I'm continental pro now, with Sunday League footballing experience. If it isn't the latter, it must be the two jobs I fucked that did it.
I'm continental pro now, with Sunday League footballing experience. If it isn't the latter, it must be the two jobs I fucked that did it.
I'm only just studying for Continental A, also starting at Sunday League level so not that I guess. I wonder if it's off the back of my stint in Greece where I regularly played (and beat) more established clubs like Olympiacos? Who knows.
How did Istra and Bosko do in the CL?
I'm a twit
They got a draw against Celtic and Shaktahr, losing their other 6 games. That was enough to see them finish 34th in the group mind, ahead of Galatasaray and Young Boys.
The team was torn apart after I left with all the good players being snapped up, so much so they ended up being relegated.
Bosko went to Paris, but Paris FC rather than SG.
He played a lot, but badly in a team that were relegated. He does have a £33m release clause now though.
Wasn't quite planning to move, but Slavia Prague just offered me an interview (and subsequently a job) and it really looks like a no-brainer, 10 times the budget of Rapid, higher reputation, a dominant team in a higher reputation league and guaranteed Champions League football, so I just went for it. For what it's worth, we'd started the season with 4 wins out of 4 at Rapid, and drawn in the CL third qualifying round against Shamrock so things looked really good, but onwards to better things I guess.
Only one job I wanted that had come up by the middle of June, so it was looking like I was in Romania for another year. However, having applied for said job, I got it.
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My rep now matches the club I'm at too.
Ventspils & Latvia 2031 Update
To quote Bad Boys 2, shit just got real.
We'll do this in chronological order, starting with our journey into the Europa League qualifiers. We drew CSKA Sofia, and a 2-1 away win was enough to see us through with a goalless draw in the return game. Our next opponents were Slovan Bratislava, and an entertaining couple of games saw us emerge 7-4 winners on aggregate. That meant we'd made it all the way to the playoff, where we were drawn against PAOK. A 1-0 defeat in the first leg put us in a bad position, however we won by the same score at home to send the tie to extra time, which soon turned to penalties...Originally Posted by Dan
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On to the Latvian Cup, where we once again cruised through to the final, this time facing Riga:
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Lastly, the league, where Riga did indeed get themselves together following their slump last year. We had a proper three team race for the entire season, with none of us dropping a whole lot of points, so it pretty much came down to the games between each other to determine who would come out on top...
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I think we might start overhauling the squad this offseason to try to take things to the next level, although we still don't have a lot of value for the players in our side, so I'm not sure how many players will end up selling. I also don't really feel like there are too many areas that we need to improve on, so it might just be a case of bringing out good players regardless of where they play & seeing who ends up becoming obsolete. Should be an interesting couple of months...
Well, it turns out that Kvaratskhelia retired from international football in July 2030, so immediately we got a nice big boost to our hopes of making our first major tournament. In the end Croatia actually tried their best to throw it all away, but they did end up squeezing through as the group winners, and it came down to a final day game between ourselves & Georgia to see who would join them at the tournament:
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We'll be looking to continue to build next year & hopefully we can keep on bringing through a steady supply of nationalised Brazilians whilst we slowly try to upgrade the facilities at home to start churning out better Latvian youngsters. I'm also still desperately trying to convince the 18 year old American lad with Latvian eligibility that he should come play for us instead, so hopefully they just never bother to cap him & he finally agrees to switch as he's the exact type of player we're missing.
FYI, been reading some stuff and as expected FM24 is basically going to be exactly the same game as FM23, but with the women's database added. Bit of a piss take.
Having said that, the game has basically been the same as the previous version for a good few years now.
Does anyone use the squad planner?
I visit the scouting screen perhaps once or twice a season
I don't even bother with training anymore.
Back at it tonight. Hopefully get to play the Community Shield.
I'm a twit
To be honest, I'm more than fine with the features the game already has. In fact, I was fine with the features the game already had like 10 years ago. Ideally I'd just like them to focus all their efforts on the match engine and the various player interaction things (not so much the bullshit talks, but how they go about contracts, playing time etc), but their motto seems to be "what minor thing that nobody cares about can we introduce so that we can add it to the list of new features", so there's that.
They need to remove broken, useless features and focus on actually fixing the myriad of shit bugs that have persisted for many, many years.
I fucking despise SI these days.
It'll be interesting to see the "influencer" reaction to this if it is true.
