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Post by jawzy on Sept 20, 2020 19:19:29 GMT
Oddly i used to be an only commetery kinda guy, but started to watch key highlights in fm19. and have stuck with it.
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 21, 2020 10:52:37 GMT
I've only just switched from comprehensive to extended highlights. Could explain why I make such slow progress...
I only use commentary when I can't bear to watch and want the match to end as quickly as possible.
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Post by chaodck on Sept 21, 2020 13:01:25 GMT
I've only just switched from comprehensive to extended highlights. Could explain why I make such slow progress... I only use commentary when I can't bear to watch and want the match to end as quickly as possible. My setup for the last two years has been "Key Highlights in 2-D" and of course no replays. The game runs so much faster. If by any means there's a game I can't be arsed to watch, I just use the instant result button.
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 21, 2020 20:31:37 GMT
I know this would probably be hard to code, but one thing I would really like to see would be some kind of memory added for backroom staff.
I let my assistant take care of the opposition instructions. We've just played Locomotive Moscow in the Europa League group stages. One of their wingers was highlighted as a danger man before the match and lo and behold sets up the opening goal for them inside the first ten minutes. My assistant decides it would be a good idea to close down the winger and instructs the players to do so.
Cut to the return match about a fortnight later. We take an early lead. The same winger sets up the equaliser. After 66 minutes the assistant manager pipes up: "Player X is a really accomplished crosser of the ball. We should close him down more often!"
No shit Sherlock.
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Post by chaodck on Sept 22, 2020 22:40:31 GMT
Finally read your last update mate and I'm pretty happy with what you've been able to do so far. Great league dominance to start, specially seeing you beat one of the bigs already, what are you looking regarding Europe? Did you fall to the Europa League? Can't tell which round you were dropped into. Keep it up mate, I'm loving this save.
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 24, 2020 20:41:45 GMT
Finally read your last update mate and I'm pretty happy with what you've been able to do so far. Great league dominance to start, specially seeing you beat one of the bigs already, what are you looking regarding Europe? Did you fall to the Europa League? Can't tell which round you were dropped into. Keep it up mate, I'm loving this save. Yeah, we dropped into the Europa League, which surprised me to be honest. I assumed my European football was over at that point but it seems that they make it difficult to get out of the extra six or eight games a season.
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 24, 2020 21:05:19 GMT
Season 5 - 2023/24 mid-season update Well, I haven't exactly been complying with the board's desire for mid-table football... Results have (obviously) been good and performances have returned to their previous solidity in general. I'm particularly pleased with the win over Valencia in December as it was a dead rubber and I had rotated my team pretty heavily. There was some indication of a continential hangover after my first couple of Europa League group matches, but that went away quietly and we just kept on keeping on.
We finished second in the Europa League group and now face Shakhtar who have just been knocked out of Ajax's Champions League group. I think this may be the end of our run, but it's been a good first European campaign.
The defeat to Malmo was particularly annoying as we dominated and they had four shots all game. Lorenzo Avogadri had just picked up an injury so I (unwisely, with hindsight) gave Kelvin Valpoort his full debut and he didn't do very well. I have faith that he will come good in the long run, but this was too much too soon for him. Ibrahim El Kadiri has also suffered torn knee ligaments so has missed most of November and December but was in and out of the side before that. Noah Crone hasn't quite been the star I hoped and has shown a tendency to pick up knocks which disrupt his form.
The big player news though concerns Joel Paulo. As it turns out, he was just too good for us.
I'm not overly happy that he has gone to Ajax, but I'm over the moon with the fee. They offered €20m originally and I negotiated hard, figuring I was pretty much in a win-win situation. I'm prehaps not savvy enough with FM to start a bidding war though, which might have been even more successful. Next time, I'll see what I can do to get others involved. On the bright side, there were some incoming bargains.
Gerald Yeboah set me back the princely sum of €52,000. Yes, you read that right, I am not missing any zeroes. Michael Adeniyi was free and will provide strong competition in midfield even as I train him to be a IWB on the right. As my wing-backs often find themselves overlapping despite playing as IWBs, I'm looking to take advantage of the fact that he's possibly the best crosser at the club already. Finally, Inge Dalene, also on a free. I like his personality and his mental attributes, but his pace leaves something to be desired. I'm interested to see how he develops but it's pretty much a no-risk signing.
