squallzell said:
Hi all, i think the country rating when purchasing schools should be updated.
i don't understand how the best south american nation at the moment ( uruguai ) has only 3 balls, the same as the mediocre columbia and chile. i agree that all the 3 of them don't have the history of argentina and brazil, but at the moment neither of those countries should have a 5 ball rating. if uruguai has a 3 ball rating, then argentina should have 4 and brazil maybe 4.5 balls.

In europe it's even worse. The current World and Europe champions Spain has only 4.5 balls, the same as the fragile france and england.
i agree that in england the football is what it should be everywhere, but rating their footballers with 4.5 balls is a little bit too much.
If the rating is based on international trophies, then i totally agree that germany is a 5 ball country when it comes to football consistency as they are always favorites to win any competition they enter, and always finish top 3, but cannot say the same about italy and netherlands. i would rate italy with 4 stars and netherlands with 4.5 stars altough neither of their leagues and football are very exciting.
Also i think portugal should have a little bit more credit because although they never won an eurocup, they're the country with the most golden boot players in europe ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Golden_Shoe#By_country_of_player_nationality ), and some of the non-portuguese players that also won the golden boot, used to play for portuguese teams. Since mid 1960's portugal gave on average 2 or 3 amazing talented players to the world per decade and that's more than france, germany, netherlands, spain or england. From the top of my head.... Eusebio, Nene, Fernando Gomes, chalana, paulo futre, fernando couto, vitor baia, nuno gomes, rui costa, sergio conceicao, joao vieira pinto, luis figo, ricardo carvalho, ronaldo, nani.

i would like to finish saying that i think the schools are an amazing feature but if the idea is to make the game more realistic, you would have to consider the nationality of the players that play in some of the most important nations in the world and championships. you would realize that there are very little germans playing in the german national team and there are very little french playing in the french national team, which would render german and french schools obsolete. French national players are in majority from african countries and german are a mix of polish, turkish and south americans, which would boost african, polish and turkish schools. The same line of thought would go to england, where although the football is amazing, the best players there are foreigners.

CSM10 said:
Great detail about Portugal, I never tought about that... And the incredible part is that the striker position is always the weakest on the national side!