The introduction of women to the game is great for those who want it, but in general adding women into something stereotypically male tends to lead to toxicity and overly toxic overreactions. See the Ghostbusters film remake. It wasn't shit because it had a female cast, it was just shit, but the studio and actresses involved decided that if you didn't like it, the only reason possibly is that you're a sexist(if you're male) or you dont support the feminist movement(if you're female).
I could see SI releasing the game with no real features added bar this and then taking that kind of defensive approach. But taking this back into the influencers point, they almost universally canned this years release for adding nothing but a squad planner and changing the scouting. Both to objectively worse versions of what we already had.
Would they universally can it this time?
DS is right. What most players actually want is to see the things in the game actually work properly. Problem is most games like this tend to run on a 2-3 year dev cycle. Even now it would be too late to add anything in to make this years release. and things wanted in off the back of FM23 are likely not going to be in until FM25. So we'll see how far dissatisfaction goes. But in the end if the same people who buy it every year do it again regardless, then does it really matter?
I don't see what could be argued to be bad about putting female football in, particularly if you can cross from tuna to sausage and vice versa during a save.
However I hope they make the women's stats scale properly - which isn't to say I want them compared to male players, but women's football has a different profile with pace and power less to the fore, and I'd like to see that reflected somehow.
Absolutely no chance they do that - the best females are obviously going to look like legends of the male game.
That said, it's a sport that hasn't yet been compromised or ruined by money, so it could be quite fun to have a crack at.
The women's game might end up being a nice addition but you just know they're going to spend all their development time on that instead of fixing the stupid bugs that makes the game ridiculous at times.
I don't mind if Vivienne Miedema (is she still the best?) has pace 20 and finishing 20, but I hope they find a model where the finishing is worth much more than the pace compared to the men's game.
European Journeyman Game - 2029/30 - St. Gallen - Mid-Season Update
The first season at what feels like a proper club in a civilised league, with the added bonus of the squad we inherited not being too bad. Despite that we had some money to spend, so shopping we went:
Summer Transfers
£84k from Maccabi Nazareth an absolute bargain. Sadly I had to loan him out due to home grown quota issues.
We had nothing at left back so this chap comes in as first choice. £2.2m from Club America.
£4.8m from Red Star Belgrade, he's improved hugely since we signed him and is now a first choice staple in the team.
Free transfer in from Everton. Squad fodder mostly so far.
Was interested having been relegated to the French second tier it just had to be done. Sadly he has a meagre minimum fee release clause which I couldn't negotiate out (as does Jevremovic for that matter), but fuck it, Bosko is back!
Back up left back. The board and my fans hated his signing, but competent stats and at a £120k fee I was satisfied.
Another staple at my Dinamo Zagreb killing Istra side, Bull had since moved to Liverpool only to rot a bit in the reserves as they looked to loan him. With no takers up to now I jumped at the chance and the band is getting back together.
£4.4m from Nacional, one I've had eyes on for a while but could never afford him to now.
League
We've been excellent from start to the mid point and the win over Young Boys with my 16 year old youth prospect getting the winner in injury time was huge. Bosko mk. II in the making.
Here's Ngung. 7 goals in one start and four sub appearances is very promising.
A word too for this chap, who is scoring a goal a game in all comps.
A decent lead with games in hand, our 3rd league title in different countries in a row should be on the cards.
Cup
Cup has been pretty routine.
Europe
We smashed the group stage and therefore don't play again until March, but it nearly didn't happen as we were seconds away from being knocked out in the playoffs by Antwerp.
Me
Anything less than a domestic double here will not be good enough and I really fancy taking the Europa Conference League as well. No huge hitters in it and we are absolutely purring. Galatasaray came calling in November, but it was too early to arrange a move in the Summer so I decided to reject it. A shame as that would have been a brilliant next job but I have unfinished business in Switzerland.
Slavia Prague 2028/29 Season
I mentioned in a previous post that right as I was starting my second season at Rapid, Slavia Prague came knocking and it was too big of an opportunity to say no to really. It might sound like a relatively small jump, but Slavia Prague have started building sort of a dynasty in their league in real life, having won 4 of the last 6 titles (finishing second the other two seasons) and this trend has continued in-game, where they've won 5 out of 6, bringing the total up to 9 league titles in 12 seasons. With Czech Republic being fairly high in the standings, that has also meant guaranteed Champions League football and guaranteed money, leading to a big gap between them and the rest of the clubs. Last season they won the league by 14 points for reference. That was also reflected in the budgets laid out before me: 33m for transfers and 650k p/w for wages (in Rapid that was 3.5m and 140k p/w respectively).
