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I never know what to do with customers headed down that path. In the end, it's pretty clear he wants a type of game that doesn't really exist - like an RPG for football players with some sort of physics going on underneath rather than a simulation.
It's an interesting concept, but every time a product starts down that path, there are rabbit holes. It could make for a good discussion.
But then you get into the instant Defcon 1 aspect - the rant about an instruction manual when the "F1" message is always visible at the bottom of the game's frame. So now you have to address something that you have covered, but people in rant mode don't respond well to being corrected.
No matter what's said at that point, he'd still be angry that he spent time wanting to franchise a player and it wasn't clear to him how to do it. I use warning-continue pop-ups, even though I hate pop-ups in general, as sparingly as possible. Perhaps I should include more text with this one, but given this is a complaint that's never been expressed to customer service and aside from the OP here (who seemed fine with the answer given), it's never been an issue before.
Sometimes, the Defcon 1 people have a lot to say, and I would value those discussions, but are so used to waging wars that there's no way to have that discussion without leading immediately to war. It's hard to have a good discussion with people who will always lead with "you're an idiot..." So I don't engage and hope that the situation deescalates before war is declared (the review) and there's no hope. You just wish at that point there was a nuke button so that person can't buy any other product of yours on Steam.
Silence is best. It's really always best. In my old age, I find myself nattering about "would-of, could-of" far too much.
One major frustration I think we all have with these games is the chess match built into football's structure. A football coach has a team of people who help him analyze everything an opponent has done and can do, and they boil everything down to a relatively simple game plan every single week. Football coaches do not sleep during the season. During games, another chess match breaks out - you see how your opponent has boiled things down and you have to adjust.
No one wants all of that in a game. You call a play, your opponent calls a play, and mayhem ensues. None of the hundreds of hours of preparation come to the forefront. How much of that preparation should I expose and how much should I leave to the engine to assume?
The book I've re-read the most is Pat Kirwan's "Take Your Eye Off the Ball". It's a great read if you want to understand how strategy is built. Another book I've read, and hated, but it's still a respected framework coaches have to understand and modify for the modern game, is Steve Belichick's (Bill's dad) "Football Scouting Methods". That introduces you to the tedium of coaching - the reason why coaches have so many assistants and interns and scouts out there. A third book I've recently read is Nicholas Dawidoff's "Collision Low Crossers", which takes you through a year with the New York Jets' coaching staff.
In many ways, a coach is an old-fashioned librarian managing an answer desk. A game designer has to decide what questions to ask. And while the customer is always right, the answer is always going to be that the perfect game for each customer cannot exist because each customer is different.
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