PC Football Manager 2020

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melbournemartin said:
I'm curious. I've loved FM for a while. Do you guys prefer the on field or off field action? I know some people who sim through all the games and only care about signing and developing players, but then I also know folks who get super into each match.
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I started playing on Champ Manager 3, way, way, way before they introduced the match engine, and I could just never get used to it. It disrupted my managerial flow!

I always sim games with match engine disabled, text commentary only, and on the highest speed. I'll vary the speed or pause to make tactical changes but that's about it.
 
I like getting through seasons pretty quick, so I usually sim through games (unless they are big games or finals) and focus on signing and developing.
This way I can get on with building my team and getting promoted without getting bogged down playing every match.
Each to their own though.
 
melbournemartin said:
I'm curious. I've loved FM for a while. Do you guys prefer the on field or off field action? I know some people who sim through all the games and only care about signing and developing players, but then I also know folks who get super into each match.
Click to expand...

I try to keep a balance. I play on Key highlights so I don't labour over each and every highlight, and admittedly I much prefer the development side of the game to crafting a tactic.
 

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6th season now with Merthyr Town, doing a Welsh-only dafuge challenge (sim a year into the future from the start and take over a team promoted into the Conference North/South). 2nd season in the fifth tier and we take home the title, League 2 and professional status awaits!
 
As a relatively new player, the scouting, developing and the pre-match tactics are the interesting part for me.

But I finished my second season as Bradford City tonight, and what does any of that work mean if you aren't going enjoy the satisfaction of watching your results? In the playoff final I was 2-0 down after 55 minutes, I swung some changes, and I scored the winner in the 94th minute, securing double promotion and heading up to the Championship.

That ain't s**t if you're just simulating the game and looking at the score. But when you're watching it, having dedicated hours of work into it? If I'd had any gatorade in the fridge I might've poured it on myself, that's how exciting it was.
 
League 2 to League 1 didn't feel like that big of a jump.

But holy s**t, League 1 to Championship is a massive jump. It's quite disconcerting to start the season with an email telling me about about my wage bill of $156k a week... which is the lowest in the Championship, is almost $80k a week less than the 2nd-lowest spending side, and is about 10% of what Crystal Palace were spending. On $99k a week, Wilfred Zaha earns more in a week than my whole starting 11.

It's a good way to learn the intricacies of the game and how involved you need to be with them though. I started the season with a draw and a loss, so I started going deep down the rabbit hole of reading scouting reports and setting individual orders for my players; it's also helping me identify gaps in coaching and in player attributes, so I can be more specific in filling needs going forward.

I'm currently 5 games into the season and I'm on 5 points, just out of the drop zone. I think it's going to be a long season!

My only regret now is that I just didn't go the whole hog. As my first save involving a lower division team, I thought League 2 was already pretty ambitious. But now I wish I'd just started from Vanarama north or south, cos I'm unlikely to ever spend this much time on an English League save again.
 
Smashing the 03/04 DB on FM19.

I won the league easily, lost in the quarters of the CL to United and lost the FA Cup to Chelsea.

My squad is as follows

Lehmann
Lauren Carvalho Campbell Cole
Carrick Vieira
Simao--------------------Pires
Adriano----Henry​
Robben
Messi
Essien
Cesc
Robinho
Tevez
Dunn
--
Alves
P. Ferreira
Kompany
Vidic
Toure
Lahm
Clichy
Gilberto Silva
Parlour
Jeffers

I'm about to agree a deal with Xavi for his buyout of 24m. So will probably drop Adriano and play three in the middle.

Messi and Cesc are 17, Robben, Alves, Lahm and Essien 20, Robinho, Tevez and Kompany 18, Vidic, Carrick and Adriano 22.

Henry scored 31 goals last season. Pires is wild as well, Robben a great option on the bench. Probably too stacked at RB, but Alves for 16m and 20 years old was a no brainer.

CR7 destroys me every time, just like real life. United have added Frings, Jankulovski, Yobo and Thuram and to their already great squad.
 
Easy to forget that these are all real players, and everything is based on real data, when you see comments that are just plainly offensive.

I think I'd be pretty pissed off if I were a footballer and FM decided that I shouldn't dive into tackles because I "lack bravery"!
 
I had my first real manna from heaven free agent moment a few days ago.

It's my 3rd season as Bradford City (2021/22), my first in the Championship and, as I noted above, I'm shedding tears at how big the step up from League 1 to Championship is. I was about 10 matches into the season and only on about 6 or 7 points, having dropped points to the teams expected to be near the bottom of the table.

Then in October a player agent suggested a free agent who seemed to have a bit of a pedigree, so I offered him a trial. In hindsight, it's crazy that he accepted.

