1) New focus on momentum - this is a good idea, but it's been far too rigidly implemented, and it strikes me as a major factor behind the horrible passing. Players will routinely over-run short balls played towards them simply because they've had to change direction slightly to recieve the ball. In reality, such an adjustment shouldn't be a problem, but in WE 9 many players seem unable to react in time.
2) New focus on interceptions / less tackling / more fouls - again, a more realistic touch, but again, taken too far. I'm glad to see that most changes in possesion now come from intercepted passes, as this is much more like real football, but it seems as though Konami has greatly exaggerated the degree to which even world class players mis-play easy balls. They have also increased the number of fouls from direct tackles, which I think was needed, but they have done so to a silly degree. Certainly for fans of English football, the fact that the refrees now seem to perceive football as a wholly non-contact sport is a bit frustrating. I think an ideal balance would be somewhere inbetween the current madness and the referee AI in WE8LE.
3) Through pass - what on earth happened here? Partiuclarly in the case of L1 through passes, which now appear practically useless. It was suggested earlier, in Konami's defence, that the developers wanted to make the game feel more 'manual' by forcing you wait for a player to make a run before using the L1 through ball - but if anything this makes the game far more automatic. It's the AI that decides when to make runs, and forcing you to wait on them to do so takes away a great deal of control over the game. A truly manual solution would simply be to adopt a through pass system similar to football kingdom, in which you hold the button to determine the weight of the pass and the direction simply corresponds to where you've pointed the analogue stick. Why manual passing is such a mess when FK showed how elegantly it could be done in it's first attempt is beyond me.
4) Sidestepping crap - the fact that they removed some of the functionality of the L2 button and made it automatic simply so the game would be more readily compatible with the PSP version is simply unjustifiable (if true). Since when, ever, has a home version had to give up functionality simply to be compatible with a paired-down portable version that owners may or may not buy?
5) Disappearing crowd - again, at this stage in the PS2's lifecycle, the inability to render 22 players, 1 ref, and a 2D flat crowd simultaneously is worrying.
I sincerely hope that many of these flaws are straightened out with the further releases of the gamne - although if they are, perhaps Konami should have just made the effort the first time around. They set their own release dates, and if they can't put out a finished game by the dates they set themselves they should simply push them back.