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I'm sorry, but this is the most appalling BS!


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I'm approaching the end of my 4th season as Manager of Arsenal. In those four years I've won 1 League Cup, 1 FA Cup, 1 Community Shield, 2 Euro Super Cups, and 2 Champion's League.

My team is rock solid, my coaches are all 4.5 stars and above, and my youth system is starting to yield some top quality fruit. I've also kept the club solidly in the black with a very sensible wage structure.

So, all of a sudden I get a message saying that there is a takeover pending and then I get the sack.

I really think this is a feature that should just be removed from the game. Just like the way that you can't ever die (which, let's be honest, really buries any argument that this is some kind of hardcore simulator), I don't think you should be arbitrarily removed from your chosen job based on anything other than your own merits and performance. I would never have been let go were I in really the manager of Arsenal and had delivered two Champion's League titles in 4 years. Regardless of that, this is a video game. I'll stop playing when I want to stop playing, thank you very much.

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Imagine that you are playing Call of Duty, and in the middle of the game you get a message pop up telling you that your unit is being recalled and that you are being transferred to a logistical supply company as their new head inventory clerk. Not because you were bad at killing people. Just because transfers happen in the military all the time and it is not in any way an inaccurate depiction of life as a professional soldier. Would kind of suck all the fun out of the game you had been playing though wouldn't it?

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Yeah, I can see that, CityAndColor. Thanks for the sympathy though. At least you seem to get where I'm coming from. Oh, and I love the Neil Warnock article. Yeah, the guy whose team had 1 win in their last 14 league matches and was hovering one place above the relegation zone is really similar to the situation I laid out in the OP. I see it now.

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These things do happen all the time. It doesnt matter how successful you have been in the past. When a new owner comes in they will like to put there own stamp on things. QPR sacked Warnock, Blackburn sacked Allardyce. your claim of them not doing very much before they took over is redundant. Warnock saved QPR from relegation and then got them promoted in his seasons before QPR where taken over by Tony Fernandez. Blackburn were in dire straights before Allardyce steped in and kept them up on a shoestring budget for a long time. They have both had great achievements before they were taken over and then they sacked as the owner didnt fancy them or they thought there would be a better option.

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Should be an option probably, many people just want to play a long term career with one club only.

And yes it's more realistic that this can happen but on the end of the day it's just a game.

I think this is the problem.

A lot of users have a mindset that they only want to manage one club whilst the game is designed to follow a manager's career which means changing clubs.

That said having an "Unsackable" option at the start wouldn't be a bad option. Those that want to use it can whilst those that don't it won't affect them.

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While I think the feature needs to stay, I think you really need to be doing badly for a board to sack you when they take over. Sure it happens in real life, but so do a lot of other things that are not in the game for gameplay purposes.

Something similar happened to me back on FM07, it left me fuming. I know things have been improved since then but if it happened again I'd consider leaving FM for good.

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A lot of users have a mindset that they only want to manage one club

Which is perfectly reasonable when you've won two Champions Leagues in four seasons...

whilst the game is designed to follow a manager's career which means changing clubs.

Why does the game have such a simplistic view of management? Managers change club either by choice (bigger opportunity) or by having poor results and being sacked. Both of which are entirely possible within the game. There are plenty of long-serving real life managers too.

The Allardyce sacking was met with bemusement, while Warnock had won once in 14 and didn't look like adding to that (similar to Di Matteo). Neither of which are very comparable to a manager who has won two Champions Leagues and an FA Cup in anything but very broad terms.

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TThere are plenty of long-serving real life managers too.

Define "long-serving"

Out of the 92 English league clubs only five managers have been there more than six years whilst a massive 75/92 (81%) have been there less than three years.

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Define "long-serving"

Out of the 92 English league clubs only five managers have been there more than six years whilst a massive 75/92 (81%) have been there less than three years.

And none would be sacked if they won the Champions League twice.

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if it happens in real life or not its still a kick in the nuts for the OP. I would be pretty annoyed.

Sometimes these boards are not helpful at all.

It seems like every other answer is "use the editor" or "its your tactics" or now "it happens in real life look at Warnock"

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I think Cystorm has a point.

This game (or simulation, for the nerds out there) is bought for the enjoyment of the user & there should be an "unsackable" option for those who do not want to put out of a rewarding career game at the whim of the computer: & I don't give a monkey's how life-like that scenario is.

It is also annoying when the game keeps the user unemployed for years at a time. For God's sake give us a "receive at least one job offer a year" button.

The "real life scenario" types don't have to click these buttons.

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This argument is ridiculous, okay you got sacked by new owners but you achieve great things with the club, you can either cry about in post a thread or you can just load the game back up and continue. Life goes on.

