FM22: The life and times of Fredrik Jacobs

MoeS06_ · March 1, 2022

Hi all, I've been playing FM for a long time now and lurking on the forums as a guest reading about so many amazing saves over the years. I've been telling myself for a while that I should write about my own, anyway I finally took the plunge and made an account, so here we go...

This is Fredrik Jacobs, Fred for short. Fred is going to be the fictional manager throughout this save (Fredrik Jacobs was a newgen I had in a FM21 save with Lille - I like the idea of bringing a connection to a previous save into a new game world). Fred is Belgian, born in the city of Roeselare he enjoyed a successful playing career with Lille and later moving to Man Utd. Now it is time for Fred to venture into management.

I didn't want to just place a manager into a club at the start of the game so I simmed forward to January 2022 and began to apply for managerial vacancies. After several unsuccessful applications, two clubs were willing to give Fred an interview, Royale Union Tubize-Braine (Tubize for short) in the fourth tier of Belgian football and Lusitania Lourosa in Portugal. Surprisingly both offered the managerial job to Fred, after weighing up the pros and cons for each, I decided it's unlikely someone is going to just up and move to another country for their first foray into management. Fred was staying in Belgium.

Belgium: The country is divided into three regions; Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. Flanders and Wallonia then are subdivided into five provinces. Fred's home city of Roeselare is in the Flanders region, as is his new home of Tubize as it sits just outside of Brussels.

Tubize play their football in the Belgian Division 2, the league is split into three separate leagues (A B & C) - the champions of each league gains promotion to the Belgian National Division 1. As for the club themselves, Tubize (known as AFC Tubize) were in the top tier of Belgian football back in 2008 however they were immediately relegated and have never recovered since. In 2021, prior to the start of the current season, a merger took place between AFC Tubize and Stade Braine. So Royale Union Tubize-Braine was formed. The club play their home games at Stade Leburton which has an 8000 capacity.

Fred's first day... the club have a media prediction of 1st and are favourites to be promoted, so they have been severely underperforming. When Fred takes over they are languishing in 6th place, 22 points behind the leaders. Thankfully the board are not judging Fred on anything this season, I think they just want to write it off and start again next year. Looking at the previous fixtures it's very clear that consistency has been an issue this season. Since we have been losing so many games we really need to have a look at the defence and see what needs to change to stop conceding so many.

The finances... let's just say the club isn't in the best financial shape.

The players... it's actually a very good squad for this level. Very light in defence though which may go a long way to explaining some of the issues, a lack of quality in defence and also a lack of competition means that complacency is far more likely. The other problem I noticed is that our top scorer with 6 goals in a Central Defender - Naim Aarab. After 20 games you would expect at least one of your forwards to be hitting 10 goals so getting the strikers scoring again is very important. Currently El Mehdi Khaida and Thomas De Bie are the two best players at the club in my opinion, and the only two that are guaranteed places in the starting eleven.

For the formation I am still not sure what will work so it is pretty much trial and error, I'm going with this 4-4-1-1 initially but I do have a 4-4-2 in mind just incase we need to go even more basic.

The first three games were a real mix of emotions! The main highlight was in our third game agains Givry where youngster Gerard Surin came off the bench to score a 30 yarder... not bad for your first senior goal. We are dominating possession and having plenty of shots but our opponents are scoring multiple goals from a massively lower number of shots. This defence needs serious work.

The best thing about the club is the youth system, its great and we have some really talented young players already. At the end of the season I probably won't renew the contracts of several first team players as we need to address the wage budget concerns so I will be looking to give plenty of game time to these youngsters: (In particular Surin, Turgay and Ozcan)