Salford City — The Dafuge Challenge 2016!

Welcome back, friends!

If you’ve been reading my blog or Twitter the past few days, you know that I’ve been working on a Level 10 challenge using an edited database and the Stockport Town F.C. club that was just formed in 2014.  I’m still trying to drum up interest on the forums for that challenge, and I wasn’t playing since my sacking at Bristol, so I figured it was time to hop back in the waters.

I decided that since I love playing in England, if for no other reason than it goes farther down than any other league system and I am an LLM’er at heart — I rolled up a Dafuge save.  I did I believe three reloads and I decided to roll with Salford City.

The Dafuge challenge, of course, requires you to take a previously unplayable club (you have to holiday through the 2015-16 season) in England, and take your newly-promoted club at Level 6 of the English Pyramid to Barclay’s Premier League and UEFA Champions League success.  Nothing serious or anything. 😀

Being from the United States, coverage is a lot better now, but it still isn’t great.  Understandably, because of who is involved with the club, we have a lot more information about Salford City over here, and seeing as how I don’t have a “home” club or one I directly support in these low leagues, it just made sense.  At a 1650 reputation, it is also more of an average difficulty than a team like Dorchester.

I’ve also connected a YouTube channel, we’ll see if I can figure out how to use it.  Perhaps, if I can, I’ll figure out how to do the comprehensive highlights of all our fixtures, or at least the main ones.

Here’s an overview of the club:

Club Overview – June 24, 2016

I haven’t done really any looking at the club yet, I have just got together my screenshot to enter the challenge and then I am going to get to work while I watch the NFL Playoffs.

Thank you as always for following American Werewolf Football!

Designing a New Challenge for the SI Forums!

Welcome back, friends!

I don’t want to be possibly misleading with the title, but I and many of the readers here are members of the Sports Interactive Community Forums and many of us frequent the Challenges, Signups & Experiments forum there.  This is where I have found such great challenges as The Ultimate Football Manager Challenge, The Dafuge Challenge, The Sammarinese Challenge, and the Youth Academy Challenge!

Well, I’ve finally received the tools necessary to attempt to create a top-notch challenge of my own.  I just don’t want there to be any confusion, in NO WAY is this challenge endorsed or supported by Sports Interactive, it is all made possible through legal addons and modifications by the user community!

With the fine work put together by Dan BHTFC making great new English databases, all of England now becomes available for play!  We won’t be going quite that deep, but Dan’s Level 11 Database will be the one used for this challenge.

I have received his full permission and blessing to edit one club in the database and make it available for users on the SI Forums to attempt this challenge… here is what I’m setting up!

FC United of Manchester is probably the best recent example of a club entering the English pyramid with a good amount of support, and they began their journey into English football at Level 10 of the English system in the North West Counties League, nine levels below the Barclay’s Premier League!

From research, I have been able to determine their initial finances rather closely, and we know their ground-sharing arrangements until they opened their own home stadium.  What I am going to do is edit out the least valuable club (sorry, St. Helens) in the North West Counties Division One (the name has changed, but this is the league where FC United started) and make our challenge club in its place with the correct resources to begin our voyage.

I will, honestly, probably make challengers allowed to use Create-a-Club with the edited club as a base, as the Create-a-Club feature does not allow you to alter finances or anything of the sort.  Obviously, challengers would not be able to use the Dream Team feature, but I’m seeing the feasibility of this.  Otherwise, I will probably just call the club the SI Forums FC Challengers.

I have never done editing before, so while it is only one club I’m editing, I’ve got to make sure I do it correctly, and then I will post the challenge on the SI forums.  I think it is a crazy good and challenging English challenge to get all the way from Level 10 to the very top.  We will be loading all 11 levels to play, if you are relegated, you do not have to start over, only if you are sacked!

Feel free to comment if you have any input on this upcoming challenge or are able to offer any assistance.  Thank you so much for following, and a huge thank you to Dan BHTFC for allowing me to make this small alteration to his database for our challenge!

