Football Manager Series Catch-All

You want a proper cult club and lower league experience - go with 1860 Munchen

If you want a proper lower league experience you haven't seen before, go into the depths in the Brazilian league.

Once you work out their split season standings based on average results of the past three years in regional championships it's on to something simpler, like quantum physics.

Mr Bismarck wrote:

If you want a proper lower league experience you haven't seen before, go into the depths in the Brazilian league.

Once you work out their split season standings based on average results of the past three years in regional championships it's on to something simpler, like quantum physics.

Hahaha. Made me laugh, that one.

Oooooo..I'll just finish season 2 of my Wolves save (and hopefully keep them in the Prem), then I'll have a look at that.

Apropos of nothing, I'd really like FM to make negotiations for your contract as a manager mean something next year. I have no idea how they'd handle it, maybe you can chip in for badges and scouting packages or other bells and whistles, but currently there's no reason not to just sign for $1, whatever they offer you.

(Alternatively, I guess you could RP it and look at local apartment listings and try and find the best place to live you can afford on your salary.)

Prederick wrote:

Apropos of nothing, I'd really like FM to make negotiations for your contract as a manager mean something next year. I have no idea how they'd handle it, maybe you can chip in for badges and scouting packages or other bells and whistles, but currently there's no reason not to just sign for $1, whatever they offer you.

(Alternatively, I guess you could RP it and look at local apartment listings and try and find the best place to live you can afford on your salary.)

I've seen more request like this. And perhaps it's because I am old. But I long for the 'scout/build up/tactic-manager' experience like it used to be. Buy, sell, scout and see a wibble/wobble screen to tweak your tactics. Some years ago FM took a turn into tamagochi-your-players-to-the-final and even tamagochi-yourself-as-a-manager. I can play Pixel People or KOEI-games for that.

Then again, I seem to be one of the few with these feelings...

We might be up for the next Football-citizen experience

Has anyone got FM on the Switch? I hope it does well, as it's nice to have on the platform; I'm sorely tempted.

Clusks wrote:

Has anyone got FM on the Switch? I hope it does well, as it's nice to have on the platform; I'm sorely tempted.

Two years ago I bought a iPad touch-thing of FM. It was a light-version with more randomness, hated it.

In nearly all my FM saves for the past…. Ohh, let’s say decade…. I’ve cheated and downloaded insta-win tactics for Arsenal, then very predictably won the league (and everything else) for a couple of years and got bored. So, still with Arsenal… my challenge was to make my own tactics, sure I can look up guides here and there for some tactical advice (like a real manager would do I suppose – just google it!), but no downloaded tactics that break the AI. As I write this part way into season 3 it’s been a much more enjoyable and immersive experience so far and, dare I say it, more realistic too! I know it doesn’t quite have the authenticity of some of your lower league saves, but it’s a step in the right direction to enjoying the game once again for me, and if I just took the plunge and managed, say, Wrexham, who are my hometown team, it would be an exercise in frustration for someone so used to winning! I have some vague targets of staying at the club for 10 seasons (sackings notwithstanding), not spending ridiculous sums on players, giving youth a chance, stuff like that.

Season 1 – 2017/18 – Arsenal

The thing Arsenal are routinely criticized for in real life is their lack of a ‘proper’ midfielder. A bit of steel to protect the backline, some billy big bollocks to make them competitive in those tough top 6 clashes, especially away from home. Cue my first transfer window as Arsenal boss, and enter William Carvalho from Sporting CP, a snip at £18m. I also spent a lot on scouting. A self imposed rule is that I’m not allowed to scour the internet for the games wonderkids, I’m only allowed to rely on players found by my scouting team. Not a huge challenge, Arsenals recruitment department is already extensive, and I just made it bigger too. I used it to buy some kids with 5 star potential. They won’t be making an impact for a couple of years.
The season started well, and from October to November we were sitting pretty in first place. United though, who are much more formidable in game than they are IRL at the moment, went on a crazy run of 13 consecutive premier league wins. They opened up a big lead and never relinquished it. We were quite terrible away from home. The tough midfielder I bought was solid if unspectacular most of the time, but didn’t really seem to make much of a difference in away games vs the big 6. We lost 0-3 to Man Utd, 0-4 to Liverpool and 3-6 to Chelsea. The 0-0 we earned at Man City seemed to owe more to chance than any tactical masterstroke. But we were excellent at home, winning 17 and drawing 2 at the Emirates. We also had some joy in the cups, reaching the semi finals of the Carabao Cup and the Final of both the FA Cup and Europa League. The downside of this is it created an incredible backlog of fixtures in the final two weeks of the season.
Our run in went like this-
Sunday- League game
Weds- League game
Friday- League game
Sunday – Final League Game
Weds – Europa League Final
Sunday – FA Cup Final

