Football Manager 2023

[Hobo]

so I've kept going in this save but now I'm managing Dundalk and trying to get them promoted. We're 9 points clear with 7 games to go so that is looking likely. I'm doing slightly better than Parkvilla who only just recently managed to get to the top of the table and are now 7 points clear with 13 games left. They've also failed to win the Super Cup, the Presidents Cup (the Irish version of the Community Shield) and the Leinster Senior Cup. 

If I keep on with this game my aim is to build a Dundalk side that can compete with Parkvilla and maybe pip them to a title.
 

Our first match against them is coming up in the form of the League Cup Final. That will be interesting.

 

[King Ellis]

I started a game with the Norway start date of April 2023 in the interest of trying to get some interesting teams amongst those relegated from the Premier League. Like, I've heard a few people say they've seen the likes of Spurs or Chelsea go down. I got Leicester here which, whilst not as absurd as those aforementioned teams, still feels pretty big given that they're former champions so it's an interesting story in that 'fallen giant' sort of way.

Went in with the attitude of getting rid of 95% of the guys there, only keeping Vardy, Thomas and Barnes. Replaced them all with a mish mash of random loans, freebies and relatively cheap up and comers. Currently walking the Championship with a £230m transfer kitty in reserve which will make for an interesting summer. It's nice to be on the other side of the wage disparity for once where I'm spending 54m a season on wages whilst the likes of Lincoln and Shrewsbury are only spending 4m.

 

[Trey]

I've really had that simulator itch for something other than TEW/WMMA and remembered I really enjoyed the last Football Manager even if I didn't 100% grasp everything. 

 

After looking it up it seems to have been FM13 so my question is what year would you recommend a novice football fan who knows nothing of the sport?

[FLiam]

Winter update is out.

[Gorka]

On 01/03/2023 at 14:13, Trey said:

I've really had that simulator itch for something other than TEW/WMMA and remembered I really enjoyed the last Football Manager even if I didn't 100% grasp everything. 

 

After looking it up it seems to have been FM13 so my question is what year would you recommend a novice football fan who knows nothing of the sport?

I can't really think of an FM that is the go-to as a lot of players just jump in at the most recent one.

The thing with FM is that you reassign a lot of tasks or pointless clicks to staff members on your team so you don't need to get bogged down in training, press conferences etc, and can eventually find out these things as you go along.

Zealand is a pretty good YouTube guy for FM stuff:

 

[JasonM]

On 01/03/2023 at 15:13, Trey said:

I've really had that simulator itch for something other than TEW/WMMA and remembered I really enjoyed the last Football Manager even if I didn't 100% grasp everything. 

 

After looking it up it seems to have been FM13 so my question is what year would you recommend a novice football fan who knows nothing of the sport?

As Gorka said, latest is the best choice unless you can get 22 for super duper cheap. If you have Game Pass, FM23 is also available on there.

[Bobfoc]

54 minutes ago, FLiam said:

Winter update is out.

Do these things usually mess with the effectiveness of your tactics?

[Trey]

2 hours ago, Gorka said:

I can't really think of an FM that is the go-to as a lot of players just jump in at the most recent one.

The thing with FM is that you reassign a lot of tasks or pointless clicks to staff members on your team so you don't need to get bogged down in training, press conferences etc, and can eventually find out these things as you go along.

Zealand is a pretty good YouTube guy for FM stuff:

 

 

1 hour ago, JasonM said:

As Gorka said, latest is the best choice unless you can get 22 for super duper cheap. If you have Game Pass, FM23 is also available on there.

Thanks to you both for the answers; I had also seen from places I don't trust as much as EWB that latest is usually best. People also say that about Madden though so I wanted to make sure FM23 isn't the same game as FM20/21 with just a fresh coat of paint. 

[The Lusophone]

2 hours ago, Bobfoc said:

Do these things usually mess with the effectiveness of your tactics?

It can do - it's both a data update and gameplay patch - the patch notes are here

[JasonM]

9 hours ago, Trey said:

 

Thanks to you both for the answers; I had also seen from places I don't trust as much as EWB that latest is usually best. People also say that about Madden though so I wanted to make sure FM23 isn't the same game as FM20/21 with just a fresh coat of paint. 