I've also managed to extend Tommaso Merletti's loan again. This will be five consecutive seasons on loan from Milan, who only want a 10% wage contribution.
Other than that, I've managed to upgrade the Data Analysis facilities again and the training facility upgrade completed in October, so our facilities look like this:
Clearly the next target has to be the junior coaching.
However, the sale of Joel Paulo, combined with the ease with which we have gone from Keuken Kampioen side to Eredivisie title challengers has left me a little empty at the moment, so I am 99% certain that I will finish this season and put the save on ice. I will definitely come back to it as I do genuinely love Volendam as a club and want to lead them to glory, but at the moment I am feeling less motivated about that point that we all (hope to) reach in a save where a lot of work goes into making only marginal progress in order to go from second to first. I have also been struggling to ignore the temptation of Sicily as mentioned in at least one previous post, so I'll start writing about something there when I get it going. You may see me flick back and forth from one save to the other if I'm not earning enough green dots for my dopamine fix in Sicily.
Anyway, thanks for reading! I'll post a quick update with any major signings before the end of January and then do a season round up.
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 24, 2020 21:09:50 GMT
PS. I should have mentioned that Joel Paulo has already broken the club record for assists in a season with 14 despite leaving in early January. Also, the fact that he is 21, gone to Ajax rather than one of the super clubs and that teams seem to regularly pay over €100m for a player now means that we can hope for a big future fee too. This may be the best transfer deal (signing and sale) I've ever made in FM.
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 26, 2020 20:11:44 GMT
Season 5 - 2023/24 end of season round up I think I've learnt more in the last six months of game time than in all but the very first season.
The best place to start is with the transfers.
Transfers
After Joel Paulo left, I had a gap in the wide positions and €10m burning a hole in my pocket. It was this that provoked my first mistake(s). Originally, I had planned to move Carlo Holse over to the left and use Ibrahim El Kadiri on the right when he came back from injury, with Noah Crone and Daniel Sinani as backup wide options. I also had David Djunderski who could play all the way up the right hand side and had done so pretty well on a couple of occasions. However, after Joel Paulo, Sinani seemed like a downgrade and El Kadiri was still a way off returning, so I went shopping.
First on my shopping list was Edgar Pacheco, an Angolan I planned to retrain for the right flank. Part of the reason I wanted him was that he had been my main target in the spring/summer when I was arranging Carlo Holse's transfer but his agent had been awkward and the move had fallen through and now my obstinacy found a target and I was determined to get him regardless. Unfortunately, his agent was still awkward and this move took a couple of attempts to finalise. So, while I waited for Pacheco, I hurried after alternatives. Ticking all the boxes were Tiago Gouveia and Max Svensson. Both were quick, right-footed, versatile and could cross well. As you can see from the screenshots, I couldn't decide between them and ended up signing both. And the Pacheco agreed to join me and I ended up with basically three players for one vacancy. I offloaded Daniel Sinani to Twente for €800,000 which was pure profit, but also only half of what he was worth. This episode of transfer stupidity, combined with the other incoming transfers in January, then caused me problems when it came to registering players for the knockout stages of the Europa League. Suddenly, I couldn't include every member of my bloated squad and a couple of them, Edgar Pacheco and Michael Adeniyi, kicked off and the majority of the squad felt that Adeniyi had every right to be annoyed. For a new signing from an obscure club, he had a lot of influence very quickly. Cue a series of individual chats and a team meeting to address the issue and salvage some of the squad's morale. This was the first time I'd made a significant mis-step with regard to the dynamics but there was a big lesson in there. For the sake of completeness, here are the rest of the January transfers.
Caique (whose name, for comic reasons, I am pronouncing 'Cake') is a good keeper available on a free. Pablo Moreno is a young striker I briefly had on trial eighteen months earlier but was also brought in as cover for any of the front three in another moment of stupidity. €3,800 a week down the drain as there was no real need for him. The outgoings were minimal after Joel Paulo. Sinani's departure has already been covered. With Cake signing, Karlstrom was surplus to requirements, so I got what I could for him in terms of a fee. It means a marginal profit (about €4,500) but little else. Reda Akmum and Jakob Breimyr weren't getting as much football as they wanted or needed so I loaned them out but hope they can contribute at some point in the future. In Breimyr's case, his value had dropped below what I had paid for him so I was reluctant to offload him permanently. Results
So with all the comings and goings covered, on to the results. (There may be some overlap with results you've already seen in earlier posts, particularly the cups...)
