Gaming Football Manager 2021 (FM21)

[Chipper]

Doing the 5 vowel thing, all new signings must have at least that in their last name. Not sure what to do with the players who are at the club to start with, sell the ones that don't qualify/dump in reserves or allow them to play?

Hopefully doing it with Philadelphia in MLS because it also has 5 vowels in the name, just hope they're not called "Union" on the league table, haven't loaded it up yet. If they are we go somewhere else. Haven't done a save in the USA for about 10 years and remember the rules being a bit quirky and different what with the draft etc. Could be fun.

Did have a bit of a thought - manage Philadelphia and only sign players called Phil? Phillip, Phillipe, Felipe etc. Nah, that's going too far even for me.

 

[YAMS49]

Doing the 5 vowel thing, all new signings must have at least that in their last name. Not sure what to do with the players who are at the club to start with, sell the ones that don't qualify/dump in reserves or allow them to play?

Hopefully doing it with Philadelphia in MLS because it also has 5 vowels in the name, just hope they're not called "Union" on the league table, haven't loaded it up yet. If they are we go somewhere else. Haven't done a save in the USA for about 10 years and remember the rules being a bit quirky and different what with the draft etc. Could be fun.

Did have a bit of a thought - manage Philadelphia and only sign players called Phil? Phillip, Phillipe, Felipe etc. Nah, that's going too far even for me.

If they have five vowels keep them, they qualify. Just on this way of playing there's nothing more frustrating than finding the perfect player for your squad and counting only four vowels.... It happens a lot.

 

[do.ob]

Time for a new save:

Inspired by a thread on the official forums. It actually works out quite well, even without lots of polishing.
Not the biggest overperformance, given PSV have one of the best squads in the league, but I'm happy to see something that looks so silly on paper work out reasonably well.

 

[Chipper]

If they have five vowels keep them, they qualify. Just on this way of playing there's nothing more frustrating than finding the perfect player for your squad and counting only four vowels.... It happens a lot.

Ha! I'm envisaging that already, there's no way to filter for it in searches either that I can think of, not even with Genie Scout which I've decided I won't be using for the first time in many a save. Can hardly tell your scouts you want them to look at players with certain types of names!

Anyway time to get on it, not sure what leagues to load up. Imagine Mexico might be useful for MLS. England lower league players seem to often go there.

 

[YAMS49]

Ha! I'm envisaging that already, there's no way to filter for it in searches either that I can think of, not even with Genie Scout which I've decided I won't be using for the first time in many a save. Can hardly tell your scouts you want them to look at players with certain types of names!

Anyway time to get on it, not sure what leagues to load up. Imagine Mexico might be useful for MLS. England lower league players seem to often go there.

Just on Genie Scout... please don't take this as criticism in any way & I'm not trying to tell anyone how to play the game... It's a fantastic tool no doubt but the reward you get from trusting your scouts & your game searches to find players far outweighs the use of it. My biggest criticism of the latest incarnations of the game is AI squad management, so why use a tool that allows you to abuse this even more... Just my take on it.

 

[NoLogo]

To be fair, I played last year's version a bit and didn't do amazing on that, but I often play CM 01/02 with updated teams, and am pretty good at that version.
Before that I played FM08 as that for me is one of the best versions.
This has been the first version I've managed to take a Championship team to European glory and so quickly, which leads me to believe that certain tactics give you a massive upper hand and this game is maybe tailored to be slightly easier to be more approachable?!

Sure in certain aspects I feel like the game has been dumped down a bit which may make the game to easy for some veterans I reckon.

 

[Chipper]

Just on Genie Scout... please don't take this as criticism in any way & I'm not trying to tell anyone how to play the game... It's a fantastic tool no doubt but the reward you get from trusting your scouts & your game searches to find players far outweighs the use of it. My biggest criticism of the latest incarnations of the game is AI squad management, so why use a tool that allows you to abuse this even more... Just my take on it.

Fair enough, we all have our ways of playing the game and if you feel Genie Scout would take away your enjoyment then of course it's not for you. I was or am still able to have fun using it I suppose.

