Soccer Gaming Catch-All

Playing catch-up with wages, but I'm still at half of what second smallest club in PL offers:

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1272142/img/2014-06-15%2021_17_49-Football%20Manager%202014.png)

It's a great achievement, but also a big hindrance, since good PL quality players start their negotiations upwards of 1.5M p/a, while my cap is 1.1M. Using that to my advantage and only searching for teenage players, who will naturally ask for small wages (few hundred thousand).
Side effect is that the oldest player in the squad is 29 and only six of them are older than 22.

After a great start to the season, my Fleetwood team are now in free fall after picking up just 1 point in 8 games. Think it might have been a case of too soon for the Championship, need to turn it around now. About 5 points clear of the bottom 3 at the moment.

What stage of the season you are in? I always wonder about fluctuations of form, for me things usually (actually, almost always) go bad around January, so I wonder what it is for other players.

I'm in November so slump started in October really.

So.. Anybody tried Lords of Football?

So I took a secondary job as the U19 coach for Poland.

Why the hell did I take that job? It's annoying!

So -- follow up question. If I resign that position, probably hurts my chances at the big kahuna job, eh?

LilCodger wrote:

So I took a secondary job as the U19 coach for Poland.

Why the hell did I take that job? It's annoying!

So -- follow up question. If I resign that position, probably hurts my chances at the big kahuna job, eh? :)

I think so. That is what probably happened to me: when I quit Southampton, I had no good offers for rest of the season, and after being sacked from Malaga I was almost done. I mean, I spent 18 months out of work, apart from short-term contract in Spanish Third Division.

And now I'm in the Champions League with Coventry

omni wrote:

So.. Anybody tried Lords of Football? :-D

Watched a Let's Play series of it.

Didn't look particularly impressive.

Pro-Evo 14 is £9.99 on GreenMan Gaming at the moment though.

It's funny how it can be hard to find work, but famous coaches are everywhere.

Conte was fired from Athletic after a horrible seven months (which is fine by me as the RSO manager ), and already is the favorite to take over Chelsea if Mourinho leaves.

davet010 wrote:
omni wrote:

So.. Anybody tried Lords of Football? :-D

Watched a Let's Play series of it.

Didn't look particularly impressive.

Pro-Evo 14 is £9.99 on GreenMan Gaming at the moment though.

I got PES free on PS+ last month. Still a boring game

LilCodger wrote:

It's funny how it can be hard to find work, but famous coaches are everywhere.

Conte was fired from Athletic after a horrible seven months (which is fine by me as the RSO manager ), and already is the favorite to take over Chelsea if Mourinho leaves.

Yes. In my game Guardiola, Villas-Boas, Moyes, Laudrup, Benitez and Klopp are journeyman managers, jumping between different top five clubs in bigger divisions. Guardiola was just fired from Stuttgart.

On the day of the Champions League Final I get this:

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i189/Roke11/ElcigegiTransferRequest_zps170423d6.png)

I promised to sell you if we didn't win (though I probably wouldn't have sold you since you have 3 years left on your contract and I ignore transfer requests unless I get adequate bids). We can still win!

Edit: Thinking about how this happened amused me for a while after I saw it:

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i189/Roke11/DiegoMaradona_zpse327dcf4.png)

I'm tempted to buy the guy but he'd be my 3rd or 4th choice striker and cost around £35 million.

Edit Edit: Won on penalties 5-4 after comprehensively outplaying Juventus but getting nothing during the match. Wonder if the guy withdraws his request.

According to his history, that guy might be in the game at the start if Sao Paulo FC are playable.

Might have a look for him next time I load it up.

davet010 wrote:

According to his history, that guy might be in the game at the start if Sao Paulo FC are playable.

Might have a look for him next time I load it up.

Ahh, he is a real player and apparently has a brother named 'Michel Platini' according to a thread on the SI forums. My bad google skills failed me.

I'm going to make it my mission to sign young Michel. Then loan him to a club run by cannibals.

