The FM23 Youth Academy Challenge

[reggaeboy81]

thats all folks...sacked.. started off so well, second half of the season been a nightmare.. didnt even get a chance to see the regens lol.  so ill continue with this manager till the next reload of clubs, pray theres a previous unplayable team promoted and they have no manager and apply, or retire add a new manager, or try a new league all together..

[libbyshuss]

Catania - Italy - 2063/64

Champions League

so close!

chelsea have won 3 out the last 5 now. 

We did better in the league anyway....

One of the teams we lost to was Verona after I rested all my first choice XI for the CL and played random kids lol. 

 

I might keep going for one more season, it's starting to get me down now!

Oh, another 60+ goal season for Moscardelli. The man is a machine!

[reggaeboy81]

anyone know the reload dates for slovenia, romania, or slovakia, thought id maybe try a country thats not been completed

Edited February 24, 2023 by reggaeboy81

[leyrtj]

Season 7 - Atletico CP - Campeonato de Portugal - 5th

A season of highs and lows after winning the league and not being promoted last year. We ended up finishing 5th which was prety similar to our media prediction. We were so inconsistent. Some days we would destroy teams, then just lose out of nowhere. The biggest issue was scoring goals in games, and we got FMed numerous times. Sometimes I feel the game doesn't want to do well in a particular season. Going forward into the next season, we're now 11 - 1, which we means we have a good chance of going up and that's what the board wants. We've managed to keep onto our key players for two seasons and am starting to build up strength in the squad as a result. Our two central midfields are both top division quality and have signed long term contracts, It's time to get promoted.

On a more positive note Honrado, our great youth intake player from 2 seasons ago, got sold to AC Milan for 13.75m, meaning we pocketed over 4m. This clearly our debts, meant we could upgrade the youth facilities and go professional. We're losing around 2m a season at the moment, so I want to get promoted so we can start selling players for more money to cover that.

Another good youth intake with 3 or 4 reasonable talents. The talents from last year are being classified as Liga NOS talents, so it looks like the youth facilities are working. Still no striker.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 24, 2023 by leyrtj

[Daddy]

2 hours ago, libbyshuss said:

Catania - Italy - 2063/64

Champions League

so close!

chelsea have won 3 out the last 5 now. 

We did better in the league anyway....

One of the teams we lost to was Verona after I rested all my first choice XI for the CL and played random kids lol. 

 

I might keep going for one more season, it's starting to get me down now!

Oh, another 60+ goal season for Moscardelli. The man is a machine!

I hope you keep it going! You're so close!

[P O\'D]

Just a quick heads up guys about a certain skin.  I downloaded a skin called Tato for FM23 as lots of people said it was the best and when changing boxes and views in there, I accidentally showed myself a players CA.  I had no idea what it was till I clicked it, till I clicked it and it exposed one of my players for me.  I immediately released the player, had him since ths start too which was sad and changed the skin.  So just so you guys use or are intending to use said skin thread carefully.

I've switched to Zealands for instant match sims instead.

[P O\'D]

4 hours ago, libbyshuss said:

Catania - Italy - 2063/64

Champions League

so close!

chelsea have won 3 out the last 5 now. 

We did better in the league anyway....

One of the teams we lost to was Verona after I rested all my first choice XI for the CL and played random kids lol. 

 

I might keep going for one more season, it's starting to get me down now!

Oh, another 60+ goal season for Moscardelli. The man is a machine!

Wow dude, so close. Did the final go to the wire at 2-2?

[karax268]

Louletano Desportos Clube - 2025/26 Youth Intake Preview

 

Another list off A's!

I'm hoping for a player that has the CA to contribute to the first team. So far that's been missing from otherwise excelent intakes.

 

Meanwhile, the finances are getting worse and worse. Over the year 2025 we had a nearly 400k loss. However it is actually worse. The board has made about 600K investments over that period. meaning that if I want to have healthy club I need to bridge a gap of a million...

Edited February 25, 2023 by karax268

[libbyshuss]

6 hours ago, P O\'D said:

Wow dude, so close. Did the final go to the wire at 2-2?

not really tbh, we were knackered and they were all over us. My squad has no depth at all really!

[XaW]

6 hours ago, P O\'D said:

Just a quick heads up guys about a certain skin.  I downloaded a skin called Tato for FM23 as lots of people said it was the best and when changing boxes and views in there, I accidentally showed myself a players CA.  I had no idea what it was till I clicked it, till I clicked it and it exposed one of my players for me.  I immediately released the player, had him since ths start too which was sad and changed the skin.  So just so you guys use or are intending to use said skin thread carefully.

I've switched to Zealands for instant match sims instead.

Yeah, some skins do that, but try to avoid using them, as seeing the CA/PA is not allowed in this challenge. Not that we can police it in any way, but this challenge is based on trust after all. I mean, we are competing against ourselves rather than anyone else, so cheating is just ruining it for ones self more than anything else.

[Socerer 01]

You can’t see PA unless you have IGE enabled but you can see the CA. Not sure if seeing the CA affects much though as you can approximately estimate that from seeing the attributed anyways

[Socerer 01]

A question: can I do this challenge on the Touch version or is it only valid for the full game?

[XaW]

8 minutes ago, Socerer 01 said:

You can’t see PA unless you have IGE enabled but you can see the CA. Not sure if seeing the CA affects much though as you can approximately estimate that from seeing the attributed anyways

Still, revealing CA is not allowed by the rules of the challenge, as the intention is that it should be done as vanilla as possible. Experience is another thing, but no visual aids looking at stuff under the hood is allowed.

7 minutes ago, Socerer 01 said:

A question: can I do this challenge on the Touch version or is it only valid for the full game?

Yes you can, just add it as info to your posts when you post updates and completions.

We haven't tried it though, and I remember in older versions the number of youth players was limited, so we allow, but but we don't know if it's viable to do so.

[Socerer 01]

5 minutes ago, XaW said:

Still, revealing CA is not allowed by the rules of the challenge, as the intention is that it should be done as vanilla as possible. Experience is another thing, but no visual aids looking at stuff under the hood is allowed.

Yes you can, just add it as info to your posts when you post updates and completions.

We haven't tried it though, and I remember in older versions the number of youth players was limited, so we allow, but but we don't know if it's viable to do so.

I’ll run a test save to see if the youth system is fleshed out enough to make a viable save and then start, thank you

[P O\'D]

6 hours ago, XaW said:

Yeah, some skins do that, but try to avoid using them, as seeing the CA/PA is not allowed in this challenge. Not that we can police it in any way, but this challenge is based on trust after all. I mean, we are competing against ourselves rather than anyone else, so cheating is just ruining it for ones self more than anything else.

Yeah thats why I released the player... it just felt wrong still having him.  Just glad it wasn't one of my top players who I had open at the time.

[grff]

Ifeanyi Ubah FC: 2025/26 Season Review

A season to remember as we gained promotion to the Nigerian top flight. We did this in style as we went unbeaten through the league phase before winning 2 of 3 games in the promotion group phase.

Next season will be interesting in terms of coping with the step up in quality. If nothing else, we will try and use the increased revenue to improvement of facilities.

Stats were good across the board as we posted bests in goals and assists.

Youth intake was really poor. We took on just two.

Transfers. Frustratingly, the board accepted a bid for a key player and I couldn't persuade them to veto it.

Season history

Aims fot next season

• Attempt to stay in the top flight.
• Improve our facilities and youth coaching
• Commit our core squad to long term deals

[leyrtj]

Season 8 - Atletico CP - Campeonato de Portugal - 1st - Promoted

Wow, what a fun season that was. We started the year with a media prediction of 12th with odds of 11 - 1, but as the year progressed this dropped to 7 - 1 and finally 4 - 1. We had a reasonable first half, and were top but there were 4 teams within 2 points. Then we stormed the second half winning almost every game. The quarter finals and semi-finals were formalities (in the semi the other team had two men sent off in the first 15 minutes), and we were promoted. We face the Sporting B team in the ceremonial final. As the Liga NOS season had already finished they moved half their first team squad down to the B team for the final, and had players worth over 10m (including a 33 year old Nathan Ake). Blatantly cheating , but it would be a chance to see how we would fare against higher level opposition. And it was a belter. They had a sending off, we missed a penalty, they went ahead three times and we equalized in the 9th minute with a comical own goal. We then lost in the penalty shootout after our club captain, Joaquim Preto, missed our 9th spot kick. It was a joy to watch this team play this season. Watching your academy players grow into core players is one of the best parts of this challenge. I can only imagine what it feel slike to produce a world class player. I continued until the new season updated, and the board want mid table. I was hoping for fight bravely against relegation. We predicted to finish 11th out of 18th, so a promotion push might be possible.

