Soccer Gaming Catch-All

The FM patch is finally out. I'm not sure I want to start a Newcastle file again because Lovenkrands-Best or Ameobi-Best is downright depressing.

Arise!

Started new game some time ago as Toulouse. Then discovered that I can't be bothered with playing through pre-season so I resigned and waited until any Ligue 1 team will pick me up. Which happened to be AS Monaco in the January.

I started being 12th after 20+ games, now it's last game of the season and I'm two points behind leaders Lyon... which I happen to play at home.

Drama!

Whatever happens, I can't remember such awesome string of grinding results in FM. I had run of nine wins, seven or eight of them by one goal etc.

Bet Monaco wished they'd gone with you for real

Yes, actually I had a look at club finances and day-to-day stuff and I don't know whether I want to stay beyond one season. Club can't cover for running costs and average attendance is 11,5k, second from bottom in whole Ligue 1.

Still, I almost won with Lyon 2nd place gives me instant qualification for CL, let's see how much money board will put on table.

Well UCRC, you're doing better than the last FM game I had going. Playing as Wealdstone in Blue Square South after vacationing a year I couldn't get promoted in 2 seasons and ended up in administration. Roaring success that was.

For Dave (to explode (laughing, I suppose)):
Monaco save. Post Euro 2012 Capello retires. Cue new England manager, Harry Redknapp. Currently at Manchester City. Where he signed Christopher Samba and a lot of unknown Brazilians, then had crap season. Then resigned because fatherland was calling.

So they line up replacements. Actually they spend good part of month finding the best man available for job.

Whom else more befitting if not Avram f*cking Grant. I'm not making this up.

My Bayern save turned out the same way. I applied for the City job, got cruelly spurned in favour of Twitcher, Board was annoyed so I went off to Palermo in a huff. City finished 11th, Twitcher went to England, and City selected me (after much putting up of hands and much 'oo, pick me sir, pick me' in a playground style).

I will hopefully do better than Avram Grant.

Can I mention my Fulham game, where Arsene quit Arsenal in a huff for Roma and Arsenal subsequently hired the would-have-a-blast-dealing-with-the-English-media Hugo Sanchez?

Also, in my game, Citeh hired Mourinho from Madrid, and, I swear i'm not making this up, Juventus hired Sam Allardyce. He always said he could manage one of the big clubs!

You must keep me updated with the Big Sam in Italy news - I'm looking forward to the Big Sam Twitter in Italian

How is your Fulham, Pred? When I saw you playing on Steam I always assumed it's some another fifth tier LLaMa

It's 2012 and France just won Euro 2012. We just sold Clint Dempsey to Inter for a neat $18M, after finishing 6th in the Prem and winning the Carling Cup. I've got my eyes on the astonishingly overlooked Diego Buananotte, just nabbed Manuel Neurer on a free, and am busy trying to get someone to take Rafik Halliche and Carlos Salcido off my hands.

Best signing so far is a tie between Salvatore Bochetti (formed a fantastic partnership with Hangeland) and Sotiris Ninis, who managed 18 and 15 in all competitions from midfield, including the Carling Cup-winning goal. (In deference, we ended up playing Plymouth thanks to noone else in the Premiership taking it even kind of seriously)

I'm feeling like a change though, and may restart and try to take everyone's favorite German club of misfits and left-wingers to a title (FC St. Pauli, of course).

Oh this thread. After fighting my way to the middle in the lower leagues of Portugal in FM2010 I get FM2011 for my birthday last week. Start a new save in FM2011 and end up with a job back down in the Portuguese lower leagues. Got bored right before the start of season one and forgot about the game until I see new posts in this thread. I am now about to embark on a career in some top flight league somewhere for the first time since CM4 thanks to this thread.

edit: Picked a bunch of leagues and kept hitting choose random team until I got a repeat. Atletico Madrid was the repeat. Didn't get a chance to do much, but this is a completely different game than the LLM one I've been playing.

IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/srna.png)
Loan fee: 250k euros.

I saved tens of milions by loaning players from England (especially City, where everybody is permanently transfer listed, it seems), and paying only part of their wages.
Which allowed me to save enough money to buy Neymar at the beginning of Season 3 I'm at the point where there aren't many players willing to come to France whom I could consider an improvement upon what I already have.

