Set-piece specialists

Who takes the corners, the free kicks and the penalties in fm18 — and who wins the header at the end of them.

How the score works

These rankings are our model, not something the database contains. The database supplies the attributes; the weighting below is a judgement about how they combine, and you are meant to be able to disagree with the weighting rather than with the data.

Each specialism has one primary attribute and a supporting set. For a player:

base = 0.65 × primary + 0.35 × mean(supporting)
score = base × (0.55 + 0.45 × min(supporting) ÷ 100)

The second term is a bottleneck, and it is the point of the whole exercise. A free-kick taker with free kicks 18 and technique 6 is not a free-kick taker, and a plain weighted mean would let that weakness average away. Penalising the weakest supporting attribute means one glaring hole caps the score however good the headline number is.

Every term is a percentile of the recorded population for that attribute in this version, not a raw 1–20 value. Attributes are not equally distributed — a 15 is common in one and rare in another — so scoring raw values would systematically favour whichever specialisms happen to lean on common attributes.

Worked example, two free-kick takers, with illustrative percentiles:

• Free kicks 18 (99th), technique 6 (12th), composure 12 (55th), long shots 13 (62nd). Mean of the supporting set is 43.0, so base = 79.4; the weakest supporting attribute sits at the 12th percentile, so the bottleneck factor is 0.604. Score 48.0.
• Free kicks 15 (85th), technique 15 (84th), composure 15 (83rd), long shots 15 (86th). Mean is 84.3, so base = 84.8; the bottleneck factor is 0.924. Score 78.3.

The lower headline number wins, which is the intended behaviour.

What disqualifies a player

• No recorded primary attribute, no ranking. A player with no recorded penalties value is absent from the penalty ranking rather than bottom of it. NULL means “not recorded” and is never read as a zero.
• Missing supporting attributes are dropped from both the mean and the minimum, not counted as zero — but at least two thirds of a specialism’s attributes must be recorded. Below that there is no score at all, because a confident-looking number derived from two of five inputs is worse than a blank.
• Values outside 1–20 are treated as not recorded. A handful of these exist as decoding artefacts. Clamping one to 20 would invent a value.
• A ranking with fewer than 25 qualifying players is not published, and each list is capped at 50 with no pagination.

The specialisms