Taking a club as far as you can?

Anyone else managing a club where you get the feeling you may have taken them as far as you feasibly can?

I'm beginning to get that feeling now at Scunthorpe (FM08) in the Championship. First season we finished a very pleasing 16th (predicted 24th), then followed up with a rather less pleasing 19th (pred: 23rd), 3 points above relegation, then the team finally started to perform as I knew they could and this happened in the next 3 seasons:

2010 (predicted 24th)

2011 (predicted 14th)

2012 (predicted 10th)

True, each season reached its conclusion differently - in 2010 we headed into the final day game at Norwich sitting 5th and had been 5 points clear of 7th place with just 2 games remaining. In 2011 we held 5th or 6th for quite a while, but the top 4 flying away put great pressure on the 2 remaining playoff places and we buckled. Then 2012, we were top after 9 games, then failed to win in our next 9 before rallying from a long way back, but never got closer than 4 points to the playoffs again.

I'm not a career manager though - it's either Scunthorpe or give up and play a different game for me so for now I'll head into 2013 and hope we can do something different (I suspect that that "something different" will be finishing a lot lower than 8th though!) this season, but I'm not hopeful. As those screenshots show, we just can't defend, even when I played a quite defensive tactic at times last season! It's fun though so unless I get sacked (we are predicted 8th this year!) I'll keep trying.

My best 5 players now want to leave for bigger clubs though, 4 out of contract in 2 years, one at the end of this season. Also we are starting to lose money very fast despite a wage bill of only ~£100k p/w because we have the 2nd lowest or lowest attendances in the league every year. So basically this season is it for us...if we win promotion our wantaway players may be happy to stay and we will stabalise a little financially (before coming straight back down!), if we don't win promotion it'll be a painful future for us I fear, losing all our best players and having to start again

I'm loving it though in general, despite getting frustrated at the game always managing to throw us a really bad run each season so we can't quite improve...and I don'thave the talent to extracate us from it fast enough!

why would you have to start again??? I mean if you lose these players replace them?? I think your save would be a great game to play, I like you prefer to stick to one team the whole way through, you have got them headed in the right direction so with a few new players (bosman's) you never know and hopefully you won't get fired for finishing a little further down the league.

Sorry, by "start again" I didn't mean start the whole save game over again, I just meant start building up a team again because losing those key players will rip the core out of the team so we will need to rebuild in a major way.

Bosmans are a double-edged sword for a club like ours though. I got stung last season, rushing in and signing up a player released from Newcastle because my scouts said he was a definite purchase and I liked the look of him, but obviously he wanted big wages so I ended up signing him up on £9,500 p/w which is a huge wage for us and in the end he didn't displace either of my established centre-backs or my right-back so I offloaded him for £100,000 the following summer having given him ~£500,000 in wages for contributing next to nothing to our cause! This summer I have been a lot more careful and allowed numerous potentially good signings slip away to other clubs because I wouldn't pay big wages.

I've run into this a few times. As you move up from lower leagues you only have 1 or 2 season to keep getting getting promoted, or else many of your best players start looking at moves. Thankfully, it is absurdly easy to sign talented regens to replace them, and if you get them while their contract is expiring in June you can get many of them on decent wages. Waiting until they are out of contract will bump their wage demands way up.

I tend to find the opposite is true for the players I look at, although they mostly aren't young regens because all the young regens that get released in FM08 are appalling! When the player is still under contract, even if it just has 1 week left, he often demands far more from me because his current contract is on a Premiership wage. When he gets released from that and is unemployed his wage demands quickly become more sensible!

I tend to find the opposite is true for the players I look at, although they mostly aren't young regens because all the young regens that get released in FM08 are appalling! When the player is still under contract, even if it just has 1 week left, he often demands far more from me because his current contract is on a Premiership wage. When he gets released from that and is unemployed his wage demands quickly become more sensible!

For some, but many others are still on their "Youngster" or "Hot Prospect" wages, which are usually very low, so their contract demands can be quite reasonable. For me (moved from BSN to League 1 so far) these are great targets. Maybe for Championship they don't cut it - have not made it that far yet. If you have other countries loaded/active that helps as well. French regens have been amazing for me, with some Spanish and Italian as well.

If you have the Scottish leagues loaded up then send a scout there to scout just Scotland and then the Scottish U19s. You can pick up some real bargains for players and their wage demands are pretty big for youngsters but not that high for a Championship club.