I mean, to a degree they all are. FM is an extremely safe franchise in terms of how it's developed. Whatever game you have or can get at the best price will do you good, in all honesty.

It's more like MLB The Show, where everything is very incremental, rather than Madden where they add features (xfactor) that completely mess with the general balance and feel of the game itself.

Any title from the past years will do you good, and newer titles are incrementally better than the last. So choose with your wallet.

[Lineker]

 

[The Lusophone]

Mouth is closed, clearly an ai generated thumbnail.

[Gazz]

Is it possible for Lineker to ban himself?

[9 to 5]

1 hour ago, Gazz said:

Is it possible for Lineker to ban himself?

Hopefully.

[Hobo]

It's 2029, and I've gotten Dundalk promoted into the Premier Division. We lost to Parkvilla in 2 cup finals in our promotion season. They've continued to win all around them for the most part.

Unai Emery has sold Parkvilla wunderkind and all-time leading goalscorer Jamie Watters to Juventus for a mere €14 million. He didn't seem to want to play the guy who scored 72 league goals one season for me.

I've picked up a few Parkvilla castoffs for my squad as well as an 18-year-old German Özcan Bozkurt. My mission now is to kill what I created and end Parkvilla's dominance.

Also, Daniel Levy (who sold Spurs in 2020) has bought the University College Dublin team. It's weird that that is a thing you can do. Has he played a blinder? Only time will tell.

[JasonM]

I just finished the 28/29 season, and I have been at the point of desperation since the end of last season.

To re-establish what's been going on: I started a Create-A-Club as 'Sporting a Coruña', a breakaway team that tries to rebuild the lost Galician glory in football.

Tier 4 took me three years, with the simple fact that the team was crap and I could barely put together a competent team because there was no money at all to play with... But 24/25 was where we put it together and simply clutch the league.

It's the end of the 28/29 season... And three out of the past four seasons we were in a place where we could or should've won Tier 3, and we threw it away, before washing out of the playoff finals being forced to watch other teams get promoted ahead of me.

I am beyond desperation, because I have done everything to put together a strong team on the tightest budget imagineable, and every time it went down to the wire the team fell apart when it mattered. 27/28 we were running away with it, before ending 2nd and losing the playoff final. 28/29, we worked our way back into the playoff to get 3rd... and threw it away in the final.

I honestly don't know what I have to do at this point, I feel like the least clutch manager ever, and it feels like the game just doesn't want to give it to me as all form vanishes when it starts to matter.

I'm at a point where I don't even know if I want to continue this challenge, because ending my seventh season and not even getting further than tier 3 is extremely disheartening.

So yeah, had to vent... I honestly don't know what to do at this point to break the spell. Tier 3 is also just utterly brutal with the constant presence of big B-teams like Castilla, Atleti B, Valencia B, Sevilla B, etc. who are able to field players that no indepdent club can compete with.

[stokeriño]

Me: "I haven't properly played Football Manager in months/years, and real-life Chelsea are depressing me, so I should definitely make myself feel better by starting up a Chelsea game in FM."

[nb. FM22, because I haven't bought FM23]

First game, Super Cup: Villarreal 2 - 1 Chelsea

Second game, Premier League: Chelsea 3 - 3 Watford (concede 90th minute equaliser)

Me: "I no longer like this plan." 😑

[Gorka]

I'm still on FM20 and long story short, I have managed to get Burton Albion promoted to the Premier League much too quickly. 

We're 19 games in and uh, we're a bit like Derby County when they reached the Prem. We've got two wins (cheers Norwich and Wolves!) and three draws, then lost the rest so we're sitting rock bottom and oh god this is going to be a long season.

To escape the sinking ship I applied for the Southampton job while they're in the Championship. The Saints are 10th, massive underachieving when you consider their resources and gave me an interview.

They said: "Can you reach the play-offs with a transfer budget of 120m?"

To which I reacted like Fry in Futurama when he finds out he's a billionaire. Sadly, I didn't get the job 

[Hobo]

On 05/03/2023 at 13:22, Hobo said:

It's 2029, and I've gotten Dundalk promoted into the Premier Division. We lost to Parkvilla in 2 cup finals in our promotion season. They've continued to win all around them for the most part.

Unai Emery has sold Parkvilla wunderkind and all-time leading goalscorer Jamie Watters to Juventus for a mere €14 million. He didn't seem to want to play the guy who scored 72 league goals one season for me.