I'm going to put this save down for a week. It's so much fun, but the grind is getting to me a bit. And I want to go and sign some wonderkids in my home grown challenge! I'll be back. 

The squad is continuing to improve. At the end of last season we had 5 players in the media dream XI for the third division, and in the new Ledman Liga we have two of the four best players. We have a lack of true quality in defence but Silva will play centre back next year which will help. Still struggling up front, but Trendade emerged this year as a solid option, and Figueiras is scoring 20 a season playing off the main striker. With two very good academy midfield prospects coming through and almost first team ready, selling either Roque or Guillerme (our two best players) could be an option. For 10m I'd sell one, but I'm worried to offer them out in case the board accepts 500k.

Our midfield looks very handy.

Another good youth intake with more top division talent. Nothing spectacular but players that will keep us competitive in the future. Hopefully next year, with the higher division and improved reputation, we'll get some top talent. 

 

   

 

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by leyrtj

[P O\'D]

Lokere Tense 31-32 Season.

So this was a hella busy season and we really punched above our weight in our 2nd European campaign.  We suffered a little in the league for it but came good in the end with our best ever run of form to return to the Conference League for a 3rd straight season. 9 wins in our 10 playoff division games.  Super impressed.  Antwerp really shouldn't have caved the way they did.  They beat us in the 2nd playoff game to go 10 points clear of us and then completely capitulated.  I learned about using friendlies to turn form around and used the 2 week break after gameweek 29 to really put us in a happy place going in to the playoffs (nothing like 3 x 15-0 wins to boost morale).

Europe was amazing with us punching way above our weight.  Have no idea what happened vs VTSC in the first leg, think I messed my team talk up.

Euro Conference Table:

Spoiler

Not that anyone cares about it but heres the Belgian Cup run. All 2 games of it

Spoiler

Squad and Stats:

As usual heres our star players.

Spoiler

Youth:

Youth intake was the same as usual, good potential combined with trash mentalities.  But we did get a couple of balanced in there.

Spoiler

And the best potentials from the intake:

Spoiler

Transfers:

Ristic was a player who featured heavily in all my previous posts but he was demanding 7k a week to stay and alas I wasn't paying that so I continued my tradition of selling my best players.

Other Major Stuff:

Well first off was the Takeover and while it didn't change much it changed enough to where I could bully the chairman into doing what I wanted.  Sadly he didn't care enough about youth to boost the youth facilities but we made strides everywhere else.

And boy did I make hay while the sun shone.  I just kept telling him he has no ambition and he kept folding so... 2 YR improvements taking us from above average to Excellent.  A TF upgrade, and JC upgraded from good to excellent.  That'll do softtouch chairman, that'll do.

Spoiler

Things are really turning around. If we have another decent Euro campaign I should have all but erased the finance bug issue in Belgium (at least for me).  I do find managing at this level is more moral manager than anything tactical etc...

But onwards and upwards for hopefully a top 6 place (which I'll only hold if we're guaranteed top 4)  if we're not I'll likely aim for 7th again and an easier run to get into Europe.

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by P O\'D

[XaW]

His contract it up at the end of the season, so I would lose him anyway. At least now I can keep him and still get some money as well as a very good sell-on percentage.

I really don't want to see him leave, but he has refused to talk contract, so I don't have much choice in the matter.

[leyrtj]

Season 9 - Atletico CP - Ledman Liga Pro - 8th

So I said I was going to take some time off from this save, but I'm back. First season in the second flight and solid mid table position. Never looked like getting involved in a relegation battle. We had some tough results to take again - similar to two years ago. We dominated a number of games but drew 0 - 0, or got caught on the break. I am looking at changing tactics next year to something more defensively solid and counter-attacking. In our whole squad the best stat for finishing is 9 from our striker, so scoring goals is continuing to be a problem. Our two centre back are 192cm+ so we're focusing on set pieces. The goal for next season is to get closer to the top two. We are also going to sell our best player Marcos Guilherme. We tried to sell him in the January window, but no one would bid above a million. I may take 2.5m with a sell-on. That would clear the debt and hopefully get a youth facilities upgrade, and then we might get much more if he sells big in the future. The board want top half next season. We have probably 3 - 4 seasons before they ask for promotion.

 

Squad is looking decent, though some quality in defence and up front is needed. Augusto will go to the left wing next season and a youth prospect come in at left back. We are overloaded in midfield, with 6 top division players or prospects. We are going to sell one a season for a while I think to generate cash. We also had our first full international debut for Ibraima Cande for Guinea-Bissau. 

A poor youth intake. Only the second time without a golden generation. One good right winger, which is actually something we needed.

 

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by leyrtj

[WhiteCat33]

FC Elazig Spor Hamburg

Season 8 2030-31 Oberliga Hamburg (Tier 5)

Season 1 | Season 2 | Season 3 | Season 4 | Season 5 | Season 6 | Season 7 |

Competitions

League: 8 of 20 [Preview – 17/20 (400-1)]

There are so many teams in our division now. Yet another relegated team and our champion failed to advance, so now we have a marathon 38 game season. I have to say we did great with us just 4 points off 4th place we have closed the gap and joined the top pack. Wandsbek just stupidly over-performed this season due completely to their amateur striker Fritz Kleiner who scored a stupid 55 goals in 38 league appearances on just a 36xG.

Spoiler

Cup: 2nd Round

Very disappointing here as we beat Juventude 2-0 in the league and then turned around and lost in the cup an embarrassing 4-1

Spoiler

Squad:

Excel is sorted by Coach CA Rating (showcase how well he does) ; Squad is Sorted by Minutes Played. I've built a new excel sheet for statistics so I'll save Squad analysis for a separate post.

Transfers:

Spoiler

 

Youth Academy

Youth Intake Preview:

Youth Intake:

We found ourselves a star! My upgrade to both JR Coaching & Youth Recruitment seems to already working in our favor.

Spoiler

All Elite Talents

YI Player Highlights:

Spoiler

Gotta start with Cavdar who is a 4* CA Striker who has 16 finishing! Not the best Personality but its not player-breaking. He’s fasters than my main striker and has better finishing, just has to develop his mentals.

Turk also is low determination with a decent set up for a DM

At LB I’m very excited about Kose, great physicals for a FB with teamwork, workrate and aggression.

With Yildirim we’ve got another AML prospect which we are severely overloaded in

Ulker is our CAM prospect. He’s missing some key attributes though and is super slow.

Academy Data:

HOYD

Spoiler

Head Coach

Still working on my License, but here are my stats:

Spoiler

Club

Finances are a mess now with everything working against us: No cup run, increased Youth Setup costs (YR, JRC & Rep all increased), and increased wages for my youths hitting real contracts. FC Victoria started the season going into administration and they were top 3 for the past 5 seasons; hopefully we can get a takeover / promotion before it happens to us...

Spoiler

Manager Thoughts

Very excited about our intake and the increasing performance and development of our starters. There will be a couple lineup changes for next season with me phasing out my CB who is 34 now as well as trying new players at DM, which has now become my second worst position after CB. Even with his inconsistent attribute, my 6'5" GK is developing well and should do the job till I get a surprise stellar GK intake. I'll save most of this for the stats-update post that I'll follow up  with. Slow and stead Lower League Progress!