The Writers Curse – Jumping Before I’m Pushed…

The save will be a short-lived one, as even though being fired or relegated doesn’t end The Ultimate Football Manager Challenge, on a first job in the save, I treat it as it does.

I spent the better part of a full day researching my squad and following all of my usual steps that I wrote about in the “First Day at a New Club” articles, but as I said in Part Two — you can either succeed or fail, preparation can only do so much and your lads have to get things done on the pitch.  I thought I had Bristol Rovers turning around, but I think a combination of not having enough good players and a lot of players with questionable mental toughness that led me to resign.

I hadn’t received any sort of ultimatum from the board.  Earlier in my tenure, before my first win, I had gotten as low as the board “thinking you should be performing slightly better in your job as head coach” but had gotten the board back to satisfied with my performance, highlighted by the supporters liking what I was able to do in the transfer (loan, really) market.

We weren’t able to build on that first win, as we drew in our next fixture, and then the rot was back.  I’ll give myself some credit, my main (only) midfield playmaker and best player, Chris Lines, was injured in the first match for six weeks.  This coincided with my second-best player, my right winger Cristian Montano being hurt in the third fixture.  Which also came with a startling loss of form and a ton of crying from my only proven striker in Matty Taylor.

I tried to pick the lads up with team meetings every three weeks to a month (the sweet spot not to get the team pissy from too many meetings) and praising and criticizing players in what would normally be the correct spots.  I’m a very hands-on manager, and love to have personal relationships with my players to help them develop — but a lot of these lads just weren’t having it.  I suppose having 13 points from 20 matches when I arrived had something to do with it, but we WERE improving.

Maybe the team will be able to rebound, but at 14 points from safety with 11 fixtures left and the team at rock bottom, I decided to jump.  The Stevenage job that I so covet became available, and it just seemed like time to resign and get on with my life.

If I can get an interview with The Boro, I’ll continue on with this same attempt at the challenge, otherwise I’ll move on to a restart or get my secondary save for the season started for the year.  I usually play two to three saves max, and I do want to have some diverse games so I have content to give you as readers — but I need a few hours rest to decide my next move.

It is all the writer’s curse — if you write an article and try to appear as an authority or even knowledgeable on a subject in pretty much any field, things that follow it will always do their best to make you look an absolute idiot.

Luckily, in Football Manager, you can just load another save and get right back to it.  And I’ll be doing that tomorrow after a good night’s rest.

Thanks as always for following American Werewolf Football! 😀

My First Day at a Club…Part Two (Bristol Rovers FC)

Welcome back, friends!

This is the second part of the series I began yesterday detailing my first day at any new club.  I feel that you can do so much to set yourself up for future success before you even hit continue that I had to break the post into two parts so I could cover all the ground I wanted to.  Here we go! 🙂

The Squad

I know it’s a weird time, but I usually haven’t looked at my players until I’ve done the steps in Part One. (OK, maybe I take a peek…)

Since I was only going through formations and TI’s to deduce tactical familiarity in Part One, I haven’t wanted to burden myself with knowing who I have to this point.  I’ve got my list of shapes they are comfortable with, and then I can go and look at the players.

The one time I stray from this is if I’m going to immediately do mutual terminations with all staff that have any ability to judge player ability and potential.  You can obviously gauge a lot through attributes, but not which roles players are comfortable in, what is judged to be their best position, and things of that nature.  And of course, the star rating if you fire your assistant. 🙂

This is one of those times I make my handy-dandy lists!  I go through my squad and make a list with the following positions:

GK:
DR:
DL:
DCR:
DCL:
DM:
MCR:
MCL:
AMR:
AML:
AMC:
CF:

Obviously, if you play with actual positional wingbacks, you’ll want to add those.  I never do in any formation, so I don’t add them.  I also like to have my left centre-back with at least a reasonable left foot, so I differentiate the position.  You may not give a damn.