Anway, going old-school with this new save. I remember years ago having a print-out of what were said to be the important attributes for different positions and simply adding them up to give players a score in that position then going from there. Might try that again here, and at least the game can highlight the attributes for the different roles now so I know exactly what to look for. Perhaps I can give half-points for secondary attributes on top of that. Combine with scout opinion of injury proneness, ability to improve etc. and I should be good.

 

[Chipper]

Well this is going to be hard, think I picked the worst league to try this experiment in as the transfer rules are proving difficult to grasp fully after reading through them a few times and watching a couple of videos. Still, we're up for a challenge. Looks like it's hard to necessarily move players on and I'm literally going to have to change my entire squad before the first game. I can waive players to bin them off but they still count against the salary cap for the upcoming season as far as I can tell and it's the salary cap that's all important in MLS. Got to get that down to be able to sign anyone.

Will give it a go anyway. Maybe it will surprise me as I haven't fully dived in yet but I'm wondering if I'll be able to field a team that comply with these self imposed rules by opening day at this point. Don't really care if it's dross, we'll magic a few results up just as long as we can get to that point.

 

[Chipper]

Well we have 1 player, signed a defender called Tomas Hilliard-Arce as a free agent. He's not bad actually. A 'keeper called Kevin Piedrahita turned us down to go to Vancouver.

Luckily we're quite rich, was able to buy the most expensive scouting package and found 28 Americans with the 5 or more vowels in their names (I'm counting double-barrelled names as one name too). Just waiting for those reports to come back, but had to jump on those other 2 targets before I chance to scout as bids were in from other clubs.

MLS Superdraft is upcoming, literally no players meet the naming requirements. Not sure what to do. Suppose I can sign players to sell, just not play them? Can also try and trade my draft picks for other stuff. Can trade for other players, general allocation money which is a way of offsetting your wage bill and allowing more room in the salary cap (you essentially pay to reduce the money that counts towards the cap), or international slots as each club is limited to so many overseas players. You can sign more international players by trading an extra slot form another team I think. This whole thing is alien to me.

Spoiler: Hilliard-Arce

 

[Chipper]

Hmmm, was able to sign Kevin Piedrahita after all even though he chose Vancouver over us. Got ripped off, but had to offer them £475k of our general allocation money when he's only worth £250k.

What can you do though? I need a goalie and there's hardly any options out there for us. Most of that £475k I'd just got from trading away a couple of draft picks anyway. Ha, starting to use jargon that I wouldn't have understood at all a few hours ago. Anyway, enough of me talking to myself in here, will come back to this tomorrow.

Spoiler: piedrahita

 

[Chipper]

My eyes hurt. This was a bad idea, scrolling through loads of players just to see if I can see any with longish-looking names then squinting at the screen as I count the vowels, mostly to get disappointed when there's 4. If getting through that stage it's a click on their profile to find they're rubbish most of the time. Still, I will do one season of this no matter what. No idea what to expect on the pitch or how we'll match up against the other MLS sides. To top it off this team is in the North American Champions League which I didn't know about, got about 3 weeks to put together the rest of the squad.

We currently have 10 players, a couple more in the pipeline. All Americans. 2 are good 2 are semi good, the rest kind of making making up the numbers. I'm allowed 9 international players (foreigners), about to go and sign some up, I supsect they'll be the bulk of the team playing week in week out with the American lads supplementing them.

 

[Berbaclass]

My eyes hurt. This was a bad idea, scrolling through loads of players just to see if I can see any with longish-looking names then squinting at the screen as I count the vowels, mostly to get disappointed when there's 4. If getting through that stage it's a click on their profile to find they're rubbish most of the time. Still, I will do one season of this no matter what. No idea what to expect on the pitch or how we'll match up against the other MLS sides. To top it off this team is in the North American Champions League which I didn't know about, got about 3 weeks to put together the rest of the squad.

We currently have 10 players, a couple more in the pipeline. All Americans. 2 are good 2 are semi good, the rest kind of making making up the numbers. I'm allowed 9 international players (foreigners), about to go and sign some up, I supsect they'll be the bulk of the team playing week in week out with the American lads supplementing them.

