SatournFan

Adding Scandinavian leagues later down the line could prove fruitful in this regard. Just clicking through the Danish Superliga club squads on Wikipedia I found there's quite a good amount of African players currently plying their trade there, same goes for Swedish Allsvenskan and Norwegian Eliteserien. FC Nordsjaelland famously has a partnership with the Ghanaian Right to Dream Academy, of course.

I reckon a bit of an update is due. Unfortunately I'll have to put this save on hiatus until FM 23 comes out, the reason being my GPU has died and I have no other means of gaming at the moment. I will be getting a new PC in October, but with the new entry in the series being close by, I don't think there'd be a point in continuing this save in FM 22. Therefore, this topic will be repurposed once FM 23 is released. Apologies for those who waited for updates all this time, but such is life.

Palermo FC – Season 1 Part I: The Initial Impression & Planning for the Season The 25-man senior squad that I inherited from Palermo’s promotion campaign + the summer transfers they made as of August 10th is, at first glance, not that lacking in quality, judging by the attributes noted in my squad view. There’s a reason I’m willing to let 8 of those players go however – there’s a severe need for better reinforcements if we are to avoid relegation, as we’re predicted to come dead last and some way off fellow promoted side Südtirol. Goalkeepers Perhaps the one position that I’m not going to change as both players here are considered new signings. Mirko Pigliacelli has an amazing set of goalkeeping attributes for this league, save for his aerial reach, but lacks a bit mentally and is also not the tallest. Regardless, he’s a set-in-stone first teamer for the upcoming season, while Massolo will likely provide adequate backup despite not being all that great. Thinking ahead, both of them have deals that extend beyond the current season, and while Pigliacelli will definitely remain at the club past 2022, Massolo will perhaps be moved on next Summer for a better rotation option. Defenders There are 10 defenders in total currently at the club; 5 of them are listed for either transfer or loan, which says a lot about the quality here. By far the most under-equipped position here is the CB spot, with only Nedelcearu – a new real-life signing for Palermo – worth keeping. The four full-backs who will remain at the club can’t boast a lot of quality either. For now, I envision Somma and loanee Sala to be first-team players, with two Balkan players Doda and Devetak serving as rotation options, but let me be clear – none of them look to be of standard for this league. Midfielders Considering the tactic I want to employ during this save, the position of central midfielder seems to be well-equipped, with 4 capable if unspectacular footballers that include veteran De Rose, Luperini (both of whom have actually already left the club IRL), and the younger Broh and Damiani. I would prefer to add to this quartet with at least one more signing for depth. Pierozzi is the odd one out – he’s a young loanee who plays in the M(R) spot which I don’t plan to use. I might have to retrain him as an inside forward on the left, but most likely will just not play him altogether. Wingers Another area that likely needs bolstering, as 2 players were deemed surplus to requirements by me. Out of the 4 remaining, Fella emerges as the clear favourite for the LW spot, with Valente and both loanees Elia and Stoppa able to provide decent backup if needed. This, however, leaves the RW position completely empty so a foray in the transfer market for at least a right-winger is bound to happen. Getting 2 would be ideal, so I’ll probably have to move Valente on – not a huge fan of his physical attributes. Strikers Both of these are new signings, and Brunori actually looks like a capable false nine. Soleri, however, is perhaps too weak in certain areas to really be a good rotation option, so perhaps I’ll have to scout for another forward too – alternatively, Fella doesn’t look half-bad in that spot. Overall, the squad does look especially weak in the defensive department, and up front there’s not much quality. On second glance, a couple of players I listed for transfer appear to not be as bad as I first evaluated them – Marconi and Lancini both look OK as center-backs. I’ll have to make a decision in regards to them; Marconi’s price tag might be the reason I sell him in the end as we’re quite short on money at the moment and need to add at least 4 odd players to fill the squad. --- The coaching and scouting team at the club was way below the league standard, so I sacked all but one of them. To be truly competitive, we need to also have the backing of the staff, and said staff must be of quality, so I made a few moves. One major signing I want to try and pull off is Chelsea legend Gianfranco Zola. Despite not being philosophically aligned with me, he is one of the better coaches available for us who also doesn’t want a fortune. Our staffing budgets are tight, so a lot of wheeling and dealing had to be made. Finding the right Head of Youth Development was extremely hard, so in the end I settled for the newgen Jose Antonio Gomez who shares my tactical vision and also has a decent personality. Several former professional footballers were willing to join my team – Sami Hyypiä and Anders Svensson agreed to become coaches, while Tomasz Radzinski, Gerardo Torrado and the go-to scout to sign Vicente will hopefully strengthen the recruitment side of things. --- Finally, let’s talk tactics. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the formation I chose was the 4-3-3 DM, with Wing-backs providing support for attacking Inside Forwards, Ball-Playing Defenders spraying passes to the midfield trio and a False Nine who will drop deeper to either feed his wingers or carry the ball himself. All of this constitutes a tiki-taka-esque approach – I want my teams to play a free-flowing style of football with a lot of ball and a lot of passes, while being ruthless in attack. In two of my previous save attempts the tactic proved to be somewhat of a success in that regard – I saved a replay of one of the goals scored which shows the creativity and quality of passing, but of course it was Arsenal who obviously have much better players. The tactic also showed its worth in my failed Everton rebuild save, where I only played one friendly, but the players adapted well to this style anyway. It will be exponentially more challenging to force this Palermo side to play like that, so if my hand is forced, I’ll make the necessary adjustments so that my players can perhaps understand it better. I’m also open to criticisms and suggestions from all of you, so if you have any feedback in regards to the tactic, don’t hesitate to share it. --- Next step will obviously be to set up training for the pre-season and early league days, wait for the new staff to arrive and scout for much needed new recruits. I’ll also take a look at the youth squads in the meantime.

Ah, Palermo… Although not exactly a fallen “giant”, the rosanero had been a mainstay of Serie A in the previous 2 decades, with their run from 2004-05 to 2012-13 being the most seasons in a row they spent in the Italian top division. That same run saw them compete in the UEFA Cup and then Europa League on 5 different occasions, with no massive success however as they only ever made it out of the group stage once in the 2005-06 season, losing to Schalke in the Round of 16. For the majority of their existence Palermo bounced between Serie A and Serie B, with a few stints in Serie C back in the 80s and 90s. As far as major honours go, Palermo can only boast several Coppa Italia finals, with the most recent one being over a decade ago, as well as five Serie B titles. Those who follow football of course know, or at least heard of, the tragic story of Palermo by the end of 2010s – financial mismanagement, coupled with a plethora of different owners, saw the club excluded from the Italian second division, and then the professional leagues altogether, after the 2018-19 season, despite them finishing 3rd. Palermo finished the 2019-20 season as champions of Serie D and after two seasons in Serie C the club managed to get the desired promotion last season after enduring a lengthy play-off. The latest development in their story came in July of this year, when the club was announced to become part of the ever-growing City Football Group. Palermo’s successes in the 21st century are inseparable from its chairman at the time – Maurizio Zamparini, the eccentric and very trigger-happy businessman who oversaw a staggering amount of 41 managerial changes during his 15-year long tenure at the club. It was during his reign that Palermo unearthed the gems of Italian and international football such as Javier Pastore and Salvatore Sirigu; several 2006 WC winners like Andrea Barzagli, Fabio Grosso and Cristian Zaccardo; and, of course, the two young South American forwards Edinson Cavani and Paulo Dybala, who were brought to Europe thanks to Palermo’s recruitment team and went on to become some of the finest footballers of their generation; amongst numerous others. Zamparini initially stepped down as chairman in 2017 after selling his stake at the club, but was then brought back and ultimately called it quits almost 2 full years later, in November of 2018. Since then Palermo had begun their tumble down the leagues and the financial rabbit hole, but with the recent steady climb up the leagues and the acquisition by City Football Group, their horror story might be nearing its end. Palermo, situated on the island of Sicilia, play their home matches at the Stadio Renzo Barbera (also known as “La Favorita”) named as such after their former president under whom the club reached two of their three Coppa Italia finals in 1974 and 1979. With its capacity of 36,365, the stadium is the third biggest one in Serie B this season, losing out to Genoa’s Stadio Luigi Ferraris and Bari’s Stadio San Nicola (which, by the way, can hold almost 60 thousand people!). Palermo start off with Great Training and Youth Facilities, Good Junior Coaching and Adequate Youth