I then try to see if I have two players with at least a 2.5* rating at each position, and preferably 3*.  So when I add to the list I would write “Jones (3*, 26)” and the secondary player the same way.  This list serves two purposes as a quick reference.  First, I have it for when I am in the tactics creator and really don’t feel like flipping screens to look at a sorted squad, and it lets me know immediately if certain shapes are out.  If you don’t have anyone who can play defensive midfielder, you’re not going to build tactics that play any.  Second, it lets you know very quickly which areas you’ll need to immediately prioritize in the transfer and loan market.  Using the same example, if you like playing tactics that involve defensive midfielders, and you don’t have any, your list just let you know one area you need to approach in the transfer market.

You could obviously get more in-depth with your list and add the players preferred role, but I find when I’m actually designing the tactic is when I just use the in-game filters on the individual positions.

By now, you’ve got you shape in mind and know if you have the players to carry it out and can start to build your tactic.  There are many articles and threads on the SI forums themselves by far better tacticians than myself to aid you in building successful tactics and using player roles in a coherent fashion and I advise you to check those out as they are beyond the scope of this piece. 🙂

Training and Coaching Setup

After you’ve built your tactic and know what roles you need at which positions, you’ll want to get your players training programs setup before you hit continue.  Odds are, you will want your players on a different training regimen than they were on.  Again, you are taking over mid-season for a reason, don’t assume for a second that any area of your club was being soundly managed.  It may very well have been, but don’t leave it to chance.

In a lot of cases, your initial squad won’t have a player whose primary role is the one you envision for that position in your tactic.  You’ll want that player training attributes or the role itself for what YOU envision as soon as possible, so do it before you’ve ever hit continue.   You aren’t getting the benefit of a pre-season taking over when you are, so you’ve got to manage a full fixture schedule while at the same time trying to use match preparation for tactics!   I tend to use individual training on all of my players from senior to my lowest youth level, but I’m a micro-manager.

I could literally link his ideas in every article, so here’s the best place for it — Cleon, moderator at the SI forums, has great information both in threads there and at his website http://sisportscentre.com that go into a lot more detail on great training setups, so by all means, educate yourself!

You also want to go into the “Coaches” tab of each of your squad’s training screens, and make sure that the coaches you have are being utilized properly.  If your coaches are setup improperly, what you’re trying to teach them is going to fail anyway, and you might not understand why!

Whatever training program you use, don’t forget to install it immediately on your arrival before pressing continue.  It will pay dividends in the long run, leading to better player development, and hopefully, a lot less injuries!

Scouting Assignments

You may be bringing in new scouts, or you may not have any, but if you do, don’t forget to get them scouting for your new club immediately.  I always advocate having your next opposition scouted first and foremost, but after that, you need to have your scouts out there trying to find the next great players for your club’s future success.  A lot of people get caught up in all of their other responsibilities that they do not setup their scouting system on the first day.  Obviously, if you’ve used mutual terminations and don’t have a scouting staff, there isn’t anything you can do — but in that case you must make sure to assign your scouts the day they join the club.  You’re paying them, make them work!

Summary

We’ve covered a great deal of ground now, so I’ll just put up a short “to-do” list summarizing a full day’s work before hitting “Continue” for the first time and starting your voyage as your new club’s manager!

· Get your staff in order and mutually terminate any backroom staff that you can replace with an upgrade. (If you can afford to do it, of course.)
· Do a tactical familiarity check with only formations, and only turning individual team instructions on/off or to different levels to check what players were being taught.
· Make a list detailing your best two players for each possible position in a tactic, so you can discard shapes you can’t use and give you top priorities in loan and transfer market.
· Armed with that information, build solid tactics or research and then build the best tactics for your new club.
· Set up your desired training programs for either your entire squad, or everyone by individuals.  Remember there’s no preseason and adapt!
· Make sure the coaches you have at your club are optimized to train the correct areas.  If your coaches are setup incorrectly, your players will not learn your methods!
· If you have scouts, begin setting up your scouting network immediately.  Joining midseason, you do not have time to waste and you need to have as much information as possible as fast as possible to help you save your club!

Doing all this, you can still fail, or you can be a great success!  But even if you fail, it won’t be because you didn’t prepare correctly, sometimes that is just football.  Just try to meet your expectations, and make sure you survive to do your big summer overhaul.  Be the savior, THEN be the great architect!