I did a save in the MLS a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Was okay once you got to grips with everything. The thing that did my head in was not being able to scout the draft participants beforehand so a lot of the time you're just making a complete guess on attributes alone. Maybe I just messed it up thought and you can actually do that, who knows.

 

[Berbaclass]

Been playing a save with United and I've has such a problem with injuries

This is up till December

 

[NoLogo]

Feck me I totally forgot what it was like to manage a team lower down in the financial pecking order. Second season in January and like 1/3 of my squad is under transfer bids. I know I'm a selling team but not in January, they can feck right off.

 

[Chipper]

I did a save in the MLS a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Was okay once you got to grips with everything. The thing that did my head in was not being able to scout the draft participants beforehand so a lot of the time you're just making a complete guess on attributes alone. Maybe I just messed it up thought and you can actually do that, who knows.

I think I was able to scout it this time. Not 100% sure as I couldn't take any players in it.Might have been just some players, I remember getting a list of the promising ones, I think it asked me if I wanted to scout them. There was a training combine/some trial matches and I could get reports from that. I don't use attribute masking anyway and I think I was able to see all the player's stats. The only thing that could have been missing were things like injury susceptibility, personality traits that a scout might tell you. Guess you'd just have to gamble on those if not scouting.

Yes, the league itself looks fun to me, might not be to some but I can dig it. Could be frustrating to get all the way to the MLS final and lose,particularly if you dominated the season. The upside to that is that it might feel sweeter to win if/when you do.

On top of that these squad rules should at least in theory make it more difficult to absolutely dominate to quite the same extent you might in some other leagues. I'm sure you'd learn better squad building techniques for the particular quirky rules they have with each passing season as well, and the best way to handle it all.

The only problem is the amount of work I've given myself from this self imposed ruleset on top of it all. One of the other unusual ideas where I only sign players whose last name starts with the same letter as the initials as the team would have been a lot easier. There would have been LAFC, NYFC, DC United to pick from, but more importantly could order in game player search or scout by alphabetical order and find players by their name. Will definitely come back to MLS in a future save but this time it's just going to be a one season deal.

 

[YAMS49]

Have you managing in Brazil before, Chipper? It's great fun with different competitions occurring all over the place. You don't know where you are one moment to the next. You win one mini league & they throw you in another comp with half the teams again. It's nuts.

 

[NoLogo]

Season 2 is well underway and we are doing really great. At the start of the season I had to bring in a couple more first team players because I lost a couple to other teams in more reputable leagues.

Spoiler: Transfers Out summer 2021

Next to three first team players Pedro Porro, Carles Alena and Brenner. I also brought in 8 youth team players, everyone for less than a million € which I was really happy about. Also got some great talents from my own youth team pick.

Spoiler: Transfers In summer 2021

Despite losing some of my more valuable players and replacing them with fairly cheap ones we are doing exceptionally well this season. The tactic has developed further and now almost feels a bit too good?

Spoiler: Current Tactic

I'm currently on an 23 games unbeaten run in the league.

Spoiler: League Table Jan 2022

My CL group could have been harder but I still feel we did pretty well just drawing one game against Gladbach and winning the rest.

Spoiler: CL 2021/22 Group Stage

Tabatha is still from the squad I took over and despite the fact that I had other players in front of him in the pecking order last season he is now my most important player and is on 21 goals and 5 assists in all competitions.

Spoiler: My Top Scorer

The original Sporting squad already has a couple of very talented youngsters, the ones I use quite regularly in my first team are the following:

Spoiler: My brightest students

Nuno Mendes of course already a full blow starter. Quaresma and Ignacio are pretty much sharing playing time next to our veteran center back and Captain Sebastian Coates who btw already scored 11 goals this season... as a CB.

 

[Lay]

Have you managing in Brazil before, Chipper? It's great fun with different competitions occurring all over the place. You don't know where you are one moment to the next. You win one mini league & they throw you in another comp with half the teams again. It's nuts.

Indeed, great league to manage in. Colombia has a weird league too if I recall correctly.

 

[Chipper]

Have you managing in Brazil before, Chipper? It's great fun with different competitions occurring all over the place. You don't know where you are one moment to the next. You win one mini league & they throw you in another comp with half the teams again. It's nuts.

