Getting lost in Łódź

[dalenichol]

Aug 9, 2020 22:25:26 GMT chaodck said:

I think that's a pretty good season Dale for the level you're currently at. Kovacic looks like a steal for that price, specially if you factor in that Maribor is a pretty important club, kudos on that. Bringing down the spending might be a tough ask, but I'm sure you can replace every bit of deadwood if you set your mind onto it, even if it means doing a ton of manual scouting.
Good luck mate.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to focus on. I've relied on certain players too much and I'm opening up to the idea of having a couple of capable players fighting for their positions, as opposed to having an idea of a solid XI and some backups, which is a trap I often fall in to. 

Kovacic is good, he had a good spell last season and whilst he hasn't hit the ground running this season, I think that's partly down to our own profligacy up front, because despite getting results, we're not exactly free scoring. 

[Nick]

Great stuff Dale, good to see you're settled in terms of being happy with the save, but also in terms of results on the pitch too. Looking at the table, there doesn't seem to be loads you need to iron out. You lost nine games, only one more than Lechia, who won the league. A bit of extra quality and some luck and I see no reason why you can't push further towards the European places next season.

How does Poland compare to the rest of Eastern Europe? Are you able to attract the better players from Serbia or do you need to look at players from Slovakia and Slovenia et al instead?

[dalenichol]

Yeah, we're making progress and we're much more consistent again this season, which is excellent. Having a similar problem to yourselves in Turkey with a real lack of goals, particularly from my strikers, but our defence is making up for it and we're potentially (he says, before it all collapses) going to make that push for a European spot this season, we keep hovering around the top 4 area.

I don't have the game open to verify, but I think that only maybe Czech Republic and Russia would be leagues in the East with higher rep than ours. I've mostly signed players from Slovenia, Macedonia and the odd Serbian on a free as the fee's have been more reasonable. Getting the better prospects from the likes of Serbia and Croatia is actually possible, but like we see with the £675k for Kovacic, they definitely start to come at a premium that I'm maybe not quite willing to spend yet.

[dalenichol]

Just heading off to bed, back to work tomorrow after 4 days off.  This is the league after 30 games. We had a poor run there, picking up 2 wins and 4 defeats in our final 6. Now we've got the Championship Group, so I'm happy to be minimum top half finish once again, but Jesus, look how tight it is. We could mathematically win the league, we could finish 2nd or stay 3rd, but we're just as likely to finish 8th. This league is crazy for consistently producing inconsistent teams. 

Wisla come back up and sit 6th, Lechia win the league two seasons in a row and only just make the cut this year. 

[Marshdweller]

Is there a high turnover of the key players or managers at the top clubs?

[Reiver]

Always amazing to see a team of a 750 people village playing around in the Polish Top Division.

[dalenichol]

Aug 11, 2020 16:20:56 GMT Reiver said:

Always amazing to see a team of a 750 people village playing around in the Polish Top Division.

Yeah, I didn't realise this until I started looking into the league more. Their stadium holds 6x more people than there are in the village.  They're also the smallest village club to ever play in a senior division, which is really cool. 

Marshdweller  well...

Slask:

 

Lech:




Wisla:



Lechia:




Even Bruk-Bet and Rakow are on their 3rd and 4th managers of the save, only us and Pogon have been more consistent. So yeah, that's definitely a factor I'd guess. 

[dalenichol]

Widzew Lodz 2023/24 Season Review



Right, apologies but this is going to be a short update. Not sure if anybody has seen much scottish based news, but we've had some horrible weather and had massive flooding in Perth last night and this morning, which has knocked out a lot of power and what have you, and I've had no internet all day. So I'm already into the next season, tired, grumpy and looking to go to bed...and I'm just about managing to stop myself throwing this PC and this save out of the window...YEET!





So it's another 7th place finish, which shouldn't be a bad thing for us...but wait, there's more! As is the usual with FM, we had a sticky start until matchday 12 where we got up to 3rd, we then flitted between 2nd,3rd and 4th until matchday 28 or so. Then the usual happened, we went on a 3 month shit streak, winning 3 of our last 13 games, drawing 1 and losing 9. Because of course we did.




So once again, we've somehow unexplicably collapsed. We weren't scoring for fun before, but we weren't really conceding either and we just ended up being able to offer nothing against teams for no reason that I could see. I know I'm not a tactical expert, it's my weakest area of the game, but it just boggles my mind that we can just suddenly collapse pretty much three seasons in a row at the exact same time. 



