Recruitment · tactical fit

The Fit Board

Recruit for a system, not a stat line. Choose a role or a reference player, drag the target anywhere across the style matrix, and every qualifying Big-5 player re-ranks live by how well they fit. Each name links straight to their full scouting dossier.

1,585 qualifiers 47 FM roles Big 5 2025/26 ≥900 min

Set the target

Three ways to say what you are shopping for — a role, players whose style you want more of, or a free drag of the crosshair.

Target by

Football Manager role

Duty

Manager philosophy

Positions

Max age

Min minutes

900

Leagues

The board

Every qualifying player, plotted on two style axes of your choosing. The red crosshair is the target — in role mode it sits at the role's exemplar centroid, in player mode at your reference blend, and it drags. The list on the right re-ranks live; every row links to the full dossier.

The style matrix

Two chosen axes · unit: z-score · drag the crosshair to retarget

Source: Understat × FotMob × Sofascore, 2025/26 · 22-metric per-90 style vectors, z-scored within position group

Horizontal axis

Vertical axis

Units

How fit is scored — and what it is not

Role mode. Fit (0–100) is the player's within-cohort percentile blend of the Football-Manager role's metric fingerprint, tilted by the chosen duty — Attack boosts the attacking metrics ×1.15, Defend the defensive ones. ★ marks the ~15 roles FM keeps distinct that our 30 archetypes merge.

Fit does not compare across cohorts. Because the blend is of percentiles cut inside each cohort, every cohort's median fit is ~50 by construction. So a defensive midfielder's 48 and a central midfielder's 51 do not mean the second is more of a ball-winner — DMs out-tackle CMs 2.00 to 1.82 per 90 while scoring lower on Ball-Winning Midfielder. Read fit as "how much he looks like this role among his own peers", and filter to one position before ranking.

Players-I-like mode. Fit is the cosine similarity of the 22-metric per-90 style vector to your references' mean, rescaled to 0–100. It measures how alike, not how good — the separate R value on each row is the Statz rating.

Free drag. Ranking is proximity on the two visible axes only — a deliberate simplification for hunting a region of style space, not a full-profile match.

Duel, physical & skill axes. Everything outside the "Style composites" group — duels, physical output, take-ons, fouls, carrying, the Opta deep-event per-90s (xT added, final-third entries, deep completions) and the finishing axes — comes from the Sofascore / FotMob / WhoScored-Opta season boards rather than the style vector, z-scored within position group at load. A player missing a value (the boards don't cover everyone, and xGOT−xG carries its own ≥10-shot gate) sits at the pool mean on that axis rather than being dropped.

What it is not. No transfer economics live here (no market values, wages or contract status). Axis baselines differ by family — duel, on-ball, deep-event and finishing axes are z-scored within position group and pool, while the style composites and PCA axes are z-scores across all outfielders; the chart caption says which pair is on screen. A role auto-scopes the pool to its eligible position line before ranking. Goalkeepers rank only in role and manager modes (via their GK role fits): their 7-metric GK vectors are not comparable to the 22-metric outfield style space, so they sit outside the matrix, free drag and players-I-like modes. Big-5 leagues, 2025/26, ≥900 minutes.

The Fit Board

01 Set the target

02 The board

The style matrix

Set the target

The board