Six games in 15 days, and our squad, which has an excellent first XI but little depth, imploded and didn’t win a single one of them. The run included a 0-2 defeat in the North London derby, a 0-1 FA Cup Final defeat to Man Utd, and a 2-3 defeat to RB Leipzig in Europe. We somehow managed to cling on to 2nd place in the league, and we did meet all the goals set forth by Stan Kroenke (the massive bell end that he is, excuse my French), so although it felt pretty terrible to end it in that way I have to look back on the season as a success. It is 4 places better off than their real life counterparts after all. On the personnel front, Aubameyang was excellent. He might have been league top scorer, but he did share some of the limelight with Lacazette whereas the like of Kane and Lukaku were playing week in week out. I’m yet to find a formation to get the best out of Ozil, who managed only 5 assists in the league and an average rating just a smidge above 7. It’s time for a summer of upheaval though – United are a certified juggernaut in this version of reality and they must be overhauled!

kergguz wrote:

United are a certified juggernaut in this version of reality and they must be overhauled!

Yeah, I've watched a few people's multiseason vids, and United always seem to win a lot of trophies early on. Pep also seems to get sacked a lot in the first season or two.

Great stuff with Arsenal. Good luck with Season 2!

davet010 wrote:
kergguz wrote:

United are a certified juggernaut in this version of reality and they must be overhauled!

Yeah, I've watched a few people's multiseason vids, and United always seem to win a lot of trophies early on. Pep also seems to get sacked a lot in the first season or two.

Same here. Man City finished 3rd and won the Champions League in season 1, but a 5th place finish in season 2 saw him replaced with Ancelotti.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Great stuff with Arsenal. Good luck with Season 2!

Thanks! It's going to be fun to write up. I'm actually well into season 3, and despite my intention not to break the game with downloaded tactics, may have broken it anyway through constant tinkering. Will report back soon!

Wow, Football Manager 2018 is on sale this weekend for $15 on Fanatical. That's the cheapest I've seen it yet.

EDIT: Although I don't think I'll play it in the near future, I bought it. I'm weak.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Wow, Football Manager 2018 is on sale this weekend for $15 on Fanatical. That's the cheapest I've seen it yet.

EDIT: Although I don't think I'll play it in the near future, I bought it. I'm weak.

I would be tempted, even though my PC is slow as molasses that made FM2016 not enjoyable. Fortunately the key doesn't unlock in Canada (even though they list the Canadian price) so I avoided that bit of enabling.

Just caved and got 2018. Now to find the Conference North team I shall guide to Champions league victory over the decades.

First choice is Blyth if they are playable.

I did Solihull Moors first, ended up at Rotherham and won the League Cup while still in the Championship. Good luck!

Blyth are playable

Spent most of yesterday downloading 25gb of graphic mode and player pics so now I just need to find time to actually play.

Might be time to treat myself to the lower divisions of the Brazilian league, as suggested by Mr Bismarck.

I had a brief look at Brazil and got a headache. So now it's off to sunny Italy. I'm just re-reading John Boot's book on Italian football ('Calcio', which I would recommend to anyone with even a slight interest in football, or Italy), and was intrigued by his descriptions of Livorno as 'the most left-wing club in Italy' and whose fans were notorious for their verbal assaults on Berlusconi (they were fined numerous times for chanting 'Berlusconi - pizza di merda' as well as waiting until a game against the far right Lazio fans before unveiling a huge banner of Stalin.)

They're in Serie C/1, but unfortunately are 5-1 on favourites to go up. No pressure then. Decent stadium because they've been in Serie A in the recent past, and not gone bust. Time to get the loan signings going, though I can't sign any non-EU players who aren't already in Italy.

One thing I did notice is that there are 19 teams in the division. As usual with Italy, it turns out that there were a raft of financial failures, legal challenges etc over summer, so the 60 eligible teams ended up as 57, which were divided into 3 regional competitions of 19 each. Livorno went up in real life from this group, but the next 9 or 10 (!) teams go into end of season playoffs. It's worth having a look at the actual tables for this year, and noting just how many teams had points deducted for 'irregularities'.

