IrishRovers

I'm having a fun save with Bristol Rovers, although 2 playoff losses in 2 years tested my patience. My two main bits of feedback are firstly that squad building feels two easy - in the Championship I've managed to bring in players on a free, sell them for loads of money, replace them with better players on a free, year on year. I know it's always been a bit like this but I think it's easier than ever in spite of the shonky scouting mechanisms. Secondly a specific goal where a corner gets cleared once or twice and a player, often the corner taker, pops up on the angle of the box to score, recurs incredibly often. Again there's always been patterns of play you start to see recurring if you play too much but this one feels especially egregious (and not like something that happens v often in Real Football). Overall though I'm enjoying it. The Premiership is beckoning this year, trust the process.

Why does nearly every team I play against with a back 4, from L2 to the Premiership, play with an inverted fullback or wingback? Most teams in real life don't do this as far as I have noticed.

I've been saying this every year for a while now, but the squad building issues really do make the game a lot less fun. It's especially egregious at midtable teams in the top flight, where in reality there's a fair bit of churn with new managers adopting new systems, players running down contracts and so on - in FM Everton, Brentford, Brighton etc just have the same squads for years and years and years. Very boring and very immersion-sapping.

This is exactly right. It's Potemkin villages all over the place.

I get the impression that longterm saves are being phased out in favour of short stints with big clubs. The way the gameworld develops over ten years or more is profoundly unsatisfying to me. But maybe I'm just jaded and nostalgic. I just feel like things used to be more fluid and surprising, and now when I get promoted to the Premiership after eight years or whatever it's still Mount and Haaland and Saka running riot. That might be just the way football is now, I guess - who could afford to buy Haaland - I dunno. I'd also love the new job press conference, the only one I ever do myself, to vary depending on club. Nobody's taking over at Halifax and saying they're a massive and ambitious club. Finally, I did win the league with a midblock 433 so credit where it's due, I do think the hegemony of high lines and nonstop pressing has beeb addressed to some extent at last.

I'll concede that this is a minor issue but it annoys me - the excessive and hyperbolic descriptions of goals in the text commentary! I just conceded a messy goal to a very physical Cardiff team (against my beautiful, tiny boys at the Barcelona of the midlands, Derby). No problem with the goal at all; in fact it was cool, it felt like the kind of goal you do concede against horrible teams in the Championship when you try to play it on the deck. But the commentary was like 'What a goal! One of the best you'll see all season', or whatever, which they basically say for every goal. It bounced off someone's head, bobbled around the box and someone smashed it in. There should be more variety in the way the text expresses the action, surely, especially to reflect the types of physical, messy, non-skill-based goals you see in the lower leagues. I guess nobody reads the text other than me, haha, and I know the tone is intended to reflect the hyperbolic tone of contemporary football language, but it could just be toned down a wee bit in my view.

One of my favourite ever FM saves was about seven years ago, eventually winning the SPL with Dundee Utd having initially got them promoted from the second division. I was also finishing my PhD at the time and staying in a friend's flat while she was on holiday so it's especially vivid in my memory! I can't remember which version it was, though. We played a 4-4-1-1 with a wide playmaker and a winger, some brilliant football. I think it's actually not as hard as you'd think, because most of the other teams in the SPL are *****, so as soon as you start getting third or fourth regularly you can easily build up some cash reserves, improve the squad, bring in younger players and so on. I think I won the UEFA cup before I won the league.

I've played three seasons with Charlton, finally in the Championship in the fourth season after two years of playoff misery. I like the match engine this year, so far. My main issue is with the dynamism of the gameworld. Issues with AI youth development are part of this and being discussed elsewhere. But for me it's also just a lack of flux, transfer movement, change, especially in the lower leagues. In real life the team I support, Sunderland, has gone through about five first 11s in five years; that is common in lower league football but not really reflected in the game. So four years in, I'm now playing Championship teams that look much the same as they did in 2022, but older. Bit boring. The ideal for me would be improving the manager AI so that you can see transfer preferences play out - Tony Mowbray likes young technical players, Alex Neil likes physical experienced players, etc. As it stands AI squads are very static, full of unhappy players who aren't playing, and often lacking basic components like full backs or whatever. It really pulls me out of the gane, sadly. Not sure how hard it is to implement that technically.

I would really like the graphics to change; not to be 'better' in the sense of being more photorealistic, which I don't really care about, but in the sense of being more attractive, more stylised, more aesthetic. Things like giving you a sense of different pitches, changing seasons, the different attributes of players ... for me the dream would be a sort of 2D engine but a really beautiful one, not trying to look 'real' but trying to convey something of the impressions you get when you're actually at a football match. But I imagine I'm on a hiding to nothing there. I won't buy the next one, mostly because I'm after starting a new job that's going to be more timeconsuming, partly because I find the game increasingly ponderous and boring and hard to understand.