The United team I am building behind my first team is the most exciting side I've ever had in FM
Vandevoort, Dalot, Williams, Kana, Makengo, Mejbri, Bellingham, Greenwood and two young regens named Banks and Long are around 18 months away from taking the world by absolute storm. Kana, Mejbri and Greenwood are there already.
Yes, Bamford has surprised me a lot, as he only scored 12 in 42 in the championship but finished 2nd top scorer with 19 just finished the season, put all my eggs in the Europa league as I won my group (don’t know if it’s a bug or it’s something that’s going to happen but it meant that I went to the 2nd knockout phase so that saved 2 extra games)
Beat schalke won 3-0 away
QF vs Arsenal L2-1 away before taking them to the cleaners 5-2 at home
SF Vs Jose Mourinho’s Roma beat them home and away
Final Vs Monaco originally I won 3-1 but my game wouldn’t load back up for some reason so had to play the final again and thankfully won 7-6 on penalties.
Couldn’t get Elliott from Liverpool as they wanted over 100m for him, but Barcelona had Leroy Sane on the transfer list for 23.5, not a bad replacement. Sane wanted to sign so badly he took a 80k a week pay cut
Also signed Abdulkadir Omur from PSG for 16m he will takeover from Harrison on the right,
Europa win is a great result, it’s not easy at all. You usually have to play traditional CL teams like Arsenal and other teams like Monaco have fantastic squads of really good youngsters after a few seasons. It’s like that now with the knockouts since the introduction of the Conference League.
Sane is a massive signing, I would be delighted with that
The United team I am building behind my first team is the most exciting side I've ever had in FM
Vandevoort, Dalot, Williams, Kana, Makengo, Mejbri, Bellingham, Greenwood and two young regens named Banks and Long are around 18 months away from taking the world by absolute storm. Kana, Mejbri and Greenwood are there already.
I have to admit, I only really make the switch to youth when I am forced to. I am Mourinho at heart, I worry about throwing away trophies because I threw the youth in too soon!
I am hoping the lower league saves with less money will help me enjoy bringing through players more.
In march 3rd season with (Dirty) Leeds, won the championship, came 6th last season (with the lowest wage bill in the premiership) currently 5th with 9 games to go
Current XI
Casilla
Calabria Holding Clarke-Slater Taylor
Harrison Phillips Bellingham Elliott*
Nmecha Bamford
*on loan from Liverpool, unfortunately I will have next to no chance of signing him on a permanent deal
Man Utd are 4 points clear could be about to win the league for the first time under Ole, I’m a long way from challenging them with their front 6 being
Europa win is a great result, it’s not easy at all. You usually have to play traditional CL teams like Arsenal and other teams like Monaco have fantastic squads of really good youngsters after a few seasons. It’s like that now with the knockouts since the introduction of the Conference League.
Sane is a massive signing, I would be delighted with that
I’ve found it a bit mixed, played some good sides from the last eight but before then feck me The group stage of Europa is too much of a piss. The Europa conference is horrific, I’ve seen like Hibs and ferencaros in the semis. I dread to think how these competitions are gonna be once they take place in real life (if they ever do).
You still got Shackleton, Mcallmont and Kenneh? They all develop really well.
I’ve found it a bit mixed, played some good sides from the last eight but before then feck me The group stage of Europa is too much of a piss. The Europa conference is horrific, I’ve seen like Hibs and ferencaros in the semis. I dread to think how these competitions are gonna be once they take place in real life (if they ever do).
Haha, I have to try and get into the conference one year then. A win is a win. I would take a Europa or Conference win over a CL quarter final. I am a trophy fiend
I think it’s a great idea for real life though. That extra round in the Europa was a killer and ruined teams seasons. Now it has as many games as the CL.
I would definitely watch Conference games between teams like Everton, Bilbao and Milan, who will no doubt be the type of teams qualifying for it in real life. It sounds like fun and I usually always end up coming back to England to manage in the game, simply because there are more chances to win a trophy.
You still got Shackleton, Mcallmont and Kenneh? They all develop really well.
I’ve found it a bit mixed, played some good sides from the last eight but before then feck me The group stage of Europa is too much of a piss. The Europa conference is horrific, I’ve seen like Hibs and ferencaros in the semis. I dread to think how these competitions are gonna be once they take place in real life (if they ever do).
I don’t, the funny thing is I picked Leeds as I know that had some good young players.
Unfortunately I forgot that you can approach to sign players on yth contact as Kenneh had a yth contract Arsenal came in for him, so when I offered him a contact he turned me down to sign for them, he’s still yet to play for them but he does looks very good, value is 10.5m.
Shackleton is at Palace he was 5th choice so I thought it be best for his development else where
Mcallmont is rotting in West Ham’s reserves his value is still under 1m
I have kept Boguez he’s my 3rd choice midfielder, turned out very well he’s worth over 20m now.
