Football Manager 2022

[Gazz]

That's because you're a plastic. I bet you don't even wear a suit to cup finals.

[METALMAN]

Life is too short for training. And I don’t wear a suit. I go Alex Totten 1997 style.

[Lineker]

 

[Kyle]

I just sat for half an hour making a spreadsheet of how much I've spent on regens/youth players and got disappointed when I realised I'd made a 7m loss over the seven seasons I've played so far. Realised I hadn't taken into account players that I hadn't sold. I'm sitting on over 600m worth of developed regens. Ah.

 

_{I realise there are probably ways of exporting all of this stuff from the game itself and I didn't need to do it manually, but how else do you spend a Wednesday night?}

[Szumi]

Finally played a game with Liverpool for fun. Pretty sure I'm stopping after 1 season because holy shit that was not fair. Didn't have to worry about Trent's defensive errors in a Final, or Stevie G letting it slip again. Won the Quadruple. 

League Cup saw a 5-1 thrashing of Spurs in the QF, an aggregate 5-1 win of Arsenal in the SF, and a 3-2 ET win over Manchester United thanks to Naby Keita completing the comeback (was down 0-2, albeit for one minute only) with the winner.

FA Cup included a 4-1 rout of Man City, 2-0 victory over United in the next round in the QF, ending red hot Leeds run in the SF 3-0, and then continuing to slay the feel good stories by easily beating Brighton 3-0 in the Finals.

Premier League went to the final day of the season though! Lost 3-1 at Man United, meaning they were up 3 points, but I had a game in hand. Comeback win at Leicester 2-1 to survive a scare, then won my game in hand 3-0 home to Burnley after being held 0-0 at HT. That put us even on the final day, but my GD now +4 better. They won at Leeds 2-0. I won 6-0 home to Brentford to leave no doubt.

Champions League group stage saw easy progression against Villarral, Bestikas, and somehow second place Club Brugge. Lost 0-1 to Inter in First Knockout first leg, and thanks to Alexis Sanchez making it 2-1 on the night in the 82', extra time seemed looming... until Divock Origi did Divock Origi things, scoring the winner in 90'+4 to win the tie right in front of the Kop. Manchester United were dispatched 5-2 on aggregate thanks to a 4-1 rout at Anfield in the second leg, then Atletico Madrid 3-0 in the SF after winning 3-0 in the first leg. Gave me Real Madrid in the Finals, ironic. Sadio Mane was sent off in the 8th minute, but we still dominated all the stats. Courtois still stood on his head, but Real we're terrible, so went to penalties after 0-0. Firmino had a chance to win it after Casemiro shanked his, but hit the post, only for Jovic to then do the same thing. 4-3 on pens, Quadruple done.

Some of the Liverpool players were just ridiculous. Mo Salah especially. 58 goals and 16 assists in 52(3) apps, including 40 in the Premier League. Diogo Jota had 28 and 14 in all comps. Jordan Henderson had 23 freaking assists as a Mezalla, Trent had 17, Ox scored 11, and Keita had 5 & 12. 

Craziest FM game ever too. Man City were midtable all season before barely finishing 6th on GD on the final day with 58 points. Leeds lost out on top 4 on the final day to Arsenal. Spurs finished 16th on 39 points, only securing safety on Match Day 37 after spending almost all year in the bottom 3. Spain was the craziest though. Bilbao were in 1st place from Match 10 to 36, only to bottle it to Atleti in the final 2 matches. Barca were in Top 4 the whole season until Match 33... and then bottled it and finished 7th! Real Madrid were outside the Top 4 all season except for after Match 35, but then drew their final 3 matches to finish 6th. Barca won Copa del Rey so they're in Europa League and Real are in the Conference League. Absolutely wild.

[Kyle]

Just found out that one of my star wonderkids (3.5 CA/4.5 PA) that I signed from Derby County a few seasons ago is a Liverpool fan, so that's him being sold off to the Bulgarian Second League.