Eredivisie: The second half of the season was a little bit of an anti-climax. We kept getting the results, but the performances were a little flat and we were clearly suffering from the goings on in the January transfer window. Firstly, none of the players that came in could quite match what Joel Paulo had to offer us. Secondly, the disruption to the tactical understanding by attempting to inegrate so many new signings was noticeable. Finally, morale was low after my European registration blunder and it all came back to bite me, albeit gently. We ended up cemented in 2nd place with four games to go, so I rotated the team a little. Performances there weren't great either and Joseph Asare had to rescue us on more than one occasion.
KNVB Beker: I was hoping to go further than this, but we'd laboured into the quarter finals and then faced Ajax. There's only one Dutch team who makes my heart sink now, and it's them. Even more frustrating about this is that we should have been on a high, having beaten them in the league only four days earlier, but the performance wasn't great and we exited the cup.
Europa League: As predicted, our run ended at the hands of Shakhtar. All that aggro with the squad for what was two matches in the end. The second leg was, however, the most aggravating match of the season. I'll just put this here to give you some idea as to why... To give a little more context, only three or four of their shots came before we went down to nine men. And Giovanni Troupee broke his leg. I nearly posted something in here about how much I hate this game at the final whistle. So we ended the season like this: Player performances A few key points from this: - Joseph Asare is the first player of mine to score over 20 goals in a season - not bad considering he started as backup
- Regarding the other strikers, Noah Crone did pretty well, getting into double figures despite losing his place in the starting line up early on and suffering with niggling injuries. His downfall lies in (a) the injuries and (b) his inability to string together a goalscoring run in the same way Asare did. Attributes-wise, he is still the superior striker. Rene van de Looi has progressed really well and is at a crossroads - he probably won't get enough chances next season but really needs football, so I will consider loaning him out unless someone comes in with a very big bid for one of the other two.
- None of the new signings really set the world alight. I'm starting to see the benefits of taking chaodck 's approach and bringing players in and sticking them into the B team for six months, and it's something I will try to use in future.
- Carlo Holse blew hot and cold but still equalled the club record for assists this season. Or would have done if Joel Paulo hadn't broken it before Christmas...
Youth intakeThe youth intake preview had only one green line, talking about the quantity of players, so I didn't bother with a screenshot, but in the event there were a couple of decent prospects in there. Finances Financially, we're very strong.
Looking forward
As mentioned previously, I'm going to pause this save here. I've thoroughly enjoyed this so far but I've got to a point where I fancy something fresh, even if only briefly. I think I've reached the point where we are comfortably the second-best side in the Netherlands but the gap to bridge between us and Ajax is huge. The Joel Paulo transfer is a prime example - we were challenging them for the title and yet they could afford to spend €40m on my best player. They then pay him €94,000 a week (for reference, my highest-paid player earns €13,250 a week). His transfer was part of a €147m outlay this season alone, while we spent €8.5m in total and have been given a similar figure for the coming summer.
The board have agreed to expand the stadium, so we can start to increase our income but it will be a long, slow process to overtake them at the pinnacle of Dutch football.
Thanks for reading this far, and keep your eyes peeled for further updates at some indeterminate point in the future!
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Post by dalenichol on Sept 26, 2020 21:02:16 GMT
Good luck with any future save, buddy! You're up to a good point here and there's definitely something to build on if you come back to it, that's the main thing. Any idea where you're thinking of next?
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 27, 2020 10:19:04 GMT
Thanks Dale, I'm very pleased with how things have gone and I will definitely come back to this save. I doubt I'll be an early adopter of FM21 and my history suggests that I'll keep playing this version for ages, so I've got plenty of time to come back to it. I'm surprised by just how much I like this version of the game - I haven't been this hooked in years.
Stupidly, I spent most of the second half of last season just churning through the matches, looking forward to the self-imposed point at which I could pause the save and load up a new one. I originally thought I would give my final post-match team talk of the season, take a bunch of screenshots, write the post above and exit the game. In reality, I've chosen the worst possible time to do this as pre-season is probably my favourite part of the FM year and so I've continued for a few weeks, just to do some summer wheeling and dealing. I may play the Super Cup and then finally load a new save.