Serie C 2017-18

Hmm...this might not be as easy as I imagined.

Football Manager 2018 is Fanatical's Featured Deal at $13.99. Quantities are limited and it looks to be going fast.

YAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSS QWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNN

I chuckled when I heard Jose Mourinho reference "Championship Manager" in his press interview about a week or so ago:

"The target is Leicester match and the tactics to be changed... In Championship Manager you can just press a button. In football, you need time to work and players on the pitch to work and we didn't have them until now."

Diddling around in my game where it's currently 2020, and I took a look at the Champions League QFs and discovered that...

....Brendan Rodgers is in charge at PSG? Hired straight from Celtic, no less.

.......Sure?

Just watched England beat Germany on penalties in Euro 2020, if you were wondering how unrealistic FM is.

Prederick wrote:

Just watched England beat Germany on penalties in Euro 2020, if you were wondering how unrealistic FM is. ;)

Beating Germany? On penalties? Yeah...

I'm almost afraid to jinx it, but I think I've climbed the hill and got a serious FM game going. For the first time since my KVK Tienen savegame crashed during the 1/16th finals of the Cup Winners Cup in CM 03/04! I've tried so many mobile, classic, full games since then, but maybe this is The One.

I'm playing with my fave team RSC Anderlecht, and won every game so far (3 friendlies, Supercup and 6 league games). It's a perfect time to post this, as Anderlecht have been drawn in a CL group with Man U, Barcelona and RB Leipzig. I got a feeling this winning streak won't last long.

More by accident than by design I've been using Martinez' Belgian national team tactic, a 3-4-3 / 5-2-3 hybrid. I've done 2 transfers, both currently on loan so they'll only join at the end of the season. Let's just say that finding players who actually improve the team on our wage/salary budget is nigh impossible.

I have made it my mission to start at least one youth player each game, and Hannes Delcroix has been great at centre back. This in contrary to real life, where our youth performs great and is then replaced by an overpaid and unmotivated transfer. Well, I made one fun transfer; Dennis Bergkamp is now training our attackers!

I'm slowly mulling through the game, about half an hour to an hour per day, learning the ropes again. If anyone has any advice on some issues I'm grappling with, that would be most welcome!

- Sven Kums is playing as a CM with role Deep-Lying Playmaker (support). Part of that role is "less shots from distance", but he actually has great stats in that regard. Is there any way to make an exception to this rule, as in: keep everything about the role except the shots from distance?
- Any advice on getting trainers for the U19 and U21? My salary cap is really low, and it's hard to find good candidates
- I constantly get the message that X players are not satisfied with the individual attention they're getting during attack training. But in the coach/training overview everything is at light or medium, so I'm not sure what it means or what I can do.

I'm grappling with training in general, and wish there was a way to manually set players if I choose to, and let the others to the Assistant Manager. Now it's either "take over for this month" or "completely manage training".

Your post makes me want to restart my previous game. I'm getting the itch again.

On the training aspect, I had a lot of players complain about attention if the amount of time in the overall allocation was "light". I switched around foci for the coaching staff, increased things so nothing was light, and I think they all went away.

dejanzie wrote:

- Sven Kums is playing as a CM with role Deep-Lying Playmaker (support). Part of that role is "less shots from distance", but he actually has great stats in that regard. Is there any way to make an exception to this rule, as in: keep everything about the role except the shots from distance?

The easiest way to create a "custom" role, for me, if I wanted to create a Deep-Lying Playmaker that'd do a bit more movement is to use one of the generic roles (Central Midfielder, Defensive Midfielder, etc.) and then tweak the Player Instructions to mimic the other role I want them to be, plus some other changes.

The only catch is mentality. A CM set to "Defend" won't sit quite as deep as a Deep-Lying Playmaker in central midfield set to "Defend" (although ticking "Hold Position" will help mitigate this somewhat).

Recently, I've become a big fan of asymmetric midfields to deal with this and potential gaps between my midfield and backline, my current formation uses a DMCR and a MCL to deal with this.

- I constantly get the message that X players are not satisfied with the individual attention they're getting during attack training. But in the coach/training overview everything is at light or medium, so I'm not sure what it means or what I can do.

