Benjoe

Ndjili International Airport, Kinshasa, 00:30, 9th October 2019 A fat, black man and a white, tall and slender figure is walking through the airport. The slender man is carrying four bags as he is pushing two trolleys packed with more bags and suitcases. "Boss, you really need all this luggage? All Mumbu's stuff is in Mumbu's favorite bag. The Minnie Mouse one. Minnie Mouse is Mumbu's Idol, Boss." Nelson ignored Mumbu and flamboyantly opened his arms wide and whispered to no-one. "Just wait Anne... I'm coming for you. You won't see me, but I'll be there. Hiding in the corner of the room. And then... Suddenly. BOOM! There I am dressed in my-" "But boss. Didn't the event start 4 hours ago?" "No... you peasant. I checked the calendar invite in Zlatan's calendar. It said it was 20:00 on the 10th October." "Oh right, Boss. You had to hack into Zlatan's calendar to see the invite because you didn't gets it. Rights Boss?" "Shut up Mumbu you peasantface." The day after when they arrived at the venue for the award show. "Here I am Annie! Come to pappa!" The venue laid empty of any football celebrities, the decorations was changed and Anne was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the venue was being re-decorated for the night's main event. Pensioners-bingo. Several hours later, Nelson laid asleep under a table next to an 80-year old woman and Mumbu left with the main prize. A 3lbs glazed ham. Oh, and nice work on the awards show @Deisler26 and congrats to all the winners! Next year I promise to make a return to the scene. It's been too long!

Season 2027/28 We've gone through a bit of a mixed window. We lost Kevin Stoyle which hurt, but we got some good players in and we will be pushing a lot of our academy lads into the rotation now. Can't take seeing us miss list after list regarding academy production. Well, it was a decent enough price, but it hurt us that we had a clause for Champions League team for 14M as Tottenham offered 20M for him. He chose Nice instead - good choice lad - which costed us crucial money. Leading to the new season I looked at our player material and decided to take a chance on our youth. This also means looking at what kind of players we got coming and what type of football we want to play. We still want to be playing progressive football and having a decent amount of freedom for all players. And seeing as Ederson is FINALLY history we might become more stable in defence too. Especially seeing as we bought 2 new defenders as well. New system in theory: (yes, yes, I know @noikeee) The squad for 2028/29 7 Academy lads in the squad! I know, I know. None are starters on paper, and 7 isn't really that many. Still. With the talent - or lack thereof it's not exactly because I've neglected them. Goalkeepers Right Complete Wingback - Support Left Full Back - Attack Centre Back duo Half Back Advanced Playmaker - Attack Central Midfield - Support Left Wide Playmaker - Attack Attacking Midfielder Duo - Shadow Strikers Jokers Notes So, we have some interesting players here. Our central area with our CMs and AMs is where we have our main strength. Amazing starters, solid bench options. Nzube on right back has already become a Wonderkid with barely any game time and he'll be a starter now on our important right flank. Expecting him to have some trouble early on and hopefully grow into a strong performer at the end. Tonon and Giovannini will be thrown around in the starting lineup as they can cover multiple roles. Tonon is not going to cut it as a starter I'm afraid but a very decent bench choice no doubt. Giovannini has been a very wanted man as Juventus, Man Utd, Liverpool, FC Bayern etc etc have all tried to poach him. Well, he's still here! And he'll need some game time to keep him happy. Of course another important point for me is to see if Alblas is as bugged as Ederson proved to be for us. Thrilled to have kept Morán and Higham in any case as well!

Spoiler: As always in this thread apparently I've finished the thread season and forgotten to update for a while. Oh well. Youth Intake 2027/28 Big meh. Uhhh wait. This might be something. Look at those stats - and we desperately need some Central defenders from our own academy! Wait a minute... 8 jumping reach? That's odd, but ... oh for **** sake! 173cm tall?! Okay, back to what this thread is really about. Us sabotaging ourselves. And a season wrap up! Okay, so hopefully that created some suspense. Did we make it to top 3 which would give us a chance at Champions League next season?