So yeah, just a quick one before I go to bed. I've started the next season, I'm getting stuck with the same shit and I'm almost to the point of being done. But I'm gonna keep trying, because for the most part I enjoy this save but it's a struggle when you feel like you're getting "gamed" for the sake of it!


Next update will be more detailed, I promise

[Nick]

This is something that I've seen more and more on this version. It used to happen a lot on previous versions, as you know, with the fabled "re-ranking", but SI seemed to get it right from maybe FM18 until now.

I share your frustration with a lack of consistency and a general lack of improvement mate, disheartening after all the effort you put in over pre-season. Do you still create your own tactics? I've all but given up on that now. I'd much rather download a tactic as a base and tweak that to the players I have. Tactics in FM have got so much of a ball ache over the past few years. Worst part of the game.

[dalenichol]

Aug 13, 2020 12:37:01 GMT Nick said:

This is something that I've seen more and more on this version. It used to happen a lot on previous versions, as you know, with the fabled "re-ranking", but SI seemed to get it right from maybe FM18 until now.

I share your frustration with a lack of consistency and a general lack of improvement mate, disheartening after all the effort you put in over pre-season. Do you still create your own tactics? I've all but given up on that now. I'd much rather download a tactic as a base and tweak that to the players I have. Tactics in FM have got so much of a ball ache over the past few years. Worst part of the game.

Yeah, it's awful and it seems to be more and more common on every version. It's something that almost always kills my saves, because I'm not that great with tactics, so when something goes wrong I find it hard to identify and fix the issue, and this is made even harder when the issue is an inexplicable drop in form, especially when you've spent two or three seasons building a side that fits a specific tactical duty, only for the game to go "nah, that wont work now...just because."

I still stubbornly try and make my own tactics, using the fairly simple principles that I understand and often it'll work and others it just completely falls apart. 

[dalenichol]

Widzew Lodz 2024/25 Season Review

This game is awful, and I hate it. 






I swear to god, this game is going to send me to an early grave (I mean, I'm fat and Scottish, so I'm due to die soon anyway, but still)

It's been a long four years in the Ekstraklasa, so it's genuinely fantastic to qualify for Europe, to finish second and, for just a little while, look like a team that might've won the league at one point, but my god is it stressful. We're the most consistently inconsistent team. We can play teams off the park one week, and lose to the bottom of the league the next. We'd go 2-0 up only to lose 3-2, we'd go 2-0 down and win 4-2. We'd score 95th minute winners and throw away a two goal load in the last 3 minutes of a game. It was just a nightmare for my poor heart. 




Our post winter break form was much better than previous years and we were so close to putting up a bigger title challenge. In the 2-2 draws against Lechia, we were 1-0 and 2-1 up, before drawing. We were also up 1-0 against Wisla Plock in the 2nd last game, until the 78th minute. We're not clinical and we don't put games to bed, that's a problem I'd love to be able to address, but we just can't seem to get it right. 




There were some good performances this season, with Dariusz Formella having an absolutely stellar season once again. Being the only player to beat double figures for goals or assists is worrying though, considering he plays wide right. 

We sold Denis Kovacic (who we signed for 675k from Maribor) to Porto for £1.3m and 50% after two poor seasons at the club and replaced him with young Croatian striker Nikola Pavlovic from Dinamo Zagreb for 500k. He had a decent season, better than Kovacic had, but we need more from a lone striker. Maybe I need to change to a two striker formation, but I'm loathe to change something now that's semi working for us. 

In other transfer news, we lost a young midfielder from our youth team, Kamil Drewniak. He's very good and has developed very well, but he's now wanted by Sevilla and Fulham, and we're due to receive 40% of any profit on that deal, so that could be pretty lucrative for us. 




Off the pitch:


I've asked the board to increase the youth recruitment and junior coaching, which they've done, as we've had 3 poor intakes in a row now, which isn't good enough for a club like us, that have good facilities, so it's imperative that we get that sorted, especially as there isn't quite as much affordable Eastern European talent kicking about now as there has been. 



However, with that said, we do go into next season with a healthy bank balance. We're going to hit close to £10m by the time sponsors and season tickets come in, and we'll have the added bonus of some European football next season, which is incredibly exciting.  It looks like we'll go in to the Europa Conference League at the 2nd qualifying round, there's some nice and appealing small teams that go in this round, but there's also quite a few bigger teams that I'd definitely prefer to avoid. Teams like Molde, Krasnodar, Trabzonspor and Standard Liege were all kicking about in that stage this year, so I'll need to bear that in mind. 