[WhiteCat33]

FC Elazig Spor Hamburg

Oberliga Statistics 2030 (S8)

Season 1 | Season 2 | Season 3 | Season 4 | Season 5 | Season 6 | Season 7 |Season 8

Moneyball

With all the development SI has been doing on the statistics depth available in FM I've gotten more interested in the Moneyball approach to playing the game vs the 'hoard wonderkids' strategy I (like many of us) have played in the past. This combines with my frustration with SI's change to Board offering Youth Facility Improvements making my small-nation endgame totally stagnant. While I was able to get my Slovenia save in FM22 to progress well with 2 Europa League Trophies my mini-nation saves (Malta & Luxembourg) stall out when we have 150M+ in the bank and are stuck with just "Great" Youth Facilities. This has prompted this current save in a Big-5 league save, with the Lower-League extended databases to give me the small-club 'underdog' experience I crave in FM.

Hamburg Oberliga

Using a 6-Tier Germany database the size of T5 fluctuates based upon the drop down from the top of the pyramid and the success/failure of teams trying for a 50% chance promotion. In my Universe Hamburg clubs (excluding St Pauli & HSV) have not done well in Germany. Hamburg starts with only three clubs in Tier 4 and no clubs in Tier 3. While Altona 93 has held their position in T4, every team who has gotten promoted from our Oberliga T5 was instantly relegated back down to us. In addition, Entracht Norderstedt and FC Teutonia Ottensen who start in T4 have fallen down to us and have failed to even win our league even once, thus haven't even had a chance at promotion.

Due to this our league has grown to 20 teams from 17 when we got promoted into it. With this many teams not getting promoted it made me wonder: how hard is our Oberliga compared to all the others in Germany? I highlighted Wandsbek stupidly efficient striker in the above post, which really made me ask: Do our clubs' Star Players perform better than the Tier Average? Because of that (and my rationalization that building excel-sheets is "learning" so I feel less guilty staying up building one rather than 'playing one more game') I've started a stats excel sheet.

Resources

Before i built my own I searched through the forums and online for different spreadsheets that players have made publicly available. A really useful website for me was https://fmstag.com/ who talks about some interesting created statistics they use as well as a nicely produced spreadsheet to download for direct player comparison. An older post on the forum is a good discussion providing a great spreadsheet. Then I've been a watcher of The Cult of FM YouTube channel where he uses Moneyball in the majority of his saves explaining his logic in transfers and analysis very well.

While I didn't use any formulas/code from any of these sources they provided inspiration into how I structured my spreadsheet as well as will guide future generated statistics in the future.

Excel

So what did I do? I used an unemployed manager to export a list of all Oberliga Players who played at least 2000 minutes in the 2030 season. I then did conditional summary statistics based on two dimensions: 1) Division/Club & 2) Average Rating. I ended up with this universe:

In the Squad-View I created I added tons of statistics including all of the standardized %, Ratio and /90min datapoints I could reliably get. There are two major facts you can't get without any scouting: 1) Most common played position & 2) Best Foot. Really the latter just means you can't differentiate between inverted vs regular wide players.

Why 2000 Minutes

Honestly, because its a pain in the *** to do anything in between the 1000 marks as you have to manually tick up/down as the search bar won't let you type in a value. To check though how many star players I missed in my search I did an alternative search of just Oberliga players and sorted by Average Rating. Of the top 100 players across the Oberliga only 3 played less than 2000 minutes at about 1900. Therefore, if I dropped it down to say 1800 minutes I would be skewing for much lower performing players.

Dealing with Positions

The only position variable that (I found) available is the full 'all Green' "Position", which can have unlimited positions included. I used a two-step clean on it to break out all the combinations that appeared in my database into individual position variables (took ~90 hardcode rules and that is nowhere near all the combinations). I then created binary variables for each position to notch per player what positions they can play in. Yellow highlights just to showcase an example player who can play 3 different positions, so he gets 1 for each position. I put space in for 7 PosVars but my universe only had up to 5 for any player.

Why is this important?

Because of the multiple positions players can play they will get counted multiple times and in averages where they may never actually been played by their manager. If there was a 'most common position' variable I could utilize that would fix this issue, but the upside of this 'issue' is that the population of each sub-group is higher than it would be naturally and fits with a lower-league situation where you have less specialization.

TLDR: Show me Stats!

I know I write too much, sorry about that wall of text. Here are all the field player summary tables. I got tired last night and didn't finish GK and honestly am not in the mood to dive into excel today, so I'll update this later with GK. Also I have fully switched to a 4-2-3-1 so I just did the formation positions in the summary sheet. I have calculated all positions in the data tabs, so eventually I can add them.

What am I looking at?

I made 6 different populations, but only am displaying 5. The first axis is Division/Club which has 3 steps: All Oberliga, Hamburg Oberliga, Elazig Spor Hamburg (Club). The second axis is Average Rating which is only 2 steps: All players & Players with 7.00 or higher Average Rating. Due to how few of my players are in the universe (10) it makes no sense using the 5 that are over 7.00 rating. 

The names of the statistics are literally what the game exports from the squad view. These first two for Striker are Dribbles per 90 minutes & Springs per 90 Minutes. Choosing STC first lets me highlight when a singular player from my squad is isolated. Here is my Striker, who is our highest CA player in the squad (so I get to show off my "talent  ):

What is interesting to see here is that even though Mehmet Can is an absolute snail-paced player with 5 across the board for speed ability, he still makes the full Oberliga average for Sprints, and more than other Hamburg Strikers.

Sliding down the table looking at Goal-Scoring we have: Shots on Target / 90 ; Expected Goals / 90 ; Goals / 90 ; Non-Penalty Expected Goals / 90 ; Shots / 90.

Yes I know the order is bad, but its just how it ended up in the export when I made the view. You can see that across-the-board Mehmet Can was above every average Oberliga performance even though he had an under-performing season compared to last year. Part of it was he had a mid-season slump and one of my young prospects became a great off-the bench speed forward scoring repeatedly off the bench. While his starts didn't impress, 11 goals in only 1100 minutes of play isn't bad and helped share the workload.

Hamburg Strikers vs Oberliga Overall

Here in the striker category there are multiple dimensions of how Hamburg forwards are overperforming the league average. Even before we get to the broken out stats the Percentage of 7.00 Avg Rating players in Hamburg who can play striker (and played 2000 minutes) is massively higher than the overall tier average. 47% vs 27%. 

If we then just focus on the scoring averages, star Hamburg Strikers have at least 2x every of the statistics for the league in general. When looking at stars from the league overall, while they are noticably better than the full population of strikers there is still a wide gulf between them and the Hamburg strikers. Fair to say we are in a punishingly offensive league!

Example of 2 Players

Moving over to AML the statistics for Elazig include both my striker Mehmet Can above as well as my exciting AML Efekan Sengul. Dude is Resolute, with speed, dribbling, flair & technique all at 12. 

If we look at the AML table, you'll see that he and Mehmet Can are being averaged together to give us our AML statistics

Even with the below-average dribbling of Can, our AML Drb/90 & Sprints/90 stats are still above all the averages for every league. Just how high then is Sengul? 4.51 Drbl/90. This absolutely demolishes the averages.

This gulf shows the real weakness of these stat averages without player attribute value filters. But from a 'game philosophy' standpoint being in the German Oberilga we don't have the scouts to tell us anything about these players abilities, so we "realistically" only have access to whatever publicly available statistics are published. Obviously, its not realistic for us to grab the data on every player in our league, but maybe we have a friend at a stats company who is feeding us this intel?

Anyways, long post but thought I'd show what I'm working on adding into my excel library. It's not ready to be shared as its hard-coded to be used with the German Oberliga. At some point I'll build a GUI to add league flexibility and filtering options. Probably won't happen till I get promoted and am forced to make changes to keep using it.

So lets go Erzag and get up to the Regional Division!

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by WhiteCat33

[XaW]

I wish I could give more than one upvote for that post @WhiteCat33. It's a post that touches something in my heart, the perfect mix of FM and spreadsheets!  

[WhiteCat33]

30 minutes ago, XaW said:

I wish I could give more than one upvote for that post @WhiteCat33. It's a post that touches something in my heart, the perfect mix of FM and spreadsheets!  

