Where can I find a description of player stats and their importance in FIFA 2011?

Question

Could anyone provide a description of what each player stat does in FIFA 2011?
For example:
What does strength do? It is my impression that it determines who is more likely to be able to shrug off other players, but what is this stat compared against? Is it compared against the opposing player's strength score or some other stat? How do player traits and specialties tie into the stats?

Answer 1

There is no source that I know of directly, but you can usually deduce what the values are used for using intuition and an understanding of football.

For instance, strength, which is usually directly related to size and weight, determines how well a player can jockey the ball away from another player, how well they can push the player around while fighting for position (when waiting for air balls and such), and how well a player can maintain position when under stress from jockeying. It is compared to the opposing player's strength, the positioning of the other player and the momentum built up by opposing player (eg small guys wrecking into big ones).

There are so many factors that play into the physics and game play that the explanations you are looking are going to be hard to come by. Some are easy to quantify or measure, like acceleration and sprint speed, but others are hard to 'see', like vision and marking.

As far as specialties and traits go: specialties are reflected in a players stats (an average high score in shooting attributes will give a player clinical finisher specialty) while traits are unique tweaks and modifications that I don't fully understand.