It's going to be a bit of a restructuring year and i'll need to spend some serious time looking at players and transfers this year and we've got a small squad and with the likes of Henrik Ojaama moving back to Estonia (he's been with us since the third tier) and a few others wanting to leave, I need to start looking for the right replacements. 


This season has got my hunger for the save back though, as stressful as it has been, so let's see where it takes us. 

[Marshdweller]

Congratulations on finishing second! That's a nice jump up the table and good to see a stronger finish to the season. Are you confident you can consolidate and build over the next few seasons?

[dalenichol]

Aug 17, 2020 8:15:19 GMT Marshdweller said:

Congratulations on finishing second! That's a nice jump up the table and good to see a stronger finish to the season. Are you confident you can consolidate and build over the next few seasons?

Honestly, I'm not sure. This league has been so all over the place over the last 4 seasons, that I really can't begin to predict anything.  This summer I've already brought in 5 new players who improve the squad, whilst getting rid of some players that were holding us back, and I still think there's more business to be done. So I'd love to say that we're going to be even stronger this time around, but if we can't start consistently scoring goals, or our tactic doesn't quite take hold, then we could be back to square one. 

Basically, I'm equal parts confident that we're good enough to challenge for the title whilst also shit enough that we could have another disastrous season...

[dalenichol]

Not quite ready to take this step yet, but it was nice to be considered

[dalenichol]

Widzew Lodz 2025/26 Season Review


Lads. Lads. Lads.









So that's it, it's taken 5 top flight seasons (7 overall) but we've finally clinched our first Ekstraklasa title. 

So I don't even know where to start, really. We weren't exceptional, but any stretch, but we were just that little bit more consistent, that little better better in front of goal and, most importantly, conceding only .78 goals per game is a pretty fantastic testament to our defense. I'd have preferred more than the 1.6 GPG we managed, but considering Lechia were top scorers with 62, it shows that this just simply isn't a high scoring league. 





We managed some much better team performances this year and I think having two forwards in Michal Jaroszek and Nikola Pavlovic both scoring >10 goals this season, which is the first time we've had that, was a massive bonus. Turcin and Formella once against contributing huge from the wide areas and our newly signed defensive midfielder Andrey Dichenkov being tied 1st for highest average rating, with new CB Alexandr Shisolv not far behind, is a massive improvement. 





Not bad for a combined £400k!  Just look at Shislov, he's a god damned monster, 6'4, 14st and he still has some speed. He's been so, so good. 



Djuzel has been good, but is upset that he can't force his way into the team, Brest looked much better before he did his cruciates in and probably killed his career, whilst Zych is just a good, squad depth player. 


Europe:



Our first taste of Europe was a really weird one. We beat some stronger teams in the qualifiers, in Mlada Boleslav and a huge win over Shakhtar, before going into the group stage against two sides in Partizan and Trencin that we should've beaten...and then failed miserably. 

So yeah, that's a thing.  But now we've got Champions League football to look forward to, so there's that!



Off the pitch:




We end the season with £12m in the bank and we have some incoming sponsorship and season tickets to look forward to. Our training facilities were downgraded to average last season, so I may need to look at improving those, as well as our junior coaching and recruitment. 

But outwith that, we're kind of set. I need to see what sort of players we can attract, although I don't think we need to improve many areas of the squad but you can never rule anything out.  There's money to spend on the right player now, but it's just a case of finding them. 


But yeah, that's where we are. I've wrapped up our first league title, a chance at Champions League football and I'm now a club icon. Let's go!

[Marshdweller]

Great stuff Dale! That's pretty rapid progress in seven seasons!

[dalenichol]

Thanks buddy! Marshdweller  

It's nice progress and I'm glad we made it fairly steadily, you sometimes see people play this game and become a giant within a season or two and that's just not something I can ever seem to replicate.  But the club were a bit of a sleeping giant, as far as Poland is concerned, so they really were already set up to succeed eventually, so it's nice to achieve that. 

Also, we're definitely on the rise off the pitch too...








I wish I'd taken some screenshots from when we started, but I didn't think to do it. We started somewhere around the 1-1.5* mark and have steadily increased as the game has progressed. To be up in the top 5 is fantastic

[dalenichol]

Sometimes we're not very good, and then sometimes we go do this...

