How does it all get recorded?

A capture is a session

Capturing needs Football Manager running beside Squad Vision. The date comes from inside Football Manager itself, read from its top right corner, so every capture is filed under the day it was in your save, not the day you played. With no save loaded there's no date, and nothing can be captured.

• The Capture button is named for that date, such as Capture 1 Oct, and the note beside it says whether it will add a capture or replace the one already held.
• Captured this season lays out the season's twelve months, each with the dates captured in it. Click a month and the grids below show its captures.

Capture opens setup, then Start goes full screen for the steps, one Football Manager view each, followed by the positions screen when somebody needs filing and a summary of what was stored. The cards under the button say when each step was last captured for the squad.

Who and what

Setup asks two things before the run, so the rest needs no decisions. Switch between the three answers to Which players? below.

• All players: the default. Everyone in Football Manager's view, and anyone the squad has that the view doesn't is asked about: moved, gone, or no change. That's how Squad Vision learns a player has left.
• New players: only those not in the squad yet, such as a signing or a promotion. Everything is ticked, and Squad view is required, because it's what finds them.
• Players I pick: only the players you tick, with players out on loan in gold. Nobody else is touched.
• What do you want to capture? Squad view runs first. A step already captured on this date starts unticked, so the usual job, capturing what's missing today, needs no clicks.

Tick a step that's already captured and setup warns it will overwrite what's held, so the choice to replace it is made once, before the run. Metrics can be narrowed to the categories you want.

One view per step

Each step names the Squad Vision view it reads. Open it in Football Manager for the squad being captured, press Fetch from FM, and the step shows what it read.

• Squad view always runs first. It says who is in the squad, and every other step finds players by their Football Manager ID.
• The metric steps run alphabetically, the order Football Manager lists their views in, so you can work straight down its list.

Checks that catch FM's quirks

Football Manager has habits that can quietly spoil a capture. Each step checks for them before anything is stored.

• Too few rows: Football Manager only sends what it has drawn on screen, so a long list can arrive short or with rows half filled. The step compares what it read with the count FM gives, and says what to do: click off the squad and back on, then scroll the whole list, down and across, and fetch again.
• Gaps in the rows: every row arrived, but some players are missing values the rest of the squad has, because FM drew only part of the table. Re-fetch, or Capture anyway, which stores the gaps for good: nothing later says which capture left them.
• A renamed or new column: the column review asks which column a new heading is, remembers the answer, and offers to track columns it has never seen.
• The wrong view: so few of the expected columns that a different view must be open, so nothing is captured from it.
• Two dates: a session is filed under the date it started. If Football Manager moves on a day, the next fetch is refused, so one capture never mixes two days.

Squads and leagues

Switch from Squad to League and the screen captures a whole division instead: the crowd League comparison measures your players against. It works the same way, with one difference: you pick the league you're capturing at the top.

• A league you've captured: pick it, and League captures held lists what's held for each, with its season, its players and how many categories.
• A new league: pick New league and say when its season starts, so its captures are filed under the right months. It's asked for a new league only.
• Seven steps: one per metric category, each from its SquadVision.League.Metrics view.

A league figure is stored against your squad's own column, so capture a category for your squad before capturing it for a league. A division is a long list, so the count check matters most here.

Filing positions

Once every step is saved, Squad Vision asks where to file players who can play more than one position. Each row lists a player's positions, strongest first, with his best role score at each, and the strongest is already picked. Where he's filed decides his heading and his Squad depth pool, never what he's scored against: a player who can play two positions is still judged at both.

The scores come from attributes alone, so they compare fairly across positions. Where the attributes can't separate two positions, the row says too close to call and is listed first, and the i beside his name opens his card to help you decide. Only players nobody has filed yet are asked about, so later captures only ask about new arrivals.