Yes, once a long time ago. Might have been way back in FM 10 or something like that. I remember going on an achievement run for Steam. There was English Hero, Scottish Hero, Brazilian Hero etc. for taking a team from the bottom division of their setup to the top in the various countries. Still exists now to an extent but it's just one achievement, "National Hero" and you can do it anywhere instead of individual ones for different countries. I remember going a team called Santa Cruz as they had a massive stadium even though they were in the bottom league. Fun rivalry in the State Championship with a team called Nautico.

 

[Berbaclass]

Have you managing in Brazil before, Chipper? It's great fun with different competitions occurring all over the place. You don't know where you are one moment to the next. You win one mini league & they throw you in another comp with half the teams again. It's nuts.

Far too many games. I can just about stand the 38 PL games so feck the Brazilian league system

 

[YAMS49]

Yes, once a long time ago. Might have been way back in FM 10 or something like that. I remember going on an achievement run for Steam. There was English Hero, Scottish Hero, Brazilian Hero etc. for taking a team from the bottom division of their setup to the top in the various countries. Still exists now to an extent but it's just one achievement, "National Hero" and you can do it anywhere instead of individual ones for different countries. I remember going a team called Santa Cruz as they had a massive stadium even though they were in the bottom league. Fun rivalry in the State Championship with a team called Nautico.

Nice... how about the Pentagon challenge? Needs a powerful PC or you are forever loading & removing leagues but a great project for one save game.

 

[SilentWitness]

Santos with Ganso and Neymar back in the day

 

[Lay]

Nice... how about the Pentagon challenge? Needs a powerful PC or you are forever loading & removing leagues but a great project for one save game.

I’ve wondered about doing this, I already have the Copa Libatadoras and UCL in my current save. I have the Chinese league loaded so have contemplated doing at least 3 of them.

I wish there were more African leagues, feels a bit meh with just South Africa.

 

[Chipper]

Nice... how about the Pentagon challenge? Needs a powerful PC or you are forever loading & removing leagues but a great project for one save game.

Had to look it up, looks interesting, might even be my next save. It's the kind of thing I think I'd like.

Have you done it?

As for powerful PCs, mine is getting a bit old now. Don't even know what FM would be intensive on, not going to be GPU but which out of RAM or CPU is going to be most important? Neither is great on mine these days, got an FX-8350 with 16 GB of RAM but it's DDR3 whereas we now have DDR4 and I don't think the actual RAM Speed was that impressive by today's standards. Just googled it, was apparently 1866 Mhz. I don't really know what that means to be completely truthful, but I think you get better numbers these days when it comes down to it. Higher is better kind of thing.

Anyway, that does sound good. Just read this little guide on it.

 

[YAMS49]

Had to look it up, looks interesting, might even be my next save. It's the kind of thing I think I'd like.

Have you done it?

As for powerful PCs, mine is getting a bit old now. Don't even know what FM would be intensive on, not going to be GPU but which out of RAM or CPU is going to be most important? Neither is great on mine these days, got an FX-8350 with 16 GB of RAM but it's DDR3 whereas we now have DDR4 and I don't think the actual RAM Speed was that impressive by today's standards. Just googled it, was apparently 1866 Mhz. I don't really know what that means to be completely truthful, but I think you get better numbers these days when it comes down to it. Higher is better kind of thing.

Anyway, that does sound good. Just read this little guide on it.

I tried it on FM12 & won three of them before my interest waned. Actually getting started was the hardest part from memory. It led me to another classic which was win as many league & cup doubles in different European leagues as possible. I got 10 or 11 in one save but the Allsvenskan was a total bastard for some stupid reason. Cost me something like 15 seasons.

Wouldn't know where to start on PC's, leave that to others here... I had to check mine.... I have a Ryzen 7 3700U eight core, 8GB DDR4, 512SSD, Vega 10 integrated which is running FM20 with 30+ leagues on huge database very comfortably. I don't think it's very high end.

 

[YAMS49]

I’ve wondered about doing this, I already have the Copa Libatadoras and UCL in my current save. I have the Chinese league loaded so have contemplated doing at least 3 of them.