Cheers man! Appreciate it. Ha! Time to feed him to the wolves man. Erh.. I got issues. Many of them has worked, but then for some reason I feel the urge to change "just one thing" and then suddenly a 3-5-2 went to a 4-2-1-3-0 and so on.. We need to start a support group for people like us man.. But mainly it is for the lolz and experiments as the ME in 17 (at least in all my saves on it) is completely ********. Can't be bothered really going into the analytics of the setup because the times I've tried it, and see a pattern for a couple of games and we get some momentum then suddenly it goes up in smoke and nothing works like it used to anymore for no apparent reason. Frustrating as hell.

**** right off.

There is some positives at least. Let's look at Higham for instance! He's been unreal so far this season which really took me by surprise evident by the surplus of strikers we have as I didn't think we had enough options. But oh my has he been a monster. Hopefully he can develop his technical stats a bit more even though he is a brilliantly complete forward at the moment.

Another day. Guess what. Yes. Welcome to another episode of the "EDERSON IS ****ING ***** MATE" show.

Same game. Against Bologna. Who's in the middle of the league. We are behind 2-1 now. After a run like this. And Higham just went off the pitch injured.

Another one....

And as promised, a galore of stupid **** in gif format. We start with our right back running back like he had 1 pace, 1 acceleration. Yes. We concede. I have no words for this. Can ****ed up sure. But if Ederson was being a Sweeper Keeper on Attack like he should, he'd gotten to that one first. Embarrassing. I don't even... THE CONTACT IS FROM THEIR OWN PLAYER FFS! I wish I had an explanation for this coverage. I really do. We're not the only team that gets weird red cards. Can't really argue against this one I guess. Let's take a break from the horrible stuff and look at Stoyle's first touch! Again. Stupid error from a defender, but if Ederson wasn't glued to the little box he'd be out to stop this nonsense. Ederson.......... Mansueto does weird defending again. And Ederson. I... Eh... Double coverage for no reason. And still failing to stop the cross. They score of course. .... ????????? IT GOES THROUGH HM? I need a break.

Bah. How does that even happen. I subbed him before he had any injury and suddenly after the game he is injured... No way I'm letting him leave for anything under his 50M release clause - which is way too low in any case!

Transfers 2027/28 Oh boy, what two windows it has been! We've sold for a big sum, and bought for an almost big amount. It wasn't planned to be like that. We were planning on selling a few, and buying even fewer. But to sign some of the players we did, on the wages we did, and ahead of the clubs we fought with, well, we had to give some sometimes ridiculous release clauses. It was a non-negotiable demand from the players from the get go in all cases so seeing how contract negotiations work in FM17 my hands were tied if I wanted them. The main guys who left on release clause deals are: What hurts even more is that three of them was snapped up by league competitors. Filthy pigs. We ended up with buying both some replacements for the players who left as well as some players who were just available for too cheap to ignore. Nzube is a huge talent as well as Nigerian ( @kidthekid ), although it seems the Italian NT is going to snap him up ahead of Nigeria... He is rotation at the moment but I expect him to develop and become our trusted first choice. Orrica was picked up super cheap as a replacement to Coulibaly leaving. Pretty much the same type. Completely intentional. I want a player who can retain possesion and defend behind our aggressive right winger. Pasquale was quite expensive, maybe too expensive? Well, he's Italian, very young and very talented. Solid defender with attacking prowess, just lacks the pace to really set himself aside. He's been performing well for us in the cameos he's gotten. With his skillset, and given his lack of pace, he might be more fitting as a centre back or defensive mid eventually. We'll see. I do like his defensive qualities as a left back behind our Raumdeuter though for the formation I'm going with at the moment. Nardecchia was available very cheaply and I decided to snap him up. Seeing the way Conti performed last season, and the way Higham is doing this season, I figured we risked losing a striker and having a backup internally would be handy. Not sure he really has much to offer seeing how we're rapidly elevating our game above anywhere he can be a valuable kog. Will probably be loaned or sold next season. Figueroa was a free transfer, and what a free transfer! Either footed, incredible combination of Passing-Vision-Technique. Love it. He played for Bayern before coming through Real Madrid's academy. He never featured for Madrid though before Bayern got him on a free as well. 7 games, 4 assists and 7.5 rating so far. Lovely. Super cheap. Quite interesting potential. Could become something really nice in the future. Tam is looking like a serious baller. I can't use him this season due to the non-european rules, but I can't wait to use him next season. Mainly bought as cover for Morán as he is likely to getting snapped up at some point. Miguel was bought because he was relatively cheap in terms of both transfer fee and wage. There's no immediate need for him tbh. Silly transfer to some extent, but he almost doubled his value after the transfer so we should be able to flip him for a profit in worst case. Ajer was a last minute panic grab as Can was snapped up by Roma in the very last second. We might've paid a bit much for him given he was at Celtic, but he is a huge player to get in for us. We're building a team of giants too. Love it. Preben style football. Power and physique with finese!