The squad was already very strong, to the point where I was quite confident I would walk the league even with no signings. In order to avoid bloating this post with screenshots, here's the two that I would label as the stars of the team:
A player that's great in both defence and midfield and he actually ended up playing in both positions at various points in the season. Also an incredibly well-rounded player, which is a trait I really like.
Now my tactic uses traditional wingers, so I was planning to play this guy on the right wing. But seeing as we struggled finding a proper left winger, but found a good right one, I decided to somewhat adjust my tactics and have him play as an inverted winger on the left and boy was that a good decision.
Good squad aside, nobody in their right mind would expect me not to spend all that money that was thrown at me surely? Even the board required me to spend the whole budget, so I decided to do them a favor. Under my tenure we spent a total of 46 million on 7 different players, while offloading players that didn't quite fit my plans for a nice 20 million. Out of the 7 players, and having gone through the season and seen how they evolved, I've decide the following three deserved a special mention:
Let's start with a familiar face. The squad did already have a promising striker, but he really failed to deliver in the first few games, so I decided to go with something tried and tested. He only cost us 5m after all so even if he struggled to make the jump, it was a relatively small gamble.
A player that admittedly didn't quite meet my expectations, but one that at his age could still become a key player for the club. Cost 6.5m, so not that cheap, but we did have the money to burn, so burn it I did.
One position the club was lacking at was the center of the defense, where our third best option was a 36 year old Mings, so this lad joined us for a hefty 10m (club and national record). He's a rather well-rounded defender though, so I think the price was justified.
With all that out of the way, let's take a look at our performance. Let's start from the league format. The league consists of 16 teams, leading to a 30-game regular season, after which the league splits in two (as is typical in most eastern countries really). The championship group consists of the top 6 teams, which, unlike, Romania, keep all of their points from the regular season, and thankfully, also unlike Romania, only play each other once, resulting in a 35-game season. The cup structure is also much better than Romania, as there's a total of 7 rounds in the cup proper, and the big boys only enter the competition in the third round. That, coupled with the fact that there's no two-legged ties, means that we would only ever play a maximum of 5 games, bringing us to a total of 40 domestic games in a season. A nice change of pace compared to the madness of Romania. With the formats explained, let's go straight to the league table at the end of the season:
The gulf in class was just ridiculous. We actually won the title with 8 games to spare, so the "championship" group was only that in name. And it's not only that we were amazing, breaking pretty much every record in the league and only recording a singular defeat (lost 2-3 at home in this abomination of a game), but also that the rest of the field was atrocious. 62 points for the second placed team is just abysmal. Given that level of dominance, it should be no surprise that we also won the cup, completing the double:
We almost got in trouble against Banik Ostrava early on, in a game that we should have won by like 3 goals in regular time, but we beat them on penalties, and from there on it was just smooth sailing. The same cannot be said about Europe unfortunately:
Now I have to say that we were unexpectedly competitive (yes, even in the Chelsea game), and I reckon, based on our performances, we should have picked somewhere around 6-9 points, but the game just didn't agree. In the end, it wouldn't have been enough to see us through to the next phase, but I wouldn't have said no to the sweet sweet prize money.
Many great performers really, but it's just hard to look past Delibasic. He had a somewhat rough start with just 3 goals in the first couple of months, but later he started settling and eventually was back to his old self from last season. When he faltered, Enes Sali was there to pick up the slack. Mind you 7 out of his 18 goals were from penalties, but that in itself is still magnificent, seeing as he didn't miss a single one of them. Add his 12 assists on top of that and you can see why he was the first name on the team sheet (even Delibasic was more replacable than him considering the alternatives).
So closing this season, the conclusion is an obvious one: On the domestic front we have nothing to worry about really, and I will be quite disappointed if we don't repeat the double next season. However, we must do better in Europe. Or rather, I would be somewhat satisfied with similar performances but better results. With that in mind, I can't quite see myself staying at the club next summer. I'd rather look for something bigger, possibly in Holland/Portugal, or else I will just get bored I reckon.
Last edited by Adramelch; 19-04-2023 at 06:21 PM.