Please feel free to leave a comment either here or on the SI forums!  I post on the SI Forums as jaysdailydose and I am on Twitter @USAWerewolfFB!  Thank you very much for reading!

My installed mods and graphics!

I’ve gotten a few questions off of my screenshots as to what mods I’m using, and I’m never above crediting people who put in so much work to give us a better game.  Here are the current mods and addons I am using and where I was able to get them.

– SortItOutSI.net’s licensing fix.
– Metallic Logos Logopack (SortItOutSI)
– Cut Out Faces Megapack 2016 (SortItOutSi)
– Andromeda skin by TheBantams (FMScout)
– Debski’s Default Regen Hair Replacement for FM16 (FMScout)
– Football Manager 2016 Trophies Megapack  -DazS8 (FM Scout)
– TW15 Kits Megapack – TeenWay (FMScout)
– Fez’s New Turfs for FM2016 (Great Looking Pitches) by Fez (FMScout)
– Mini Stadiums Superpack by Stam (FMScout)
– Enhanced 3D Match Balls by Bart Watkiss

And some things you can’t see:

– Match In-Between Highlights by Michael Murray.
– FM16 Audio Commentary Patch by DAZS8 and others at FMScout!

My First Day at a Club…Part One (Bristol Rovers FC)

Welcome back, friends!

I got into a nice discussion over Twitter yesterday regarding tactics with a new follower.  He had been having some troubles with his tactics, and had Wigan in 20th in the Premier League.  I learned that he took over Wigan mid-season, so he didn’t have a preseason to prepare his players to accept his methods.

I felt this would make a fine blog entry, and would provide a look at how I approach my first day at a club, especially considering I just had my first day at my new club, Bristol Rovers, and took over midseason!

The things you can setup before you hit continue for the first time can sometimes be the most important things you do at the club, so make sure you’ve set yourself up for future success before you hit continue!

After writing this piece I decided it would be two parts before I published it, so make sure to look out for Part Two! 🙂

Backroom Staff

The first thing I do is to look at my backroom staff and staff responsibilities.  Go through and make sure that all of your Staff Responsibilities are exactly where you want them as one of the first things you do.  Your club could be employing a director of football and he could currently be in charge of transfers, etc — get your club onside with how you want things to go IMMEDIATELY.

Since I am starting at the bottom of League 2, one of the biggest things you can do to improve your club is to make sure you have the best coaching staff possible.  As I’m sure we all know, when you take over a new position at a club, all members of your backroom staff will accept a mutual termination of their contracts, so if they do not fit into your plans you can get rid of them for significantly less than if you terminated a contract in the future.

The first move I made was to look at my assistant manager, and I found he simply wasn’t going to be someone who would make the grade.  Starting out with a manager who is 20 years old with little to no knowledge of England, there were very few options available for staff.  Here’s a look at our now former assistant Marcus Stewart, who we offered a mutual termination to leave Bristol Rovers FC:

Marcus Stewart

As you can see from the highlights, the most important attributes for an assistant are Judging Player Ability and Potential, and Man Management.  Obviously, he suffers greatly in these areas, even at this lower level of football.  I also look for assistants with a decent amount of tactical knowledge as well — as they are the ones who give you advice during a match.  If your assistant doesn’t understand tactics, he can’t really read a game very well and his instructions will often be poor.

For coaches of any kind, you are ideally looking for Determination, Level of Discipline, and Motivating as they are hallmarks of any good coach and part of how FM rates your coaching.  If you’re at a lower level, though, sometimes you just have to make sacrifices for what you need, rather than what you want.   Obviously, in a perfect world your assistant would be someone who could get the best out of players on the training pitch as well, but this isn’t a perfect world, it’s League Two.

He hasn’t confirmed his arrival at the club yet, but we feel we found a much needed upgrade at the assistant spot in Steve Watson:

Steve Watson

He isn’t amazing, by any means — but he’ll be the first person on the coaching staff we can look to for player analysis and actually get a decent response (14/14 JPA/JPP.)  His tactical knowledge bump of 8 points over the outgoing Stewart is also big.

