turnip

In Search of Incompetence 18 seasons into this save, and I've had every available European league running as - at least - VIew-only for the whole time. Some on Playable. That's a lot of opportunities for AI managers to battle it out for the title of 'most incompetent'. I'm not talking about big clubs failing to reach Europe; I'm talking about teams doing profoundly, impressively badly in their league. Spanish D2 - 2036; Tarancon; 2 points -------- 2037; Mirandes; 2 points. (Impressively, in 2030, Mirandes finished with 3 points ) Spanish La Liga - 2040; Ponferrada; 7 points Slovenian Second League - 2027; Tolmin; 7 points Slovak Second League - 2039; Spisska Nova Ves; 4 points. (Sered finished second-bottom that season with 5 points) Portuguese Championship - 2040; Bustelo; 2 points Icelandic First Division - 2037; KV; 4 points Icelandic Premier Division - 2035; IBV; 7 points Greek Super League 2 - 2026; PAO Rouf; 5 points Greek Super League 1 - 2025; Panserraikos; 7 points German Liga 3 - 2040; Jena; 6 points & 2037; Altona 93; 6 points French National 2 - 2038; EFC Frejus Saint-Raphael; 2 points Finnish First Division - 2032; Atlantis FC; 5 points Czech Second Division - 2037; Zapy; 4 points Belgian Jupiler Pro League - 2037; RE Virton; 7 points Austrian Premier Division - 2031; FAC Wien; 7 points and I've left the best 'til last Bulgarian Second Division - 2031; Svetkavitsa Targovishte; 1 point In mitigation, despite me running a gigantic database, for some reason Bulgarian second-tier teams really seem to struggle for players.

Season 18: TSV 1860 München, German Bundesliga das spitze Ende des Stocks Against Stuttgart, we did very little until a backpost cross found Ange N'Dri exploiting the match engine's hard-on for broken back-post headers (BBPH). Our high press caused the panic and mistake that let us beat Hamburg. Bull ***** FC gave us a good game but also a BBPH. We had no recognised (good) strikers against Mainz, so played Cristian and N'Dri up top and the Great Dehumidified One lofted a delightful ball for one of the Pablos to finish. An arid BBPH and penalty saw off a spirited Furth before (we will utter no details of the atrocities witnessed against Dortmund) an error-strewn performance saw my delicate voice shredded by constant screaming, shrieking and profanities as we drew Hoffenheim. Freiburg can consider themselves unlucky to have lost against us, but we did whip out a BBPH against Eintracht Frankfurt as part of a deserved win. We lost convincingly against Hertha and Bayern but good performances against Koln and Wolfsburg left things pretty tasty going into the final round of matches. How tasty? So we were left with a match against Leverkusen, while Hoffenheim were playing Bull ***** FC, with whoever finished higher qualifying for the Champions League. Mind you, we weren't just playing Leverkusen, we were facing Wichai Wongsrikeaw, one of the most detestable little snots I'd managed at Lusitania Lourosa. A central defender we signed from Thailand, who thought he was hot **** despite having single-digit Jumping Reach, and who spent most of his miserable time under my management complaining about one thing or other and just generally being the kind of immense pain in the arse that you remember with hatred 12 seasons later. Now, according to the game, he's "one of world football's global superstars", with 124 caps for Thailand and commanding a regular spot as one of Leverkusen's centre-backs. However... The reason he was pissed off with me at Lusitania Lourosa was that I never played him at centre-back. Why? Well, because his single-digit Jumping Reach made him a liability. Leverkusen play him at DCL. So, theoretically, if Ange N'Dri - our AML, if you've forgotten - were to put a far-post cross into the box, aimed at Nicu Ispir... Yeah. Basically, get ****ed Wichai Wongsrikeaw. Obviously, I'm delighted (I'd say "astonished" but I'm not sure you can claim that at the end of a 34-match season) to have finished 4th, but arguably I'm just as thrilled that Hertha won the Bundesliga. The first time in 110 years. 1860 Munchen finished second that season. I'm just saying. Thing is, though, I've said throughout the season that we've massively overperformed. How badly? Genuinely, I think the correct response to this is: "lol, lmao". If you'd offered me 14th at the start of the season, I'd have been thrilled. Nicu Ispir is the best player in our squad and he's a "Good Bundesliga player". The rest of the squad ranges from "decent Bundesliga player" to "good Bundesliga 2 player". Our team stats are generally slightly better than the 14th the xG table has us at, but not by much. We finished 4th in the league and only 4 players had an Average Rating of over 7.00. This is so stupid it's hard to parse. I do love Nicu Ispir and he will need a new contract at some point in the next 12 months. Thankfully, I don't think he's good enough yet that someone will drop £54m to trigger his MRFC. Ange N'Dri continues to defy his modest CA by just being good at crossing and passing, and obviously knowing when to pull the trigger on a BBPH. Rodolfo Dimas turned out to be just the kind of keeper we needed - mostly reliable, but with a bad habit of hoofing the ball aimlessly downfield when he's nervous. Abdoulaye Samassi, meanwhile, is just a very competent centre-back; he rarely does anything other than defend and he's very good at that. We are going to need to improve in the summer, though, and in a big way. Thankfully, the board have decided that being stingy is somewhat uncouth: Also, the whole "sign 'em, play 'em, make 'em better" thing is - slowly - working out for us. Biagioni is worth about £170m, but I might be able to get Brard with our new-found wealth. That would be nice... We got £78m for finishing fourth, which is very nice.