[dalenichol]

I have some good news, and I have some bad news. 


The good news is that we made our way to the Champions League group stage, gaining £13m in the process. 

The bad news is, this is our group....




Fuck. 

[Marshdweller]

You still get prize money for defeats right? (It's a while since I managed a Champions League team...)

[dalenichol]

Aug 25, 2020 11:27:38 GMT Marshdweller said:

You still get prize money for defeats right? (It's a while since I managed a Champions League team...)

Not that I've noticed, but it's still a significant increase in gate receipts and we'll get the prize money at the end of the season, so I wont complain too much. 

The money from the group stage allowed me to go out and spend about £9m, which is more than I've spent in every other season combined, so that was nice

[stouters]

Congratulations on the league win, Dale. That stadium of yours will come in handy for the gate receipts. Do you think your squad will handle the extra matches?

[dalenichol]

Aug 25, 2020 13:42:30 GMT stouters said:

Congratulations on the league win, Dale. That stadium of yours will come in handy for the gate receipts. Do you think your squad will handle the extra matches?

Thanks stouters, I hope so yeah. We're doing well so far this season, I've brought some players in and I'm doing a job of rotating a bit more too. 


Speaking of stadiums...


 

That's a boost of 3k seats, which is not insignificant. Adding to the junior coaching (excellent) and youth recruitment (well established), we're looking good on the facilities front.  I just wish it was reflected in our intakes, which have been poor for a few seasons now. 

[dalenichol]

Widzew Lodz 2026/27 Season Review

It's the end of another season in Poland. The eight season, which may actually be the longest FM save I've had in at least 3 versions, which is kinda nuts. Especially considering we've not had a good intake in about 6 years and I don't sign anybody that isn't from Eastern Europe. I think I've learned quite a bit about patience and expecation from this save, and whilst we've obviously achieved a lot in that time, it's been nice to be more focused. Hopefully that will set me up better for future saves on the next edition of the game. 



We just couldn't quite keep the pace needed to retain the title. A draw with Lechia and a loss to Lech in the Championship Phase were unfortunately the results needed to seal the title in Lech's favour. However, I'm not going to complain about 2nd place, because we were by far on of the best teams in the league this season. Defensively solid, whilst still being good going forward and just generally more consistent. I'm looking forward to next season if we can keep this up. 



As you can see from the graph, once we got going, we were pretty fantastic, but we just couldn't keep the pace. 



Transfers:

We've been slowly building our money up over the seasons to the point where I'm getting ready to spend money, and it's nice.  First up, Porto came in and activated the release clause of Andrey Dichenkov, who at the time was one of our best players, but there isn't much we can do against release clauses at the moment. However, much like Denis Kovacic who we sold to them 3 years ago, he'll probably be wasted and they'll do nothing with him...them's the breaks. We move on!



3 players, £8m spent...well spent in my opinion but others may disagree. (3m, 3.5m and 1.5m in that order). I know Mares is a bit rough around the edges, but he's still only 17 and will keep improving. Araskiewicz contributed 12 goals and 9 assists, whilst Beglerovic scored 5 and assisted 5 from the centre of midfield (I've trained him from AMC to MC)

We also signed Maciej Fryzowic on loan from Fiorentina and I'm currently waiting on a response to see if they'd consider selling to me, because he'd be a fantastic permanent addition to the squad. 



Champions League:




Our Champions League run went about as good as you'd expect it to once we hit the group stage. The qualifiers were fantastic, however, and getting to the groups netted us a cool £13m, so I clearly wasn't going to begrudge getting smacked about a bit by teams of their stature. That sort of money keeps us at the top end of the table for the next decade, so fuck it!



Off the pitch:



We end the season with £18m in the bank before the season rollover, which means we'll be sitting around the £23-24m mark when the next season starts, which is excellent.  I probably wont have quite the same spending spree next summer, as we're now pretty stacked, but I'll wait and see what opportunities present themselves.

The club are currently in the planning stage of a 3k seat expansion in the stadium and I've just, whilst writing this update, got them to agree to youth and training facility upgrades for another £5m or so. So that's definitely a positive. 

Other than that, there's not a whole lot more to add.  If you can think of anything, please let me know

[Marshdweller]

Great stuff Dale!