[Kyle]

Real have had a stinker here. They're also the only team not to concede 7 goals in one match to me in this group as well, so that proves to me they've had a howler of a group stage if they've finished behind Rangers.

Spoiler

 

[Kyle]

The man is a cheat code, and I hate it. 32 goals in 20 appearances so far this season is ridiculous.

[Cymbols]

On 29/05/2022 at 20:52, Cymbols said:

Spent £150m on Ansu Fati and won the Champions League with Gladbach, so that's nice.

Turns out spending £150m on Ansu Fati (and an obscene amount of $$$ over the years) puts me in a £36m financial fair play black hole. So I have three options this summer:

1. Figure out how the fuck FFP works and try to fix it.

2. Say fuck it, and spend £110m on a promising looking winner from Southampton and trust that FFP goes away or figures itself out.

3. Leave Gladbach in the mud and apply for either the Chelsea or Spurs vacancies.

Sold a lot of my loan army, ended up back in the FFP black.

Celebrated by offering Southampton £110m for an uncapped winger (who will render Ansu Fati obsolete). See you next year financial wizards. 

[RazorsEdge]

Playing as Dortmund to try and dethrone Bayern. I'm using a tactic from Zealand that I've been wanting to try out that uses no wingers.

January Season 1 lose Akanji to Newcastle and Emre Can to Man City for about £50M each. Bring in Omar Rekik (£21M), Linues Gechter (£22M) and Julian Weigl back to the club for £25M. Go on to finish 2nd 17 points behind Bayern and 17 points ahead of Leverkusen.

End of season comes and what I know is going to happen happens - Haaland is sold to City for £160M(!).

I go on to sell Julian Brandt (£21.5M), Thorgan Hazard (£11.75M), Roman Burki (£5.25M), Steffen Tigges (£1.6M), Marius Wolf (£6.5M), Thomas Meunier (£3.6M), Axel Witsel (£6.75M), Mahmoud Dahoud (£8.75M) and a few random Dortmund II players.

I bring in no less than 13 players to the club. Starting off with Niklas Sule from Bayern for free as is happening in real life. Then I bring in Nicolas Seiwald (£15M), Williot Swedberg (£2.2M), Karim Adeyemi (£22M), Jurrien Timber (£41M), Sonje Hansen (£300K), Fabricio Diaz (£2.5M), Weston McKennie (£22M), Hugo Felix (£3.6M), Andri Lucas Gudjohnsen (£5.5M), Charlie Patino (£14.25M), Lucien Agoume (£9M) and Ricardo Pepi (£21M). I also renewed Renier's loan for another season and I've also arranged a £50M transfer for Eric Garcia from Barcelona for at the end of the season to replace an aging Mats Hummels. I still have about £40M left.

So my squad now looks a little like this:-

GK - Gregor Kobel / Luca Unbehaun
DR - Jurrien Timber / Felix Passlack
DC - Mats Hummels / Omar Rekik
DC - Niklas Sule / Dan-Axel Zagadou / Linus Gechter
DL - Raphael Guerreiro / Nico Schulz
DMC - Julian Weigl / Fabricio Diaz
MCR - Jude Bellingham / Nicolas Seiwald
MC - Giovanni Reyna / Reinier
MCL - Weston McKinnie / Mahmoud Dahoud / Lucian Agoume
ST - Karim Adeyemi / Youssoufa Moukoko
ST - Marcos Reus / Donyell Malen / Ricardo Pepi

I don't expect Adeyemi to put up Haaland numbers but if he can get 15-20 goals in the league this first season I'll be happy. Reus played well as a striker last season with 17 goals and 13 assists in 37 matches. I'm still not really expecting to challenge Bayern but I've signed what are arguably the best players that are willing to come to Dortmund so here's to hoping.