Transfer Retrospective Season 2: The first one is the most blindingly obvious: Albert Bucur Signed at 16 year old from a Romanian youth team, it took him the best part of 3 years to make the first team but then he simply didn't leave until this season when the siren call of Saudi money sung him to a pre-retirement slumber. 12 Portuguese Premier League titles, 8 Portuguese Super Cups and 7 Portuguese League Cup wins, alongside solitary Champions League and UEFA Super Cup wins. Philip Behnke: We paid £250k for him, got one okay season of him as our player, then 2 excellent seasons as a loanee. RB Leipzip probably could have found a better striker in terms of raw ability, but it's hard to argue with that goalscoring record. The biggest shame/surprise [delete as appropriate] is that he only got 7 caps for Germany.

Season 18: TSV 1860 München, German Bundesliga Youth Intake A good intake, by any reasonable standard. No strikers, but who needs strikers in the youth intake when the third, fourth and fifth tiers of Spain exist? I long ago gave up trying to work out whether a highly-rated goalkeeper at youth intake would be any good, and I'm not going to bother with Fiand. 3.5+1* Potential rated. Yay? Hocine Abdellaoui is a different matter, though. The kid's gonna get sick of working on his Stamina & Work Rate, but them's the breaks. Cyril Bessard isn't too impressive on first look, but does have the attributes to turn into a decent centre-back if he develops well. The slightly cro-magnon-looking Stefan Dietl is the pick of the bunch, though. Obviously. I don't quite know what to do with him, though. 15 Finishing is utterly wasted on a FB/WB, but with his Physicals, he could be a monstrous CWB. Maybe an Inverted Winger on Attack (from ML, rather than AML)? Hmm. A damned good problem to have, I will admit.

Season 18: TSV 1860 München, German Bundesliga January We accepted an offer for Cristian from ADO Den-Haag, but having strung us along for the second half of the month, it fell through when it turned out they didn't have the money. Cheers, dudes; very helpful. That meant the only departures were some loanees (I'm ignoring Dzaferovic who was a useless U19). Rizzi, Daly and Bernardini should get the first-team football we agreed to; I'm sceptical that Balducci and Manuel will, though. Levi Phillips is your stereotypical English clogger DC, even if he is Welsh. We needed someone first-team ready to bring some stability and he looks capable of doing just that. Hamidou Gomis is the one I think could be excellent. An excellent technical base for a DC and the Mental/Physical side of his game should improve as he develops. Again, he wanted Squad Player... I can't wait until the club's reputation improves. We brought Dragan Pesic in as a replacement for Cristian... In fairness, I think Pesic is better as an out-right Winger and if his Potential holds, he'll be a bit of a weapon out wide. And Aitor Alonso is just our young Spanish SC signing for the window. Looks like he could be really good (don't they all) but needs to develop his Mentals a bit. We scraped past Leverkusen and Werder, which was to be expected - the performances, I mean, not the results, which were very much unexpected. We rotated fully for the cup game against Bayern and got what we deserved from that match. Nice to see Delgado getting himself a goal, though. No such dignities in the dismal display against deadly Borussia Monchengladbach And then, 3 days after getting schooled in the Munich derby, we utterly crushed Augsburg, with 72% possession and restricting them to only 0.6xG. So what have we learned? I have no idea.

Season 18: TSV 1860 München, German Bundesliga

There's a bug that happens very infrequently where what happens while you're watching a match isn't the same as the result afterwards. By "very infrequently", I've seen it happen possibly 3 or 4 times over the last 20+ real-life years playing the game. If you're having it happen several times in a season, I'd send the save to SI.

SI needs to give us the 'Sarcastic Applause' interaction option for during games. God knows my players deserve it a few times each match.

Season 18: TSV 1860 München, German Bundesliga Fixtures Things have gotten tougher as the season's gotten longer. No real surprise; man-for-man our players kinda suck compared to every other team. That said, there have been some good results. The win over Dortmund - second in the table - was great: we changed tactics 3 times during the match, but managed to hold out for the win after Ispir scored his very funny goal (video above). Ispir got his second hattrick of the campaign in a very silly match against Koln. On the flipside, we were crushed by Bayern, barely getting within a mile of a whiff of a chance. We defended well against Hertha (3rd in the league) but conceded to one of the derpy FM24 goals I hate: a goalkeeper long-ball that bounced off the head of my centre-back straight into the path of their striker, who finished. (Seriously, I don't even know what's supposed to be happening with those chances). We've built up a good number of points so far, and although I suspect fixtures will get harder as the season progresses, our players are mostly improving, too. And with BMG and Hamburg stinking things up early on, I do think we're in with a good chance of avoiding a proper relegation scrap. Random Player Showcase We signed Rizzi at the start of last season from Serie C Carrarese and he's had a few sub appearances to date. With my deeply-stupid transfer strategy of signing every half-decent DM/MC I find and giving them Playing Time promises they don't really deserve, I've struggled to give him the game-time I wanted to. Still I think he could be terrific, so I'm going to try to find a good loan deal for him. We've got the usual rag-tag group joining us in January - mostly youngsters (again, as usual) but we do have some DC backup arriving in the form of a [sigh] 18-year old from Génération Foot. Look, they say the first step is recognising you have a problem, don't they?