Ladies & gentlemen...we got him
Seems to be a lot of goals in this version. I’ve previously only played with TTH so figured them being overpowered for their leagues meant goals(!) but Man Utd’s (The Reid) first three matches were a 7-0 win against Chelsea, a 5-5 draw with Leicester, and a 5-1 demolishing of Arsenal (Mike). And I’ve just beat Leicester 7-1. Arsenal’s first league game was a 6-0 win. Goals!
I'm a twit
He only beat me because the skin we had wouldn’t let the away team in a player vs player game make subs and stuff. Or it would have been an epic 5-6 to the Arsenal for sure.
I wouldn't say it's this version. It's been a thing for quite a while really, just too many goals.
I patched CM01/02 a while back to have tons of goals (even more than usual for that game, like top AI strikers getting 50 in a season) which was a bit of fun for a bit but I can imagine it gets quite annoying eventually if it can’t be scaled back.
Half my squad is becoming unsettled because big clubs are coming in with bids at like a third of their value. How great.
I didn't realise until now that my current star man is actually a real player in real life
106 goals in 107 starts so far, plus plucked from the Chelsea reserve team which is also just like our real transfer strategy.
European Journeyman Game - 2029/30 - St. Gallen - End of Season Update
So fighting on three fronts, including Europe, how did we do?
The League
The most dominant league campaign I've overseen so far, we even ended up breaking the Swiss points record - beating Young Boys real life mark set in 2019.
The Cup
If there's one thing 9 seasons of this save (and previous experiences) have taught me it's that it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter who you're playing, 1-0 is NEVER enough. There will always be some bullshit that comes along and fucks you. In this game it was a massively overhit cross that one of my players decided to divert to the penalty spot by pushing an opposition player who'd have never got anywhere near it.
Europe
I said above a domestic double was the minimum requirement to make this season a success in my mind, so having fucked that up it was all on the Europa Conference League to make up for it. Did we?
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Me
While all this was going on a job came along in March that (having turned Galatasaray down pre-Christmas) I felt I had to go for. I got it and as of 7th June 2030 I am now manager of...
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The state of this:
There really needs to be a way to check this shit out before you take a job. Assuming Turkey has an equivalent of companies house/access to Google, it'd be a realistic thing to be able to check in real life and as we know, SI are all about that realism.
I joined with a transfer budget of £11m, which has already been cut to £3m only two days into the job. I left a club in Switzerland with no debt, £30m in the bank and IIRC, a guaranteed spot in this season's Champions League.
Thailand are trying to get him to switch from England to Thailand.I didn't realise until now that my current star man is actually a real player in real life
106 goals in 107 starts so far, plus plucked from the Chelsea reserve team which is also just like our real transfer strategy.
Yeah that's a really annoying part of the game. Nowadays, I will often outright reject interviews with clubs with finances lower than "secure" (once my reputation allows for that, of course). On occasion I will settle for "okay" but only if it's a really interesting job.There really needs to be a way to check this shit out before you take a job. Assuming Turkey has an equivalent of companies house/access to Google, it'd be a realistic thing to be able to check in real life and as we know, SI are all about that realism.
I joined with a transfer budget of £11m, which has already been cut to £3m only two days into the job. I left a club in Switzerland with no debt, £30m in the bank and IIRC, a guaranteed spot in this season's Champions League.
As for my save, I almost agreed to join PSV at the end of the season and it was exactly the kind of club I was looking for, but then it fell through because I remembered something: A few versions back, I agreed in January to join a club at the end of the season. When you do that, you lose all control over transfers at your current club. Of course the board proceeded to sell my three best players just days later and I wasn't even able to sign new players to replace them. So in my current save, with a good 8-9 players being unhappy because big clubs bombarded me with stupidly low offers, it would have been a disaster. My plan this time around was to try and delay the PSV deal until after the January transfer window was over, but sadly PSV wouldn't go for it and there's also no way to actually "change" the deal with them so that I take over instantly. So it was a bit of a lose-lose situation and I decided to cancel the deal.
Last edited by Adramelch; 21-04-2023 at 10:19 AM.
