Archives for August 2019

The Faintest of Pulses

A month of hard work preparing for the season only left us in worse condition than before we started. We head into our opening match with 15 players eligible to play, meaning that we don’t have enough players to fill our substitution slots. For our starting 11, we have to backfill with a right midfielder at left midfield, and a midfielder at striker. The results, predictably, aren’t pretty.

We lose our first match 1-0, inexplicably erupt for three goals and win our second match 3-1, then drop the next four, only scoring one goal over the stretch. We end the month on a faint positive note, as we score a late penalty against a strong opponent to earn a 1-1 draw. On the month, we win one, draw one, and lose five. We end up in 18th place, just above the relegation line by virtue of goal differential.

There are some positives in this. Four teams are still below us in the standings, so even being as bad as we were, we didn’t end up the month in the relegation zone. Also, as we end the month we bring in two strikers on loan to try and shore up our offense, and get our two injured players back on the active roster. We still need a left midfielder, however.

As an aside, I’m finding it tricky so far to get scouting reports in for players. Over the course of the month, our two scouts only got a small number of players scouted (and to 15-30% per player), so I feel like I’m largely blind as to what sort of talent is out there. I’ll have to take a closer look at how scouting works in this year’s version, as I feel like my scouting settings must be throwing things off somehow.

Next Installment

On a whim, yesterday I decided to find a challenging Football Manager 19 starting point in England, and then play them for a half hour to see what it was like. 8 hours later I was locked on to a career with Nuneaton Boro in the National League North. I like to take notes as I play, and I figured I’d post them here for fun. I tried saving a financially strapped team like this once before in a much older version of FM, but failed, so I’m not optimistic that I’ve got the chops to do this right. (As an aside, in real life Nuneaton Boro did get relegated.)

Season 1: Nuneaton Boro – Preseason 2018
Nowhere But Up

Nuneaton Boro FC starts the 2018 season in the National League North, the sixth level of English football. They are odds on favorites for relegation. Making things even more challenging, they are £80k in debt, have barely enough players to field a team, are already almost at their full wage bill, and come pre-loaded with some questionably expensive yet marginal players.

It is here where I start my football manager career, hoping to survive this first year and gradually right the ship both on the pitch and off. I start myself off with no experience and no licenses, so most of my managerial skills are rated a 1 out of 20.

Our beautiful, modern stadium.

I take over at the end of June, 2018. The first order of business is to assess the roster. Looking at the quality of players, none strikes me as particularly outstanding for this level of play, but we do have some functional players at keeper, central defender, and midfield. We desperately need a striker of sorts. We have no one at all who can play left mid.

But perhaps more important than the quality is the quantity. As it stands right now, we’ve got a total of 16 players, and only half are signed. We’ll need to either hope no one gets hurt or bring on more players. Signing more players could be a problem, as shortly before I took over, the club signed some dubious one-year player contracts that have eaten up most of our salary capacity. Our total roster wages can’t exceed £3k per week, and we’re already at £2.75k. That means I have roughly £250 per week of wiggle room to add players. We do have some potential to add players via loan, with three of our six long-term loan spots available. We’ll have to do a good job of scouting and adding helpful players.

I start out by bringing on two scouts and a physio, and set the scouts to work looking for players to sign. Our first official match isn’t until early August, so we have some time. Unfortunately, our scouts seem to be pretty dodgy at producing reports, or I don’t quite understand how they work any more. We fritter away most of July without identifying any clear improvements over what we’ve got. On the rare occasion we identify someone helpful, their wage demands are beyond what we can pay. Most loan targets don’t want anything to do with us.

We end the month of preseason friendlies and training with two of our 16 players hurt and only one central midfielder added via loan. As we head into the opening weekend, experts peg us for last place and we can’t fill out all our substitution spots on the roster.

Next Installment