Given how badly Forest are doing in real life, I'm sorely tempted to try a season with them to see if I can do better. I always find that the worse they do in reality, the more I play FM to try to put the universe right if that makes any sense. However, I find the actual matches in FM one of the least enjoyable parts so the idea of a 46 game season, plus cups, plus the board expectation of play-offs (meaning at least two more matches) a real deterrent. I'm also leaving the Netherlands because I'm a bit annoyed about the imbalance caused by the money swilling around and I don't think moving to England is really going to improve that situation!
So, as I think I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I'm going to try one of the league packs (I think it's Timo's?) and start off in the Sicilian amateur leagues. I've never managed amateurs before because I really struggle with assessing players at the weaker end of the scale so it will be an interesting challenge in that regard. I also feel a little tied to the 4-3-3 with Volendam and I'd really like to try a different tactical approach (again, just to learn a system), probably a 4-4-2 diamond variant or maybe a 3-5-2 as I've never had much success with a back three. The problem is that there are so many clubs to choose from at that level in Italy, so it will be a difficult decision. I'm tempted by the thought of trying to build someone tiny or rebuild a bigger club (e.g. Siracusa, who were in Serie C back on FM17), or possibly do a Sicilian-club journeyman-type save.
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Post by dalenichol on Sept 27, 2020 16:29:07 GMT
Yeah, I completely understand. I'm always hesitant with England due to the sheer volume of matches in the lower tiers. I'd considered the 6th or 7th tier of England before starting my current save, but it's just too much especially with the new game realistically around the corner (and I've pre ordered it, because I'm a glutton for punishment)
I have the same issue regarding player judgement at a lower level (I'm pretty terrible at it in general, tbh) and one thing I'll just make a point of mentioning, if you are going to Italy, is that if you're loading Serie D/Eccelenza, that's something ridiculous like 28 leagues in that one tier, so be prepared for the game running very, very slowly after a few seasons and you'll need to consider how many leagues outside of Italy, if any, you're going to want to load.
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 27, 2020 20:14:55 GMT
That's a really good shout Dale, I've been experimenting with Empedoclina in Promozione Sicilia A, but it's taking two or three minutes to process a day of pre-season, and the transfers side of things is utter chaos at the moment, so I may start again with a team slightly higher up the pyramid....
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Post by dalenichol on Sept 27, 2020 20:21:42 GMT
If you can get a working and up to date Serie D file, you'd have Palermo in the 4th tier, which might be too high for you, or too big a club? Other sicialian teams in Serie D would be Licata, Ragusa and Biancavilla
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 28, 2020 9:32:35 GMT
I've loaded another one with the Eccellenza as the lowest division and picked a club there. Things seem to be better in terms of speed but I'll see how that goes. I also went for a standard large database rather than the custom one I had previously chosen.
If that's still too much for my laptop then I'll go for Serie D and either Licata or Ragusa. Palermo would be a bit big for me and also that's a save that no doubt has been done to death by other FM players. There's a contrary part of me that likes to take on a different challenge from the majority.
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Post by Marshdweller on Sept 29, 2020 12:39:01 GMT
With the back and forth regarding teams and leagues etc. in Sicily, I'm really struggling to find a save that sticks. As a result I've dipped back into the Volendam save and I'm having a bit of a facepalm moment... you know when you think things are going a little too easily? Well, I've just realised that the big mistake I've made is around the number of home-grown players there are in my squad. I've got a slightly oversized squad, the turnover has been quite high so a lot of the players are new signings and the ones I want to sell are the Dutch players... Some tough decisions need to be made before the Champions League registration deadline!
There's a big lesson to be learned here and it goes against both my natural tendencies as a risk-averse squad builder and my learned experience as a FM Touch player: namely, that I shouldn't sign someone simply because they're better than what I've currently got. Instead I need to consider the other aspects in terms of squad registration, how it will affect the development etc. of other players, and whether the player I'm replacing really needs to be replaced.
