I mentioned this before, but I can’t find the post.

Why is it so hard to please the board? What do they want from a manager? I’ve almost qualified for Europe in the fast ticker (having written this I will now probably fail to reach Europe) and my appoval rating is at 8%. It has been hovering around this figure all season and I think I’m doing quite well, the club has lots of money and we’re doing ok. What have I got to do to please them?

Is this something that might be revised in the future? Different clubs should have different goals. In real life it is unlikely that Barnsley will win the Champions League, so the board would have a different expectation to a club like Man City. I think this should be reflected in the view of the board and how they view the manager.

You performance in the eyes of the board is based solely on two things:

1) Individual match results – if you win your rating increases, if you lose your rating decreases, if you draw it depends on opponent quality…the amount of percentage points it increases/decreases depend on whether you played home/away and the opponent quality compared to yours
2) Final position in official competitions – if you finish above the expected position (or is knocked out in a stage beyond expectation) you earn points, if you finish below (or is knocked out earlier) you lose points…the amount of points depends again on the quality of the opponents involved in the same competition

There are two improvements we can make to adjust these calculations. The first one is to better evaluate team quality, sometimes you are overrated by the board because of that. My team at the moment was expected to reach the semi-finals in the national cup but was expected to win Libertadores. That tells me there are at least two teams in Colombia (that should be cup finalists) that are not in Libertadores that are evaluated as having a squad better than mine! The second one is that the penalty for being knocked out earlier in cup competitions may be pretty high, causing situations such as yours. I’ve faced this on the past when I was knocked out in the first round of the cup and was immediately reduced from 24% to 1%.

Of course other factors could be taken in consideration such as money balance, transfers, etc, but fixing the fundamental points above should already make things better. And fixing squad/player quality calculation would also improve CPU teams hiring/selling decisions. Maybe managers wouldn’t really like that though ;-)