I didn’t make any other moves on my coaching staff for the time being, as I need to acquire more knowledge of staff from around the world — but if you have the resources and can find better staff, do it before you hit continue.

Tactics

Probably the most difficult thing when joining a club mid-season is installing your style of play.  You’ve had no chance to recruit “your guys” and you are left trying to make a quality dinner out of the ingredients the previous chef left you.  But, you’re taking over mid-season, so in most cases either those ingredients were garbage, or the guy before you couldn’t cook… so you’re in a bit of a pickle.

In my case with the new Bristol Rovers save, I’m in more than a bit of a pickle.  I’m propping up League Two and I’m on 13 points through 20 fixtures when I am introduced as manager.  I’m here to put out fires, not possibly create more — at least for the time being.

The first thing to do is check out your Team Report and the Tactics analysis located in your Tactics screen, which will give you analysis as to what formations the team used, what they were good against, and what they were bad against.  You can really dig into the analysis and come up with an idea of what they were playing.

Team Report
Tactical Analysis

However, the best way I find to see what tactics your new players are knowledgeable about is to go into the Tactics creator while it is still a blank slate, and hit “Create New Tactic” and go through and look and see the level of fluidity you are given with each formation.  It will take you about 5 minutes, but then you have no more questions about which formations your players know and do not know.  Obviously, if there are unlisted formations that you are comfortable with, you can move the shirts on the tactics pitch and check those shapes as well.  You’re strictly checking level of familiarity at this point.

Once you’ve found something they are fairly comfortable with, still keep everything else a blank slate but start turning on Team Instructions one at a time and checking what they do to your tactical fluidity.  For instance, go in and click “Stay on Feet” and go and check the fluidity.  Did it raise or drop?  Then check the other option “Get Stuck In” and check the fluidity.  Finally, check with neither instruction selected.  This will give you a great idea as to what your predecessor was teaching your players, as you can do this for every instruction.  Even if you never plan on using any of these instructions, it pays to take the 5 minutes and find out how your players were being instructed.

I advise using a notebook, maybe even two, but I’m a strange OCD kind of fellow.  But after having done those two tactical steps, I have a small list of shapes the team could be comfortable with, and I generally know what instructions I could give that they would be fluid with or would have to completely relearn.  (Changing a team’s passing style or closing down methods mid-season can be a recipe for disaster, just as an example.)  My other notebook is what my evaluations tell me would be my best two for each position on the pitch, it just makes for easier comparisons when combined with the FM screen.  Or I’m just a freak, your call. 😉

You don’t want to try to re-invent the wheel overnight.  In 90% of the cases that you are taking the reins mid-season, you are in trouble.  Try to solve one or two of the most glaring areas and get yourself on the right track, and just meet your expectations for the season so you keep yourself in a good light with your board.  The time for major tactical overhauls and big transfer swoops is in the summer and a full preseason, not when you’re trying to save your club’s blushes. (This doesn’t mean I won’t try to be active in the market as I took over on December 11th… but most likely it’ll be the loan market or trying to sell deadwood.)

Once I have an idea what type of football my club would be comfortable playing, I then will setup one or two tactics to be trained. In a rescue situation such as this, I try to get one tactic as close to fluid as possible before starting another, but your training methods and situation may vary. In this case, I’m using two but I’ll explain why below.

One thing that I discovered as far as tactics in last season’s version is that it is a very good idea to have a tactic fully fluid with a shorter passing style and one fully fluid with a direct passing style. I found it very useful for in-game adjustments last season where I could play whatever style I wished for the game and could switch between passing styles with the confidence that my players were 100% proficient in both styles. Obviously, having the mixed style to full fluidity is nice as well and I think it is often overlooked. Especially for those of you that will listen to your assistant’s advice “We should advise our players to adopt a more direct form of play” — that’s great, but are your lads proficient in direct passing styles?

My players were actually fairly technically proficient, so I have them training both a counter tactic and a control tactic, but those are personal choices. I’m currently playing a four-man back line, three in central midfield (CM/D, AP/A, B2B/S from left to right) with a winger on the left and an inside forward on the right with a lone striker who is a defensive forward.