Slavia Prague 2029/30 Season
After a stellar domestic campaign but a somewhat disappointing European run last season, the goal this season was clear. The dominance on the domestic front was all but guaranteed, so Europe is where our focus was at. I wasn't given all that much money to spend, but I managed to offload all of the players that weren't part of my plans, and that left us with a lot of leeway in the wage department, as well as some extra cash to spend on transfers. In the end we spent a total of 33m, while recouping 26m, leaving us with a decent bit of money if need be, which I didn't actually end up spending. We signed 8 players in total, the 5 most important of which were:
By far the most impressive of the lot and a player that solved probably the biggest issue in our squad, in the center of the defence. And to think that he only cost us 2.5m, such a great piece of business.
This lad I signed just because he was young, Czech and had a lot of potential, but over the course of the season, not only did he convince me to sell Lingr (a player that spent 10 seasons at the club), but he also became an important part of our squad. Cost a hefty-ish 6.5m, but on hindsight that was quite the bargain.
The second attacking midfielder to join the club this season. This lad was meant to be the bigger deal of the two, but he didn't quite hit the mark, so ended up being dethroned by Barone. Definitely not a bad move though, at a 4.6m price and with the potential he seems to have.
Another midfielder and a similar story with Gonzalez. Came with a lot of promise but didn't quite meet expectations. With him being a bit older and costing 9m, he might not be considered a successful signing, but he only had 6 months at the club, so might well come good.
The story with Stojanovic is a bit of a weird one. We didn't need a striker at all, but signing him allowed me to transform my backup striker to a backup left winger, since we really struggled finding a good player there. And seeing as Stojanovic only cost 2.3m, it was somewhat of a no-brainer. He even ended up grabbing 10 goals almost exclusively off the bench so a great piece of business really.
And with all that, let's get straight to the action:
More of the same really. We broke all sorts of records (well the ones we established last season basically) again, with most wins and points. Funnily enough we finished with exactly the same amount of goals scored and conceded. We also had our token bullshit loss again in an extremely similar manner, at home, against relegation fodder (at the time at least) in this silly game. As for the cup, we made it to the final and then had the most ridiculous game I've had in this save, with a (seemingly, you can't really quite tell from the 3d graphics) bullshit penalty, and two red cards by the hour mark, to lose 3-1. Oh well.
As for Europe, this time around we didn't start straight in the group stage, but we instead had to go through the playoff round. We were unseeded, but had a rather favourable draw, as we were pitted against Young Boys. Both games were competitive, but we just didn't have our scoring boots on and we ended up losing both 1-0. A bit of a punch in the gut, but in retrospect they probably were the better side, however marginally. The good side of that was that we would be playing in a more manageable competition. But I didn't expect us to be quite that good:
Recording just a singular loss in 12 games was just incredible, and that came at the hands of Liverpool in the quarters. We were somewhat unlucky getting Liverpool, with teams like Anderlecht, Salzburg, Mainz and Lyon still in the competition, but in any case we brought the game to them and we were eliminated by the slightest of margins. Just a bit better finishing and we'd have gotten them to extra time but it wasn't to be. Still an amazing performance nevertheless.
Similar case as last season. Delibasic and Ener Sali were just incredible throughout the season, but a few others also pitched in here and there with Izquierdo and Padua forming a formidable duo in defence and Veratschnig scoring some spectacular goals that won us games. Olejnik was a goalkeeper that I thought might provide some more stability, but in the end he was just as inconsistent as every other goalkeeper I've had and made no notable difference.
As for what comes next, I've already spoken about my intentions of leaving Slavia at the end of the season, and I've also explained the predicament I found myself in January with the PSV job. In the end, I missed out on that job, but it ended up being the better move, as just a month later I found an even more exciting opportunity:
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Last edited by Adramelch; 21-04-2023 at 08:28 PM.
Match of the Day's edit team had a hell of a time putting this final day episode together.
Where’s Xabi Alonso gone, @Adramelch? Liverpool?
I'm a twit
He was sacked in 2023 and is now seemingly retired (not in the game at all), so it must have been rough times for him.Where’s Xabi Alonso gone, @Adramelch? Liverpool?
European Journeyman Game - 2030/31 - Fenerbahce - End of Season Update
Our first season in Turkey was ultimately a disappointing one that could have been so much more.
We went into our last game away at Galatasaray level of points with them but with the better head to head record, so all we needed was a point. 3-3 going into injury time the ref put 6 minutes on the board (FFS) and we conceded shortly after from some proper bullshit and couldn't get an equaliser.
We then fucked the cup final, despite having home advantage, with an horrific performance.
