Nacaw

If you want to make SI out to be political, that's fine, they have been on occasion. But there was never a news item about host selection being rigged, the WC used to be moved because of " 'club protests about tournament scheduling'. The reason it was always moved to the summer wasn't political either, it came down to nobody knowing what the schedule would look like. Once it became more clear, I think in FM19, the World Cup stopped moving from Qatar.

That is correct. However, the AI should be able to recognize that they could trigger the clause for the summer, and only pay 2.9m + the peanuts they are playing in loan fee + wages and keep the player for the same amount of time. There's no reason for the AI to buy him early for a higher price in this case.

It's about being developed as a football economy. GDP, Human Development Index, democracy, or whatever else doesn't factor into the rating. Why would it, when the game is about football? Developed countries in FM context generally offer higher wages for footballers. Where exactly the line cuts off between developed and developing, and if Poland is on one side and Czechia on the other, I don't think anyone can answer. It's possible things like that haven't been reviewed for a while, and both should be developed. In the greater context, it doesn't matter though. If you can manage in Czechia and have a realistic experience, then whatever background stat is assigned is fine. If you feel really strongly about getting this changed, I suggest contacting the head researcher for the country in question.

As I said, one of my recent saves has been 15 years in Denmark, and I have extensive experience managing in smaller European leagues, even outside the top divisions. I love managing small clubs/nations and bringing them to the top. But that things take time and the game world being somewhat static otherwise still isn't a problem for me. Design isn't the limiting factor for a Hungarian club. In fact, it's the design that makes it way way too easy to make European powerhouses in small leagues.

You call this a problem. To me, that's the essence of FM, it's designed to be this way. No matter how much they promote improved league dynamics, there is no version of FM where you end up with the Greek and Turkish leagues dominating Europe. 500 years in the future, nothing really changes. You can fight against it as the user, but there's really only so much you can do because you're fighting against the game itself. I think FM simply doesn't want to create crazy scenarios where the game world changes in a huge way, which to me isn't a problem. To the OP: It seems you've only made 3 CL appearances. It generally takes about 10 years of steady results for club rep and league rep to improve to where you get "fair" values. After playing 15 seasons in the Danish league, I now have 18 players worth £40m+ and 5 players worth £100m+. I'm paying roughly the wages of a low/midsize PL club (wages have a big effect on value). The league itself has grown to the 4th best in Europe with 4 CL spots, but my team is still the only team listed above 3½ star reputation. You need years of better CL results to improve transfer values, but they do improve, eventually.

It's both. Not enough fullbacks are generated with high dribbling/crossing and the AI doesn't prioritize training it either. It probably all comes down to the training units being the way they are, and it would require a major rewrite of the module to fix. Major work for minor gain, which is why the issue has persisted through many versions.

This isn't made clear by the message in the game, but the players don't actually need to "rest", they need to go on holiday. That's the only way to combat jadedness. They probably suffer from jadedness because of playing international games during their normal holiday period. Send them on 2 weeks holiday and they should be good for the rest of the year.

It says in the screenshot that you get 30% of sales added to your transfer budget. I understand that it's not great, but it's a lot better than 0%, so it has definitely increased since the start of the game, Furthermore, while the board refuses you initially, it allows you to discuss the issue. It's sometimes worth saving before such an interaction to learn what responses are best to choose.

Sometimes you can get around this by changing the contract start date to "end of season". Automatic renewal after X games can also sometimes work, but I don't like that clause in general. It is often the case that older players IRL only renew after January, as far as I can tell both Kroos and Modric last year only signed on for a new year just before their contracts ended, so FM has that part of the issue mostly right. What would happen if PSG showed interest in those players is obviously guesswork. In FM's estimation, most players can get their heads turned regardless of circumstances.

While it's a little annoying and doesn't change no matter how much success you have (#1 ranked team in Europe, multiple CL wins with Viborg FF), I found it had no practical downsides. I could hire who I wanted and the part-time staff worked the same as full-time staff as far as I could tell with scouts and physios.

Compared to real life, yes it is easy. Compared to other games, probably harder than most.

Yeah, I realize that's also a factor In my head I was thinking gen 11 is only 2 years old, but that's of course only true for desktop CPUs, not mobile processors.

My reply was mainly dealing with the question "Is this too good to be true" Most people who buy a laptop for gaming will need/want a dedicated GFX card. But you might fall into the niche that doesn't if you only play FM. Both things you mention are on-board / integrated graphics cards, so yes for you it will be an upgrade to get Iris Xe. Looking at the minimum specs, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to run FM23 on that laptop. As for the processor, i5 gen 11 is 2 years old and we're currently on gen 13. So the most important part of the computer, FM wise, won't be super up-to-date. That would be my biggest worry for speed. But within your budget I don't expect you'll be able to find anything from gen 13, gen 12 could be possible on sale or clearance, but you'd probably have to hunt for it for a while.

It's pretty clear to me that this is cheap because it has no graphics card. Do you need more than the on-board to play FM in 2D? I really don't know.

The new UCL format has caused many bugs of this kind, like UCL release clauses not activating and player promises of qualifying for UCL being broken. I would not be surprised if this was the same thing, the FFP ban only affects the old format competition instead of the new format. Good news though, it will be solved in FM25 since only one format will exist then!