If you try to tune* the game into your liking using exhibition matches, and finally gets it perfect, you're always in for a surprise once you start an ongoing game mode. Konami has coded so much extra mumbo jumbo into the AI in competition modes that you wouldn't believe it.
*by tune, I mean modding by any means. Tactical tweaks, global editing and even gameplay exe (ai) tweaks.
Shooting, for example, that seems quite good in 1.03, feels completely reverted back to vanilla "always hit the middle of goal" once you play BAL. The AI is much more frantic in ML or cup mode than Exhibition. So if you use one of the many tactical tweaks out there, the game will become great in exhibition mode and unplayable in cup/ML mode, for example.
The game speed also seem to vary greatly from game to game, and especially in BAL, where the game generally goes faster the better your player gets in addition to regular speed changes depending on the current opponent. Opposition players also becomes faster individually depending on your players Top Speed, but not as bad as the previous version where you could hardly ever outrun anyone.
Either way, the game is completely off in several areas, there are a lot of "cheap" ways to make the game harder, and PES and FIFA use them all, instead of making a decent AI instead. Sad but true.
PES even seem to lack a hard cap on game speed, so if your BAL player becomes truly awesome, by cheating or regular gaming, the game speed ruin the experience by resembling a footy game at 1.8x or even 2x speed.
If there even is one, they need to at least set a lower cap, that makes it believable imo, or else the game destroys itself, at least for me. I actually use BAL editors to avoid getting too good, continually halting my own progression to keep the game interesting, and at a relatively decent game speed. The speed should never be allowed to vary more than 10% from default game speed.
Funny, you say that as the good outweighs the bad
Well, you're almost right. But I only manage to play a few matches each day, or else I would burst an artery in frustration. I can only remain so calm for a short period when exposed to the level of outrageousness footy games of today has to offer...