Last piece of the jigsaw was my third attempt at the Europa Conference League and having reached the quarter-finals with FCSB and the semi's with St. Gallen I was confident of winning with Fenerbache. We didn't.
The win at home vs. Nice set us up nicely but a red card early on in France saw us capitulate.
The only good thing to come out of this season is at some point my rep ticked up to 75%, which made me a four star manager. I've a year left on my contract here and with nothing interesting available I think I'll at least see that out.
While you came short of everything, you were right there, so a decent first season all things considered if you ask me. Better than how my season is going so far, I can tell you that much.
On a separate note, I do wonder when SI will actually figure out how to properly implement "interfering with play". I guess it's completely on brand for them to implement something for realism and have it be completely unrealistic though.
Edit: What a steady character this guy:
Last edited by Adramelch; 22-04-2023 at 07:35 PM.
Leverkusen 2030/31 Season
As you may have noticed I've been flying through the seasons courtesy of (Orthodox) Easter holidays combined with some good old Covid action, so here's another one.
This season taught me an important lesson if anything: If the board tells you the club makes enough money to afford a 160m transfer budget and 3m p/w on wages, don't actually trust them because they are idiots. Even if the club has 220m in the bank. Mind you I should have known better than to spend 210m on transfers, even if we also brought in 90m from players sold and also were spending significantly less money (2.4m p/w) on wages than our budget allowed. Come January, the club was already around 30m in the red and the board removed any remaining transfer budget (I think it was at around 50-ish million at that point) and slashed the wage budget to 2m p/w. Seeing as the squad was relatively big I decided to sell some players that only appeared infrequently, recouping the 30m we were missing, but we also had to let a star player go for 54m (his release clause), without being able to offer him a contract or find a replacement. In the end, even though our net spending was 40m and we also earned 100m through our league finished, the club still managed to record a 150m loss this season. I am partially to blame of course, but boy is that just pure ineptitude by the board.
With that harsh reality established, let's look at the rest of the situation at the club. Throughout the save the club has basically retained its current real life status, where it fluctuates between 4th and 7th, however last season they only managed to finish 10th, which explains why the post became vacant. The good news about that is that I would have a relatively stress-free first season, since there would be no European football on the table. Upon a first look, the squad was very bloated so I set out to offload the dead wood with middling success. That said, the squad was relatively solid with decent depth. Out of all the players in the squad the following were the ones that immediately stood out (with this one being the player that we lost in January):
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As you can see all of them were in defence or attack, so it was pretty clear where the gaps were, and which positions we had to improve upon. To that end, those are our most important signings:
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With no European football, the board's expectations were for us to qualify for the Champions League (which I thought was quite optimistic seeing as the club hasn't finished in the top 4 in the last 4 years) and to reach the quarter finals in the cup. I mentioned in a previous post that my season was going bad, but it would appear that I just overestimated the level of our squad compared to the big boys. Bayern and Leipzig were light years ahead of us in terms of quality, with Dortmund also being quite a bit better than us. So with that in mind, the goal was clearly set at finishing 4th. By the looks of it our main competition would be Wolfsburg, who'd finished 4th in the last three seasons and Eintracht who were there or thereabouts for several years.
Our start was pretty mediocre and it seemed like top 4 might be out of reach. But with the squad getting more comfortable with my tactics and each other, and the fact that the hardest games were behind us (three of our first four games were Eintracht, Bayern and Dortmund away, things started to pick up and once we reached 4th (15 games in) we just stayed there and increased our gap with the rest, bringing us to a very comfortable finish in the Champions League spots, where we even gave Dortmund a run for their money for 3rd. In fact, 71 points is the second highest tally in the club's history, and the highest in the last 31 years, so the season was definitely a success on that front. I just had higher expectations that I should have had I reckon. Our cup run was also quite successful as we lost 3-1 at Leipzig in the semi-finals, after eliminating Bayern in the previous round.
A bit of a mixed bag if I'm being honest. The only proper stand-out player was Viola who was consistently solid between the goalposts. The rest of them had flashes of brilliance, but also tended to disappear too often for my liking. I guess if I had to single out an outfield player it would have to be Paz, who was the only that generally made things happen on the attacking front, even though I would have liked him to score more, but maybe that's too much to ask.