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Post by Marshdweller on Nov 28, 2020 20:00:46 GMT
Season 6 - 2024/25 Well, a funny old season. Perhaps coloured by my frustrating experience in Sicily, I came back to this save and the frustration seemed to have carried over. I'd played a couple of months before starting with Marina di Ragusa, so I came back and promptly embarked on the worst run of this save since the first season. However, I resurrected the team's form and we ended up with a respectable 4th place finish. A little disappointing considering our back to back second place finishes in the previous two seasons, but given who we are I need to keep reminding myself that this is still a success. I haven't included the usual player sidebar as I've carried on until the summer transfer window has opened and promptly sold my top scorer so it wouldn't be an accurate reflection of player performances. However, I did remember to grab the squad screen. The overall lack of players with average ratings above 7.00 tells its own story. Funnily enough, Tiago Gouveia, second top scorer and a strong performer in the second half of the season was nearly ushered out of the door at one point and still leaves me not entirely convinced despite his stats.
Basically, the season was a massively underwhelming experience for the most part. After the successes of the last two years, I felt in a strong position to really cement our place as the second best team in the Netherlands. I had strengthened the squad whilst turning a profit and felt optimistic. However, the squad was a little bloated and still unsettled by my European registration faux pas in January, and a pair of defeats to Ajax in the Super Cup and our opening Eredivisie match got us off to a bad start. There was also evidence of a continental hangover which left us struggling for consistency and form and the expansion of our stadium meant that we were borrowing AZ Alkmaar's AFAS Stadium until the end of February which I felt perhaps unsettled a few. A brutal Champions League group did us and our morale no favours either (bear in mind most of my squad is about Championship quality) and the run from October to December had me wondering if I was about to witness two saves unravel in quick succession. However, January was our best month of the season and from there things stabilised. The team settled, the attack found some form and we started winning where we were previously only drawing. The biggest problem we had was key players underperforming. Joseph Asare followed up his 23 goal season last year with seven goals this year. Matias Juarez managed five goals and six assists, all heavily skewed towards the end of the season. While this wasn't much different from last year, there were few of the dominant performances I had come to expect. Lorenzo Avogadri suddenly looked out of his depth in goal and Caique was unconvincing for the first few months of the season when called upon. In the end I decided that half of my problem was that I had too many options and so I could (and did) keep chopping and changing the team robbing anyone of a chance to establish themselves.
Eredivisie
Europe Dutch Cup Transfers We were busy in the transfer market in both windows and will be obliged to do more work this coming summer due to my inability to refuse what looks like a bargain.
In This covers most of the key deals as well as a lot of Jong Volendam padding. Adam Idah was a great signing and it was he I referred to earlier - 24 goals this season led to a €12.5m bid from West Brom and I happily sold him on as I believe that Joseph Asare can return to top form and it will also allow Rene van de Looi to progress. Marko Djira and Yassine Mansour came in to strengthen the back line but both seemed to take a while to settle and for a while Mansour and George Johnston had a dotted line that the game told me signified a poor partnership! First time I've seen that. Devid Bouah was a punt that paid off after Roma released him, but now I would like to cash in on his good form as I have a lot of depth at right back. You'll also see that Tommaso Merletting FINALLY made his move permanent after four and half years on loan(!). Bafana Tshilo is a creative midfielder for whom I have high hopes. Finally Emil Ceide was brought in to give me more wide options but he has been a massive disappointment - either injured or earning <6.6. Out
Again, a lot of Jong Volendam activity here but a few key deals to highlight. Diego Robben finally left after barely progressing since season 1. I managed to offload Matias Soule and make a profit, so I felt pretty smug about that. Jordy de Wijs made a fuss about something (I honestly can't remember what) and wanted to leave for PEC Zwolle who only just escaped relegation (reputation in FM still drives me mad on occasion). Devid Bouah's signing meant I cashed in on David Dundjerski for a tidy profit. Edgar Pacheco was still underperforming and he and Max Svensson were two of the players from my rash accumulation of wingers last January. Neither established themselves and were grumbling about opportunities so I offloaded both for a marginal profit.
Finances
We're really strong financially, turning a steady profit and recently able to pay off a chunk of debt. The expanded stadium will surely help and we're doing well with a steady sign-to-sell approach, though I will need to be more aware of squad registration rules when wheeling and dealing.