Thank you! I'm right there with you, there's a special magic when you use your data to tweak strategy in game and then can quantify the effects back in your analysis #SpreadsheetManager

I'm up to 3 excel windows for playing Elazig: 1) Season Summary & Youth Data [4Sheet]; 2) Current Ability Calculation [4 Calc Sheets + 2 Sheets P/Y (Youth Intake + Full Squad)]; 3) Player Performance Statistics [8 Calc Sheets + 3 Years of data]. Just managing so much data for performance statistics necessitates sheet specialization. I designed it to handle 4999 Players in a single full player analysis, so that should be sufficient for about any situation. 

The next 'project' is probably multi-year summary statistics as I've used my Yearly save points to extract both Y6 & Y7 statistics into the spreadsheet.

I easily have spent as much or more time working-on "playing" the spreadsheets than the lower league grind at Elzaig. I can't motor through back to back 38 game seasons without losing interest/making tactical mistakes, so the alternative focus has kept things fresh. More for myself here are Y6 (2028) & Y7 (2029) Summary Statistics. I forget who is playing in the National C in France, maybe this can be helpful? No idea what else would be at this low of a level.

One point is I like to see how stable the player count is between the spreadsheets: 2194, 2171 & 2188. Makes me think the easy 2000-minute cut-off (which is 22.2 full games) works quite well for 34-38 game season leagues. Still no GK, one day I'll get to it (maybe when I finally have a Goalkeeper worth showing off )

[P O\'D]

Wow man the detail and depth you go to is super impressive and here i am holidaying and simming half my matches.  I feel so inferior.

[JLAB]

So for Ukraine, the save point date to reload your game if you didn't get your team is the 3rd June. The reset date for the next season is 27th June. @darren1983

Edited February 26, 2023 by JLAB

[JLAB]

Sorry @darren1983 I messed up the wording on my part. The league reset is the 27th June, while the last game of the season before the relegation playoff in the first season which you'd use to reload to get the team you want is the 3rd June. Sorry for the mixup.

Edited February 26, 2023 by JLAB

[Weed07]

Crewe United - Season Five 27/28

Premiership

Season Summary

This was our 3rd season in the top flight having finished 5th in the previous two season and like last season we were in the Europa Conference qualifying rounds.

We started the season predicted to finish in 11th with odds of 800/1 to win the league which was an improvement on last season, this season I was hoping for more of the same in the last two season, a top half finish and qualify for Europe again, its the best we can hope for at the moment.

I decided this year I would change tactics and went from a direct counter attacking style to a slower possession based tactic that I've been using since FM19, its a style I like my teams to play and we are starting to get better players that might be able to play that way.

We started off with our European games and were drawn against Luxemburg side FC Differdange and we beat them 2-1 away and then 4-0 at home to go a stage further than last season but that's as far as we got as we were drawn against Scottish side Hearts who beat us 5-2 away and then 2-1 at home, I didn't expect to get far but it was nice to go 1 stage further and we picked up about £600k for it.

Before the league season started my keeper was rated as the 5th best to win the top player award with odds of 11/1 and he was 3rd in the best young player with odds of 8/1 so I hoped we would keep hold of him this year. My new youth striker that came though last seasons intake was also on the list for best young player in 6th with odds of 15/1 which gave me some hope for a good season if he can score the goals we need.

We got off to a good start in the league as we drew away to Linfield who are one of the best teams in the league and then we had back to back 5-0 wins with my new striker scoring 6 goals in the 3 games and picking up player of the month. our good form continued as we only lost 3 games up to the new year and on 1st January we were sitting top of the table and looking good for it, my youth striker had scored 23 goals in 17 games and we were tearing teams apart. Our possession based tactic seemed to be work well as we dominated games having full control and other than the occasional blip we weren't having any problems.

After the new year, something changed and we started to struggle, I know people say the AI works out your tactic which isn't true but they do adapt around this time of the season and change their approach depending on how well you do but it was if a switch had been flipped and all of a sudden my players forgot how to score, we were still dominating game and in control except my players were missing easy chances and our form dropped off, we were still winning some games but were now drawing a lot more and lost 6 games in the second half of the season and in the end we finished in 4th, 10 points behind the winner. It still was a good season but it was disappointing in the way things changed, my striker that had 23 goals in 17 didn't score another league goal in his next 15 games and it wasn't because we didn't create the chances because we were still creating them, he just couldn't hit the target, when one on one he would blast them over or put them wide and I couldn't work out what had changed because we played just as good as we were before the new year with the only difference being we couldn't finish the chance we made.

We did however had some success in the domestic cups, first we won the Mid Ulster cup which seems to be a smaller cup but it was the clubs first but then after last season losing the Northern Irish Cup final this year we won it which was a good cup to win as it secures us a place in the Europa Conference qualifying again next season.

So a cup double and a 4th place finish was a fantastic season, its just a shame that we dropped from being top to 4th after the new year.

The league table:

Spoiler

Our starting 11 still has 2 players in it from the start but I'm hoping to phase them out next year:

Spoiler

Our youth preview showed another excellent intake but the grades were the worst we've had at the club but we did have a A rated defensive midfielder which is a position we haven't had many good players come though in:

The preview:

Spoiler

The actual intake was ok, our best player was a right back which was surprising as we only got a B rating in the preview but it was good because right back we still had an original club player playing there as we've never had a good enough one from the intakes so that's a position where I can now bring in a youth player. The defensive midfielder we got that I was looking forward to was ok, not good enough for the best 11 but will be a good squad player, other than those two no one else really stood out.

The intake and best players:

Spoiler

I was offered the Northern Irish job which I would have usually accepted but turned it down

Spoiler

We had our youth recruitment upgraded to Above Average and later in the season upgraded again to Good and the board agreed to upgrade our training facilities which will be the first upgrade of those at the club.

Club profile and facilities:

Spoiler

My reserves won their league

Spoiler

I completed my Continental Pro Badge so I'm now fully badged up:

Spoiler

Supporter Profile:

Spoiler

Competitions:

Spoiler

End of season awards and records showed my new youth striker got a new league record for highest average rating of 7.68 despite his lack of scoring in the second half he was still getting good ratings. He also won both the Audi Belfast Ulster young player of the year and the Premiership young player of the year, while my def mid we got a couple of seasons back came 3rd:

Spoiler

My striker also got called up for Northern Ireland and became their youngest ever player:

Spoiler

 

Transfers, no one coming in but some players now leaving, I'm starting to find a lot of players just aren't improving and end up being released or let go for free:

Spoiler

Heres some spreadsheet data:

Spoiler

Club info:

Manager info:

Season info:

 

 

Next season we just want more of the same but maybe not the second half dip in form

[Weed07]

Crewe United - Season Six 28/29

Premiership

Two updates in a row, I had a week off work so got a couple of seasons completed and finished season 6 last night.

Season Summary

This is our 4th season in the top flight having finished 5th, 5th and 4th I was optimistic for this season even though we did have a bit of a second half drop in form last year I was hoping for a better season than last.

The season preview showed we had improved on last season as we were predicted to finish 10th with odds of 250/1 to win the league which is our best prediction to date, I'll be happy with top half and Europe again as the money from Europe is helping improve the facilities.

I started the season with the same possession tactics as last season as even though our league form dropped off we still had a good season overall.

We started off again with the European games and were drawn against FC Vaduz from Lichtenstein who play in the Swiss leagues and we drew 1-1 away and then beat them 2-1 at home which set up a second qualifying round against Hungarian side Ujpest where we undeservedly lost 1-0 away as their keeper got man of the match and my strikers had still forgot how to score following on from the same issues last season ended with but we didn't have that problem at home as we hammered them 5-0 taking us into the 3rd qualifying round which is the furthest we've been. Last season we got knocked out in the second round by Hearts and this year we got drawn against them again and we were again knocked out by them as we lost the away leg 5-1 but we did manage a 2-2 draw at home which was better than last season. The extra round brought in extra money and we got about £900k for our European run.

Before the league season started my keeper was again rated as one of the best to win the top player award with odds of 17/2 made him 3rd favourite and my star striker was 10/1 5th favourite while also being 16/1 5th favourite to be top scorer. My keeper was also 6/1 favourite for best young player and my striker 13/2 2nd favourite so I hoped we would keep hold of both of them this year. We did have some bids for them in preseason, my striker had some low offers from big clubs in England but I was able to reject them without any issues while my keeper had bids from Linfield going up to £450k which I was able to reject, I thought my board might have accepted that much but even if they did the player said he wasn't interested in going to them so we ended the transfer window with both players still at the club.