Yeah, what an idiot I am for thinking I could come to the forum specifically designed for users to give feedback and share ideas and give some feedback and share and idea. I beg your pardon.

I would like to clarify - I am not asking to be "unsackable" necessarily, just not under these circumstances. Let me get sacked on merit, rather than some arbitrary scenario that could happen but almost never would except under highly irregular circumstances. See my Call of Duty comment earlier in the thread. Yes, once in a blue moon a niave new chairman or a highly ambitious oligarch will make an outrageous sacking. But why does that once in a blue moon have to be me? Why must the game ruin my fun just to make an arbitrary point?

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I couldn't help notice that you didn't win the league according to your opening post, maybe the new owners want a manager who can win the league and is not just happy with playing in europe every season, regardless of success or not.

Then they're idiots, because it's harder to win the Champions League. It's where the best teams all compete towards the closing stages.

There's no reason to fire this manager. Before anyone mentions Del Bosque: Del Bosque at Real Madrid is the exception, not the rule. No board is going to repeat what Real Madrid back then did, because they can see the consequences.

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Then they're idiots, because it's harder to win the Champions League. It's where the best teams all compete towards the closing stages.

There's no reason to fire this manager. Before anyone mentions Del Bosque: Del Bosque at Real Madrid is the exception, not the rule. No board is going to repeat what Real Madrid back then did, because they can see the consequences.

Its harder to win a competition over 38 matches playing week in week out than it is to win a cup regardless of competitors ability, players will motivate themselves differently for different competitions, just look at Liverpool when they won in 2005 they couldn't even finish in the top 4 that season.

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Its harder to win a competition over 38 matches playing week in week out than it is to win a cup regardless of competitors ability, players will motivate themselves differently for different competitions, just look at Liverpool when they won in 2005 they couldn't even finish in the top 4 that season.

Most teams that win the Champions League won their domestic league, anyway. Milan and Liverpool are the exceptions to the rule.

Only one European team can win the Champions League per season, which makes it more difficult to win.

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Didn't Jose get sacked at Chelsea? Don't think he resigned anyways... but he won a fair bit at Chelsea and his sacking was harsh. In fact... most Chelsea managers in recent years have been sacked harshly. It happens unfortunately.

New board comes in and they want their own man. Big Sam didn't stand a chance a Newcastle the moment Ashley took over, same with him at Blackburn. Warnock had just got QPR promoted when they got taken over and his job was immediately in question, I can remember the uproar of it as everyone was saying you can't sack a manager that has just got you promoted when it wasn't expected (not that easily anyway).

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Didn't Jose get sacked at Chelsea? Don't think he resigned anyways... but he won a fair bit at Chelsea and his sacking was harsh. In fact... most Chelsea managers in recent years have been sacked harshly. It happens unfortunately.

Mourinho also fell out with Abramovich big-time. There's no suggestion the OP did.

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How did we ever survive 20 years ago when getting sacked in a football management game actually did mean the game was over.

I feel for the OP & would suggest that along with having a rightful moan about getting the boot they should dig out a save before the takeover was completed (this is why everyone should use rolling autsaves) & uploaded it for SI to look at as the fallout for sacking a successful manager should have stopped the new owners taking the action they did.

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"Realism" seems to have gone out of the window the moment the Arsenal board allowed a takeover surely??

Seriously though I think its incredibly harsh to get sacked for winning that list of trophies in such a short space of time. Especially considering the current lack of trophies at the club!

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I survived a takeover of my Rionegro team with a far worse pedigree and am still there 6 seasons later, so it's not a fixed odds event by any means, irl life there are very rare occurrences similar to this and if it's as rare in the game as irl then I'd say there's no problem.

I've no idea if that's the case though.

Personally I'd say push for a non sackable option, there's plenty of demand for it and it shouldn't be hugely problematic to introduce for FM13.

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I sympathize with Cycstorm. He got a bad deal and, if I ever got that high in the game (which, as a llama, I won't), I'd be bummed out about it as well. But, here's the problem with threads such as this: the OP always seems to think that "unreasonable behavior" equates to "Game Broken" and, thus, it should never happen. While I support the addition of a couple of sandbox options such as "Never Get Fired" and the like, I will never tire of pointing to the Poisson Distribution and how it absolutely ensures (and quite reasonably so) that the flow of oddball events in FM will never stop. If the EPL (somehow) played sixty million games a season irl, we'd see some very unusual happenings. If SI ever heeds the continuous flow of Unusual Event = Game Broken threads, FM will quickly be reduced to a boring snoozefest of 0-0 draws.