Plans
Well, more of the same really. Smarter signings, more of a focus on youth development, but just incremental improvements are the name of the game here. The board have set me a pretty soft target of top-half finishes, so we can afford to experiment a little and give some youngsters experience. I'm learning a lot from this save and I hope to take it on for a long time. Even with FM21 now here, I think I will persist with this for the forseeable future.
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Post by Marshdweller on Nov 29, 2020 22:28:53 GMT
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Post by Marshdweller on Dec 10, 2020 21:12:31 GMT
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Post by Marshdweller on Dec 15, 2020 20:39:37 GMT
First silverware of the save....
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Post by Marshdweller on Dec 15, 2020 21:26:59 GMT
This hurt - ended 1-1
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Post by Marshdweller on Dec 29, 2020 21:08:10 GMT
I keep meaning to sit down and write a proper season review, but I keep ploughing on and now I'm two seasons behind. And, um..... this happened:
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Post by Dirk Nowitzki on Dec 30, 2020 8:36:05 GMT
Wow great job, congrats!
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Post by Marshdweller on Dec 30, 2020 12:28:36 GMT
Thanks Dirk, I'm delighted with it. Given my struggles at the beginning of this save, this was unforseeable really!
Season 7 - 2025/26 This was a funny season in many ways. Our lowest Eredivisie finish coupled with our first silverware (spoiler above). As I've mentioned, I just kept playing so I don't have many screenshots to share from this season.
We finished 5th in the Eredivisie, a place below last season's 4th spot and just about qualified for European football. We struggled a little for goals and just couldn't break some teams down. Eredivisie
Euro Cup II Dutch Cup This was the first trophy of my reign and I was pretty pleased with it. I must admit I like winning domestic cups, perhaps more than leagues, so this was a great way for me to secure my own piece of Volendam history. The transfers were, as they always seem to be with me, many and various. I possibly undermined myself a little with the high turnover, but we did make a €30m profit over the course of the season without selling anyone major other than Adam Idah to West Brom in the summer (I think I already mentioned his sale above) and Gerald Yeboah to Ajax in January as they continued their annoying policy of poaching their smaller rivals' best players midway through the season.
Season 8 - 2026/27 'The big one' as it shall forever be known. I made a conscious decision in the summer of 2026 to keep the transfers to a minimum. I had overinflated the squad again, so I trimmed where I could and focused on a couple of key areas. More creativity in midfield and another wide option mainly. To that end, we brought in Kenzo Goudmijn from Feyenoord for €12.5m, Odin Thiago Holm from Inter for €3.5m and Strahinja Stanisavljevic from Cukaricki for €2.2m. In terms of outgoings that might mean something to anyone who's read through this thread, we sold Brian Brobbey (a free from Ajax last summer) to ADO Den Haag for €1.6m, Tommaso Merletti to Verona for €4m (he'd shown a really bad attitude in training since losing his place to Yassine Mansour last season) and Michael Adeniyi to AZ for €5.75m. Adeniyi had really good attributes but had never performed for me and if it's possible to say this about a player in FM, we hadn't seen eye-to-eye almost since day one. I was glad to be rid of him. We also had another surprise departure in January: with the team performing well, a number of players were attracting interest. Suddenly, towards the end of the January window, Newcastle started bidding for Yassine Mansour. He wasn't particularly keen to leave and I didn't want or need to sell him, but some rather audacious negotiating saw me accept a take-it-or-leave-it offer of €53m and he happily agreed terms. He was a loss, but we had cover in that area so this was great news. €52m profit in two-and-a-half seasons.
Onto the actual season: Rene van de Looi really repaid my gamble on him as my main striker. Last season he top-scored with 17 goals, this season he just hit another level entirely. A major shout goes to Carlo Holse too. I made a tactical tweak at the very last minute in the summer and his form also exploded. Both set new records for goals or assists this season - Holse had broken the assist record by the end of January and van de Looi broke the goalscoring one in February if memory serves.
Results-wise, the season looked like this: Super Cup
As Dutch Cup winners we finally deserved our place in the showpiece opener, and we won on penalties after a 2-2 draw with Ajax. Of course, their equaliser came in the 90+3rd minute of the match....!