One thing I have noticed with this version, certainly compared to the versions I've played before, is that it seems much more realistic in how difficult it is to retain league titles etc. I think Chaodck is finding the same with NEC. In previous years it seemed that once you got to the top, as long as you made a couple of sensible additions each summer you were pretty much there to stay, whereas now that's not true.

[dalenichol]

Aug 28, 2020 19:44:38 GMT Marshdweller said:

Great stuff Dale!

One thing I have noticed with this version, certainly compared to the versions I've played before, is that it seems much more realistic in how difficult it is to retain league titles etc. I think Chaodck is finding the same with NEC. In previous years it seemed that once you got to the top, as long as you made a couple of sensible additions each summer you were pretty much there to stay, whereas now that's not true.

Thanks buddy!

Yeah, I definitely think that's a thing.  In earlier games you could win the league in a season or two and that was you set for the rest of your career, but it definitely feels a bit different in this one. 

That said, however, we're genuinely just a 30 goal a season striker away from winning the league each season, I think. The issue with that is that it's such a low scoring league, with winners Lech only scoring 62 goals.  For the longest time, I felt it was our tactics, but this just isn't a league where a lot of goals are scored and I'm not sure why.  If I could just crack that tactical nut, I think we could be unstoppable. 

[dalenichol]

So 4,500 instead of the initially planned 3,000, which is nice.   The cost, along with the £5.5m the club are spending on youth and training facilities does knock us down to £11m, curtailing any significant spending I was going to do this summer, but I'm big on these improvements, especially the stadium seating. 

It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. 

[dalenichol]

For my next piece of news, I will be invoking the ancient football manager rule of "it'd be rude not to, wouldn't it?", allowing me to completely circumvent the imposed save rules once or twice purely for the shits and giggles. 

So, with this in mind, I present to you, without comment:







EDIT:

Safe to say it's been a lucrative move for us. Well worth it. 

[Marshdweller]

Aug 29, 2020 8:18:59 GMT dalenichol said:

For my next piece of news, I will be invoking the ancient football manager rule of "it'd be rude not to, wouldn't it?", allowing me to completely circumvent the imposed save rules once or twice purely for the shits and giggles. 

So, with this in mind, I present to you, without comment:



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EDIT:

Safe to say it's been a lucrative move for us. Well worth it. 

The coach report logic still winds me up even after all this time "may be past his best", "could improve a lot"

[dalenichol]

    Widzew Lodz 2027/28 Season Review






You love to see it. 

So after failing to retain our title last season, I was determined that we'd kick on and put up a real fight this year and that is exactly what we did. From gameweek 7 through to 37, we never moved from the top spot. We shit the bed in the Championship Group, winning only one of our last 7 games, thankfully being the title decider against Lech, who themselves had an awful last 7 games, but what matters is that we won. After 9 seasons I'm getting used to the inexplicable end of season form drop, so it's just about making sure we're in a solid position going into the league split. 

It was a more well rounded, consistent set of performances this year too.  Luka Janzekovic kept a record breaking 35 clean sheets across all comptetitions, 24 of those in the league, our defense were incredibly solid, Neymar (19) and Mujkic (12) created plenty of assists and both Pavlovic and Jaroszek scored 15 goals each. We were just very good, basically. 

Europa Conference League

On a real life personal level, I fucking hate the idea of the ECL. It seems like yet another attempt at keeping smaller teams and nations out of the Champions League and Europa League to help appease the big money leagues and teams. It's shite. 

But anyway, we did quite well this year so I hate it slightly less. 



So yeah. We went out to eventual winners Celtic who beat Bordeaux 2-1 in the final.  We had a run that belied our ability and we sort of lucked out a little, but I'm not going to complain. It was good competition and it'll raise both our reputation and the nation coefficient. There's fuck all money in it, so we need consistent Champions League football, but it's still a nice achievement. 



Off the pitch:

I hadn't seen this before, so it was pretty cool...



and that bit of news was immediately followed by ....



So that's exciting! Zbigniew Boniek of Juve and Roma 80's fame is a club legend and I'd love to see the stadium named after him. So is current player Tomislav Turcin but they'll likely go with some boring shit like "Lodz Arena". This'll be the first new stadium I've had on FM20 though, so I'm very much here for that. 


There's not much more to say really. We say goodbye to Neymar, who retires at the end of the season turnover. He had a good enough season with 5 goals and 19 assists and it was fun having him around just to be able to say that we did it. Give it another 8 years or so and I'll try and sign Mbappe!


As always, if there's any questions etc, just lemme know!