[Hobo]

I've been dipping back into my FM16 mega-rich league of Ireland game again recently. Which started with me mucking about with the in-game editor in the hopes it would let me make a change that I guess I can't (I wanted to change where my B team plays back to the IRL stadium Parkvilla play at).

I ended up boosting the youth facilties, and pumping up the stats on a few youth players because it was really becoming a detriment to champions league squads as the newgens have all been terrible. Of course this now means I have a handfull of wonderkids.

I noticed one is called Jamie Watters - and there's actually a Watters Lane just up the road from Parkvilla's real life home ground. So I have head cannoned him into being the Trent Alexander Arnold or whatever of the team.

[RazorsEdge]

Second season with Dortmund and we go undefeated in the league and win to knock Bayern off the top. We got knocked out of the Champions League by Ajax in the first knockout round (we won 4-0 then lost 6-1). We got knocked out of the DFB-Pokal in the semi final against Bayern. That made Julian Weigl unhappy as I had to promise him we'd win a domestic trophy in negotiations. So Weigl is off to Bayern for about £30M.

So along with the prearranged transfer of Eric Garcia this coming off-season I also have Gavi coming in for £40M, Vitinha (Porto) for £40M as Weigl's replacement and Jong Ajax's Olivier Aertssen for £5M. I still have £10M left and am waiting to see if a few players are going to leave as there's some interest shown in them.

For the season my strikers were all pretty great. Adeyemi scored 23 goals in 31 (2). Reus scored 15 in 33. Moukoko scored 12 in 11 (16). Ricardo Pepi scored 9 in 11 (6). And finally Donyell Malen scored 6 in 11 (11). Giovanni Reyna scored 16 in 33 (4) from midfied, and Dan-Axel Zagadou also helped out from centreback with 10 goals in 30 (2) all headers from set pieces.

Challenge now will be to see if I can maintain my grip on the Bundesliga trophy and go further in cup competitions.

[Kyle]

The year is 2028, and I've officially won every top trophy I can at Everton. Prem, Champions League, FA Cup, Carabao Cup, all done. I've accepted the England job and resigned as Everton manager, so let's see if my domestic success can be translated into international success. Spoilers, it will be or I'll die trying.

[DavidMarrio]

On 17/06/2022 at 20:10, Kyle said:

The year is 2028, and I've officially won every top trophy I can at Everton. Prem, Champions League, FA Cup, Carabao Cup, all done. I've accepted the England job and resigned as Everton manager, so let's see if my domestic success can be translated into international success. Spoilers, it will be or I'll die trying.

I don't think I've ever not been just an international manager. I've always been in charge of a club and applied for an international job at the same time 

[Hobo]

haven't done it in a long time (probably not since I last played FM in any serious manner) and I always managed a club while managing an international team. The long gaps between games makes it a bit tedious i find.

[Bobfoc]

I find that international games are interesting primarily to see how the club competitions develop without my influence. It's also nice sometimes not having to worry about finances and contracts.

[JasonM]

[rant incoming]

Having done International management in this save (once getting Poland to the WC final and winning the euros with the Netherlands), my biggest frustration with it is that it just isn't fun or engaging in any way.

- Scouting players straight up sucks and it takes a lot of setting up to get a decent picture of what you're working with.
- There's no interactions whatsoever between games, other than the odd player whinging they weren't called up, or the odd player asking if they should flip nationalities.
- There's zero prep, no training during international breaks, and it's extremely hard to impossible to get tactics familiar even if you call up the same group every time out.
- It has no real hook that makes it even interesting to try aside from club management, because all you're doing is calling up a group, playing 2-3 matches, then processing a few months to do it again. There's nothing to keep you busy, other than the aformentioned tedium of making sure scout report/national pool is still up to date.

It's extremely shallow, and it hasn't seen much or any focus from SI for as long as I can honestly remember. I think I could boot up FM05 and have largely the same thing going on with international management.