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I sympathize with Cycstorm. He got a bad deal and, if I ever got that high in the game (which, as a llama, I won't), I'd be bummed out about it as well. But, here's the problem with threads such as this: the OP always seems to think that "unreasonable behavior" equates to "Game Broken" and, thus, it should never happen. While I support the addition of a couple of sandbox options such as "Never Get Fired" and the like, I will never tire of pointing to the Poisson Distribution and how it absolutely ensures (and quite reasonably so) that the flow of oddball events in FM will never stop. If the EPL (somehow) played sixty million games a season irl, we'd see some very unusual happenings. If SI ever heeds the continuous flow of Unusual Event = Game Broken threads, FM will quickly be reduced to a boring snoozefest of 0-0 draws.

It's not about luck. It's about a lack of rational decisions.

This manager has won the Champions league 2 times out of 4 and has built a solid team with solid foundations, and a youth system that is producing results.

So the manager has had short-term success, looks to be on course for medium-term success and has also built for the future.

Why would any board fire this manager, who is likely to have a very good rapport with the fans, and is quite frankly doing nothing wrong?

It's odd that you mention the Poisson distribution, because you can't mention this without mentioning hypothesis testing - where the event n=1 can be statistically significant in some cases - i.e. a bug.

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I sympathise with this, winning the Champions League on FM is -in my experience definitely- the Holy Grail. Let alone twice. I've never been sacked as a result of a board takeover and I wasn't making much progress at the time so this scenario doesn't ring true to me.

But football is a funny game, who'd have thought Blackpool in the Prem or David N'Gog starting football matches?

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1. How would an unsackable option work long-term anyway? Would the players, fans and board just get more and more angry with you? Would team morale plummet and the team stop listening to you, to the point where the game becomes unenjoyable anyway? Adding an unsackable option isn't as easy as just removing sackings.

2. The OP isn't even asking for this anyway, so I don't know why it came into the discussion in the first place. An option to avoid being sacked immediately, regardless of success, when a new board takes over would be a more appropriate suggestion, but for the sake of enjoyment of the game, it shouldn't be necessary to add this in the first place.

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1. How would an unsackable option work long-term anyway? Would the players, fans and board just get more and more angry with you? Would team morale plummet and the team stop listening to you, to the point where the game becomes unenjoyable anyway? Adding an unsackable option isn't as easy as just removing sackings.

Why would the long-term result of such a game be a downward spiral?

If a user keeps losing, then I don't think it matters whether he or she is unsackable or not - they will need to take a look at how they play the game.

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Have we established who the replacement manager is? Maybe the new owners brought back Wenger or turned up with Mourihno, maybe Guardiola or even Ferguson (I know the last one is stretching it a bit).

There are plenty of other successful managers in the FM gameworld that might actually make sense as the new boards preferred choice & people should not be shouting bug without the full facts of the situation.

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x42--

It's not about luck. It's about a lack of rational decisions.

Well, ultimately, it is about luck because nearly everything in FM is based on probabilities. But even if we put on our anthropomorphic hats and assume that all of the AI teams are populated by real humans, it's to be expected that some AI managers will make unreasonable, even irrational decisions. Because that's what humans do and the game simulates that. I must admit that it puzzles me that so many here seem not to understand that. And, if one comes to accept that point, well, then Poisson rules (see below).

Why would any board fire this manager, who is likely to have a very good rapport with the fans, and is quite frankly doing nothing wrong?

Simple. Because some boards act irrationally.

As for your 'Poisson bug' comment, I doubt seriously that Cycstorm's firing constitutes a bug. I think the game is working as designed, that is, to include some unreasonable sackings. As pointed out by others, it's not as if it doesn't happen in real life. I think the real problem here is that the FM community is split into two large groups. To oversimplify, the one I inhabit welcomes the oddball events as flavor that livens up the game and presents unexpected managerial challenges. If I suffer a run of injuries that cripples my team, I am frustrated at the management level but I enjoy it at the gamer level as I struggle to patch together a team for the upcoming relegation fight. The other group wants a controlled environment in which, much like most other games, they can find the winning formula and enjoy a succession of eighty-game win streaks. To each his own but we'll never see eye-to-eye.

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x42--

It's not about luck. It's about a lack of rational decisions.

Well, ultimately, it is about luck because nearly everything in FM is based on probabilities. But even if we put on our anthropomorphic hats and assume that all of the AI teams are populated by real humans, it's to be expected that some AI managers will make unreasonable, even irrational decisions. Because that's what humans do and the game simulates that. I must admit that it puzzles me that so many here seem not to understand that. And, if one comes to accept that point, well, then Poisson rules (see below).

Why would any board fire this manager, who is likely to have a very good rapport with the fans, and is quite frankly doing nothing wrong?

Simple. Because some boards act irrationally.