Still playing FM19(gotten into the habit of buying my sport games every 2 year, don’t play enough these days to justify buying every year) and just started a save with Red Bull London. Found it on FM Scout.
They have taken Welling United had them be taken over by Red Bull. As expected the Conference South has been a breeze for far, undefeated in 13 league games so far.
Expecting an easy promotion this season with the coming seasons to be a bit harder.
I don’t, the funny thing is I picked Leeds as I know that had some good young players.
Unfortunately I forgot that you can approach to sign players on yth contact as Kenneh had a yth contract Arsenal came in for him, so when I offered him a contact he turned me down to sign for them, he’s still yet to play for them but he does looks very good, value is 10.5m.
Shackleton is at Palace he was 5th choice so I thought it be best for his development else where
Mcallmont is rotting in West Ham’s reserves his value is still under 1m
I have kept Boguez he’s my 3rd choice midfielder, turned out very well he’s worth over 20m now.
He was worth 56 million for me after two seasons at Las Palmas.
It’s an easy mistake to make though. The same thing happened me in my first save with Lazio. City offered Armini a contract before I even realized and he was gone
I'm encountering my first proper 'transition' in my Poland save. I'm into season 11 and fresh off my first CL win last season I had a big sell off.
I was sick of being absolutely bombarded every window with offers from clubs so I decided to sell them off to make room for the next crop who we're ready to step into the first team.
The bad things about Poland are that there is simply no money, so Champions League success has become absolutely vital for me. My wages are around £50 Million P/A and I'm losing close to £40 Million a year so I'm now trying to balance being competitive with selling some of my best players to keep the club financially viable.
The other bad thing is that in Poland you have a rule which requires you to always have a U22 Polish player in your lineup at all times. I'm in a privileged position where I can pluck any good polish regen from any of the other clubs but it's so annoying. If that rule wasn't a thing I'd be so happy.
Just qualified for the African Champions League final against Supersport United, another South African team who we have a great record against.
2 days later my BWM breaks his toe and is out for 8 weeks, experienced back up left in January and they don't let you add players to your squad selection after August.
FINALLY!
First time I've ever stuck through the whole thing and managed to complete the pentagon challenge. Won the first leg 2-1 away from and the home leg was a pretty comfortable 1-0.
Ended the season with a clean sweep again, bit harder this time as the league didn't get confirmed until the last day of the season (we'd won it pretty much anyway as the gap was 3 points and we had a far better goal difference), had to fight back from 1-0 down to win the FA Cup final 3-1 all with 10 men as my right winger went mad and got sent off after 7 minutes.
That leaves me with
Asian CL - 2026
NACL - 2028
Copa Libertadores - 2029
ECL - 2034
African CL - 2036
Aside from that CL wins:
Malaysian League and Cup double
Chinese FA cup
South Korean League
MLS and US cup double
Brazilian state championship and Cup
Italian league
German League
French League, Cup, Super Cup
South African League, Super 8, FA Cup and Knockout Cup (x2)
A pretty successful career I think. Now I can finally graduate to FM20, no way in hell I'm doing this challenge in this one.
Just had an insane end to my first season at United. We were 10 points behind Liverpool with about 10 games to go, clawed it back despite the Europa League. 6 points behind with 3 games left, one of which was a delayed game against the team in 18th, but first we had a home game against Liverpool. Rashford was immense throughout our run that got us back in contention, unfortunately a "bad tackle" (sure) snapped his leg in the first 20 minutes of this deciding game. Greenwood came on and took his place and just as it looked like they'd escape with a draw and the title, Van Dijk cocked up and allowed Greenwood to score, he even added a second in injury time just to be sure. Won the title on goal difference. I'm pretty happy with that.
Really good reading about other people’s saves. I find it interesting reading how different personalities go about things
I just had an insane ending to a season. I was a good 13 points off second place when I took over Coventry in January but the team in second collapsed and Sunderland took their place. I went on a run of 10 wins and got myself 1 point ahead with two games to go.
An absolute screamer won the game away to Ipswich and we were a win away to Wycombe from promotion. Failing that, we just needed to better the Sunderland result.
At half time, we hadn’t shown up and were 1-0 down but Sunderland were 2-0 down. Comfortable.
10 minutes into second half and Sunderland score, still no hassle, but doubts creeping in.
10 minutes later, they are level and “Coventry slip into 3rd” on goal difference. Panic stations.
We get a penalty in the 80th minute. Campana, on loan from Wolves, tucks it away. We are up into 2nd again, but not playing well. We just can’t get anything going.
Three minutes later, Sunderland score and are now winning 3-2 and take over 2nd place. If we don’t score a winner, we are into the playoffs after being so close.