@Pred: Buonanotte is injury-prone, I think. And has about 3 strength. How did that go?

How do you earn money with Monaco, given the size of their stadium ? CL money ?

"Especially City, where everyone is permanently transfer listed"

Must have been a relic from Twitcher's spell in charge

UCRC wrote:

@Pred: Buonanotte is injury-prone, I think. And has about 3 strength. How did that go?

We'll see. He just put in a fine shift for River (34 games, average rating 7.21), but don't expect many updates soon, OOTP 12 just got released and i've got Combat Mission on my plate. FM's firmly on the back-burner right now.

davet010 wrote:

Must have been a relic from Twitcher's spell in charge ;)

Now, with Harry they've *bought* all those crappy players

I bring in TV money (30m) and CL/league prizes (20m) and transfer money (30-40m in last two seasons), which allows me to have net transfer spending of -10-15m and couple extra million to increase wage budget.

IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/2011-06-26_01-50-53.png)

This has been probably my most active transfer window in FM 2011 where I offloaded all average players and brought in four-five guys into first eleven.

I loan players all the time in my top-division FM games as well UCRC, it's very handy. I think I had Boateng on loan from Manchester City for three straight seasons on my Newcastle save I have going.

I guess on the transfer market I'm doing the same thing you're doing (though it's less difficult to deal with the transfer market playing an English club instead of France or elsewhere). I've had negative net transfer spend in all but one season (indulged in buying Phil Jones) and been around Champions League football. Transfer listed players, Bosmans, and young scouted players are my bread and butter.

I switched from my old 4-2-3-1 (which I used in almost all of my FM saves those past two seasons, with success (edit: damn, I miss that Panonios save, that was the most fun that I had since winning PL with MK Dons)) to 4-1-2-2-1 (moving AMC into DMC position) because
a) Miguel Veloso was available on cheap and I'm a sucker for elegant midfielders
b) I left huge gaps again and again when DCs backtracking, thought DMC might solve that

I have a lot of problems with setting up middle of the midfield to dominate possesion and slow play down.
I discovered that switching wing-backs into attacking roles also switches most of the ball distribution into flanks, because in that case Srna (DR) and Vargas (DL) prefer to pass ball forward to my wingers instead of safe, lateral pass to DMC/MC.

edit: SUGGESTIONS ARE WELCOME

I haven't been able to make the 4-5-1 work in FM since 2006 though I'm not much of a tactics tweaker. I assume what your using is similar to Chelsea's 4-5-1 they used under Mourinho. I'm pretty sure I was having the same problems you're having UCRC, I was just never able to comprehend it.

I can think of two possible solutions. The first would be to set your team to focus passes through the middle. Alternatively, shortening the wingback's passing mentality could do the trick.

Did the fullbacks/winger usually pass to your wingers under the 4-2-3-1? I've noticed that they do with the setup I'm using on my current file, but with the two deep midfielders and the Attacking midfielder in the centre my wingers don't mind passing to the middle when there isn't space on the flank. Moving out from the back, if my fullbacks have the ball they pass it to the wingers and if my central defenders have the ball they pass to one of my two central midfielders.

Switching to through the middle worked suprisingly well. Now I see my three midfield pinging short passes between themselves quite often. Which is exactly what I wanted, because both central midfielders have 17 passing and good mental stats.

It's so weird to sit on huge pile of money and don't be able to spent it, because there aren't any better players out there.

Barca are offering almost 50m for Neymar, Jesus. That would mean >25m of profit after four months. But then again, what am I to do with that money?

I have no idea how you've managed to get Neymar for that much. In all of my games, Neymar and Ganso regularly go for $40M and up.

Anyone paid much attention to the early news on PES and FIFA? The latter's touting its new collision detection system (they can call it whatever they want, that's all it is), the former seems to have been pretty mum thus far.

