izigame.me

I want to highlight a single mechanic that quite nearly ruins the game. There is almost no discussion of this online and no fix and the editor does not provide even a cheat to fix this. That is social groups.
If you have a decent-good squad (enough to win a title or cup without save-scumming), this will hit you. Your entire team will form a single social group, despite not actually meeting any of the perceived requirements for forming social groups. Your squad atmosphere will tank because you have "too many contrasting personalities at the squad". This social group will form saying "these players have been at the club for a similar amount of time" despite 6+ nationalities, and some players being at the squad for 5+ years and some being recent signings.
What this does in effect is tank your squad performance because cohesion, atmosphere, and happiness matter more than your team's attributes. This just happened to me twice in a season, once after each transfer window, despite meeting what I had perceived from previous saves as the necessary turnover to prevent this. I signed several new first team rotation options during January for almost the sole purpose of staving this off (new starters resigned with Barca or wanted salaries over my board's cap). Those players have no social group while my core social group has 22 players.
(This also happened despite several players, new and old, being unhappy with playing time, a typical and expected occurrence every FM player understands.)
This incredibly annoying mechanic essentially requires Players who don't have superb mentorship (good luck signing world class oldsters for manageable salaries on a cheap team) to turn over several influential or highly influential players every year just to maintain NOT HAVING A COHERENT SQUAD. You are incentivized to sell players who are sufficient for your squad (in my case, winning a Bundesliga title/maintaining 2 or 3 slot, challenging in champions league), in order to avoid punishment.
This is without doubt the most opaque mechanic in the entire game. You can watch a hundred youtube videos about tactics or how training is a lie, etc. This is the mechanic that has zero explanation whatsoever. There is no coherence to how social groups are determined. I'd say it was a bug if it wasn't completely persistent. This is a broken mechanic in a game series known for broken and opaque mechanics.
I wanted to do this entire save as my first without ever save-scumming, but I cannot. I am reloading the january transfer window and selling 100 cap players I wanted to keep for the season. All to avoid this pernicious "feature".