My Current Tactic – Note the Fluidity First Day on the Job!

I’ll go into more detail on my own players and my future vision in subsequent posts, but this was already getting long and I just wanted to provide you readers with a visual aid for now.  I will definitely be extending this to a second part as there are a lot of other things to consider on the first day on the job to set you up for future success, but this is a solid start towards getting things on the right track!

I would like to thank Cleon of http://sisportscentre.com for changing the way I analyze football games, and I must admit I’ve been using his methods of at least watching at least the first 15 minutes of every fixture in order to better understand tactical play — and hopefully provide better content for you readers in the long run. (I’ve actually watched the full 90 on several occasions since my wife gave me the game for Christmas.) 😉

Part Two should be out in the next day or so, make sure to check this space!

Thanks as always for following American Werewolf Football! 😀

You’re Hired! Bristol Rovers FC! — The Ultimate Manager Challenge

On December 11th, 2015 we received an email from Bristol Rovers FC, and our career and this challenge is now off and racing!

As you can see, we are bottom of the table when we take over, but they did win their last game under the previous manager, Darrell Clarke.

Our only mandate for the season is to avoid relegation, and as we are in League Two, only two teams get relegated.  We have only 13 points after 20 fixtures, but we are only seven points from safety with 26 matches to go.

I need to have a look at the backroom and playing staffs before doing anything, and see what I can come up with tactically… but I think I will break that into a few parts here before we get rolling on a normal update pattern.  Taking over a club midseason is one of the hardest things to do in Football Manager, in my opinion, so I’ll try to focus in a little bit on my process.

I am sure there will be some sorts of changes, as 13 points from 20 matches is absolutely unacceptable.  We must stop the rot and begin to acquire points.

I will keep you posted after I’ve had a look at my surroundings, and thank you as always for following American Werewolf Football!  GO ROVERS! 😀

The Ultimate Manager Challenge 2016 — My Introduction!

Welcome back, friends!

My San Marino save wasn’t salvageable with my upgrades and such, so I will be restarting a new save for it and working on it this year as well — but we are going back to the Ultimate Manager Challenge.  I know it is what brought the few of you who have been loyal followers here in the first place, so we’re going to get started on the challenge for 2016!

For those that do not remember, it is a crazy extension of the old Pentagon challenge, which also entails becoming the world’s top international manager as well!  Your manager starts at 20 years old (mine will actually be 19 at game start, but 20 once he starts managing, as I have a mid-July birthday) and you must start with no coaching badges and with a former player level of Sunday League Footballer.  You start as an unemployed manager with those qualifications and must win the following competitions:

—– Top Division Club Competitions Required:

Barclay’s Premier League (England)
Liga BBVA (Spain)
Bundesliga (Germany)
Serie A TIM (Italy)
Ligue 1 (France)

And five other top division titles — I’m shooting for:

Brasileirao Chevrolet Serie A (Brazil)
Eredivisie (Holland)
ABSA Premiership (South Africa)
Hyundai Oilbank K-League Classic (South Korea)
Liga BBVA Bancomer MX (Mexico)

You must also win *TEN* domestic Cup competitions in which top level teams can enter.  It is not required, but rather wuss-like if they are not from ten different nations, so we’ll be looking to win Cups in ten different nations.

—– Continental Club Competitions Required:

UEFA Champions League (Europe)
AFC Champions League (Asia)
Orange CAF Champions League (Africa)
Copa Bridgestone Libertadores (South America)
CONCACAF Champions League (North America)
FIFA Club World Cup (World)

I may look into winning the OFC Champions League for good measure, but it is NOT a challenge requirement.  I don’t think it was all that well done in previous iterations of the game.

THEN we move on to the international competitions!

—– International Competitions Required:

FIFA World Cup
FIFA Confederations Cup
UEFA European Football Championship
AFC Asian Cup
Copa America
CONCACAF Gold Cup
Orange Africa Cup of Nations

As you can see, its an amazing and daunting challenge, the same as last season… but I’m getting a much earlier start and will be looking for full completion this season.  I will be posting at very least seasonal updates, and I will also be taking a look at who wins all competitions and awards in separate posts.

