If you get this error message, then training will stop working completely, and will just hang on an infinite load screen.
Is your Madden 17 franchise getting hung up on an annoying bug that prevents you from doing weekly training? Are you getting a dialogue saying "Training is not ready. Ensure that you have focus players selected."? I had this happen to me, and the resolution is not immediately obvious. I searched the EA troubleshooting forums and Reddit and only found partial solutions that didn't work for me. Apparently, this "glitch" has a couple different causes.
Most of the solutions that I had read online involved adjusting the user team's depth chart. In some cases, users said that the problem was caused by not having enough active players in a specific roster position. By signing a player at the necessary position, the problem was resolved, But this fix wasn't applicable to all users. I specifically encountered this bug in week four of my franchise's preseason. It happened right after installing the 1.04 update, and I feared that the update had hosed my save file. Fortunately, I found a resolution.
First, I tested the fix suggested above by ensuring that I had players at all roster positions and that all depth chart positions were filled, but didn't have immediate success. After a little bit of extra troubleshooting, I found that it was because I had too many players on my active roster. I had signed an extra player to replace an injured player. The injury was only for 3 weeks, so wasn't worth putting the guy on IR, but the new player put me over the roster cap. Since it was preseason, the game apparently doesn't enforce a roster limit, but I noticed that the Week 4 activities included "Cut 11 players". Usually in week 4, you're only supposed to cut 10 players. So I cut some dead weight (so that the activity now says "cut 10 players") and the training loaded.
Having too many players on your active roster can cause the error.
I'm glad to find that this seems to simply be a case of poor error-reporting from Tiburon, rather than a game-breaking glitch! Though it couldn't hurt for Tiburon to add some extra error-handling to prevent these situations from arising, or to provide a more useful error message.
How to trigger and fix the "Training not ready" error
So in summary, this error can be triggered if any of the following conditions are met:
- There are no players at a given roster position,
- The only player(s) in a given roster position is/are injured,
- There are too many players on your active roster.
So, if you are experiencing this "Training not ready" problem, then follow these steps to resolve it:
- Verify that you do, in fact, have focus players and drills selected.
If not, then select some.
- Verify that you have the required number of players at all roster positions.
If not, then sign* a free agent at the relevant position.
- Verify that the only active player(s) in a given position are not injured.
If the only player is injured, then sign* a replacement player.
- Verify that no position on your depth chart is empty.
If a position is empty, then substitute a player into that position.
- Verify that you do not have too many players on your active roster.
If not, then cut players until you are below the roster limit for the given week.
* Instead of signing a free agent, you can also trade for a player at the relevant position, or edit an existing player's position to be the necessary position. Make sure that this doesn't leave another position vacant.
Having an empty roster position (or having all players in the position being injured) can cause the error.
For the record, I was never able to force any of my focus player slots to be empty. Cutting a player who is currently selected as the focus player only seems to cause the training menu to replace the cut player with a different focus player. The only other way that I could think to force an invalid / empty focus player would be to have a focused player become injured or be placed on injured reserve. Since I can't control injuries, I wasn't able to test this, so it remains un-verified.
It's also worth noting that after making the roster adjustments recommended above, I sometimes still ran into a game crash while loading training (PS4 blue-screen crash). However, after quitting the game, restarting it, and loading back into the franchise autosave, the game worked correctly and the training loaded without issue. So if all else fails, try just restarting the game.
Older versions of Madden (like, PS2-era games) used to have a "Roster Breakdown" screen that showed (on a single screen) a count of how many active, injured, and inactive players were at each position. That screen wasn't really useful in those older iterations, since your roster-management options were limited. I don't blame Tiburon for removing it. However, with all the features involving pre-season cuts, injured reserve, and practice squads, I think it's time for Tiburon to bring that screen back. It would certainly be helpful for troubleshooting this particular problem.
Well, I hope that this helps some users resolve this particular error in their Madden 17 franchise. There may still be other conditions that can cause this error, and there may in fact still be some underlying issue that Tiburon needs to fix. If you find any additional situations that cause this error, please be sure to report it in the comments below and on EA's troubleshooting forums, and hopefully, we can find a solution to that situation as well. But in the meantime, it looks like this error can be resolved with a little bit of roster / depth chart management. Now back to the gridiron, and stay tuned for my full review of Madden 17, coming in the next couple weeks!
Perhaps it's time for Tiburon to bring back the old "Roster Breakdown" screen from older versions of Madden?