I am smashing every button and time is going fast. I am getting FM’ed!
94th minute, one last corner, which is absolute smashed across the 6 yard box. Our CM appears out of nowhere to power home and just keeps on running. 2-1 and we are up with the very last touch of the game.
Sunderland go on to lose the playoff final to Charlton, an agonizing 3rd season to their Netflix show.
In 3 seasons, I have worked my way up and am now a manager in the Championship at a club with a 30,000 seater stadium. Our first season relegation in Sweden’s bottom tier a distant memory.
So glad I didn't sell Chong but Bailey instead. Chong is really stepping it up in my third season as an inverted winger on the right contributing 14 goals and 8 assists in 20 PL games.
I also picked up a new defender in January for 89M €. 21 year old french lad named Todibo. He is going to replace Maguire who is simply too slow to play with my high d-line. He hasn't been bad but I get into real trouble every time he is playing and the opposition team has a fast striker.
Edit: of course, since I just wrote on here how awesome Chong is developing he manages to pick up an injury for 6 weeks. Argh.
I wasn't going to get it this year but it ended up being free on Game Pass so I said feck it. As usual very little has changed beyond some annoying extra stuff, the match engine sucks, they haven't fixed any of the issues that have plagued it for years, and of course I'm still fecking addicted despite all that.
Went with Utd for an easy first save. Got Sancho for £55m somehow and got rid of Lingard. Fecked a few other shite players off on loan too. Sancho has been brilliant for me. Martial good too, Bruno and Rashford decent but not great. Greenwood is a super sub. Pretty much replaced shithouses like Shaw and Lindelof with the likes of Williams and Tuanzebe too.
Currently 2nd in the league behind Liverpool who are insanely good. So yeah, I'll take that and a good run at the Europa. Building up a really strong scouting network and already identified some really promising young players for the summer. My Utd side are usually unstoppable within 3 or 4 years so once that happens I'll start a save with a league one/championship team.
I had an absolutely amazing first season at United. At least in terms of the league. I thought for a long time that Liverpool would run away with the title on account of only losing one game (to me at Old Trafford) for a long time. Furthermore I initially struggled to get my forwards firing, luckily my defence was solid throughout the campaign so I scraped by in the beginning with a few narrow wins. Incredibly I made it through the season unbeaten though ending up on 104 points. And around november I figured out how to get the strikers going, so Martial ended up being my topscorer with 28 goals or something like that. Rashford and Greenwood both got close to 20 as well. Tuanzebe ended up with nine goals, I think.
One of the keys to staying consistent in the 2nd half was bringing in Chiesa in January. He ended up in double digits and got the most man of the match award of the campaign.
My best results were probably winning 4-1 at home against Arsenal after getting a player sent off after 15 minutes at 0-0. I came back from 2-0 down at the Etihad to win 2-4 as well.
I lost the league cup final to Liverpool, won the FA cup against City and lost the Euro Cup to Wolves.
Now, after promising Pogba we could get back in the CL and we actually did it he wants to leave for PSG the prick. I told him to wait a year but he's throwing a hissy fit. Meanwhile I triggered his contract extension.
For the new season I've brought in Thiago Almada, Talles Magno and Matheus Henrique.
I still think the scouting system on this is bugged though. None of my scouts finished scouting the nations I assigned them to during the first season. So now I've started sending them out for just a month at a time, which results in them giving me lists back where I cannot readily see their rating of players and all that useful info. And the news item doesn't even include a direct link to the reports under the given scout.
Who is everyone bogey team? With Inter currently and I can’t beat Leverkusen in the champions league. They’ve knocked me out in the semi finals by being the only team to beat me at home and then thrashed me away.
Next season, had them in the group stage, looking for revenge but they beat me twice. Faced them in the quarters and they knocked me out again.
I had a friendly against them in pre season and lost that one too!
Over the last two seasons, I've beaten Liverpool in 5 out of 6, City in 4 out of 5, Spurs in 5 out of 7 but against Chelsea I have 1 point from 4 games. Always struggle to beat Norwich as well for some reason.
Who is everyone bogey team? With Inter currently and I can’t beat Leverkusen in the champions league. They’ve knocked me out in the semi finals by being the only team to beat me at home and then thrashed me away.
Next season, had them in the group stage, looking for revenge but they beat me twice. Faced them in the quarters and they knocked me out again.
I had a friendly against them in pre season and lost that one too!
Playing with Manchester United it's funnily enough actually Wolves. Against the big six I have only lost twice in 3 seasons so far. 1-3 against City in the league and the most annoying one 0-1 against Pool in the CL final. But fecking Wolves beat me twice in my first season, I only lost 3 games that season and drew with me 1-1 and lost 2-1 against me last season.