Here are the initial nations I am loading this season:

Here are my initial screenshots of my manager and all of his information:

I’m not sure if you, the readers, are looking more for stories or more focus on tactics and “advanced” gameplay — so I will be guided by you in the comment section, or on Twitter.  I am just dedicated into making this a great Football Manager fansite, and I am glad you are following along!  Thank you!

My FM Twitter is at @USAWerewolfFB — it was as close as I could get to the blog title.  I hope you will follow along, and thanks again for reading! 😀

Upgraded my system, adding to my game!

Welcome back, friends!

I’m sure some of you have been waiting for an update on the start of the San Marino save — and I do have it saved to the cloud, but I’m unsure if I will be able to resume the save or not.  I *believe* I can, but I’m not positive.

I had been having some minor malware and other security issues under Windows 8.1, and decided to take the free upgrade to Windows 10.  I had planned on doing a fully clean install, but I need to pick up a new USB drive as my DVD-R is extremely finicky and I’m having issues getting the installation media to burn to the DVD.

Anyway, that is neither here nor there.  I’d already used sortitoutsi’s competition names fix and gotten a decent facepack — but I’m getting a logo pack and some other stuff with my new install, and I’m not positive it is all save-game compatible.

Odds are that I just may start another save or two, as I plan on doing a great deal of writing on this year’s version.  I will definitely doing both the Ultimate Manager Challenge and the Sammarinese Challenge this season at least — but I want to make sure I have everything absolutely perfect first, and I don’t believe I did with my original save for the year.

So it may be a day or two before I get any fresh content to you, but I am dedicated to pushing this site forward this season and into the future, including getting a top-level domain and the like so it has a better fansite/strategy site feel to it.

Thank you all for your patience and for following so far… I promise your patience will be rewarded with quality Football Manager content!

Here are links to both Sortitoutsi and the community forums for Sports Interactive so you can get more information both on graphical and technical adjustments to improve your experience in-game, and the forums will allow you to see many of the great community made challenges that are already going on this season!

https://sortitoutsi.net — licensing fix and many amazing graphical updates!

http://community.sigames.com/forumdisplay.php/31-Challenges-Sign-Ups-amp-Experiments — Sports Interactive Community Forums, the Challenges forum, specifically!

Stevenage F.C. — 2020/21 Season (FM15)

                                                   Competitions     |     Manager Profile

Welcome back, Boro fans!  While it is yet another year without silverware that qualifies for the Ultimate Manager Challenge, I can’t help but be proud of our club’s accomplishments this season, and as a whole.  We continue to make credible progress towards being a big and great club, and all of our hard work feels as if it will start paying off in silverware very soon!

The media personalities and pundits felt we would solidify and consolidate in the Premier League, staying up for sure, but coming in at a disappointing 14th.  At the beginning of the campaign, the board would have been more than happy with a mid-table finish and making sure we continued to be financially prudent.

Instead, the lads challenged for a Champions League spot all campaign long, probably partially due to the fact that our cup performances were absolutely atrocious this season, as we crashed out of both the Capital One Cup and the FA Cup at the first time of asking.  We qualified for a Europa League berth fairly early, but it went down to the final day of the season, with Tottenham handling their business and forcing us to the Third Qualifying Round.  This was still an obvious success for us, as a Top-7 finish in our first year of Premier League play has to be viewed as a decent job.  Doing it on the lowest wage budget, spending less than half of what our next closest competition spent, and with the 2nd lowest net transfer spend, just feels very, very solid.

Ed Smits has continued to stay on loan, and will be staying at least through next season, but his loan fee is getting prohibitive — but Manchester United know as well as we do what they have, and that is a world class centre forward.  When I check with my talent evaluators, some days he’s world class, some days he’s a leading player for the Premier League.  He had a couple minor knocks, but he’s right there at that world class level now, and has starting banging in goals as a full international for Holland now, so the word is out on the young Dutchman.

