91 PHYSIO
A physio lowers the fitness lost by any injury by one level. An injury which doesn't affect fitness, except in the current match, is cancelled altogether.

You may own multiple physios, but only one is effective.

10.2 COACHING PLAYERS

To raise a player by 1 fitness level costs that player's age in CPs (For youth players, the cost is 1 CP). A player
can only rise 1 fitness level through coaching in a session, although he can rise by resting at the same time (so it possible to
rise by 2 fitness a session if both apply.

Simon regarding your Apprentice Raoul

If you spend 1 CP on fitness & dont play him in any games in the next session he will rise by two fitness levels to -2

and will then be able to play in the next session!

I think you have missunderstood the fitness rules & as such over estimated your problems

Personally I think the fitness rule is working very well as it is

Cheers

Dave

 I agree with Dave - I think the fitness rule is working out very well. You can use CP on Fitness (an SBY or APP only costs 1 CP for fitness), and by combining that with not having the player play in a given session, he will have his fitness raise by +2.

You can still use CP and Youth Coaches on any player, even if they do not play in any matches in the session. The theory is that the CP and Youth Coach are based on efforts the player made during the week at practice/training. I've been able to use this to my advantage twice now. In one case, one of my APPs was suspended for 2 matches in a 3 match session. This meant that I couldn't him into 2 games, and thus would not be able to maximize his potential. So, I played him in the last match and used my Youth Coach on him. In the other case, one of my SBY's was injured and had a -3 Fitness. I was unable to play him at all in the session. I used 1 CP on his Fitness and also used the Youth Coach on him. His Fitness rose to -1 at the end of the seesion and the Youth Coach was applied.

So, there are ways to work with the system. The injuries are in there not only to try to inject some realism, but also to introduce some measure of randomness and excitement to the league. Injuries can have a major impact, so it's interesting to see how people deal with them.

In the past session, I had my best MF lose 6 points to his Fitness due to injury. He currently stands at -5. His age is IV, so it will cost me valuable CPs in order to get him back to playing level. I have to weigh the pros and cons of spending at least 12 CP over 3 sessions to have him play, versus just letting him sit on the bench, versus selling him to a foreign league. I still haven't made up my mind.

But, I say, keep it the way it is - I like it.

Or send him to the Backroom Rob!

Simon does have a point I think.  A player who is badly injured could be out for many sessions which could scupper development plans which seems unfair for essentially a random event and one you have minimal control over.  Perhaps we should be able to coach fitness more per session?

Or (and I like this better) scrap the -2 minimum to play.  A player can play whatever his fitness condition.  So a player on -7 fitness can still play a game but obviously at  a very low (and possibly negative SL).  Youth player development is unaffected , although the team playing with the injured player suffers a heavy penalty.

J

You can spend CP to raise SL on an injured older player.  They don't have to play.  Development of the older guys is not a problem with Fitness lost.  You only miss out on being able to play them at all - which is the point of the random injuries in the first place as part of the game.

The biggest loss then is for Youth players.  An injured youth obviously misses out on the games they have to get in to qualify for the SL gain.  The bad luck that strikes down a top apprentice definitely hurts, as it prevents a player from ever reaching peak SL.  Even so, you are looking at the loss of only 1 SL.  Youth players all start at Fitness 2.  Due to playing only one or two games per session, they cannot lose Fitness due to use.  So only injury can cut them down.  The worst injury possible is -6.  So the lowest a youth player can get (unless incredibly unlucky and injured twice for large Fitness loss within 2-3 sessions of each other) is -4 Fitness.  Resting one session and spending just 1 CP gets the player to -2 and he can play.  For an apprentice, this means +4 SL on the season and not +5 SL, so he can afford to rest another session and get another CP and end up at Fitness 0 before coming back.  Schoolboys can miss a whole session and still get their +3 SL in due to only needing to play 9 of the 10 sessions.

Even if a Youth Player goes down with injury - they CAN still get qualifying points in through the Youth Coaches.  A team can have up to 2 Youth Coaches active, so it is possible for an apprentice to sit out a session and still be on track for max SL gain.  Or two schoolboys can be injured and the team won't be out games due to Youth Coaches picking up the slack.

Well, I should say that "in theory."  I haven't had two youth coaches myself, so can they both spend their point on the same player?  I don't recall seeing that in the rules or hearing of whether Rob has done that or not (or anyone else with 2 Youth Coaches).  If not, then an apprentice will lose out on one SL, though they can still get 1 QNL to protect against possible future injury loss as well.  That's the price of injury early in a career for this league.  A Schoolboy will not though, as they have the one session buffer built in and can also get max coaching from the Youth Coach in any session even when injured.

The net effect of having an apprentice injured can lose you 1 SL from the maximum possible for a player over the course of his career.  That's not a whole lot, given that the player would have to be injured to -3 or -4 in one shot before having a chance to be CP'd back to -2 Fitness.  If you have a Physio on your team, then there is only a 10% chance that any injury (which peaks at ~12% per match anyway) will cause the player to miss games.  Less than 1% combined odds per match on average is decent for such loss.  That means that a team such as Cardiff City which is playing 4 Apprentices up this season (8 matches per session) has an cumulative probability of 7-8% per session of having an apprentice injured, and 70-80% at max for the season.  So far, we've had one youth injury which will cost our top DF apprentice to miss out on one possible SL.  We also had one Schoolboy get injured, however we were able to cover that with our Youth Coach for that session he was out.  Each team playing youth regularly can expect one such injury per season.

One per season sounds about right for injuries having long-term impact on team strength, especially when that impact is in all likelihood only 1 SL on one player.  Teams playing more youth might see two go down.  If planning on doing heavy youth investment then first get 2 Youth Coaches and a Physio lined up so you won't have nearly as much to worry about or overcome.  If you neglect that area of resource management, then I guess you'll just have to live with being far more exposed to the effects of everyone's favorite random number generator, good ol' Olmec.