Our league season didn't get off to the best start as we lost the first game but we found some form and only lost once more up to the end of December where at this point we had done ok without being great, we weren't at the top like last season but we weren't too far behind. Our biggest problem was scoring goals as we were having the same issue we had in the second half of last season where we were dominating game and creating a lot of good chances but my players kept wasting them. I change tactics a couple of times and settled on a 4-3-3 DM formation with only one striker because only my best striker was actually scoring and whoever partnered him was poor, last season my6 second best striker got 18 but only had 2 in 12 games this year so was dropped. I though i had found a good quick passing tactic as we won 5-3 then 5-0 compared to 13 goals in the previous 7 games but it went back to struggling to score again.

December was then a poor month, we had a lot of games to play which needed more rotation and I found that my back up players just aren't good enough, too many players have stagnated and aren't improving and after two narrow wins we drew 4 then lost 2 and all games had the same problems of struggling to score and as the New Year came around we had fallen away from the leading pack.

After last seasons change in the new year from being good to lesser so this year not much changed and we continued with our struggles to score while having mixed results which ended in 4 defeats and a win in the last 5 following the league split and we finished the season in 5th and a long way behind the top 3 clubs.

We done ok in the cups again and retained the Mid Ulster cup winning it for the second time and we got to the Northern Irish cup final for the third year in a row but lost 3-0 to Linfield which put us into the leagues European playoffs where we lost the first game against Coleraine who were the only side that we beat after the split which brought an end to a disappointing season where we have gone backwards and have missed out on qualifying for Europe. We did get another cup win but it wasn't enough to deem the season a success.

The league table:

Spoiler

We phased out the remaining original players from our best 11 and mostly played youth products:

Spoiler

Our youth preview was another good one:

Spoiler

Our intake wasn't as good as i hoped for, we had a stand out striker and a central midfielder that looks ok, both good enough as back up players but for the first time not one good enough to go straight into our best 11.

The intake and best players:

Spoiler

We had more facility upgrades as our youth recruitment was upgraded to Excellent. I was planning on saving my money to hope to go professional but for that we need European money or to sell players, I decided that with us missing out on Europe and in the belief that player development is stagnating I asked the board to improve the training facilities and they agreed which spent all our £750k money, we need to go pro and have better training facilities to push on I think as at the moment we aren't good enough compared to the top 3 sides who are all professional.

Club profile and Facilities:

Spoiler

My manager:

Spoiler

Supporter Profile:

Spoiler

Competitions:

Spoiler

At the end of season awards and records my star striker broke his own record for best average rating, although he scored less than the previous season he performed better with a 7.72 rating. He also won both the both the Audi Belfast Ulster young player of the year and the Premiership young player of the year for the second year running. My centre back from our first intake who is now captain of the club came 3rd in the player of the year award.

Spoiler

 

Transfers - no one came in but there were more leaving the club that are never going to be good enough:

Spoiler

Heres some spreadsheet data:

Spoiler

Club info:

Season stats:

Manager stats:

Next season we need to improve but I'm not sure how, without Europe I'm going to spend the summer working on tactics in friendly games and see if I can find something that works better to get my strikers scoring and we need to keep our best players at the club but I don't think thats going to be possible.

I'm going to end with a bit of a rant about something that annoyed me as the season ended. On the 17th June Wolves bid £44k for my star striker which is too low to accept, I done what I often do and what the AI does and countered them with a ridiculous offer saying I wanted £15M and 50% of next fee and they countered with £11M and 50% of next fee which surprised me, I didn't really want to sell but at that price I couldn't refuse and accepted and then planned to spend it to hopefully go professional and get facilities upgraded, it looked good for the long term of the club and would speed up progression. All good, but then on the 18th June, 1 day later the club went into a transfer embargo due to a takeover and the transfer was cancelled. We've been the subject of a few takeovers over the years which all fail and then on the 22nd of June the takeover collapsed. In the space of 5 days we went from getting £11M and planning to spend it to having nothing but a unhappy player because he couldn't go to wolves. I offered him to Wolves for the same deal but they rejected it because they spent £28M on someone else after the transfer was cancelled.

I think we may end up selling him next season as we won't be able to keep him for long but we might not get anywhere near that kind of deal

[Riebow]

Arras Season Review (26/27)

League: Our first season in the fourth tier (National 2) didn't prove to be too much of a step up, as we finished 5th. Offensively we were by far the best team, but defensively we're very poor. For some reason our defenders and goalkeepers aren't really developing. 

The interesting about this tier is that the Reserve teams aren't allowed to be promoted. Sochaux 2 has won this division for two years in a row, so basically you just have to be the best non-reserve team.

Cup: We were knocked out again in the 8th round against a team from the National.

Intake: An 'excellent' intake according to my HOYD. Myself, I'm a bit more sceptical and don't see anyone immediately contributing. 

Tony Noirot: Bad personality, but maybe something that can be improved by mentoring. He does have interesting attributes to compete for the Pressing Forward spot in the future.

 

Spoiler

Pascal Bertrand: Not playing with wide midfielders, so retraining him as a right wing back.

 

Spoiler

Muharrem Keles: Supposed to be top prospect of this intake. Goalkeeper is a position I could definitely need some improvement.

 

Spoiler

Best XII: As you can see from the average ratings, the discrepancy between our offensive and defensive unit is quite significant. 

Other: The board refuses to improve any facilities, which to be fair are better than some teams playing in the League 1...

Next Season: Offensively we're good enough to compete for the title, we just need to become a bit more solid defensively.

[karax268]

Louletano Desportos Clube - Youth Intake 2025/26

Boris Ucceli 2601 | Hélio Fortes 2602 | Eugênio 2603 | Jajá 2604 | Hélio Rosa 2605 | Rafael Pereira 2606 | Gonçalo Bárbara 2607 | Bernardo Meireles 2608 | Jean Meireles 2609 | Jorge Ferreira 2610 | Fabian Meyer 2611 | Guilherme Salas 2612 | Nuno Espadinha 2613 | Saico Baldé 2614 | Andrzej Samborski 2615 | André Lopes 2616

 

Another good intake. There are some nice talents here with decent personalities. Still no one that can be the difference maker in my 1st team, unfortunately. 

[reggaeboy81]

Here we go again! a new save, this time Whitby Town.. Vanarama North again, lets see if it goes better than Hitchin Town save.

[WhiteCat33]

FC Elazig Spor Hamburg

Spreadsheet-Manager: Dynamic Master Sheet

Season 1 | Season 2 | Season 3 | Season 4 | Season 5 | Season 6 | Season 7 |Season 8

Statistics: Intro & 2030 (S8) | 2029 (S7) & 2028 (S6)

The Strikers of Hamburg

Tonight, was another night in spreadsheet-manager as I just couldn't shake the need to understand the power of the Hamburg league offense. Just for a quick refresher, here is the summary table for Strikers with Hamburg and my club Elazig Spor selected. The above links can jump you up (the couple posts) to where our statistics journey began. 

Fritz Kleiner of Wandsbek

In the Hamburg Oberliga among those 21 strong strikers there is one man who stands above the rest, and that is the Wandsbek Legend Fritz Kleiner who years forsake money and a multitude of offers to play up a division to lead the team he loves to the league title. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us) they failed in the playoffs, so are still here in the Oberliga looking to defend their title. He had multiple offers to move up to the regional divisions to play, but Wansbek finally ponied up and are paying him $500 p/w to repeat his insane season:

Comparing Players

Now you'll notice that I've started the next season in Hamburg so sadly all the beautiful statistics generated by the game have been reset, so the only place to look into the full breadth of his unbelievable season is in my dataset that I've created. So, is this a convenient thing to do? Not particularly as I'm forced to search by his UID and then read the statistics in the data / cleandata sheets and he's all the way down at 895! 