But the latter is also just FM in general, where there's quite a few upgrades all around, but there's also still so many things that have barely or had no improvement at all in the past seventeen+ years. And also a bunch of systems that lack the granularity it needs to really work.

Like why is youth intake a complete lottery, for example? Every team IRL has a philosophy in scouting/recruiting, why is it near enough random what you get every year? Fuck, Total Club Manager 03 had more depth on the youth system than FM has now, in TCM you could even set up overseas academies and look into pre U-18 youth squads. I'm not saying TCM was a better game than CM4 or FM05, but they actually had features back then that aren't even in FM22 now.

Why are almost all stats exactly the same as the Championship Manager games? I know they added advanced stats like xG, but with near enough none of it being saved from year-to-year, what's the point in giving advanced stats when clubs irl track that stuff over significantly longer periods than a singular season. You can't even have something like "Top 100 scorers in Premier League history" lists, it's just THE top scorer and fuck every other player that isn't him? Compare that to a game like OOTP, which tracks EVERY stat over every single season, from youth to seniors and everything in between.

Set pieces are some of the most dynamic and important aspects of football, yet in FM it's still shallow as hell. You can only have a singular corner strategy per flag and there's no real flexibility in what you can do. I can't slot a player on the edge of the opposite side of the box, I can just pre-set them to very specific places. Free Kicks are even worse, with many teams having all sorts of different routines depending on the situation, you can't even set a routine on free kicks on the sides of the box, only in front of it. It's truly wild that a game this focused on accurate football has neglected these aspects.

Some parts are even a step back vs. CM0102, in that game you could set up defensive and attacking positioning, even to a level of granularity where you could tell players how to position themselves based on where the ball is. in FM22 there's only guesswork in what the roles and all the instructions will actually give you.

And those four things are just what I can think up right now. And don't get me wrong, I love this series and this game, I got near 600 hours on a singular save on this year's title. But the more I play this game and this series, the more frustrated I get about the very selective (and underwhelming) improvements.

[Bobfoc]

I totally agree on international management. I enjoy it as a casual experience, but it lacks the kind of depth you'd want. I've long hoped SI would give it more depth, but it never seems to happen.

Like you, I'd also be happy to see more stats being saved year-to-year. While I've only played a little OOTP because I'm not all that knowledgeable about baseball, it does seem a long way ahead in terms of the kinds of stats I'm interested in.

[Naitch]

On 19/06/2022 at 18:28, Daddy Magic JasonM said:

It's extremely shallow, and it hasn't seen much or any focus from SI for as long as I can honestly remember. I think I could boot up FM05 and have largely the same thing going on with international management.

Just about the only difference going back that far in the game series is your assistant manager suggesting a squad, which I believe must have been introduced in FM10, 11 or 12. I imagine tweaks have been made regarding eligibility since then but that's also been the case IRL, so of course it should have.

[RazorsEdge]

So before my third season with Dortmund started Bayern of course came in and bought Karim Adeyemi for £75M. I did what Dortmund do and replaced him with a Red Bull Salzburg player - Benjamin Sesko. Donyell Malen was also allowed to leave on loan to Atalanta with a £15M fee if he played 25 games (he did). In the January transfer window Nicolas Seiwald was subject to a £40M bid from PSG so went to France, Fausto Vera replaced him for just under £20M. Future transfers for William Saliba and Martin Satriano (both frees) were arranged also in January, while some youngsters came to the club.

So I managed to win the Bundesliga again (not unbeaten this time as we lost twice), the DFB-Pokal and the Champions League (against Barcelona).

Strikers were again great - Marco Reus 28 in 40(5), Youssoufa Moukoko 24 in 37(6), Ricardo Pepi 21 in 16(12), Benjamin Sesko with 12 in 14(7) (he broke his leg and was out for 4 months, unfortunately). Giovanni Reyna once again was great from midfield with 22 goals in 38(3).

So now my focus turns on retaining the league for a threepeat and retaining the Champions League while clubs inevitably come for my best players.