His stats seemed quite low for Maradona

Drug tests have advanced by 2025

Just read someone wondering if Spain's listlessness and lack of oomph was due to the fact that blood bags are more difficult to transport and keep properly refrigerated if you are taking them to S America.

No.

In my Oviedo file I sold £205 million worth of players in the summer transfer window. I think I have a problem.

Roke wrote:

In my Oviedo file I sold £205 million worth of players in the summer transfer window. I think I have a problem.

OMG you're living my dream.

I actually had a goal of this Everton campaign of keeping up with there style of keeping selling and buying pretty even. But then I got a weird glitch that erased all my purchase history so it looks like I got all my players on free transfer. So I'm a little sad.

Even so, I still try to buy low sell high, I am always on the look out for a great deal. I just spend the last couple weeks cheering for the South Korean captian Koo JaCheol because I got him super cheap in FM. He was sold to me for 2.8, and now has a value of 20.5. Not a bad return for my investment, especially considering is first game on he subbed in and scored the winner with his first touch. Of course, because of that I find it nearly impossible to sell him...

I just won La Liga with Real Sociedad, and I'm not sure my entire team adds up to $205 million.

Did you completely gut the team Roke? How many players did you sell to get there?

I do get sentimental with some player and end up not selling them, though it's fairly rare. In my Everton game I had going in FM13 my striker Sergio Lopez was one of those guys. Chasing 1,000 career goals had a lot to do with it. With this Oviedo file my Turkish leftback and Turkish midfielder are shaping up to be guys I'm too attached to sell.

LilCodger: Keeping in mind I run with two XI. The first XI with my strongest players and the 2nd XI is either young players I'm developing, guys who were bargains, or players I need to fulfill UEFA's home-grown rules. Normally my First XI plays most league matches and the 2nd XI gets Cup and European football. The League Cup makes this work a bit better in England (more games for the 2nd XI) but it's doing well enough for me. The only problem is I can't come close to catching Real Madrid in La Liga.

Players sold:
#1 DM for £36M (I already had 2 superior players coming in from South America)
#1 GK for £23.5M (My #2 was originally signed because he's Spanish but he developed to be just as good).
#2 ST for £66M (2nd time in 3 years I've sold my 2nd-choice striker for £55m+)
#2 AMR for £21M (Was moaning about a move and Chelsea made a good bid)
#4 MC for £24.5M (Needed to make room in the 2nd XI for an excellent MC prospect)
#4 DC for £32.5M (Make room for a slightly inferior home-grown centreback)
And a couple low-fee deals for fringe players not even in my 2nd-XI.

Basically I had ready-made replacements for the First-XI guys I sold and 2nd-XI sales were either too good to turn down or making room for young players. 3 years ago I lost a couple of good players due to their release clauses but I've been more vigilant with clauses since then.

I did spend £58M bringing in a 2nd-XI ST, 2nd-XI AMR, 2nd-XI GK, and some prospects so it's not as if all the money's going to pay down debt Glazer style.

Edit: I forgot to mention I did turn down a £71m bid for my #1 striker. His performance dropped off last season so I was tempted but I figured going into a new season with completely new strikers would be madness.

Man, I just can't compute that. Perhaps I should try more of a second XI. I tend to end up with people pissed off at insufficient first team time and they're usually shown the door.

My highest value player currently is Sergio Canales at AMC. He's worth about £7.5M. My star defender I imported from Argentina comes in second around £4M.

I had wonderkid Sandro for about 1.5 seasons before Arsenal swooped in with a $20-30M bid for him. I've had four or five promising youngsters that big teams come snatch from me for minimum release clause (usually around $7-9M)

I'm guessing it's due to the fact that I took the team over deep in the adelante, and they were absolutely shedding talent. Not much in transfer budget, and big names didn't want to come play for me anyway. I ended up using cheap transfers (lots of expiring contracts) and young players (average age is around 23). My players have generally been happy at the club, so it's been easy to turn down some $3-4M offers for some of them. Their value really starts to spike as they get passed around, doesn't it?

I do see my payroll creeping higher and the offers keep ramping up, so I'm guessing it's a matter of time. Especially since Barca and Real Madrid are always two of the names poaching all my young talent, which doesn't bode well for my position in the league a few years from now.