Objective

There has to be a better way! What we need is a table generated that easily showcases Fritz next to the summary statistics table that we already have available from our last season in spreadsheet-manager. There are a couple different ways we can go about isolating him. The two that make the most sense is to have him with the other 20 Hamburg Star Strikers or to show him with all of his teammates in the dataset. 

While I can see the first as being the ideal MoneyBall strategy, the second fits more with a Youth Academy Challenge & Head-to-Head matchup preparation situation. Thus, I started first with isolating all the players by team. I'll save by position table for the next session of spreadsheet-manager.

Curse of Old Excel

For those who use Microsoft 365 or Excel 21+ there is a pretty simple way to accomplish this with their new "Unique" and "Filter" functions that will build for you a list of unique values from a much larger array. Naturally that is not my situation, so I had lots of fun with Array formulas . I ended up building a three. The first set generates the list of Divisions & my cleaned Regional Division Variable. As I'm down in the German Oberliga this is 14 different divisions. Then for each of these divisions I then build a list of all the clubs that are a member of each of these specific local leagues. Even though the biggest has 20 teams I put this formula down further for future-proofing purposes. Generally curious, what league in the game has the most teams in it?

The next step is then to repeat this process for the club. Because there are so many clubs instead of fully generating the lists of players I make this one conditional based upon a selected club. You'll notice I use UID and no names, if you have ever done datawork you know to never use name strings as your identifier. Numbers always are better and it is a blessing the game lets you access UIDs.

TLDR: Again Man, where's the Sheet!

I ramble yet again I know, but this is its own kind of 'season summary' and while eventually I'll build a thread for this somewhere on the forum, its about my Youth Academy save and I consider it just as crucial to the story of Elazig Spor as my yearly performance review. Without further ado, here is my very rough Master sheet:

Master Sheet Breakdown

Selector Cells

Top-Left we have the only part of the sheet now that you need to touch. The top "Division" one I'm not currently using because my other formulas use the cleaned "Regional-Division" variable so that is why there is the big bold red "Oberliga". To find Kleiner, we just need to change clubs as he's also a Striker and in the Hamburg region. You can see that my list isn't alphabetical, I don't want to mess with the array formulas, so you have to work for it to find stuff.

You may ask did I fix the GK table? Nope! I swear I don't hate GKs, but again didn't want to deal with the unique variables required there. I also still only have the 4-2-3-1 positions selected because remember this is for me first . We will Select "Wandsbek" and "STC" to get us to Fritz Kleiner!

Summary Statistic Table

This is the same table at the start of the post with the exception of the final row where Wandsbek has populated now and we can see how their 2 Strikers averaged together against the same benchmarks we compared Mehmet Can in the previous post. 

Players at Club Table

And we've finally found Fritz Kleiner! He's midway down the table and we can see he was being brought down in the average, but who was he being averaged with!? Here is where my hard-coding is producing an error as I'm not sure which of these players is getting counted as a Striker. A truly proper clean of the Position variable is needed here, so that's on the 'to-do' list, but for now we can just look at Kleiner!

The most impressive part of his statistics is that he has an xG/90 of .93 and then produced 1.43 Gls/90 with it. And yes, this is boosted by his penalty taking but his nP xG is still .79 which is almost double that of Top Hamburg strikers at .47 and crushes the Tier stats of .21 & .28.

Next Steps

The first will be to build the League Star Table so when I select Strikers I can get a drop-down list of all 21 Stars in my league to see exactly where each of the players sit and what teams they play for. That will allow direct player  to player comparisons to really see if I can get my Mehment Can to outperform Fritz Kleiner! 

Then of course to finally fix GK and add all the remaining positions. 

Future Datasets

My game has the top-2 tiers of England, Germany, Spain & Italy loaded. This should provide sufficient players for Tier 1 and Tier 2 datasets eventually. I also have kept yearly save-points anticipating this analysis so can produce these for each of the 8 seasons (if I wanted to). Because I haven't loaded tier 3 outside of Germany I will actually have the worst ability to compare my performance at that level. Luckily that is a few years off...

Depending how much I procrastinate this week I might start having more relevant data for the group to share and eventually the whole spreadsheet + ScoutView so ya'll can play spreadsheet-manager as well and find even more reason to stare at little numbers on your computer screen!

Edited February 28, 2023 by WhiteCat33

[JAwtunes]

8 hours ago, WhiteCat33 said:

FC Elazig Spor Hamburg

Spreadsheet-Manager: Dynamic Master Sheet

Season 1 | Season 2 | Season 3 | Season 4 | Season 5 | Season 6 | Season 7 |Season 8

Statistics: Intro & 2030 (S8) | 2029 (S7) & 2028 (S6)

The Strikers of Hamburg

Tonight, was another night in spreadsheet-manager as I just couldn't shake the need to understand the power of the Hamburg league offense. Just for a quick refresher, here is the summary table for Strikers with Hamburg and my club Elazig Spor selected. The above links can jump you up (the couple posts) to where our statistics journey began. 

Fritz Kleiner of Wandsbek

In the Hamburg Oberliga among those 21 strong strikers there is one man who stands above the rest, and that is the Wandsbek Legend Fritz Kleiner who years forsake money and a multitude of offers to play up a division to lead the team he loves to the league title. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us) they failed in the playoffs, so are still here in the Oberliga looking to defend their title. He had multiple offers to move up to the regional divisions to play, but Wansbek finally ponied up and are paying him $500 p/w to repeat his insane season:

Comparing Players

Now you'll notice that I've started the next season in Hamburg so sadly all the beautiful statistics generated by the game have been reset, so the only place to look into the full breadth of his unbelievable season is in my dataset that I've created. So, is this a convenient thing to do? Not particularly as I'm forced to search by his UID and then read the statistics in the data / cleandata sheets and he's all the way down at 895! 

Objective

There has to be a better way! What we need is a table generated that easily showcases Fritz next to the summary statistics table that we already have available from our last season in spreadsheet-manager. There are a couple different ways we can go about isolating him. The two that make the most sense is to have him with the other 20 Hamburg Star Strikers or to show him with all of his teammates in the dataset. 

While I can see the first as being the ideal MoneyBall strategy, the second fits more with a Youth Academy Challenge & Head-to-Head matchup preparation situation. Thus, I started first with isolating all the players by team. I'll save by position table for the next session of spreadsheet-manager.

Curse of Old Excel

For those who use Microsoft 365 or Excel 21+ there is a pretty simple way to accomplish this with their new "Unique" and "Filter" functions that will build for you a list of unique values from a much larger array. Naturally that is not my situation, so I had lots of fun with Array formulas . I ended up building a three. The first set generates the list of Divisions & my cleaned Regional Division Variable. As I'm down in the German Oberliga this is 14 different divisions. Then for each of these divisions I then build a list of all the clubs that are a member of each of these specific local leagues. Even though the biggest has 20 teams I put this formula down further for future-proofing purposes. Generally curious, what league in the game has the most teams in it?

The next step is then to repeat this process for the club. Because there are so many clubs instead of fully generating the lists of players I make this one conditional based upon a selected club. You'll notice I use UID and no names, if you have ever done datawork you know to never use name strings as your identifier. Numbers always are better and it is a blessing the game lets you access UIDs.

TLDR: Again Man, where's the Sheet!

I ramble yet again I know, but this is its own kind of 'season summary' and while eventually I'll build a thread for this somewhere on the forum, its about my Youth Academy save and I consider it just as crucial to the story of Elazig Spor as my yearly performance review. Without further ado, here is my very rough Master sheet:

Master Sheet Breakdown

Selector Cells

Top-Left we have the only part of the sheet now that you need to touch. The top "Division" one I'm not currently using because my other formulas use the cleaned "Regional-Division" variable so that is why there is the big bold red "Oberliga". To find Kleiner, we just need to change clubs as he's also a Striker and in the Hamburg region. You can see that my list isn't alphabetical, I don't want to mess with the array formulas, so you have to work for it to find stuff.

You may ask did I fix the GK table? Nope! I swear I don't hate GKs, but again didn't want to deal with the unique variables required there. I also still only have the 4-2-3-1 positions selected because remember this is for me first . We will Select "Wandsbek" and "STC" to get us to Fritz Kleiner!