So looking at the future, my intention is to maybe stay here a couple of seasons and try and make Leverkusen one of the big boys, even if that doesn't lead to any titles. Just being able to hang with Bayern and Leipzig would be a big enough achievement for me to consider my stint here a success. Obviously I'll have to be careful with the money I spend as I don't want to find myself in a similar situation again. Of course that would mean that it will be harder to improve the squad, but hopefully we can do some bargain hunting and find some diamonds in the rough.
Last edited by Adramelch; 22-04-2023 at 09:59 PM.
It's crazy how retarded the boards can be with the budgets they offer. I've no idea how Fenerbahce fucked things up so much that they needed to take out £230m of loans in 2028, but having done that the board still offered me the ability to spend £800k p/w on wages. I've now got it down to just under £500k p/w which I think is enough for us to make the loan repayments and still break even, but anything more than that and we're racking up more debt without Champions League football.
Quick update on how our 2031/32 Conference League campaign ended up playing out. Having made it to the knockout playoff we got drawn against FC Nordsjælland, and following a 0-0 draw at home where we dominated we got our rewards in the return game as we smashed them 4-1 to reach the last 16. Olympiakos were our opponents, so a swift exit was the expectation, however we deservedly beat them 3-0 at our place before nicking a goal away & clinging on for our lives to go though 4-3 on aggregate. That would be as far as we'd go though, as by that point we were obviously the worst team left by far & it was left to Everton to do the honours, taking us down 7-3 over the two legs.
That's obviously still a huge run for us, and we're continuing to climb towards the top 20 in the coefficients, so another couple of good years should see us reach the next jump point for better qualification places. We've drawn HJK in the 2032/33 Champions League qualifiers, which seems like a winnable tie, and if we do get through it'll be Rosenborg next, so I feel like there's a decent chance we're playing European group stage football at a higher level than the Conference League this year.
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I'll do a proper Euro 2032 Latvia update with the main end of year one, but we drew England, Belgium & Denmark, so I'm pretty sure you can figure out how that went for us.
This feature's funny when it's you lot:
I'm a twit
On top of that madness, one of the board's expectations is for me to increase the club's commercial revenue. Not sign high profile players or anything, just generally increase commercial revenue. How is that the manager's responsibility? On top of that they have the token "make the most from set-pieces" expectation. Surely that's not an actual thing right?
You've all inspired me to go journeyman. Got most of Europe loaded. National C badge and Sunday league footballer experience. Holidayed to 1 Dec and then applied for every job. So here we are... at Sund IF in Sweden's something'th tier. Competition reputation – 140. No budget for transfers or wages, club £25k in the red, best player had an arranged transfer before I arrived. Can't bring any players in, and my best player according to stars is a 16-year-old prospect. Oooer.
Playing this and its phenomenal possession football, rock solid and the front three confuse defences as they're so deep then break:
The four matches since creating:
Wayne Rooney has spent the last 6 years running them into the ground:
But still.
Being approached for the job and then losing out to Malky Mackay.
Proper football man is Malky.
I lolled hard at that. The good news is that Malky might take them down and make it an even better job next time it comes up.
I bet Malky's known for making set pieces an important part of the game, which is a very real criteria that decisions are based on in real life
European Journeyman Game - 2031/32 - Fenerbahce - End of Season Update
If I can interrupt the porn links, it's update time.
After the nasty business with Man Utd, I focused on finishing the season with Fenerbahce and unlike last season we didn't fuck up domestically.
The League
Wasn't quite as nervy as the table may look as we won it with a game to spare.
The Cup
We then moved onto the cup final and no mistake this time:
Europe
Sadly this was a complete shitfest from start to finish.
Seems I'm destined never to win the Europa Conference League.
The Future
With my contract expiring I was keen on renewing, but a lot of my players had paltry minimum fee release clauses and the vultures were circling. That coupled with a bit of a managerial merry go round after the Euros made the job that became available all the more appealing. They've just won their league so I will finally find out how much prize money you get for the new fangled Champions League group stage and they seem like a decent springboard to either go for the Benfica job when their current manager retires or a chance at a big club in the top 5 leagues (well 4, as I won't be taking any job in France bar PSG and I'll need to be 5 star rep for that I'd imagine). Anyway, in the meantime we are now manage of:
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Great choice that. Have quite a few fond memories with them in multiple Jman saves.
Restrictions wise the Dutch league doesn't seem to have any either, which is pretty facking sweet.
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