Oh, here's one about FIFA 12's Player Personalities. Of course, it looks nice, but a gripe i've always had with the series is players being rooted to their positions (in the vid, the only player in the box for the cross is Peter Crouch). One dude in the box on a cross isn't particularly realistic, and with everyone else standing 20 yards away, knockdowns and the like aren't possible, nor are goals that perhaps miss the first two intended targets but find a third. Moreover, such a situation (one striker v. four defenders) massively favors the team defending, so FIFA removes even further from the realism by turning every header from a cross into a one-on-one battle, rather than something more organic.

....I'm angry at myself for writing all that.

Also, I'm biting the bullet and restarting with St. Pauli. I'm just too familiar with Fulham, if that makes sense. I like a little mystery, plus Germany's such a ridiculous and interesting league.

Prederick wrote:

I have no idea how you've managed to get Neymar for that much. In all of my games, Neymar and Ganso regularly go for $40M and up.

From Santos? In my game somehow nobody wanted him for first two seasons and his valuation fluctuated between 20 and 30 million. I just waited till the moment they were willing to go down to 21m, there weren't any other bidders.
And now Barca is paying 57m, and my board will accept it. Two days before end of transfer window. I lost interest in playing anymore for now
(BTW Javier Pastore went to Real for 61 million, and looking at his stats he's worth it. He has 18-20 in all of critical attributes, it's quite amazing.)

I hear that PES is betting heavily on improved player movement this year.

Hell yes from Santos. In my Denmark game the pair fetched Santos a combined $115M. Not kidding.

New game, new Bundesliga team. What's that? Our transfer budget is $85K and we've already used all four of our transfers for the season? Oh good!

Don't spent it not wisely.

I replaced Neymar with Paloschi (delightfully typical Italian striker: off the ball, pace, finishing, composure, anticipation), but I'm still annoyed at unability to negotiate with board. In real life you could easily strike a compromise where you wait till the end of season to cash in on player.

It's so depressing that I can't buy anybody with all this money. I only seem to be able to attract players from mid-table Italian or English clubs, France, Russia and some of Brazilian stars. When I filter out uninterested players in search there are only five or six guys out there who have rating of 3,5 stars and Alexis Sanchez rated at 4 stars. (As usually my first eleven has everybody at either 3,5 or 3 stars).
I guess it takes year or two of waiting for club reputation to rise.

edit: oh no, actually I was lying. Only four players with 3,5 stars out there. Pjanić, Yaya Toure (demanding 8 million per year), Sanchez and Jucilei.

FM11 50% off, I was almost ready to bite at this price but I know I just won't dedicate the time a game like this requires to it. Unless I see it on a deeper discount I'll probably wait for 2012. If I can then 2011 will be the first iteration of the series I haven't got since CM01-02

I just realised that thanks to regional pricing FM11 is $10US but $22.50US for me. Any helpful Goodjers able to hook me up in exchange for a paypal donation or a $10 game?

Prozac wrote:

I just realised that thanks to regional pricing FM11 is $10US but $22.50US for me. Any helpful Goodjers able to hook me up in exchange for a paypal donation or a $10 game?

PM sent.

I've used selling Neymar to make last few improvements to the squad, and I'm proud to say that now my Monaco is close to being the best side in Europe.
In half season after selling Neymar I went to win the league (with almost 100 points in 38 games) and lost to Barca in CL final. But I thumped Madrid 5-1 at home on my way there, which is nice.
In next half season (autumn 2013) I've demolished everything in my way (including dominating Man Utd) and my squad is probably close to being complete now:
-I've snapped Alexis Sanchez for 15m by being shrewd and patient. I've beaten Man City and Barcelona to the signing, so I guess that tells you something.
-I've bought Kyle Walker, prospective English full-back for 10m. 19 pace, 17 acceleration, it's always fun to have guy like that in your team, just to watch him overtake everybody else when there is a counter attack.
- I've signed Romero for free, he's current Argentina first choice.
- Brought in Sergio Canales for 4m. 19 passing, technique, first touch. 20 creativity and flair. Thank you, Real!

I'm playing the same formation I've been, this season trying to utilise more and more width (due to great attacking wing-backs) and make passing shorter. It's slowly approaching Barca style.

IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1272142/2011-07-07_11-02-25.png)

My net transfer spending over three years is -20M (150M players bought, 172M players sold)