Summary Statistic Table

This is the same table at the start of the post with the exception of the final row where Wandsbek has populated now and we can see how their 2 Strikers averaged together against the same benchmarks we compared Mehmet Can in the previous post. 

Players at Club Table

And we've finally found Fritz Kleiner! He's midway down the table and we can see he was being brought down in the average, but who was he being averaged with!? Here is where my hard-coding is producing an error as I'm not sure which of these players is getting counted as a Striker. A truly proper clean of the Position variable is needed here, so that's on the 'to-do' list, but for now we can just look at Kleiner!

The most impressive part of his statistics is that he has an xG/90 of .93 and then produced 1.43 Gls/90 with it. And yes, this is boosted by his penalty taking but his nP xG is still .79 which is almost double that of Top Hamburg strikers at .47 and crushes the Tier stats of .21 & .28.

Next Steps

The first will be to build the League Star Table so when I select Strikers I can get a drop-down list of all 21 Stars in my league to see exactly where each of the players sit and what teams they play for. That will allow direct player  to player comparisons to really see if I can get my Mehment Can to outperform Fritz Kleiner! 

Then of course to finally fix GK and add all the remaining positions. 

Future Datasets

My game has the top-2 tiers of England, Germany, Spain & Italy loaded. This should provide sufficient players for Tier 1 and Tier 2 datasets eventually. I also have kept yearly save-points anticipating this analysis so can produce these for each of the 8 seasons (if I wanted to). Because I haven't loaded tier 3 outside of Germany I will actually have the worst ability to compare my performance at that level. Luckily that is a few years off...

Depending how much I procrastinate this week I might start having more relevant data for the group to share and eventually the whole spreadsheet + ScoutView so ya'll can play spreadsheet-manager as well and find even more reason to stare at little numbers on your computer screen!

Nice work!

What version of Excel are you using?  I think the copy I have on my laptop is 2007.  I have tried to learn SQL, specifically for FM (of course), but gave up and just bought more ram for my laptop.

[Cultured Left Foot]

If you'd like to follow along in more detail. This is a video series on my YouTube channel : http://www.YouTube.com/c/CulturedLeftFoot

 

END OF SEASON 16 REVIEW
 

Only a little update this one because I was so excited I forgot to take screenshots... Ha!

WE ARE UP! To The Championship.... !  Finishing 2nd in League One has got us automatic promotion to The Championship!
 

 

 

Talon Allpress was once again the star for us and made the team of the year.  Along with the Cameron Thorpe. 

 

 

Our season ending balance didn't look good, but we are one step closer to the money-bag Premier League, so hoping that we can sort the finances out sooner rather than later!
 

 

But to end on a little bit of good news. Our 18s had a wonderful season, yet again. 

 

An amazing season, gaining promotion to the Championship was fantastic. Now the challenge is to stay up and work hard!

ONTO SEASON 17 WE GO!

WISH US LUCK!

[karax268]

Louletano Desportos Clube - end of season review 2025/26

League fixtures | Promotion Fixtures | Finances | Supporters | Transfers

 

Liga 3 Champions!! we did it. not sure how. but we did.

 

How we did it

We never had the dominance we had in our first season at this level. Teams seemed to have adapted to our playstyle and we had difficulty adjusting to that. We started the league decently but never solidified a spot on top. A bad run of form near the end of the regular season almost saw us drop out of the promotion league spots. A tough win against Torreense saw us through.

In the promotion stage we honestly did not deserve our succes. we were outplayed in 4 of the 6 games. Somehow we went unbeaten with two wins, giving us the top spot and promotion to Liga 2. A championship match against Lusitania lourosa was the cherry on top of this amazing season. It was a tight affair, neither creating much. in the end we snuck a 1-0 win past them. Champions!! for the second time in 3 years.

The cup

Our first decent cup run. A couple of good wins saw us reach the fourth round for the first time. There we embarrassed ourselves against lower league opposition.

 

The Squad

Still mostly legacy players. However, Wilson Evora 2401 and Steffen Bohnsack 2402 made minutes in the first team. Steffen has the honour to have scored the first goal by  academy player. It promptly got awarded (unjustly) with the goal of the season award.

Cavadas was once again the best player of the season, while Sander got top goalscorer again.

next year will be more academy players i hope. People are developing but not yet good enough for the first team.

 

Off the field

Finances are worse still. Hopefully Liga 2 brings in more money for us. No upgrades are approved, nor coaching badges. And while our facilities started as good, if we want to progress we need more. 

Our average attendance dropped slightly this year. Not sure why. 

Next season

I am very curious how our team will do against this level of teams. We will have a more 'normal' season with 34 games and no second stage. So hopefully we can get into a groove and surprise yet another league.

 

 

 

 

[WhiteCat33]

5 hours ago, JAwtunes said:

Nice work!

What version of Excel are you using?  I think the copy I have on my laptop is 2007.  I have tried to learn SQL, specifically for FM (of course), but gave up and just bought more ram for my laptop.

Thanks!

I'm on Home 2019 for the laptop where I'm building it so it's pretty recent and has been getting the regular updates to integrate it visually into their Office 365 thing. Unfortunately, that doesn't include adding additional functions under the hood. Thinking about backwards-compatibility I realized I should replace my use of Concat() with the legacy Concatenate() so versions like yours can run it. Luckily that's an easy Find/Replce fix. Pretty sure that is the only function that is an updated version in the worksheet.

I really should properly learn SQL as well. Part of the justification I have for building this thing is this is forcing me to remember how to do data cleaning & analysis in excel as I haven't done this type of stuff for years. I did academic data cleaning/analysis in STATA during undergrad and just out of college which runs on a modified C language. I think I still have STATA 9 or 10 saved somewhere as you could literally keep it on a flash drive and plug it in and launch it on whatever computer you wanted. Might even be properly licensed to me 

On another computer I have Office 2010 professional which includes Access. That would be where to really take this thing 'to the next level'. With an external data-source link to an access database I could have every Tier and year all in one pretty package. Ah think of all the data!! But that is a long ways off.

Current Plan: First I'll get the functionality I want with the Oberliga. Second will be flexibility to all the Tiers in my game. Then I'll try it on my ALS Porto save and its leagues. I think I have a few save-points there to get a couple years. If all that works without errors it should be ready for public consumption. Maybe then you'll have a reason to learn SQL for real? 

[Riebow]

Arras FA Season Review (27/28): Les Boyaux Rouges

League: I was 2nd most of the season, but Gazelec Ajaccio ran away with the title. In the last 2 months I tried to give some young players some starts with the hope of developing them (especially the defenders). We win games by outscoring teams, because our defenders are very poor. I benched my starting goalkeeper in favour of the one I've gotten from last season's Youth Intake. So far he's developing well, so let's hope he gives me more stability in goal. At left back my options are playing an original player past his prime or a 4 silver star CA player...

Cup: We were knocked out in the 8th round by Le Havre.

Youth Intake: I'm starting to think that facilities don't matter. This is my 5th intake and I don't believe I've had a player with more than 2 stars CA. I'm not expecting wonderkids, but with the facilities of a mid-level first tier team, I expected a bit more. Again not many talented defenders.

Hamidou Tounkara: Best of the intake according to my HOYD. 

Spoiler

Ethan Farges: Bad personality

Spoiler

Improvements: The board wanted a meeting to offer me a new contract. I've asked for improvements in youth recruitment instead.

Best XII:

Next Season: Compete for the title!

[libbyshuss]

and so the end has come.....

Italy - Catania - Season 2064/65

 

Champions League

After last years losing final, did we go one better this season?

Nope, out in the last 16 to Liepzig, who battered us.

And with that...... I'm handing in my notice. 

 

So here's a few things I learned on my Italian journey:-

1. State of the Art youth facilities really do matter. I had no wonderkids for years until I managed to get my facilities to state of the art. then they started pouring out. Around 4 seasons ago the facilities dropped, I had no option to improve, and the wonderkids dried up. Anecdotal, I know, but really that new 'feature' SI have introduced has screwed us on this challenge

2. It's really difficult without a decent keeper! Honestly, after 45 seasons or so, I never ever had one better than Serie B standard. So I usually had to win games 4-3

3. I love this challenge for throwing up players like Lorenzo Lippi 40K and Giovanni Moscardelli 51A. Seeing them develop, destroy the league, and, in Moscardelli's case, win 7 balon d'ors is what it is all about!

