I forgot to mention. I was playing against Ireland in the quarterfinal of the European Championship I recently won with Spain. This is the 2016 Euro Championships mind you. Who was their starting keeper? Shay Given...at the age of 40. He got an 8 rating in the match as well. His all time history showed over 800 matches for all his different teams. I thought it was an amazing run. I don't know how many players I've seen over 550 matches. There's Given, starting for his national team in the quarterfinals of the European Championships. Impressive IMO.
I've now topped the Bundesliga 6 years in a row with Dusseldorf, the last season (2014/2015) I won the Treble, finally avenging years of losses to Milan by beating them 2-1 in the Final. My main reason for continuing with this game is to see how my youngsters turn out. I have quite a number of 17-20 year-olds with decent-to-great stats and the simulation junkie in me wants to see how they turn out in a couple years. That, and a lot of them are German, which fits in nicely with my other job -- manager of Germany. Last WC we went out in the QFs to Italy and I almost got fired. I'm on track to qualify for the Euros fairly easily and hopefully do a bit better this time out. The CPU coaches seem to be fairly bonkers, as Podolski had all of 6 caps when I took over in 2012, despite being far and away the best German player in the game.
You will find that hardly any of the Germans have caps. The senior squad is comprised of 'greys' until regens appear due to something to do with copyright.....unless you implemented the fix? See Oliver Kahn, a.k.a Jens Musterman (twat)
Everyone should know about the fix by now. It can be downloaded at any of the popular FM fansites. It also corrects the names of the cups and leagues. The other "fix" I recommed is the one that changes the attributes color to highlight the higher levels.
It is just a replacement file that colors player's attributes by scale. So above 15 = one color then there is another color for a middle range and a third for low score. There are a few versions out there. I use one called fm_highlight_attributes.zip. I think the one here is the same: FM05 downloads
Just started playing agian. Halifax is my squad and after 12 games 10-0-2 in the conf. first place and not looking back.
Already? Wow, time flies. I took a couple week break from WWSM. Last night I got about an hour in and started off the 2016/2017 Premier League season off strong. Big wins against Spurs and Liverpool shot me to the top of the table. After 10 or so games I have Middlesbrough sitting tied for 4th, off the leader by 5 points but with a game in hand. I just sold one of my young prospect midfielders to Arsenal for $27 million, a 15% of next sale clause and a $9 million after 30 league games clause. The guy was a star for my Spanish European Cup squad but his head got too big for Boro. Arseanal came in with a low bid, I rejected it and he cried about it. So I took him out of the starting lineup, offered him to all major clubs in Europe and got about 6 serious offers. I negotiated for the big $$$ and Arseanl were the only takers. It was a good time to move him as he was nursing a small injury and having trouble getting fit for the season. When he got to Arsenal he disrupted the team chemistry and fans were warry. Since I bought him for $17 million a two years earlier I think I did very well. The transfer fee puts me on very solid financial ground and will allow me to make a move at the mid-season point. I played my first Champions League group match against Panathinaikos in Greece and they got a goal around halftime while I dominated play. I couldn't get many chances and I got more and more attacking as the second half went on. By the 80th minute I had made my three subs and I was sending a lot of men forward. In the 92nd minute one of my forwards was putting pressure on the keeper on a goal kick. Right as the keeper made his run to kick, after a substantial delay on his part, my forward ran at him. The ball went straight to my forward, deflecting straight back into the goal. Tied up in the 92nd minute. Right after the kick off the game ended. So I got a tie out of the tough away fixture. Good news for the group stage. I'm looking forward to my first home fixture in the group.
I've seen that type of goal both for and against (and in real-life, unfortunately) It just released today, and already there's a patch.
Bought it yesterday and 'tis an awesome game I didn't buy FM'05, because I decided to wait for CM but FM is 10 times the game Championship Manager is now. Respect to SI
My tenure at Boro ended towards the end of 2017. We were sitting in 5th in the Premier League. The team I had assembled needed to be winning in Europe to pay for their high expenses and that wasn't happening. My cash balance was about down to zero and I knew the off-season would be full of triming instead of buying for future success. I think the 2015/16 season finishing 2nd in the Premier League was the best I was going to do with them when the board wouldn't expand the stadium as I was selling it out on a regular basis. So when the Valencia job opened up and I was picked by the media as a front runner, I couldn't let it pass. I haven't coached in my native Spain, aside from the national team, in 10 years. I figured now would be a great time to return because my Barca team had all moved on and they weren't dominating as they had. I applied for Valencia, was accepted and delighted to learn the club gave me a $120 million transfer budget. We finished the season in 4th, qualifying for champions league. The club has been doing very well of late, they are ranked 5th in the European rankings. I have some work to do to keep that up. There are a lot of foreign players on the squad. I need to sell some of them in the off-season and bring in some EU role players. We have a good base but need to strengthen on the attack. Defense is good with Kasper Schmichael in goal. I need to sign three or four guys and I think we'll make a good run at some hardware.
If any of you are a non-massive club, have a look for Dudu Cearense at the start of the game. He is on a free and plays superb in the DM role. Another player of a similar standard is Emil Jensen. Either Swedish or Danish (one of them), a D RL that can play both sides very well and will cost well under half a million. In two seasons as Hartlepool, Adam Boyd scored 38 in League One and then 28 in the Championship as the lone striker in front of 2 AMs. Have a look at him.
I'm managing Coventry City on FM06. So far, we're hovering around a playoff spot after a horrible start while I figured out the game. Offloaded a lot of high wages and replaced them with younger players, so the board is happy they are making a modest profit. Out of the Carling first round, but I use my reserves in them anyway. Training has been the hardest thing about this game for me. I keep reading on other sites about people hiring 20 coaches or something to get their training up to snuff. However, my club has no money, so I have to keep the same five crappy coaches I started with.
I don't bother with training much, maybe I should. I let the assistant manager handle it. Right now I'm having injury issues so I'm going to hire a couple more physios and 5 more coaches.
I don't know how Physios fit in anymore. Before in FM2005, you would assign Physios, now Idk, unless I missed something.
A simple way to improve your training without diving too deep is to just make sure you have a decent core of at least 5 coaches, then tick off a couple of the options from each one until you see the stars go up on their specialties.
Tony, can you go into more detail on what you mean by: "tick off a couple of the options from each one until you see the stars go up on their specialties." Where do you do this? Thanks.
In the Training Screen when you select 'Coaches' , it shows you each coach and his schedule. The default is for every coach to be placed on ALL schedules, but that heeds the minimum results. What you SHOULD do is specialize by assigning the schedules to the Coaches based on Attributes related to that Training Regimen. For example, a Coach with a HIGH Defence Coaching rating should be coaching Defence.
In WWSM/FM 05 it doesn't rate the coaches by what position it coaches best. If you tell an assistant to handle training, will this be changed or will I have to go in and change?