I wish there were more African leagues, feels a bit meh with just South Africa.

One or two were almost worthless, yes. But I was on FM12 so they could be way more interesting now.

 

[NoLogo]

Is this just happening in my save or are players generally demanding unreasonable playing time and wages? At lest 2/3 of my team want to be either star player or important player right now, and they don't take regular starter and just cut of my contract talks with them. Even if I then agree to contract talks with the agreed playing time they ask for wages that are just not reasonable for a club like Sporting. Nuno Mendes is currently probably our best player and earns 55k pw with a new deal he agreed to at the start of the season I have one player earning more despite not necessarily being better, but I'll let it slip because he is my best goal chance creator and probably second best player right now, and he is on 70k pw. Now within a very short time my right FB asked for 80k pw and being considered an important player, he is nowhere near good enough for that squad status and wages. One of my CM-At already asked for similar wages, but he actually is having a pretty bad season and is down the pecking order atm, so no way I'm going to give him that kind of contract, now my right-winger is asking for similar, he is rating wise though my absolute the worst player atm and I'm not even willing to give him important player status with this kind of ratings, what in the hell is going on here?

Is this happening in anyone else's save game with a not so rich club?

 

[Berbaclass]

I tried it on FM12 & won three of them before my interest waned. Actually getting started was the hardest part from memory. It led me to another classic which was win as many league & cup doubles in different European leagues as possible. I got 10 or 11 in one save but the Allsvenskan was a total bastard for some stupid reason. Cost me something like 15 seasons.

Wouldn't know where to start on PC's, leave that to others here... I had to check mine.... I have a Ryzen 7 3700U eight core, 8GB DDR4, 512SSD, Vega 10 integrated which is running FM20 with 30+ leagues on huge database very comfortably. I don't think it's very high end.

I wouldn't worry too much about specs. I mostly play on my iMac from 2013 and I load up 400k players. Runs it no problem.

 

[SilentWitness]

Is this just happening in my save or are players generally demanding unreasonable playing time and wages? At lest 2/3 of my team want to be either star player or important player right now, and they don't take regular starter and just cut of my contract talks with them. Even if I then agree to contract talks with the agreed playing time they ask for wages that are just not reasonable for a club like Sporting. Nuno Mendes is currently probably our best player and earns 55k pw with a new deal he agreed to at the start of the season I have one player earning more despite not necessarily being better, but I'll let it slip because he is my best goal chance creator and probably second best player right now, and he is on 70k pw. Now within a very short time my right FB asked for 80k pw and being considered an important player, he is nowhere near good enough for that squad status and wages. One of my CM-At already asked for similar wages, but he actually is having a pretty bad season and is down the pecking order atm, so no way I'm going to give him that kind of contract, now my right-winger is asking for similar, he is rating wise though my absolute the worst player atm and I'm not even willing to give him important player status with this kind of ratings, what in the hell is going on here?

Is this happening in anyone else's save game with a not so rich club?

Yeah, it always happens on FM. Sometimes I think it is to do with AI clubs being interested in them. I had a player who I wanted to keep and was on 10k a week. Fulham matched his release clause and then gave him 70k a week. My highest earner at that point was on about 21k per week. AI clubs are programmed to use the wage budget available to them and in the PL for example they can be extortionate so wages can get silly. Frustrating for the player though as they either have to sell or pay silly fees.

 

[NoLogo]

Yeah, it always happens on FM. Sometimes I think it is to do with AI clubs being interested in them. I had a player who I wanted to keep and was on 10k a week. Fulham matched his release clause and then gave him 70k a week. My highest earner at that point was on about 21k per week. AI clubs are programmed to use the wage budget available to them and in the PL for example they can be extortionate so wages can get silly. Frustrating for the player though as they either have to sell or pay silly fees.

Well I decided to sell the two players who make demands like that at the end of the season, can't risk my entire wage structure just to keep two players happy who I don't count as essential to the squad tbh.