I've picked up a few Parkvilla castoffs for my squad as well as an 18-year-old German Özcan Bozkurt. My mission now is to kill what I created and end Parkvilla's dominance.

Also, Daniel Levy (who sold Spurs in 2020) has bought the University College Dublin team. It's weird that that is a thing you can do. Has he played a blinder? Only time will tell.

Parkvilla had a terrible season in 2029. Although it is not quite over yet.

They got knocked out of the Champions League at the semi final stage by Porto when Marcelo Barbosa (who had been signed when I was the Parkvilla manager from Porto and Emery sold back to them) scored against them and Parkvilla goalie scored a last minute own goal.

They lost on penalties to my Dundalk side in the League Cup Final.

Shamrock Rovers beat them 5-0 in a game that took place during an international break. That meant they had 13 of their first team unavailable so were reduced to playing kids. This is also Parkvilla's record defeat.

And ultimately they've lost out on a 14th (i think) consecutive title to Dundalk because we beat them in the game right after the Shamrock Rovers one and then beat Bohemians 1-0 to clinch a first league title since 2015.

[JasonM]

On 05/03/2023 at 17:36, JasonM said:

I just finished the 28/29 season, and I have been at the point of desperation since the end of last season.

To re-establish what's been going on: I started a Create-A-Club as 'Sporting a Coruña', a breakaway team that tries to rebuild the lost Galician glory in football.

Tier 4 took me three years, with the simple fact that the team was crap and I could barely put together a competent team because there was no money at all to play with... But 24/25 was where we put it together and simply clutch the league.

It's the end of the 28/29 season... And three out of the past four seasons we were in a place where we could or should've won Tier 3, and we threw it away, before washing out of the playoff finals being forced to watch other teams get promoted ahead of me.

I am beyond desperation, because I have done everything to put together a strong team on the tightest budget imagineable, and every time it went down to the wire the team fell apart when it mattered. 27/28 we were running away with it, before ending 2nd and losing the playoff final. 28/29, we worked our way back into the playoff to get 3rd... and threw it away in the final.

I honestly don't know what I have to do at this point, I feel like the least clutch manager ever, and it feels like the game just doesn't want to give it to me as all form vanishes when it starts to matter.

I'm at a point where I don't even know if I want to continue this challenge, because ending my seventh season and not even getting further than tier 3 is extremely disheartening.

So yeah, had to vent... I honestly don't know what to do at this point to break the spell. Tier 3 is also just utterly brutal with the constant presence of big B-teams like Castilla, Atleti B, Valencia B, Sevilla B, etc. who are able to field players that no indepdent club can compete with.

Follow up on this, the season after I finally managed to get the monkey off my back and we managed to clinch the division one game before the end of the season, to finally give us our exit out of the horrible Tier 3 and into La Liga 2... Finally I can start to grow my team in a meaningful way, no longer restrained to ridiculously undersized budgets that still somehow run the team a deficit of close to 750k a year.

...

What do you mean you're only giving me 41K/w budget?!

So you're telling me every team is given their own budget they have to deal with, based on past sustainable profits, and because we only get 4000 fans and ran deficits every year of existing we've been given a 41k/w budget, on top of being required to at least guarantee every registered player makes a minimum of 1.5k/w, INCLUDING loan players?

- screaming into the void -

So you, because of the new Spanish financial system, the league gave me a maximum allowed wage registered wage budget of 41k/w among an entire playing squad, all players except U18 (which I have none of that are actually talented, because we ran the worst youth academy this past decade to save money)? Yeah, to put that in comparison, the next club up in 21st is allowed to register a wage budget of 80k/w...

Greaaaaaaat.

Through some fenagling and cajoling, I have managed to somehow slap together a 21 player squad with zero depth or backup. All in the hope that we can maintain our place in LL2.

One positive in all this, with me spending only 350k a month total on expenses, I am making near the same amount in gross profit every month off the back of outrageously better tv revenue. In one month I got as much TV Money as I got from all the seasons in Tier 4 and 3 combined.

So hopefully with that very strong financial growth, I will be able to start investing a lot into the club to build up to my eventual aim at making it into Tier 1 as a regional powerhouse. (with Deportivo stuck in LL2 with me, there's a real chance I can make it happen)