As for your 'Poisson bug' comment, I doubt seriously that Cycstorm's firing constitutes a bug. I think the game is working as designed, that is, to include some unreasonable sackings. As pointed out by others, it's not as if it doesn't happen in real life. I think the real problem here is that the FM community is split into two large groups. To oversimplify, the one I inhabit welcomes the oddball events as flavor that livens up the game and presents unexpected managerial challenges. If I suffer a run of injuries that cripples my team, I am frustrated at the management level but I enjoy it at the gamer level as I struggle to patch together a team for the upcoming relegation fight. The other group wants a controlled environment in which, much like most other games, they can find the winning formula and enjoy a succession of eighty-game win streaks. To each his own but we'll never see eye-to-eye.

The only sacking I can think of that compares with the OP is Del Bosque's sacking at Real Madrid. Which would serve as a warning to any board that sacking a successful manager who has the team's respect and the fans' respect is a terrible, terrible idea. I can't think of any manager who was sacked in a similar fashion since.

There is no need to hide behind the notion that the game throws you unreasonable decisions every now and then to liven things up. Stop making excuses. A sacking like this would be highly unusual, which is a good reason to bring it up as a bug. Why was he fired? For a change of direction? Well, given the OP has done plenty of winning, the only other direction is "losing". Which makes no sense.

Just ask yourself this - if Wenger were fired in reality, and the next manager did as well as the OP, breaking Arsenal's barren trophy streak, and putting the club on good footing, why would a takeover want to get rid of that manager? That manager is clearly doing something right, as he has been successful and the club is in very good shape, in a footballing and financial sense. This manager is very good for their investment and ego, and can only get better. I really don't see why the future board would want to get rid of this manager. Especially since FM doesn't communicate "why".

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The only sacking I can think of that compares with the OP is Del Bosque's sacking at Real Madrid. Which would serve as a warning to any board that sacking a successful manager who has the team's respect and the fans' respect is a terrible, terrible idea. I can't think of any manager who was sacked in a similar fashion since.

There is no need to hide behind the notion that the game throws you unreasonable decisions every now and then to liven things up. Stop making excuses. A sacking like this would be highly unusual, which is a good reason to bring it up as a bug. Why was he fired? For a change of direction? Well, given the OP has done plenty of winning, the only other direction is "losing". Which makes no sense.

Just ask yourself this - if Wenger were fired in reality, and the next manager did as well as the OP, breaking Arsenal's barren trophy streak, and putting the club on good footing, why would a takeover want to get rid of that manager? That manager is clearly doing something right, as he has been successful and the club is in very good shape, in a footballing and financial sense. This manager is very good for their investment and ego, and can only get better. I really don't see why the future board would want to get rid of this manager. Especially since FM doesn't communicate "why".

More generally I agree with Aytchman, but in this specific case I have to concur. This turn of events is so beyond belief that it feels like a bug.

Admittedly, incredibly weird things happen in real football all the time and some fairly frequently individuals and organisations display monumentally bad decision making.

However I struggle to envisage any situation in which the OP would be sacked, short of alienating the entirety of the board. In real life support of the manager would likely be a political necessity at board level.

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I survived a takeover of my Rionegro team with a far worse pedigree and am still there 6 seasons later, so it's not a fixed odds event by any means, irl life there are very rare occurrences similar to this and if it's as rare in the game as irl then I'd say there's no problem.

I also survived a takeover in FM11 when I was the Aston Villa manager and the only thing I won by that time is the FA Cup

**** happens in a manager's carrer, even being sacked by a new board despite you were doing good or not. And didn't the Bilbao's new board brought Bielsa to the team without taking in mind how the other manager was doing?

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x42--

I'm not quite sure what we're arguing about. We both agree that it's an unreasonable decision. Perhaps you're arguing that it's a really, really unreasonable decision. Even so, I think they should -- indeed, must -- be in the game to some extent; you apparently don't. And that's where Poisson comes in. Because of the sheer volume of games played in FM versus real life, if you recode the game to eliminate unreasonable events, you will inevitably and inescapably reduce the game to pablum. Still, I support some sort of "Never Sack Me" option for those so inclined. That would keep everybody happy.

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x42--

I'm not quite sure what we're arguing about. We both agree that it's an unreasonable decision. Perhaps you're arguing that it's a really, really unreasonable decision. Even so, I think they should -- indeed, must -- be in the game to some extent; you apparently don't. And that's where Poisson comes in. Because of the sheer volume of games played in FM versus real life, if you recode the game to eliminate unreasonable events, you will inevitably and inescapably reduce the game to pablum. Still, I support some sort of "Never Sack Me" option for those so inclined. That would keep everybody happy.

x42bn6 likes to argue/discuss the contrary viewpoint, it's the trait that defines him. ;)

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