4. I don't have the staying power of Padders! the team is falling apart at the seams and would need a major rebuild over several years and I haven't got the willpower to take that on

 

Anyway, I'm a sucker for a youth only challenge so I'm jumping straight back in. I fancy another try at Uruguay for some reason. possibly because it's only 2 leagues!

 

 

Edited February 28, 2023 by libbyshuss

[XaW]

Folkestone went to hell, so I'm giving Follo yet another go...

[The7Striker]

34 minutos atrás, XaW disse:

Folkestone went to hell, so I'm giving Follo yet another go...

I knew it 

[XaW]

1 minute ago, The7Striker said:

I knew it 

[The7Striker]

5 minutos atrás, XaW disse:

You will complete the challenge with Follo. 

Edited February 28, 2023 by The7Striker

[XaW]

7 minutes ago, The7Striker said:

You will complete the challenge with Follo. 

I do hope so! I'll at least give it a go!  

[leyrtj]

Season 10 - Atletico CP - Ledman Liga Pro - 2nd - Promoted

A nail-biting season throughout, but we did it on the penultimate day, finishing 2nd against a media prediction of 6th at 11 - 1. We changed our formation this season to a 4141, and it worked well. In previous seasons (and all of FM saves), Ihave played an ultra positive 4231 wing. However, we lacked a top quality finisher and, without the option of buying one, we had to play to our strengths - a lot of quality in midfield. quick wingers and tall centre backs. We played defensively solid football with a focus on counter-attack and set pieces. We also have an aggressive and determined squad and even managed to break the ill discipline record. Love it. We ended the season with a lower goal difference than the year before but 11 points more, and 16 clean sheets out of 34 (and a number of 1 - 0s). This excludes the game against Farense, where they scored 4 goals in the last ten minutes to win 5 - 4. 

We also sold our best player. I saw Chelsea interested in Marcos Guilherme, and sold him to them for 800k. Not great but I was hoping being there would see his value increase and then be sold for around 10m. However, after three months I cashed in his sell-on for 3.7m, and finally managed to get another Youth facilities upgrade. I will probably look to sell one player a season going forward to finance more upgrades, though being in Liga NOS on a small budget might be enough for this season.

The squad is starting to take shape with depth in all positions and talent coming through where necessary. The only position needing an upgrade is striker. Trindade is good but he doesn’t score enough, and only has 10 finishing.

Our two best players. Vitor Roque will be a go on to be a club legend and Cezar Augusto might be a wonderkid - he’s dubbed the next Branco.

After last year’s disappointing youth intake, this one was much better. Ferreira looks fantastic, though his personality needs mentoring. He’s dubbed the next Ricardo Queresma. Daniel Annan also later went up to 5 star potential and looks really good. 

I've been looking through the players with the most appearances. The youth intake from 2024 was spectacular with 5 players that have regularly played for us, and 4 who will hopefully help us win the league. Honrado was also in that youth intake but he sold very quickly. He’s just averaged 7.71 in Serie A with Milan. 

 

[Aidan John]

Hi guys I am on my second season in wales as a semi pro club. I used to be able to offer part time contracts, but now the option has completely disappeared and I can only offer non contracts. Is my save busted, or is this normal, with my finances being bad or something?

[JAwtunes]

8 hours ago, Aidan John said:

Hi guys I am on my second season in wales as a semi pro club. I used to be able to offer part time contracts, but now the option has completely disappeared and I can only offer non contracts. Is my save busted, or is this normal, with my finances being bad or something?

I've had this happen before. Sometimes it is linked to the division you're in, i.e. some only allow amateur contracts. However, sometimes the option to offer PT contracts just disappears and then reappears again. There have been loads of posts on the forum about it over the years but I don't think I've ever read a good explanation from SI as to why this happens. I'd stick with it if I were you and hope that it becomes an option again soon.

[DazRTaylor]

12 hours ago, XaW said:

Folkestone went to hell, so I'm giving Follo yet another go...

Several things are guaranteed in life.  Death, taxes, me doing 5,127 saves at once and @XaWat Follo.

[XaW]

XaW - Follo Fotballklubb - Season 2023 (Season 1) - PostNord-ligaen Avdeling 2

Squad | Transfers | Finances

Well, this was an excellent season! I did not expect us to do this well here as a newly promoted side. However everything just seemed to click from an early stage and we were only slightly challenged by Bærum and KFUM before they also eventually dropped off a bit. Next season we are up into the 2nd tier, where there are a mix of professional and semi-pro teams, and I doubt we will go professional any time soon. At least it has seemed so in previous tries. So I think we just have to suck it up and just try to stay up while getting in better youngsters the coming seasons.

The board has decided to install under-soil heating this winter.

I managed to get a few improvements accepted.

Norgesmesterskapet: We beat Vard Haugesund, Ålgård, and Arendal before we lost to top tier side Lillestrøm in the 4th round.

2nd team

They only played friendlies this season.

U19s

They finished 3rd in the Norwegian U19 Oslo 1 this season.

Junior NM: They beat Vidar before they lost to HamKam in the 2nd round.

Youth intake:

Trophy cabinet

PostNord-ligaen Avdeling 2 - 1 (2023)

Player statistics:

Most apps for the clubs

Name			Nation		2nd Nation	Apps
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ulrich Rom 23b		Norway		<N/A>		21
Lars Martin Bryn 23a	Norway		Finland		19

Most goals for the club

Name			Nation		2nd Nation	Goals
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ulrich Rom 23b		Norway		<N/A>		1

Most assists for the club

Name			Nation		2nd Nation	Assists
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lars Martin Bryn 23a	Norway		Finland		2

Supporters:

Summary:

[Libertine13]

2031/32 (Season 9)

Having survived relegation fairly comfortably last season we were hoping for some minor gains this time around. Whilst the board and supporters were both happy for us to just avoid relegation. It ended up being a season of bad spell followed by a good one, mostly because of how the fixtures fell. We struggled against the better teams and beat the worse ones. As you'd expect with form and results like those, we ended up midtable, or "best of the rest" if you want to put a very positive spin on it. The good news was that finishing in 7th place meant we'd get a free hit at qualifying for one of the European places. 

Our main man, Robbie Lee-Clingan 29A, had a very good campaign personally. He ended on 32 league goals in 33 games (only good enough for third place for the golden boot) and he also won both the Danske Bank Young Player Of The Year and the Audi Belfast Ulster Young Player Of The Year!

European Places Play Offs;

Spoiler

The play offs are seeded so we'd be facing Glentoran who finished the season in 4th place and it would be a singular match that determines the winner. In our previous 13 games against Glentoran we had only managed one solitary draw, so it was always going to be a mountain to climb in beating these.

We actually flew out of the traps, Robbie Lee-Clingan 29A, being brought down inside the box within 4 minutes. He stepped up to take the penalty himself... MISSED! Keeper had read it correctly and pushed the spot kick wide. It didn't dishearten us though, we played on at a very good level and got our rewards through playmaker Johnathan Mitchell 31B after 33 minutes. We went into half time in front and very good value for the lead.

It felt like we were playing a completely different team in the second half, we were under a lot of pressure and pretty much holding on as they threw men forward in search of an equaliser. We held on until the 78th minute! They managed to take it to extra time, but we really weren't in the game at this point. Their pressure paid off and they won themselves a penalty, which they converted and saw themselves into the play off final.

Best XI;

Spoiler

Youth Intake;

Spoiler

The preview was the worst we'd had since starting the challenge. I'm all set for a first choice keeper for years to come as well, so I'm banking on a half decent winger at the very most.

Imagine my surprise when I saw we'd gotten a very decent full back prospect in our intake. The lad has very good mental attributes and will likely replace long serving right back, Ciaran Gardiner 25C. 

,

Brendan Moore 32A

Lee Young 32B