Seeing as a few of us have the game, I thought that I might start a thread outlining how I'm cracking along in my FM career thus far. Feel free to have a stab yourselves if you want to...

I started unemployed with all European leagues enabled - holidaying through and looking for jobs at lower reputation clubs. After rejecting offers from clubs in Russia, Macedonia and Belguim I was finally offered my first British club job: the mighty Kettering Town who, despite predictions of challenging for the playoffs, were just above the relegation zone with a single win in 12 games.

Opening game was a 1-0 win over fellow stugglers Ebbsfleet - my first ever win and clean sheet in FM. Shall keep you all posted, but when I'm used to playing with top class teams it's fair to say that this is going to be a different experience.

Shame you can't use a program or the game itself to dump out some stats. An XML file maybe.
(Does Steam log anything? On L4D it'll log preferred weapons etc.)

DY357LX said:

Shame you can't use a program or the game itself to dump out some stats. An XML file maybe. (Does Steam log anything? On L4D it'll log preferred weapons etc.)

FM used to have the ability to export tables and stats as HTML documents. To be honest, print screen and uploading a snapshot is just as easy as we're not trying to build any sort of historical library.

Kettering Town is turning out to be a tougher job than I thought that it would be, with no real progress in the league (10 games without a win will do that to you) and injuries to key players across the squad. Re-inforcements were brought in over the January transfer window in the form of a new goalkeeper, midfielder and striker - but in true FM-style the goalkeeper and midfielder have immediately gotten injured and my leading goalscorer has torn a hamstring, leaving the new kid (who scored a debut hattrick) to work alongside some of the players earmarked to leave at the end of their contracts.

Still - the performances have really picked up in the last couple of games and morale has improved, so with any luck we can get into some midtable obscurity before launching a promotion push next season.

Talarin said:

Still - the performances have really picked up in the last couple of games and morale has improved, so with any luck we can get into some midtable obscurity before launching a promotion push next season.

Could've done with you managing us Cillit Bangers in Dublin last year!

Season 08/09 Round up

A remarkable end of season run ended with Kettering managing to achieve that mid-table obscurity and to get a FA Trophy finalists position (where we were roundly thumped by Luton).

Financially, we're better off than we were at the start of the last season - although without that trip to Wembley I suspect that we'd be in trouble.

Attention now turns to the coming season, and re-inforcing the squad through good free transfers and loan players. 8 first team players will be leaving at the end of their contracts, with pre-contract deals already signed with 5 replacements and I'll be looking to make the numbers up through season long loanees.

Of note, a deal has been signed with another Old Firm player - a defender from Rangers who looks like he could be in League 1 or the Championship, rather than the Blue Square Premiership. Needless to say I'll be basing my defense around him...

In other news, Arsenal won the Premiership at a canter, with Tottenham beating a inconsistent Liverpool team into 5th place and out of the Champions League. Manchester United beat Barcelona in the Champions League final (as well as claiming the FA Cup against Everton) and Villareal beat Aston Villa in the Europa Cup.

Kettering will be up there one day...

Season 09/10 Round Up

Murphy's Law is an incredible thing. One incarnation of it reads something like If you write about something being good - it will immediately stop and that's exactly what happened.

Injuries to McGowan (star striker) and Bayly (work horse in midfield) showed how lucky we'd been on the fitness front in the first half of the season as their loss to long term injuries triggered a massive drop in form, allowing promotion favourites Luton and Cambridge to make up a lot of ground in the league. Unconvincing performances in the FA Trophy led to a few squeaky bum moments and we got thoroughly thrashed in the FA Cup by 4th rounders Bristol City.

All in all, things weren't looking very rosy.

A good part of that was my fault - as I'd reacted to losing two key players by trying to tighten the defense, when instead I should have gone more attacking. We stopped dominating the midfield (where we'd built our easy success) and weren't creating many chances, which led to a run of 6 games without a win and 4 failures to score.

A couple of months of constantly fiddling with tactics, trying to correct what I'd broken didn't help either.

Thankfully - I realised what I was doing wrong in time for a five wins out of five finish to the league (helped by McGowans return from injury) to win the league and seal promotion into the football league proper, but really had managed to make it difficult along the way. The FA Trophy (which I expected to face Luton in the final of) yielded a pleasant surprised in Salisbury knocking out Luton on away goals only to be comprehensively stuffed by us.

So - two years and two non-league trophies. Not bad.

Looking ahead, again we're letting a number of former first team players leave at the end of their contracts, to be replaced by much higher standard people. Heavy midfield reinforcements are coming in, along with a new right winger and the capture of last year's loanee Prijovic at the end of his contract.

Long term loanees should be a little easier to deal with also, now we're in the "real league". Still - we're favourites to go down. It promises to be a difficult season ahead.

Edit: Upbeat summary ruined by clicking continue and finding McGowan putting in a transfer request to move to a bigger club.

McGowan thinks you're a cock.

Talarin said:

2012 was also the year of the Poland/Ukraine European Championships, which France won against Italy in the final. A special note should go to Belguim, who managed an unlikely semi-final apperance, beating England and Germany along the way.

The semi-final appearance is indeed not very normal for us but we eat Gerbals and Brittoons for breakfast on a regular basis !
Although this funky webpage : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_national_football_team
seems to state differently (what the hell kind of a stat is that against the dutchies ? Shame !)