Eredivisie Apart from the defeat to Feyenoord, both of the other two defeats came to goals in the 88th minute or later, and the AZ defeat was after the title had been sealed. The only disappointment there is that they are the closest thing we have to local rivals. Europe We dismantled the group, took care of Celtic and then fell apart against Tottenham. To be honest, at that point I was finding European football a distraction from our chances to win the Eredivisie, so my biggest concern was not masterminding our way through but minimising the impact on morale from the almost inevitable defeat.
Dutch Cup
No repeat of last season's triumph here. I was hoping to go all the way, but a slightly rotated team just didn't turn up against Ajax and it could have been uglier.
Overall, a wonderful season for us with the aforementioned tactical tweak paying off in spades. Basically, I was unhappy with the defensive work down the flanks, so switched from a 4-3-3 to a flat 4-1-4-1 and things seems so much more solid without the ball without losing anything when we had the ball. I also decided that my central midfield had been a bit soft, so changed a role to a BWM and in January brought in a specialist to play in that position, Ajdin Catic from Midtjylland for €2.5m. In Conclusion
I think this will be the point at which I really do park this save for the time being. It was only ever intended to be a trial save and it has snowballed into something much bigger. However, I have played this save and my unsuccessful Marina di Ragusa save only, racking up nine and a half seasons of FM, and it has taken me 320 hours to do so. I think I will be starting a new save on FM Touch so I can whizz through the seasons a little quicker. To be honest, by the end I had farmed out most of my responsibilities to my staff as it was - my DoF handled contract negotiations, my Assistant did the press conferences, training and opposition instructions and I left my Chief Scout to sort out scouting assignments. Basically, I was playing Touch with added team talks.
Also, I find this point in a save the least satisfying. I don't really enjoy continental competition as it just drags out the season immensely and coping with the 'continental hangover' is something that really winds me up. I much prefer building a club to this point than taking one of this stature and aiming to become the best in the world.
This save has taught me a huge amount about FM and I will take that with me into my new save, wherever that is. I'm torn between FMT20 or buying FMT21....
Thanks for reading!
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Post by Marshdweller on Feb 13, 2021 19:27:13 GMT
I haven't settled on a save for FM21 yet so have played another season with Volendam. It was nearly as good as last year. I don't think I've ever been involved in such a close finish...
We led until the final match, which we won 2-0. However, Ajax won 6-0 to pinch it on head-to-head results.
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Post by Marshdweller on Mar 27, 2022 20:22:07 GMT
Just had this guy come through on the youth intake...
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Post by Marshdweller on Apr 11, 2022 20:38:08 GMT
So, after three years of second place finishes, we finally have the season I feel like we should have had for a while now.
Our player stats look like this (I finally got Rene van de Looi scoring again!): And this is the system that got us there. I made some changes in the January of the previous season and it has resulted in a much more solid defence. The key has been a lot of tinkering with the roles of the LM and striker. I knew I wanted the LM to cut inside and I've tried everything from Wide Playmaker, Wide Midfielder and now Inverted Winger. It's only recently that I've gone with the Support duty and that seems to have helped a lot too. The striker started off as a DLF(A) and has cycled through that, the Poacher and the AF. Eventually I have perservered with the AF as almost all my strikers are best suited to this (according to the green circle algorithm anyway).
What's even more satisfying is that I've done this on the back of selling my first-choice striker from the last season to Chelsea for about €80m and not replacing him as I knew deep down that my strikers were good enough and that the issue was tactical. I'm still no tactical genius but I'm feeling very satisfied with this season as a vindication of my ability to tinker and get it right eventually.
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Post by dalenichol on Apr 12, 2022 9:53:38 GMT
Brilliant stuff buddy. Achieved what I was unable to do, and too grumpy to persevere with lol!
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Post by Marshdweller on Apr 12, 2022 12:59:51 GMT
Thanks Dale! I'm really pleased because after the previous title win we fell away a little and I wondered if our moment had passed, so to claw our way back to the top was very satisfying.
I think this is probably it for the time being with this save (though I know I've said that before and I have a track record of going back to established saves when I can't get the momentum with a new one!). As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm keen to try a front two and I also think I've reached a tipping point with this squad. The majority of the players are young and have potential to develop a little further but in order to put clear daylight between myself and Ajax I need to take things up another notch. With this in mind, I don't know where to upgrade the squad as they are all pretty similar in terms of ability and I'm at a level where upgrades are going to either take years to develop or cost the sort of money that gives me vertigo.
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