Enter 24 year old German free again striker Cedric Teuchert, who'd spent most of his career up to that stage not playing for Schalke, and had been a FA since the pre-season a few months earlier. Despite not playing, he had a 4 star current ability, and his strong attributes were exactly where I like them. I offered as much as I could, still expecting to be outbid... and I wasn't.

Fast forward to the end of the season... and I didn't lose a league game after January. In the 29 games Teuchert played up until match day 46, he scored 24 friggen goals and had an average match rating of 7.8 (and I couldn't even have him take pens, cos despite having a good rating he kept spraying them. He missed 3 and scored none before I sacked him).

From 6 or 7 points after 10 matches, I managed to make it all the way up to 5th spot. Having not lost in forever, and having had essentially my own version of Messi take over the Championship... imagine how gutted I was when Bristol City ended up beating me in the playoff semi quite easily :(


Sadly, after hoping to consolidate on that playoff appearance, I've already screwed up the 2022/23 series. I'd been among the most injury-hit teams in my league in the previous 2 seasons, so I wanted to experiment with a slightly more physical off season. What I didn't realise was that it was a shortened off season cos of the Qatar World Cup. So as soon as the season started my medical room started to look like a COVID clinic in Florida. I lost all 3 starting midfielders for 8 weeks+, and lost my best wide player until after the WC break. We're currently a couple of matches before the World Cup break, and it's not going well.

At least I have an Iranian kid who hasn't been able to play a lot for me, but whose ability is sky rocketing just on the international game time he's getting.
 
Struggling at the moment with Merthyr, brought them from Vanarama North up to League 2 now, second season and I'm sitting 17th.

Managed to nab Ben Davies on a free though, albeit for 7 months until he retires. Still by far the best player to come through the club:

1595405410042.png
 
In bad news, the 2nd wave has meant there are no jobs for me to apply for.

In good news, * me I have a lot of time for FM now! Or is that also bad news? It's a wildly addictive game, hey? I had to not even load it up today or yesterday - something that was easy to have on the background and progress a bit while watching tv or cooking dinner was starting to feel a little out of control!

My progress was helped though by the fact I've had a lot of meaningless games, and I've developed a preparedness to just watch the goals and text commentary unless it's important one that I'm going to be emotionally invested in.

For example, I ended up being able to skip most of the 2nd half of the 2022/23 season. I went into the World Cup break in 2nd last and genuinely shitting myself about potential relegation (that hadn't been in the plans!). Then I came back from the break like a house on fire, didn't lose a game between Boxing Day and the end of January... and it was just mid table boredom from there. So I managed to get through the 2nd half of that season in like a day. (I literally had like an 8-10 week period from Feb through April where I didn't move from 12th spot. I ended up getting as high as 9th when other teams had games in hand, and finished 11th.)

The time consuming bit was doing an entire staff overhaul in the 2023 off season. I'd really had it as set and forget since I'd started the save - the U23 and U18 teams were looked after by the DOF, and I wasn't actively upgrading the senior staff. Combined with digging really hard in scouting it took ages. I replaced at least three-quarters of my staff (including the U23 & U18 teams, which I took control of along with pretty much everything else), and I identified about 4-5 (realistic) prospects for each position that I wanted to pursue during the 2nd half of this season, and during the first expected EPL season. (Like, the perfect player - not just "striker", but Poacher who can also play on the right wing as depth for example)

The time spent paid off though. The 2023/24 season was barely even a challenge. I was killing it from the start, and was never outside the top 4. Made easier by the fact that, by Christmas, there was a huge gap between 6 and 7. So the top 4 were 2 wins clear of 5, and then 5 and 6 were 2 wins clear of 7.

Still, heartbreak at the end of the season... I hadn't been top all season, but as the season went on, I kept winning, and I got close to the top, * I wanted it. All I'd won was that pointless leasing.com trophy, and I kept having people talk about my "complete absence" of silverware.

In the 3rd last game of the season, I beat ladder leading West Brom... and I went top. I was so happy! I was going to win the Championship... until I had a very, very severe "almost threw my laptop off the balcony" moment. Playing Millwall in the final game and I had to win. At half time I was 2-0 up. In the 85th minute I concede one of those own goals that makes you question everything about the gameplay, it was just so ridiculous. I hung on for the 3 minutes of announced injury time... but we were still playing after 95 minutes, for no reason at all. There'd been no delays in injury time. Of course they scored with the last kick of the game, after 95 minutes and 42 seconds.

Yeah, automatic promotion, but still no real silverware :(

Still, as a brand new player who only cut my teeth on FM with a couple of A-League seasons, I feel like getting from League 2 to the EPL in 5 seasons is pretty good. Especially when, in that time, my signings were 99% free agents - the Board hadn't given me a dollar to spend in the transfer market in 5 seasons. The only 1.7m pounds spent on transfers were on a guy that I asked the board to take over negotiations for.
 
SI have confirmed there will be a FM21 albeit a bit of a later release.
 

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