This is why I love FM

Europa League Group Stage vs Lazio

Good to know that I have a wide variety of players available to me. I should mention that at least seven of the players ineligible/injured start regularly for me when fit. Four of the injuries are still over a month away from returning and three of those have been for longer than three months.

What would FM be without injuries and ineligibilities, and playing one fit substitute with a striker in midfield and a right back in defensive midfield in an Europa League game against Lazio?

What was the score?

We lost 4-0. I wasn't too fussed though, we beat Lazio 1-0 at home in a ridiculous match and ended up qualifying from the group with Celtic ahead of both Lazio and H-Tel Aviv. This was our first year that we had made it past the Third Qualifying Stage of the Europa League though, and for a small club in Northern Ireland who can't even win the league it isn't a bad effort, I feel.

There's only 22 players in your first team there, and 3 are unregistered so you're operating with just 19 registered players for a competition? All european competitions allow you to register 25 players, if you had another 6 players registered you'd have had a starting 11, 7 subs and a player not in the matchday squad. I don't mean to sound harsh, but you were sort of asking for it, especially given that you can have an infinant amount of u21's who are elligible for your squad. Personally I go with 25 registered players over 21 and 4/5 u21's who are being developed, gives me a squad size of 29/30 all of whom can play; 6 injuries in a squad that size would be nothing worth batting an eyelid at in terms of being able to field a full team of players.

With such a small squad though, no wonder you will struggle in the league, the NI leagues have quite a lot of games if I remember - that few players can't be expected to be fit and firing on all cylinders through such a long campaign. Beef up your squad a bit, free signings, loan signings etc and you will probably have a lot more success in that league Should be countless English sides you can loan youngsters from who will be elligible to play in the european competitions incase of injuries too.

With such a small squad though, no wonder you will struggle in the league, the NI leagues have quite a lot of games if I remember - that few players can't be expected to be fit and firing on all cylinders through such a long campaign.

I remember experiencing similar problems when managing in NI. The league/cup structure just isn't designed to cope with clubs reaching the latter stages of European competitions. You really do need a big squad to cope with it, or maybe even two squads, one for domestic cups and one for the league/Europe. The fixture pileups you will experience should you make the latter stages are hard to cope with if you have such a small squad.

I had nearly all my star players out of the Europa League final and i was playing Juventus......we won 1-0. It was even better as we had to do it without my star players.

I had to drop a few players or else we didn't match the nationality rules, we don't have many home grown stars. I could use a few more players though, that's for sure.