Jimbo will have his view, but I'd always say that if you can't replace him and there's little value in losing him, keep him. A surprising number of players will chill out about this once the transfer window closes, as long as they're [still] getting playing time. So sometimes it does come down to how much of a ruckus are they causing in the dressing room? If it's one or two bit-part players who are demonstrating solidarity, ignore the losers. If it's half of your first team, that's a bigger problem if it's affecting performances. If not, I'd still ignore it.

I'm old enough to remember Championship Manager 3 being so delayed it released in March (and it was still buggy as hell). At the very least, senior management are much better with deadlines than they used to be

If he's managing a team in the National with a small database, it's quite easy to believe that his scouts aren't going to find anyone willing to join him, because most of the players in Austria will be a big teams and unwilling to join a small team that's possibly semi-professional. Or, if his team is very good, the scout might not be finding anyone interesting enough to highlight. Other than RB Salzburg, there's usually not a lot of top-level talent in Austria. But if he's (I dunno) Amiens in the second tier, than yeah, his scouts should be finding a few players worth looking at. Or if the database size is big - there are usually a few players at non-league teams good enough to improve a National-level team. We also don't know how long the assignment has been ongoing for, although I'm assuming that Roger Schubert is an Austrian scout, so the Knowledge side of things should be fine.

Season 18: TSV 1860 München, German Bundesliga Transfers We let a few players leave at the end of their contracts. The only notable one was Janick Sieger who'd scored 34 goals over the last two seasons. A bad idea? Maybe, but sometimes you have to take the 6'5" training wheels off. Mboup was the only end-of-contract player we didn't release, keeping him on a month-to-month deal until ManUre came in and gave us £500k for him. Kwaku Sarpong wanted a new contract, but we didn't need him, so I offered him out and Pescara took us up on the offer. Muhlig - our former GK - also wanted a new contract but I try not to reward **** with actual money (which he wanted) so we got rid. Bernard Nnapere was one of our development DLs, so getting over a million for him was a laugh. Meanwhile, Rafa was a development ST who had a pretty meh loan in the Spanish 4th tier last season; some teams have more money than sense. Delgado and Pablo were the two wingers I was excited about. The scouts and coaches prefer Pablo - and I can see why - but I still think Delgado will be a more interesting long-term option for us. The set pieces are the difference for me, for now. That said, Pablo should go on to be a phenomenal player. They'll both be second-choice in their respective positions this season, but neither is much of a downgrade from Cristian or N'Dri. The other Pablo we signed is another Spanish U20 player. And, obviously, another DM. (5th-tier) Toledo are getting some great players through their academy and although I don't think Pablo is quite ready for the Bundesliga, I thought giving him the playing time was a price worth paying for someone as promising as he is. With our DR's loan finishing, we needed a new player and Winai Sa-ngapol was our best option. Another who's probably not quite at Bundesliga-level yet, but can get up and down the flank at speed and should develop the technical side of his game a fair bit. As discussed, we needed a new GK and Rodolfo Dimas was - yet again - the best option available in our price range. At the press conference afterwards, we were asked if the age difference between him and the rest of the squad would be a problem. Yep, he's 25... The need for another striker was something that came a little later in the window, when I noticed that an 18-year old who played 6 matches last season would be our second choice. Nicu Ispir is an upgrade over Janick Sieger in every aspect, including wages, and honestly looks great. The other signings are youth players. Fixtures I wasn't sure how we'd match up to teams this season, and after edging a close-ish game against 3rd-tier Bochum in the cup, we utterly dominated BMG in the opening league match but still conceded a couple of cheap goals. Having then kept Augsburg at arms-length for 90 minutes, the game against Werder was just carnage all-round. They deserved to win, but as long as we have N'Dri on the left pinging crosses to the back post, we'll always have a chance. We probably have to go on the attack to get much out of the league this season. We'll have some good defensive performances, but I think we're just better going forward. I was holding off renewing some contracts to see if any clubs would make bids for the players in question, so the wage bill will go up. That said, at £5.59m per year, our current salary spend is just over 2% that of Bayern's. There are just 7 players in their first-team squad on lower wages than our entire wage bill. There are only two other teams in the league whose financial status is better than "Okay" - Frankfurt and Freiburg - and in the case of the latter, that's probably because they just sold a player to Bayern for £82m. We did end up getting an upgrade to Youth Facilities. Apparently the board wanted to take the credit for the idea, so they proposed it at the end of the season. Well done, lads, we're all very impressed.

Depends how many players there are in Austria, what team you're playing as and whether any of those players want to sign for you. Scouts don't usually give you reports on players who aren't interested in your club.