Recap season 2026/27 So, we dropped the ball slightly and lost out on Champions League, that's not so bad is it? Well, we did have a few players who wanted to leave if we didn't secure CL football. So, sort of bad. We didn't do too bad in Europa League this season. We got defeated by Man Utd, but they did get to the final (were they got beaten by Barcelona - crazy EL final), so we did a good showing for the most part against them. A quick summary on the squad: Inconsistent. Best performers were Morán by a mile followed by Conti, Simoncini and Stoyle. Del Sole and Zakaria did well too. KariKari was strong too but he was one of the "CL or bust" boys, so lets not talk too much about him. Our main 4 defenders all have good avg. ratings, but don't let that fool you, they had a lot of meltdowns and brainfarts. That is something that has been happening for most of FM17 for me though, so no surprise really. Conti and Morán made it to the team of the year. Nice. Need to pay them bonuses now. ****. Let us not mention the Italian cup. Embarrassing that we are still not on this list. Next up will be a complete overview of our transfers this season as we just passed the winter window and I might as well give them both in one. And furthermore, when that is out of the way I will show you a cascade of gifs from the season. A lot of them portraying stupid **** that the FM17 match engine is throwing at me, and a few really lovely moments too.

Eh. Roma took over in second half, and killed the game. We did well to hold them off - 16 of their shots were long shots after all. But they were as dangerous as us so it was a fair result with the draw in the end. Atalanta beat AC Milan 3-2 so we actually had a chance to take 4th! But Roma were too much to beat. In the end, a very respectable finish. Could've been much, much worse if we hadn't beaten both Milan and Juve first though. But we did, so let's be happy and look forward to next season. We have a good squad, but it's blatantly obvious, that we are still far, far off the best teams - in Italy and especially the rest of Europe. A couple of good seasons more could change that as we have very interesting players who are still developing, namely Higham and Satskihs. We need to look at rebuilding our squad a bit perhaps though. But with the two non-europeans we have out on loan joining our squad next season we'll already then be a much better side and we should have some money to spend on fixing some other areas. A goalkeeper is top of mind seeing as Ederson has been a travesty. Speaking of him, I am giving up on the experiment on having a sweeper keeper. I've literally seen him do any sweeping 0 times. Even on SK(a) he's done nothing like it. He's got 17 in rushing out, yet he never does. We were playing with a high line, off side trap, and him set to SK(a) and he stayed AT THE GOAL LINE. The striker easily sprinted into the box with the ball and placed it past Ederson. If that's the way it works, then what's the purpose of playing a high line and having looked for a sweeper keeper? Phew. Rant off. So, I'll look to offload all our keeper basically for any price. Just want their pay check off our books. Need to find something solid instead. More on this season at a later point.

25 minutes into the game and Roma are biting back. But crossbar denial and clearance and the score is still 0-0.