Attributes are responsible for determining a player’s quality, and knowing them well can give you the opportunity to choose your team more efficiently. In this new series presented by Silvio Teixeira – also the author of tête-à-tête – you’ll have the opportunity to go deeper on each one of the game’s attributes according to the new FIFA 16 rules. Welcome to “Learning about FIFA 16 attributes”.
Learning about FIFA 16 attributes: The Pace Attributes
Today we’ll be using a slightly different format, since we’re basically talking about two attributes that are directly related to each other, the Pace attributes.
On FIFA 15 these were the attributes that used to decide a match, because being fast was basically what mattered. On FIFA 16 things changed a bit, but they’re still very important. A lot of people still choose their players for all positions based on pace, so the level of importance in this case remains personal. I know some people who won’t let go of pace even for their centre backs, needless to say the rest. However, it’s important to be aware that each attribute has a different characteristic and not always that one player who “seems” faster is actually faster.
We have:
- Acceleration
The higher the Acceleration attribute, the less time it will take a player to reach his maximum speed, no matter what that is
- Sprint Speed
It is the maximum speed a player can reach
If the two attributes are close to each other, there’s not much to think of. A player like De Bruyne, for example, has 76 in one and 78 in the other (hence 77 of pace). So that’s alright, but imagine a player like IF Coutinho, you see he has 90 of Acceleration and think you’ve got yourself a new Aubameyang, but then you notice his disappointing 77 of Sprint Speed when he can’t really do that much. His sprint evolves really well, but his maximum speed is pretty low. It happens the other way around as well, the midfielder Andre Hahn from the German league has 90 of Sprint Speed but just 78 of Acceleration. It means he is in fact able to run fast, but it takes long for him to reach his top speed. Like me, you know, a bit tubby, it takes me some time to start running, but when I do (downhill preferably) I can get pretty fast, but by that time the opponent already got past me. He’s a good player to conduct the ball through the wings where he can start off slow and reach maximum speed with time.
To exemplify I shall repost a paragraph from another article that I wrote some time ago:
“A race between a man, a car and a plane, who wins? It depends. If it’s a 30 meters long race the man wins, and it would take him only 4 seconds to finish. However, if the race had been longer, around 150-200 meters, the car would win, and then the plane would be the winner at anything beyond that. That happens because the man’s acceleration is greater than both the car’s and the plane’s, but when it comes to maximum speed capacity he naturally loses. Got it?”
Importance by position
- Great Importance | LB, RB, LM, LW, RM, RW,
Medium Importance | CM, CAM, ST, CF, RF, LF
Low Importance | CB, CDM
As I said before, the importance depends a lot on everyone’s play style, but in fact there are other attributes that are more important for centre backs and defending midfielders and therefore should be looked at before Pace.
We don’t even need to talk about the pace beasts, everyone knows them, plays with them, but here are the main leagues that can be used for Pace:
Players with High Pace
- Gold | Theo Walcott (96), Aubameyang (95), Bale (94)
Silver | Mathis Bolly (96) Ernest Asante (95) Jurgen Damm (95)
Bronze | Dominic Oduro (94), Alex Kiwomya (93), Emmanuel Sarki (93)
The list of fast players is so big that we’ll only consider the players with 90+ to analyze the leagues. The BPL is the winner with 15 players, then comes the BBVA and the Serie A with 13 each and the Bundesliga is fourth with 9 players.
Making good use of Pace
– Nothing better than the good old long sprint forward. Your player loses a lot of speed while trying to control the ball, so use the right stick to push the ball forward always that possible.
– For the full backs who will run great distances with the ball, give preference to Sprint Speed, because they’ll often receive the ball from the goalkeeper and have a lot of time to gain speed. In other cases go for Acceleration, it’s really more important that you start off ahead of your opponent.
Squads with high Pace
Today’s team suggestion is a little different. We’re all used to playing against people using players like Theo Walcott and Aubameyang, but what if you surprised your opponent with a different category team? What about using just silver or bronze sons of the wind? With the BPL this is possible. You could still choose stronger gold defenders for the team, and the rest being silver and bronze for a bunch of long passing and desperate runs. You can’t really win the highest divisions, true, but certainly you’ll be able to cause a lot of swearing on the other side.
Curiosities
– For the first time we have a gold, silver and a bronze top 3 of players with 85+.
– In the top 3 of the entire game, not considering IF, we’d have a silver player (Bolly). It’s the attribute that has the most representative players being from lower categories.