Speaking of young Dutchmen, we also found another stud of a player in young Theo Huisman, a left back we got for a steal off the transfer list at PSG.  We paid only £1.9M for him from PSG, and his value has already tripled to over £6.5M and he is also now viewed as a world class full back.  We got a great season out of Michael Folivi, who again scored 20 goals, but my staff feel he has peaked as a player.  He’s still decent-to-good for the Premier League, but we have to begin to look for competition if not a flat-out replacement in the future.

The club accomplishments moved us up the reputation and the “rich list” with us now coming in as the world’s 25th most valuable club.  The club was worth between 600 and 800K when I began my tenure, and Stevenage F.C. is now worth £358M at last look, with absolutely zero debt — and that includes purchasing a renovated and expanded Broadhall Way, which while it still only has a capacity of 12,500, has almost doubled in size.  Owning the stadium will allow us to renovate, expand, and profit off of our stadium, so I felt it was very important to get it done as soon as possible.  We are now viewed as a rich club, and we have over £25M in the balance.

Facility upgrades have been frequent and ongoing.  One youth facility upgrade finished already at the start of the new season, and we have both a youth and a senior team facilities upgrade finishing this December as well.  As of right now (September 2021), our training facilities our Impressive, our youth facilities are Good — and again, both of those have another further upgrade finishing in less than 90 days.  We also now have an Established youth recruitment network and Exceptional junior coaching, and have actually started producing academy players with a real chance.  16-year-old Wayne Richards may be the first fruit of our upgraded academy, as he is seen as having the potential to be a leading attacking midfielder in the Premiership.  We’ve also produced a few other youths that could be solid in the last season and a half, but the work is just now starting to bear fruit, and its something to watch for in the future.

That is, if my future winds up being at Stevenage.  I declared interest in both the open Manchester jobs at the end of this season, with Manchester United being so flattered by my declaration of interest that I went as far as to actually apply while still being employed at Stevenage.  They didn’t fire me (how do you fire a club legend?) but United wound up giving the job to Hamza Hamzaoglu after firing Roy Keane.  Hamzaoglu had some success with Galatasaray, winning 3 Super Leagues between 2014 and 2018, but won nothing at Roma between 2018 and 2021 before being given the United job.  The hiring didn’t make a ton of sense to me, and the early returns for the next campaign do not bode well for Hamza OR United… they may rue the day they gave the job to another man.  The City job went to Jose Mourinho, and obviously I don’t have much to say about that hire, especially since after he left Chelsea he led Spain to a World Cup, so his CV is awfully impressive. 😉

But, for now, we stay at Stevenage and start looking to make serious runs at silverware that counts for this challenge.  I’ve also added Germany and France as playable in case things go well (or badly) in a hurry, as I want to stay in the big European leagues for the start of my career.  I just think it will help greatly with reputation issues down the road and even though it may take a little longer to get silverware rolling, I think it will help keep it rolling in down the road.

We’ve advanced to the Group Stage in the Europa League and have started solidly in our Group, and we are again challenging for the Champions League places early in the next season. Also, even though he is also a left-back, I couldn’t help but add another world class one in Angel Blanco.  I’m of the opinion that if you have a chance to land a world class player at a true bargain, you get that player and you sort it out later.  We also signed our first truly “veteran” player in a 32-year-old Theo Walcott — both to add to our attacking options as he still has blinding pace — but mainly for leadership and mentoring of younger players.  Even after his release from Arsenal, he’s more than worth the wages.

We also made our first truly “big-money” deal, as we signed England’s #1 goalkeeper, Gary Groombridge, away from Chelsea.  He had become unhappy with the Blues, and even though he was still very expensive, he was an undoubted upgrade and cheaper than he would ever be again as I was lucky enough to have him unsettled.  Klopp finally gave in, and we got our man.  Not that Klopp cares, with four straight Prem titles to add to his CV, not to mention a Champions League along with many other nice trophies. 🙂

We hope you will keep following our progress, and, as always, thank you for reading American Werewolf Football!