It's (all about) The Journey Man

The Setup

I have decided to start a totally brand new journey in FM, something I have never done before. Previously I would take my favourite football team (Oldham Athletic) and every year guide them to CL success. I have done that again and to be frank it has become a very boring game. I then tried to start a career game with a Danish amateur club, but I had done the legend style games before so it really didn't appeal to me. Then I started reading about the journey man career games that other have and thought it would be a good fit for me.

Now before I begin I really need to outline some things, I am not good at Football Manager as a whole, what I am good at is taking Oldham from League One to CL glory, that's it, and it is a totally different skillset to going into an unknown club when they are going downwards, so please do not expect this to be a successful career . My goal when going into a club is always "to avoid getting the sack". That's it, nothing more nothing less. Of course we all strive for success but I do warn you all, it will not happen for a while!

That being said what you be with me on a journey both as a FM player and manager as I try and improve my game tactically and adjust to situations I have never faced before. So without further ado... let's begin...

Leagues

I setup the leagues, picked the main ones in Europe and went for a few South American leagues as well as Asian ones.

Here is the depth of the leagues, most are set as deep as they can go

Me

Here I am ladies and gentlemen in all my glory.

Next update will include me choosing a job and my thoughts on the selection.

Offers

Well I had a fair few offers, the ones below are the ones I didn't take:

I didn't fancy Brazil at the moment as it is a place I have never done before and the tactics look really funky there so I decided against taking the Guarani & Vila Nova jobs.

I want to go to Asia to manage but would have preferred a Chinese club due to the language helping me out there, but I must admit it was pretty tempting to take that job.

Finally I did take an offer from a team called Volendam in the Jupiler League...

Volendam

Full name Football Club Volendam

Nickname(s) Het Andere Oranje (The Other Oranje)

Founded June 1, 1977; 35 years ago

Ground Kras Stadion, Volendam, Capacity: 6,984

Chairman Henk Kras

Players

After a quick look here are who I consider to be key players:

Goalkeeper

Robert van Westerop

Defenders

Barry Opdam

Midfielders

Dominique van Dijk

Strikers

Jack Tuyp

My thoughts

I don't like the age of the key players add to that one of them is on loan and van Dijk is out of contract at that the end of the season and it could lead to trouble for me. I also tend to favour pace in the team but looking at the situation not many players in the team have any pace whatsoever.

Jack Tuyp is good but looks like he is running through treacle which is unfortunate. The rest of the strikers are bad, the majority are poachers, but alas are not good enough.

Entire Team

Why the sack?

Having been predicted to finish in the playoffs and possibly gain promotion after 10 games Volendam are in 14th position, ouch! We can see that they went on a terrible run of results before the sacking.

Expectations

So what are the board's expectations?

Seems reasonable and luckily they are not judging me at all at the moment.

My Expectations

I expect not to get sacked, but looking at the league table it seems putting a few wins together I can get into the playoff slots, then depending on who finished top in the other periods they will also quality for a playoff spot. So if I really wanted to push it I will try and win a period, or be a best placed team outside of the period winners! It seems the Jupiler League is a bit complex.

Here is a better explanation of the rules.

Roll on October!

Wow, your first name really is 'the'.

Wow, your first name really is 'the'.

For the purposes of the game at least

October Update

Mixed month to be honest with you all, it started out great with a 3-2 win over Willem II which we deserved, with Tuyp grabbing 2. However, we were 2-0 up and they pulled it back to 2-2 before we managed to get the winner, so still some work to be done there.

We followed it up with a shocking defeat against FC Dordrecht, we should have won this match but ended up getting badly spanked, actually we were nowhere near winning this. Really terrible performance.

Having had a truly shocking performance I was not looking forward to our next match against Sparta who, at this point were top of the league, however, we had the best of it and despite them scoring first we hit back with two goals to take the win and move up the table.

Our inconsistency was then highlight as having beat the current leaders we then faced Telstar who were in amongst us in the league and went on to lose 1-0, again in this match they had completely the better of it leaving me a little confused as to what's going on... Very inconsistent month and I can see what happened to the former manager.

This left the standing as follows at the end of October...