Taking it to the next level

[furiousuk]

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Introduction

The jump in class in any division is tough but none more so than the jump from Championship to Premiership. The strength of the Premiership means that getting a win from anywhere is difficult and this thread is going to go through my way to progressing a team from Championship standard to a level where you can really start pushing to become one of the elite clubs. The challenge of elevating a team from lower echelons into the top flight appeals to most of us in some guise or another and when you have done it this way you will know that you have achieved one of the hardest but most rewarding things in FM. Reaching the top level will involve shaping a team by hand, if you’ve done it then I’d be interested in what you think about my approach and if you’re aching to try it then I hope this thread will be an inspiration to give it a go – by the time you’ve reached the top the team will truly be yours, shaped in many ways by you alone, of course, your job once there is to continue to push for dominance but how can you go about starting to elevate a decent team into becoming world beaters?

Choosing a Club

The first big decision is which club you’re going to elevate to the big time. Given enough time any club is possible of achieving this but some are better prepared than others. The biggest decision in my mind is ground size. A big ground filled with people provides a regular income and will give your chairman confidence to back you with some decent funds. These funds should grow as your club grows so the only constraint on them is how many people you can get watching you. As you hit the Premiership and try to climb the table you’ll get TV money but a club with 40,000 watching will always make more money than a club with 18,000. It ain’t rocket science!

A 2nd deciding factor should be the training facilities. Only the big boys can afford the biggest wages and the best players and you’re not there yet so you’re going to have to grow your own to some extent. With these 2 things in mind clubs like Leeds, Derby, Southampton or either of the Sheffield clubs have great potential. Leicester, Coventry, Forest or Ipswich also have a good base to start from. I like to play a few years before launching an assault on the Prem but in the 4 years I’ve been at Southampton they have increased the ground size by 12,000 (as have Sheff Weds) to 44,000 which puts us in a much better position than every other mid-table team to strike at the big boys.

Prep Work – Sort out the back of the house

Thinking ahead is crucial. You won’t have the wage budget of the big clubs (yet) so you’re going to have to get guys who are a step away from the best players but have the chance to get there given the right opportunity. Finding top players is easy as you’ll be playing against a load of them each week but they’ll be expensive. You need to make your transfer and wage budget stretch as far as it can until you’ve established yourself a little more. Finding those guys who’ll accept more modest wages but have the talent to push the best players in the world requires an extensive net and an eye for a bargain. Get the best scouts you can and get them working. JPA, JPP are great in a top scout when you know who you’re scouting but you probably can’t afford the best. Your scouts need to work hard to find those gems and that requires determination.

The 2nd piece of this puzzle is developing these guys. If you were following along earlier then you’ll already have half-decent facilities and you’ll be upgrading them as quickly as you can. Learn to have a look at your finances screen before spending all of your budget:

My finances over the last few years have barely dipped below 0 despite my chairman furnishing me with a decent transfer budget each season (I believe he does this as we have a juicy big ground but it may also be to do with his hidden stats). Only last year did I spend most of my budget so couldn’t upgrade the facilities any further, this was a calculated decision as I required a specific player to push my side forward – more on that later. Technical advances then worsened my training facilities which is annoying but I think I just got unlucky on this. I’m back to upgrading them this year and won’t be spending that massive 37M (I won’t be able to entice better players than I’ve already got until I’ve established myself in Europe anyway).

So you’ve got facilities, now you’ll need coaches. Don’t skimp here and push your board to allow more coaches if possible. There are lots of good threads that go into this in more detail but as a rough, quick guideline: get coaches to cover a training category each to maximise the star rating and see if you can get a motivator or man manager to cover all categories. This isn’t always possible but you’ll want to aim for it and improve each year as your rising reputation entices better coaches. I’ve only just hit Europe but this has been my coaching team for the last year:

I had to work extremely hard to get these guys. Some were pilfered when top managers got the axe, others applied via adverts whilst some were head hunted – I try to play realistically so I pinched a few from clubs where I had players on loan. My logic was that if the players were progressing then chances are the coaches were good, a quick look at their stats confirmed this so I’d swoop and pay the compensation – filching coaches is a nasty business but this isn’t a game of tiddly-winks, we’re bullying and smashing our way to the top and I’ll need to take the best guys with me! My coaching team isn’t perfect yet but for the level the club is at they are damned good and they are doing a fantastic job.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff

I was going to go on to how you can harness potential from the squad but this post has already gotten pretty hefty so I’ll leave it at that for now and post my thoughts on elevating a squad at a later time.