If I'm reading this right (and I might not be), I think usually when players say they're not satisfied with individual training it means they don't think they need to be specifically training at Technique or Crossing or whatever (or they feel they're working too much).

Now, if they're saying they're not satisfied with the amount of attention they're getting, I have to say I don't think I've quite experienced that, personally. I imagine that it's a complaint about how many coaches you have, because if a coaches' workload is "Light" that means that you have enough people that he isn't trying to train 60 players all at once, and is instead focusing on smaller groups.

I'm grappling with training in general, and wish there was a way to manually set players if I choose to, and let the others to the Assistant Manager. Now it's either "take over for this month" or "completely manage training".

A weird bug I've noticed, since I set my youth teams to automatic training, is that when I go in and change their position training and select "only for this month" it appears to stay... basically forever. So just keep that in mind.

Thanks for the tips, guys. I haven't been able to solve the training complaint issue yet, so I have chosen to ignore it for now

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Your post makes me want to restart my previous game. I'm getting the itch again.

Do eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet. And post your shenanigans here

So my first CL game. Against RB Leipzig at home, the only game I have any chance of winning. After much deliberation (aka daydreaming during boring conf calls at work) I decided to stick to my standard tactic with a few defensive tweaks. I have no idea what to expect, as this will be my first game against a bigger budget higher quality team.

If we can just hang on for the first fifteen minutes we just might... nope, 0-1 after 6 minutes and 0-2 after 15 minutes. DAMMIT! RB Leipzig continues to dominate the first 40 minutes, we just can't seem to hold on to the ball for more than a few seconds. And then... in the 42nd minute, the holy trifecta of FM satisfaction happens:

1. You have an abstract tactical idea, which you desperately try to translate into the FM tactical interface
2. You see your team actually doing this in a competitive game in gloriously outdated 3D graphics
3. It actually f*cking works!

After a corner, Kums recovers the ball in central midfield, lays the ball out to the left flank where Obradovic overlaps Onyekuru. Obra crosses the ball perfectly and Theodorzyck heads it home. 1-2, we're still in the game! Two shots to six, but we're still alive. Obradovic, probably surprised at his career's first decent cross, strains something and leaves the field.

At half-time, my ass manager suggests I should berate the team for underperforming. When half of them are already nervous and in a game against a technically superior team. Idiot. With the Any Given Sunday knob turned to 11, I gave them the vote of confidence and asked them to fight for every inch (centimeter, this is Europe dammit). They loved it.

The 2nd half was all ours. The ball was ours, the crowd was ours, but so far the score wasn't. In the 60th minute, Theo finally got through after a great combination. 2-2! Many a silent fistpump was had (kids asleep downstairs). After a few more missed chances and much (silent) teeth grinding, Theo managed to hit another one in the back of the net in the 76th minute. 3-2! Hattrick! Theo injured 2 minutes after! I don't care! We won! Exclamation mark!

And still our winning streak continues. The next game, away at RC Genk was won undeservedly after a 18m strike from substitute Kums in the 89th minute. Then a cup game against a Division 3 amateur team, another nailbiter as I took the opportunity to give my substitutes and some youngsters a chance to play.

I actually got the 10 wins in a row achievement, something I don't think I've ever done in any CM/FM game. And I didn't even save scum

(sorry for the delays in posting, writing in English is laborous for me)

dejanzie wrote:

(sorry for the delays in posting, writing in English is laborous for me)

Eh, run it through Google translate a couple times, it's funnier that way. Great story though!

I've finally begun to really break myself from just downloading someone's ultra-tactic whenever I get frustrated in the game, and even though Rotherham's magical cup run was cut short by Man City to the tune of a 5-1 obliteration, but the fact that I got a Bielsa-like 3-5-2 to actually WORK was a blast.

If I'll say anything for this game, it's that it really, really places possibly too much of a premium on having a DM, because when I don't have a holding player in that role, it's like every single team I play exploits the space and we get screwed, because there's no CM role that'll drop deep enough to cover that.

So far I’ve taken Blyth Spartans from tipped for relegation from Vanarama North to promotion candidates in league One in 6 seasons through developing solid youth players, quality loans and Dan Maguire.

Dan starts at Blyth and has consistently punched above his weight for me as an advanced forward. He’s only rated 2 Star in league One but still puts in performances on the pitch that see him being a first team regular. I plan to keep him at the club he started his career at and if possible make him my assistant manager.

Anyone else got tales of players that are crap on paper but consistently deliver?