – this allows the tutor’s traits to be potentially learned by the tutee.
- I think it would be beneficial if you were to take [the tutee] under your wing and mentor him off the pitch – this prevents any of the tutor’s traits being learned by the tutee.
Both options result in the tutee’s personality attributes and Determination changing during the tutoring session to more closely match those of the tutor.
Cancelling Tutoring
You can cancel a tutoring session manually from the Development drop-down of either the tutor or the tutee. You may want to do this so that you can pair the tutee with a different tutor sooner than if you waited for the session to finish naturally, perhaps after his attributes have developed enough to give him a positive personality description. This allows you to give the tutee more tutors in a shorter amount of time.
A tutoring session is cancelled automatically if:
- Either the tutor or the tutee is transferred away from the club – for example, the tutee may be loaned out to gain match experience.
- There is a serious injury to either the tutor or the tutee.
Giving Further Tutoring
A player can be given multiple tutoring sessions with different tutors (and the same tutor, if desired) to develop different parts of his personality (and different traits, if desired) over time.
Whatever the result of a particular tutoring session, as soon as it has finished (either naturally or after being cancelled) the tutee can be paired with a different tutor.
However, for the tutor there is a tutoring cooling-off period that lasts for up to seven months, during which he cannot be paired with any tutee.
Tutoring Requirements
There are certain conditions that must be met for two players to be paired as tutor and tutee. These include the following:
- The tutor must be at least 24 years old and at least a few years older than the tutee, although the club captain can be a tutor at any age.
- The tutee must be younger than 24 years old.
- The tutor and tutee must not already be involved in a tutoring session.
- The tutor and tutee must not have a serious injury.
- The tutor and tutee must not be undertaking trait training.
- The tutee must not be an established member of the senior squad (which occurs after he has made 75 senior appearances in his career – a player needs to play for approximately 15 to 20 minutes in a match to register an ‘appearance’, in which case he is given a match rating out of 10).
- The tutor and tutee must share a good level of positional ability in a similar playing position (a ‘similar’ playing position may be an adjacent playing position).
- The tutor must have a higher reputation than the tutee. An approximation of a player’s reputation is shown under Personal Information on his Overview > Information screen.
- The tutor must not be in his cooling-off period following a previous tutoring session (explained under Giving Further Tutoring above).
- The tutor must have a squad status of backup or higher and have a higher squad status than the tutee.
- The tutee must have a squad status of rotation or lower.
- The tutor and tutee must have more than six months left on their contracts.
How to Choose a Tutor
A young player’s tutor should be chosen very carefully. The important aspects to consider are as follows:
- Whether the tutor has a positive personality – the tutor should ideally have a positive personality description (and a good media handling style description) with Ambition, Professionalism and Determination attributes that are rated higher than those of the tutee.
- This is likely to result in the tutee developing or maintaining a positive personality and his Ambition, Professionalism and Determination increasing. If these attributes are rated lower for the tutor than the tutee then they are likely to fall for the tutee.
- However, improving a tutee’s Ambition can make him more likely to want to leave a lower reputation club if he has the chance.
- Whether the tutor has a similar personality to the tutee – players with similar personalities are less likely to fall out during a tutoring session. As such, you may want to take a patient approach to improving a tutee’s personality by using multiple tutors.
- For example, you could use a player with average Professionalism to tutor a player with poor Professionalism, and later use a tutor with higher Professionalism to increase this attribute further.
- However, a patient approach is not essential, as even if the tutoring ends early it should still have led to some personality changes for the tutee, while a seemingly unsuitable pairing can arguably be worth the risk of the players falling out if the tutee’s personality needs to be greatly improved. Furthermore, it is still possible for players to fall out even if they have seemingly well matched personalities.
- A patient approach can be particularly useful if you want the tutee to learn player traits during tutoring, as it increases the likelihood of a tutoring session lasting long enough for traits to be learned.
- Whether the tutor has beneficial or unsuitable traits – if you want the tutee to learn player traits during tutoring then the tutor should have traits that you believe would be beneficial to the tutee and ideally should not have any traits that you believe would be unsuitable for the tutee.
- Remember to select the tutoring option that allows the tutee to learn the tutor’s traits, as detailed under Tutoring Options above.
- To help you to decide whether any of the tutor’s traits would be beneficial or unsuitable for the tutee see the Player Traits guide. Unsuitable traits include those that are not suitable for your tactics and those that make a player less tactically flexible.
- Any unwanted player traits learned by the tutee can potentially be unlearned through trait training later (although some traits cannot be trained) but this may not be successful and would add to his individual training workload.
Tutoring Priority
It is advisable to give preference to young players who have higher potential ability when allocating tutors. This is because it is more beneficial to help the progression of your best prospects and a senior player can only tutor one player at a time (while there is also a cooling-off period for tutors as explained under Giving Further Tutoring above).
If you have enough possible tutors then you can still benefit from giving your lesser prospects tutoring, even if you plan on selling them later, as better progression can make them more valuable. However, you should not allow this to prevent your best prospects from being tutored, including any you expect to sign in the near future.