 

[NoLogo]

Very narrowly escaped heart break in the first CL knock out round of the CL against Atletico. Normally I would say alright, that's an opponent I don't necessarily have to beat but after we won at Estadio Metropolitano with 1-0 and a deserved at that I went into the home game with high hopes. We again played great football being way better than our opponents but couldn't convert any of our chances and of course we all know FM, 90+1 Atleti has a free kick and the dwarf Angel Correa beats everyone else to a header and scores a goal. Gutted. We go into overtime and neither team can create any more chances really, shortly before the end I sub in Filipe Soares, the youngster who I got from Moreirense last season and who has scored 19 goals for my so far this season from the CM-At position but he couldn't score the winning goal either anymore. I also subbed him on because he was better at taking penalites compared to Pedro Goncalves and lo and behold see who converted the 5th penalty for us after Dalot had missed his penalty for Atleti.

Thanks god we saved ourselves on penalties, I would have been so gutted if we couldn't have gone through after our performance in both legs. Oh yeah that ref was trigger-happy as all hell with his cards, I think half my team is actually banned for the next round.

Next round it's City waiting for us.

 

[Dan_F]

How do I delegate the tunnel interviews? I thought this was just in staff responsibilities, but I’m not seeing it.

 

[K Stand Knut]

How do I delegate the tunnel interviews? I thought this was just in staff responsibilities, but I’m not seeing it.

Does it not come up as an option when you get asked to attend one each game??

 

[Dan_F]

Does it not come up as an option when you get asked to attend one each game??

I can send assistant, but in FM20 I was able to delegate it so that the screen didn’t even appear. It was like there was no tunnel interviews.

 

[Chipper]

Wouldn't know where to start on PC's, leave that to others here... I had to check mine.... I have a Ryzen 7 3700U eight core, 8GB DDR4, 512SSD, Vega 10 integrated which is running FM20 with 30+ leagues on huge database very comfortably. I don't think it's very high end.

When you say comfortably do you mean computer performance, game speed or both?

On this save I loaded up 14 countries, all the divisions so it's 42 altogether, all playable. I think it was a large database for 96000 players. Computer performance is 4.5 stars but game speed is only 1.5. I don't really know what computer performance does. Looks like I can't bump it too much according to the game so does that mean it wouldn't improve game speed much (or at all) if I did get it to 5 stars?

Might be asking the wrong person if you don't know much about computers, but anyone else feel free to chip in!

 

[roonster09]

I can send assistant, but in FM20 I was able to delegate it so that the screen didn’t even appear. It was like there was no tunnel interviews.

You can delegate that too, I think broadcasters interview should be delegated for that I guess.

 

[Dan_F]

You can delegate that too, I think broadcasters interview should be delegated for that I guess.

I’ll have to look again later, I swear it just wasn’t there in the media options under responsibilities.

It’s actually the worst part of the game for me, even having to do an extra click to start the press conference. Then having to view a summary after too

 

[roonster09]

I’ll have to look again later, I swear it just wasn’t there in the media options under responsibilities.

It’s actually the worst part of the game for me, even having to do an extra click to start the press conference. Then having to view a summary after too

They are so bad that they even redesigned their forum, just like FM they added more clicks

 

[YAMS49]

When you say comfortably do you mean computer performance, game speed or both?

On this save I loaded up 14 countries, all the divisions so it's 42 altogether, all playable. I think it was a large database for 96000 players. Computer performance is 4.5 stars but game speed is only 1.5. I don't really know what computer performance does. Looks like I can't bump it too much according to the game so does that mean it wouldn't improve game speed much (or at all) if I did get it to 5 stars?

Might be asking the wrong person if you don't know much about computers, but anyone else feel free to chip in!

Game speed, mine is still very fast. Ideally you want a game speed you are comfortable at processing wise. If you are happy with how yours currently performs then no problem.

 

[Name Changed]

This actually happened to me in FM2020 but I presume it can happen in 2021.

I have a saved game and am 15 years in. I just noticed that I won the World Cup and my Hall of Fame points didn't increase. I went in to it and saw that the game has created a second record of myself. (I was wondering why after I won the Champions League with St. Pauli that my application to be Lecce manager was laughed at)

Basically I now have two records for my profile and it is adding any new trophy wins to the second one. The first has effectively retired.

This has ruined my game. Is there anyway to fix it? I didn't change computers or delete files, anything like that.