Recruitment. Besides just being generally a great set of facilities for a non-top club, this also bodes well with one of the save goals I’ll be trying to achieve and adhere to as part of the challenge. I guess now is a good time to mention them. --- So, besides the two obvious objectives of “complete the challenge” and “have fun doing it”, I want to set a few more goals that I’d like to stick to for the duration of the save. These aren’t anything extraordinary, or anything that adds to the already difficult (for me) challenge, rather a few things that I’d like to practice and hopefully become better at: Take (actual) charge Oftentimes, and especially with the introduction of the new training module system, I struggled to understand and truly immerse myself in the training aspect of the game. Undeniably one of, if not the, most important parts of gameplay, training for me was always in the periphery, and I usually either delegated it to my assistant manager and youth coaches or simply downloaded someone else’s schedules. This time around, however, I’ll try to force myself into training, creating my own schedules, maintaining individual regimes and generally overlooking this side of Football Manager. It will obviously consume a fair amount of time trying to make sense of it all, but if I actually succeed at doing well here, it will carry over to my future FM adventures, thus making my saves even more engaging. Scout the world (and become good at it) While scouting was never really an area I had a lot of trouble with, it was also never really something I gave too much attention to. Yes I did manage to uncover some hidden gems in previous saves of mine, and yes I usually know how to identify a good player, but what I didn’t ever do was make my scouting network extensive and search for those bargain “moneyball”-type players. Stop savescumming This is likely an issue for many FM players out there, and I am no different. Ever since my first real save in FM 2017 I was savescumming, and I continued to do so for a long time, until probably FM 2021, despite me taking no pride in this action. Even though it looks like I finally overcame that addiction of mine, there are certain matches that make me want to relapse. With this save I’m hoping to eradicate this problem of mine once and for all. Develop your own youth Something I’ve seldom done in any of my previous saves (probably because many of them were very short in duration) is promoting homegrown talent from within the club’s youth system. Of course, unless you’re running a youth-only type save or managing a top club with a top academy, it’s typically a rare sight to have a lot of high-potential graduates brought up by your own head of youth development. Even in my best save – the one mentioned in the original post, Arsenal from FM 2018 – the route I took was signing great youth from other clubs, and the youngsters I did promote were real-life players (the likes of Nketiah and Nelson in that game grew to dizzying heights). With me moving to second division clubs in this save though, I’ll be looking to develop my own talent. Analyze Perhaps the one most challenging aspect of FM, and honestly overall, for me is the act of analysis. I never seem to grasp how to actually read certain in-game moments, and that goes hand-in-hand with my unwillingness to actually watch matches, not just key highlights and general match stats. It is unlikely that I will perfect this area during my Glory Hunting adventure, but making steps in the right direction will of course constitute great progress. One last thing to mention, which isn’t a save goal, is that I’m not going to be EXCLUSIVELY moving to second division clubs – if I get offered a job by a more prestigious club in the country I’m currently managing in, or have already won the domestic double at, I can take those offers. --- And with all of that said, I believe it’s finally time to actually start playing the game! The next post will contain the initial squad analysis, the backroom staff update (I confess, I’ve already made some moves in this regard) and the tactic “breakdown” (in quotation marks because really it will just be me going over basic observations I’ve made while running tests with it in some of my previous save attempts this year and explaining the general idea behind my plan).

Thanks for the kind words! I've been a massive fan of your Belenenses and Irchester saves. I have a tactic in mind - and in game actually - which I hope will bear fruit. As I've mentioned in the first post, I did have a few recent save attempts, which is when I came up with the formation and tactic. It yielded mixed results, but was overall interesting to watch, so I'm hoping it will translate well into this Palermo side. I will show the tactic in a later post, but basically it's a 4-3-3 DM that relies heavily on passing and retaining possession, with WBs, 2 IFs and a False Nine. I will likely enforce it at least in the early stages of my tenure at Palermo and look at the results and how/whether the players understand it. If it works, great. If it doesn't, I'll have to adapt.

