How patient or impatient are you?

The question

How long do the rest of you usually spend in charge of one team when you are not winning anything (or indeed when you are winning things if you want to widen it out!)? Do you get bored after 2 or 3 seasons or do you have a gritty determination to just stick in there as long as it takes (assuming you don't get sacked)?

The inevitable accompanying story!

My current game (FM08) is now the longest I've ever played despite there being numerous times when I decided I just wasn't getting anywhere and it had stopped being fun. Something always pulled me back to it though - that feeling that somewhere lurking under the surface was success that was waiting for me to tease out into the open, unlike some previous versions of the game were success just walks up and knocks on your door in the first few seasons!

12 years it took me to finally get Scunthorpe United promoted from the Championship. First 2 seasons we were trying to stear clear of relegation, but the next 10 we finished top half, but usually 8th-10th. Then, ironically after I had imported an FM09 tactic!, I finally cracked it (ish) and we won promotion whilst, in the same season, blazing a trail past 4 or 5 Premiership clubs to win the league cup. We consolidated comfortably in the Premiership and are now very established, but further success has kept eluding us. We've played in the Champions League twice, once after finishing 2nd in the league, we've topped the table once or maybe twice through the turn of the year, but for the last two seasons we have drifted to 7th and an odious Intertoto Cup (Euro Vase) spot. We made the UEFA cup final last season after a scintillating display throughout the competition, but bottled it and got thrashed 5-1 by Aston Villa! I absolutely love the challenge though, especially since I have had ~5 or 6 players from our own youth team come through and starin the first team over the last decade which makes it all worthwhile.

We are now in our 10th Premiership season and my 22nd year at the club - still I have just 1 trophy (despite the game claiming more because of our Intertoto cup wins!), but this season I am watching possibly the most exciting footballing team I've created in almost 10 years playing CM/FM. Beautiful one touch passing football with incisive through balls and 25-30 yard screamers, etc, etc. I'm waiting for the bubble to burst because I know it will, but so far a 15 game unbeaten league run has put us 3 points clear top of the Premiership with ~10 games left...I'm almost daring to believe...but whatever happens I absolutely love Scunthorpe United now :-)

lol good for u mate. i would say im patient but im becoming increasingly annoyed with my board. im playing as benfica and its my 5th season with them i finished 3rd in my first season and runner up the last 4 seasons, but the board will only give me 7.5 million a year to spend on players and when i ask them for money they say no u need to sell some players to fund yourself. so i sell players and they dont give me any money out of it !!!! i remeber when i sold my best defender for 7 million because he was unsettled they gave me 400k out of it. that was 4 season back.....but iv stuck by them because ive built up quite a strong team, just not strong enough to beat porto.........yet.

I'm patient I guess. I also have the motivation to succeed because my goal is always to make the club I'm managing the most successful in their nation. For example, with Spurs I can only rest when I have won 20 league titles (Man U currently have 19 in my game), 14 FA Cups (Man U have 13), 10 League Cups (Liverpool have 9) and 6 Champions' Leagues (Liverpool have 5). Considering Spurs have only won 2 league titles, 8 FA cups, 4 League Cups and 0 Champions Leagues I may be some time on this challenge! This will probably keep me interested until the end of time...

I probably wouldn't stay managing that long to be honest if we were winning titles every season because I'd get bored. 20 league titles would be a very very long stretch. If they were won consecutively it'd clearly be too easy hence a boring game and if they weren't then we could be talking 30, 40 or 50 seasons.

I admire your stickability though! I often like to find some unlikely record to break - in FM07 I won the League Cup 4 years in a row and was gutted to find out Liverpool had already achieved this feat so I needed one more...alas an own goal dumped us out the following season so the record was lost forever, never again to be got back (I have never won a cup competition 4 times in a row previously, however good my team and whatever the cup so I doubt I'll ever win 5 in a row with any club in the future!)

Patient? Probably, in 3rd full season at Pompey, one FA cup semi to show for it all. The squad's capable of more though, yet 3 years of having the season finished before May sucks

At the moment I'm in my 4th season with Sunderland, nearing the end. Have one League Cup win to show for it, but slow progression is what I aimed for and now we have everything in place to really take off.

I have been at Marine and been in the BSN for 6 seasons now. Normally I would probably have given up by now but due to my 'cyber-love' for the team, I have found that I am sticking at it and am slowly improving.

I have to say the one reason why I have stuck at it so long is that I bought a new laptop which made the game take 2-3 days to complete a season (depending how much I play each day obviously, but assuming a decent evening's play) as oppose to my previous rate of more like a season per month of real time!

You can afford to have more in-game patience when you can just brush off a bad season and move onto the next one quickly!

I get impatient after every game that I don't win in

I normally get fed up after one season and start a new one

I'd stick with the team if they were losing; it's when the team keeps winning for a couple of seasons that it starts getting boring.

I'm quite patient. I'm about 10 years in, having taken Bishop's Stortford from the BSN/S to the Championship. Then again, there was always something new to aim for or look forward to every few years -- promotions, consolidations, or exciting new signings. I usually find it takes a myriad of small ambitions to keep me a goal always on the horizon. For example, building a $275K valued club into the nine digits, watching old players find success with new teams, or creating a youth academy that can produce future stars. This (game) year it was a consortium takeover, barely keeping my job, and the construction of a new stadium opening in a year's time.

Well, our unbeaten run came crashing to an end at Blackburn, just the wrong moment for it to happen!

Then we had to face Chelsea 3 times in 10 days, with Reading(h) in the middle of them. 2-0 1st leg UEFA semi win was great, the 3-0 2nd leg defeat after a centre-back was sent off on 7 minutes was rather less so. My players also tried to give me a heart attack by going 0-2 down, then 3-2 up, twice throwing away the lead and eventually beating Reading 5-4.

I said to myself before that UEFA cup tie that I would happily give Chelsea the UEFA cup and Tottenham the FA Cup (we play them in the final) if I could have the league title. Alas the world doesn't work like that and this morning was one of those moments in FM tailor made for REM's "Everybody Hurts" as we crashed for the second time in 4 days at Stamford Bridge That left us 2 points behind Spurs, Chelsea 2 behind us, but they had 3 games to play in the final week. Thankfully they drew at Wigan before beating Leicester so we still have the slimest "eye of a needle" chance, thanks to our goal difference:

http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c351/pmyraje/?action=view&current=TitleRace.jpg

That screenshot doesn't tell the whole story though. We go to Arsenal on the last day (sure they are doing badly and we thumped them 6-0 at our place, but they have players who have hurt us in the past and we are stumbling badly), but all eyes, if this were real, would be on Stamford Bridge for Chelsea vs Tottenham...

I'll be praying for a draw as our only hope, but even that will only help if we can pick ourselves up off the floor and beat the Gunners.

Ah well...it was too much to hope we might actually win the title I suppose