This season it seems I have finally broken the spell and at least my first game I have won quite comfortably with 4-0 away from home and I'll play them again in 2 weeks.
Oh yeah another thing, I switched from a 4-1-4-1 to a 4-2-3-1 this season as I desperately wanted to Haaland in my and didn't want to bench Greenwood for him, so I decided to go with a 4-2-3-1 Heynckes style with a shadow striker (Müller) behind the leading striker (Lewandwoski) and it's working crazy good so far. Haaland has 22 goals in 20 PL starts and while Greenwood has been overshadowed by the brilliant Chong so far I'm not too unhappy with his 6 goals and 8 assists in only 16 PL starts.
On that note, how are you guys actually handling rotation? Since FM 2019 I'm pretty much set on the method that I will have a quality first eleven and 5 quality rotation players that are close in quality to the single position starters and have loads of youngsters with high potential training with the first team.
This leads to me pretty much playing every one of my starters 2 out of 3 games which keeps the entire crop of 16 top players happy and well enough rested. If one gets injured I'll slot in one of the youngsters to fill in, which means I also end up giving a healthy amount of playing time to my biggest talents.
Oh yeah another thing, I switched from a 4-1-4-1 to a 4-2-3-1 this season as I desperately wanted to Haaland in my and didn't want to bench Greenwood for him, so I decided to go with a 4-2-3-1 Heynckes style with a shadow striker (Müller) behind the leading striker (Lewandwoski) and it's working crazy good so far. Haaland has 22 goals in 20 PL starts and while Greenwood has been overshadowed by the brilliant Chong so far I'm not too unhappy with his 6 goals and 8 assists in only 16 PL starts.
On that note, how are you guys actually handling rotation? Since FM 2019 I'm pretty much set on the method that I will have a quality first eleven and 5 quality rotation players that are close in quality to the single position starters and have loads of youngsters with high potential training with the first team.
This leads to me pretty much playing every one of my starters 2 out of 3 games which keeps the entire crop of 16 top players happy and well enough rested. If one gets injured I'll slot in one of the youngsters to fill in, which means I also end up giving a healthy amount of playing time to my biggest talents.
Playing with Manchester United it's funnily enough actually Wolves. Against the big six I have only lost twice in 3 seasons so far. 1-3 against City in the league and the most annoying one 0-1 against Pool in the CL final. But fecking Wolves beat me twice in my first season, I only lost 3 games that season and drew with me 1-1 and lost 2-1 against me last season.
This season it seems I have finally broken the spell and at least my first game I have won quite comfortably with 4-0 away from home and I'll play them again in 2 weeks.
I've only really looked into doing saves with them in recent years as we've been pretty rubbish, I used to manage teams just below United's level. Oh and City on FM07 would be a great save because you could replace 80% of the squad in the 1st season.
Don't really like managing the bigger clubs.
Honestly I was surprised how well Chong is doing as well. I bought Bailey at the start of last season and just by looking at the attributes I would have said there can only be one winner in the duel for a starting place and well I didn't think it would be Chong. Chong got a good run of games during a 5 week injury of Bailey and I was surprised to find he put in better performances than Bailey, at the start of this season Milan actually offered me 68M and I took at putting all my chips on Chong continuing in this good form and wasn't disappointed. The truth is I don't quite get why he is doing better than Bailey and until his injury he was even better than Sancho, Rashford, Diogo Jota and Greenwood, being my 2nd best attacker after Haaland.
Which already worked pretty nicely but I shifted some stuff around and ended up playing with the following roles which for some reason made my defense almost unbeatable.
I mainly play positive mentality with a fluid team shape. I don't really change the mentality but if I feel my opponents wingbacks start to create too many chances I pull my wingers back and change to a 4-4-1-1 formation. Apart from that I never really have to change anything, it works at home and away.
Looks amazing. Do you have a good teach to get his mentality on track? Fairly sporting isn't bad but I think with a good mentor who has the right personality you could indeed form him into crazy good player.
Looks amazing. Do you have a good teach to get his mentality on track? Fairly sporting isn't bad but I think with a good mentor who has the right personality you could indeed form him into crazy good player.
I have started using this training method from Feb, showing remarkable improvements. Should be interesting end to the season, to see how players progress from Feb to June.
I have started using this training method from Feb, showing remarkable improvements. Should be interesting end to the season, to see how players progress from Feb to June.
Any link to that guide? I really don't invest much though in training tbh, I training shedules from the workshops which work okay I guess but I'm always interested in new input on training.
I have started using this training method from Feb, showing remarkable improvements. Should be interesting end to the season, to see how players progress from Feb to June.
I usually leave all training to my assistant (although recently i've noticed he seems to use a gegenpress schedule despite me using a tiki-taka tactic all season ).
Is this method something you need to download? Or can you just adapt your own training schedules?