Football Manager and I have a very on-and-off kind of relationship. I knew of the series way before I actually got into it, and I even had a Championship Manager on disc – granted, it was one made under Eidos after Sports Interactive went their own way. At that point in life I’m still in middle school, so the complexity of the game threw me off. Fast forward several years (about a decade really), and I’ve grown jaded from FIFA and PES either changing little to nothing, or focusing primarily on the online aspect which I didn’t grow fond of. It’s late Summer of 2017, and I rediscover Football Manager through a let’s play series on YouTube by pure accident. And it suddenly clicks – I need to buy this game. This is something that I find engaging, interesting. FM 2018 was basically around the corner then, and FM 2017 was on sale, so naturally, I bought it in hopes of sinking my teeth into it. Since then Football Manager has become the one annual franchise I was willing to spend money on, and pour all of my gaming self into. I’ve bought every single installment of the series besides 2021, which I somehow won in a giveaway anyway. But truth be told, I’ve still not gotten HOW to play these games. Yeah, I sank countless hours into each of them (although probably not even close to the amount some regulars here likely have), but despite the numerous saves and attempts there probably are just two that I honestly and thoroughly enjoyed – one in FM 18 where I took over Arsenal and made them a powerhouse, and one in FM 20 where I attempted the popular dafuge challenge and got Worthing to Championship before calling it quits. And the problem persists to this day – whenever I start a save, or want to start one, I often just abandon it, either due to poor choice of a team/playstyle, my inability to create a tactic, or general boredom. This year’s installment is the one I probably enjoyed the least purely because I just couldn’t get a save going, not a single one – I at least managed that minimum in older titles, even if sometimes they were short-lived, or not fully “completed”. Which is why I decided to create this thread – perhaps this will serve as motivation for my sticking to this save. So what’s this save about, then? I recently reinstalled the game after several months away from gaming in general because of a dissertation I had to write for my master’s degree and pondered over how should I come back. I’ve already abandoned a few ideas – a European journeyman and an Everton rebuild were ones in my mind before I settled on the current idea. This save is going to be an attempt at a different challenge, one popularized by DoctorBenjy on YouTube – the Glory Hunter. The basic premise is to: win the domestic double of the league and the cup in all top-5 European leagues (obviously doesn't have to happen in a single season); win both Champions League and Europa League; and win the two major international trophies – World Cup and Euros. There will be two major differences I’ll implement in my version however: DoctorBenjy self-imposed a time limit in his version of the challenge – complete it in 20 years. I won’t be adhering to this rule as I don’t want to make an already hard game for me even harder, plus I'd like to go far beyond the era of current players. There’s another reason for this too. As part of the challenge, whenever I have to change leagues after winning the domestic double, I’ll start from the second tier of each country’s footballing pyramid. So, Championship, Ligue 2, 2. Bundesliga, you get the gist. Naturally, the starting point of this save will be in the second tier as well. Before I go on to reveal the first team I’ll be taking charge of in this save, I’d first like to mention that I’m going to use the wonderful realism addons made by @Daveincid, and also the transfer updates which include promotions and relegations of the current real-life season. One other thing I want to say is that I’ve been lurking in this section of the forums for some time now, as I’ve always been fascinated by the way other people play the game and their saves. As such, I’d like to thank @13th Man, @_Ben_ and @Jimbokav1971 for being the main inspirations of this save. I’ll likely never reach the level of storytelling or meticulousness of either of them, but perhaps I’ll at least be able to make this journey as interesting to follow as they manage to do. With all of that unnecessary pathos out of the way, it’s time to finally get into the real deal. I’ve decided to start my journey in Italy, where I’d already once managed A.C. Cesena in an older FM title. It’s not the starting team this time around however, as with the promotions/relegations update, a clear favourite emerged for me...