Roke wrote:

In my Oviedo file I sold £205 million worth of players in the summer transfer window. I think I have a problem.

Just watch out that your directors don't decide to use 200m to buy Oviedo. The town, that is.

davet010 wrote:
Roke wrote:

In my Oviedo file I sold £205 million worth of players in the summer transfer window. I think I have a problem.

Just watch out that your directors don't decide to use 200m to buy Oviedo. The town, that is.

You might be able to buy all of Asturias and a chunk of Galicia for 200m right now.

I think my Levante game last year (in FM 2012) was like that. Had such a vast squad (two elevens like Roke + 3rd set of wonderkids in Liga Adelante) that one summer I must have brought in 35-40M in loan fees alone. But I thought that in FM 2014 it would be harder to sell players at high prices.
I played whole 9 seasons in the game so far, but never was at a level, where I would be farming world-class players like that. Although Coventry might be slowly approaching that level. I'm yet to start my first CL experience.

(We went from League Two to 3rd in PL in four years, so I'm dreaming of a trophy now. But that squad is probably still only 6th-7th best in the PL, and that's being generous.)

Any tactical pointers on how to stop supersonic wingers (AML and AMR in a 4-2-1-2-1 setup)? There's no money to buy faster wingbacks and I'm getting slaughtered

The formation best suited for my team is a 5-3-2 / 3-5-2 hybrid, with the wingbacks set more defensive or attacking depending on the context.

Two schools of thought:

1. Play narrower, play deep, use someone in half back DM role: he will push CDs out wide, which can provide extra screen from attackers coming from wings.

2. Get aggressive with opposition. Play high line and squeeze space. Tick play offside. Tackle those wingers as soon as they get the ball. Most importantly: see where the passes are coming from. I don't have a clue what 4-2-1-2-1 is (is it 4-DM-2-2-1 or 4-2-3-1?), but most of good through balls will be coming from the center, into the gap between defender and the full-back. Get aggressive on central midfielders, not allowing them to turn or run into empty space between defence and midfield. Man marking CMs can be effective (at least compared to man-marking AML/AMR, which is very dangerous).

edit: If you are playing with five at the back, that should have the effect I was talking about with DM half back. Since you have so many people back, it might be the case, that you are not aggressive enough with pressing opposition playmakers. You know, kind of like playing flat, deep defence against Pirlo and waiting to see what he will do

UCRC wrote:

Two schools of thought:

1. Play narrower, play deep, use someone in half back DM role: he will push CDs out wide, which can provide extra screen from attackers coming from wings.

2. Get aggressive with opposition. Play high line and squeeze space. Tick play offside. Tackle those wingers as soon as they get the ball. Most importantly: see where the passes are coming from. I don't have a clue what 4-2-1-2-1 is (is it 4-DM-2-2-1 or 4-2-3-1?), but most of good through balls will be coming from the center, into the gap between defender and the full-back. Get aggressive on central midfielders, not allowing them to turn or run into empty space between defence and midfield. Man marking CMs can be effective (at least compared to man-marking AML/AMR, which is very dangerous).

edit: If you are playing with five at the back, that should have the effect I was talking about with DM half back. Since you have so many people back, it might be the case, that you are not aggressive enough with pressing opposition playmakers. You know, kind of like playing flat, deep defence against Pirlo and waiting to see what he will do ;)

They play with 2 DMs, 1 MC, AML + AMR. And a striker

Thanks! I actually set the defensive line higher, and the defenders marking the 2 Speedy Gonzalez on harsh tackling. Apparently I should not have man-marked them as well I always fear playing the offside trap, as it requires intelligence my lower league players can only dream of. If they had any creativity that is

In lower leagues with Coventry I played deep line and narrow, did okay against all attacks. But against better sides in Championship and PL I quickly discovered, that I needed more pro-active attitude.
Never man-mark opposition players who tend to roam around (and wingers do that) with defenders - it can completely destroy your shape. Marking with midfielders works okay in my experience.