There’s a lot of stuff here already and I’ve skimmed over great swathes of it and I haven’t even touched the most important part of any decent club – the players. Hopefully this will encourage people to look at the whole club and decide how to progress. Bullying my way into the higher echelons of the Premiership has been much harder than any other stage of the game for me so far and I’m not quite there yet but my club is set up and ready to make the step up.

I’ll add more on how the guidelines I’ve set out for my squad have helped to set my team up to challenge the country’s big boys later.

The Fury

[NEC]

Whilst not in any way wanting to take away from the obvious hard work that went into this thread, I believe that you have overstated the importance of developing all aspects of a club. For me, there are in essence only two main areas to which time must be allocated: Tactics and players.

I for one am of the opinion that the best approach is in fact to employ a 'wheeling and dealing' strategy when building a squad, rather than long term development. Buying players for pennies and selling them for pounds during one's stay at a club will result in financial security, the backbone for success. When coupled with (As you rightly suggested) an extensive scouting network the framework is complete. For me, the team building element of FM is as simple as that, and with the right management will allow your club to progress at a very high rate. Every other important facet of development will follow on naturally from this (i.e. stadium refurbishment, upgrading of youth facilities, etc) and has very little impact on whether or not a team will be successful. I would even go so far as to suggest that coaching is a minor aspect of achieving success: In my experience of guiding teams from the lower echelons of the football pyramid to EPL and CL victory, I have not employed any specialist coaching regimes, and have kept my original backroom staff. Player development is also overstressed as this can be achieved passively via loan deals, or, if the player is sufficiently compitent to perform at the league level, simply giving them a regular starting role.

The other major concern one must have is with tactics. Use of the correct gameplan for the situation at hand is of upmost importance, as it allows even an average team to become world-beaters. As long as one plays to their team's strengths then it's hard to go wrong!

So, in summary: I think that far too much emphasis has been placed on many of the features of club development in FM. Whilst building a side in this manner may be rewarding in terms of enjoyment, this approach is not the only way to be successful. At the end of the day, this game is a simple simulation that comes down to players and tactics, nothing more!

[lucatonix]

I afraid have to agree to some extent with NEC. A combination of both these posts' points in detail would make for a beastly thread and conversation point. Having said that I totally agree with what you have said so far and would love to read more about your game save and tackling the promotion challenge.

[Marsupian]

I also found that if you can find the right players at the right price for the right wage you can easily get a promotion in the first season while reducing your wage bill. The moment your prospects are close to reaching their pa your team will already have outgrown their potential (unless he would be able to play far higher level than your current level) so developing players is only useful for making a small profit by selling them to teams in the league you were previously in. Then when you get promoted you'll have to sell about half your squad or more and start dealing again to do the same trick as last year. With this method you can increase your squads quality every year while making a tidy profit from selling the players that got you the promotion last year. Player development becomes rather useless which is a shame but this is the fastest way to the top league and if you can find the right players every year it's not too difficult.

[mibsweden]

I also found that if you can find the right players at the right price for the right wage you can easily get a promotion in the first season while reducing your wage bill. The moment your prospects are close to reaching their pa your team will already have outgrown their potential (unless he would be able to play far higher level than your current level) so developing players is only useful for making a small profit by selling them to teams in the league you were previously in. Then when you get promoted you'll have to sell about half your squad or more and start dealing again to do the same trick as last year. With this method you can increase your squads quality every year while making a tidy profit from selling the players that got you the promotion last year. Player development becomes rather useless which is a shame but this is the fastest way to the top league and if you can find the right players every year it's not too difficult.

This is what I do as well. However once I get to the Premiership I like to start thinking long term, developing youth, etc. I have had tremedous success with that long term approach.

[furiousuk]

Great points and ones that I definitely could see working. I'd love to say that 'wheeling & dealing' and totally swapping your squad every few years is unrealistic, I'd like to say that it takes advantage of the fact that it is easier to find and appraise players than RL, but, unfortunately, it is perfectly realistic and is an approach taken by clubs more often than my own. I think there are a whole spate of 'promotion specialist' players who get promoted from a division just to be sold back to that division as they probably don't have the class to push the club forward in the new division.

Do you guys find that even with a modest attendance you still have adequate funds to rebuild?

If half a promotion squad was sold for, say, 10M then surely half-a-squad to fill their boots would cost maybe double that, doesn't using your budget to its max each year send the club into debt or do you not worry and know that TV and prize money will fill the deficit?

Also, I like to develop a club personality that transfers from one squad to another, can you achieve that or is success more important?

I'll totally agree that there are many different ways of playing the game and I love the fact that you can be a die-hard fan of the FM series and continually learn new ways of playing that often vastly contradict your previous way of playing.