CaptCanuck

NIORT: Season 2 Midway Point Not at the same clip as in Ligue 2 obviously, but Les Chamois's modest success continues, with a decidedly midtable 1st half of the season. Wins and losses are almost always better than draws, so so far so good. Reckon 12 pts from 51 is more than enough to see us through. A word about PSG though, I've never been in a league with an AI team dominating so completely. Mbappe has 27 goals in 17 matches, they have a single draw and otherwise as you can see from the goal difference, are thumping teams left and right, with 60GF and 4GA. Definitely keeps our longer terms expectations in check. The way France has season and year awards means we got 2 end of year awards for manager and player of the year in Ligue 2, along with 1 award for most promising player. Ligue 2 MOTY (with wrongly tallied stats) Ligue 2 POTY (with close to correct stats) 'Revelation' award (with wrongly tallied stats)

Good stuff! And ya looking at their manager history, both their managers in their relegation (22/23) season got the sack and are still unemployed, so I think that says something

NIORT: Season 2 Start (Summer Transfer Window & Opening Matches) Back from my IRL road trip and power outage from the bomb cyclone over, time to get going on Niort's second season: the far too early promotion to Ligue 1 campaign. Transfers When you're promoted well ahead of schedule, the roster is going to turn over and so it did, with 14 players in and 11 out. Fortunately we recouped a few million to keep our net spend around 3m and the wages still low: PSG obviously are waaaaaaay out in front on 322M and we bring up the rear, waaaaay behind on 5.18M - Wages: TBF we signed 5 guys that I reckon could still be major contributors to the side in 2 or 3 season's time, while many of the rest were the best we could do based on our budget and lack of club esteem Diakite, Ndiaye, Pembele and 'evergreen' at 25 Cutrone provide the youthful energy and all-rounder ability required of a promoted side, while free transfer Sergio Gil (last of Calahorra in Spanish Fed 1B) hast to provide the class and technical ability that is hard to come by for a lowly ranked club like Niort. One of the funny things from turning over a team so quickly, is your club hierarchy ends up being less of a pyramid and more of a plinth: Initial Results Expectations are to make the playoff spot, so 16 of 18. We'd take 15th right now for sure and will need one of those 4-2-0, 5-2-0 runs to collect half our points fast and hopefully scrap for the rest throughout what could be a slog of a season. 4 matches in and we're a respectable 7th, with an easy opening run and only 2 goals scored and 1 against. PSG are DESTROYING teams so far, winning 5-0 3 times and 7-0 once, eesh: When you add some many new players, eventually the supporters got tired of clapping for 10 (ten!) debutantes:

He looks really solid IMHO, especially at 22yrs old, based on the partially uncovered attributes I see being in Ligue 1. Way out of my price range (6.4M-8.6M valuation on 10.75k/pw) but certainly looks like a 5yrs and sell him on for a lot or keep for a decade type of player.

Lens have a lot of potential: good luck! They actually got relegated in my Season 1, but made 53M in sales from the Winter '23/Summer '23 windows, showing the actually quality there. Bright kit helps too... breaks up the sameness of seeing white, blue, or red all the time :-)

@Shakawkaw - good stuff there! Just back from hols and seeing lots of good progress while I was out! Running PSG that close so soon is impressive. Amazing they lost 5 matches Cool to see the goals spread around.

Cheers @karanhsingh! Ya the March update is really good, so I wanted to claw those 3+ season back in player dev and potential signings, speaking of which... Niort Season 1 (22/23) Complete: Redux Players The King is dead, long live the King! Bakayoko was definitely nerfed in the update, with the accel and composure reductions. He managed 3 goals in 16 Ligue 2 appearances (6 starts). Another guy, Godwin Bentl had a go (2 goals in 5 starts/16 subs) however, like in save 1, a saviour was found lurking on the second team. His name: Sidi Cisse and we go from the 6'4" 187lb Bakayoko to this chap at 5'7", 132lb soaking wet. Unfortunately he didn't play enough matches to get included in the best of teams or player of the year award, as he was the Ligue 2 top goal scorer and clear leader in ratings, shame really. The results: Cisses's modest attributes: Key Transfers Leo Petrot (ASSE): Again their garbage is our treasure. Solid left-sided CB who's decent enough to be a BPD and will lock down that left side for the next 5-7 seasons. Came in at 400K (200 now, 200 later) and was offset by the sale of Bilal Boutobba to Nimes for 650K Petrot's attributes: Even if we didn't get the best loanees in, it was great to see top clubs making loads of their players available. We got a GK and a DLP out of it in the Winter window and look forward to taking advantage of it fully in the coming Summer window. We unloaded some wages, making the team a bit weaker in the process, but all about setting up the future. Ligue 2 Player of the Year: We still did win this with our shadow striker Kevin Rocheteau who put up 9 goals and 8 assists in 30 matches before being lost for the season with a hip injury. Results It was a slow start as we figured out how the update ME would impact things. It seems spending more time on Positive than Balanced and dropping the DL one notch down more often than not, was what got things ticking again and the 1st half of the season had us in 6th. Then after a rough patch in February capped off with a loss to OM in the Cup QFs, FM's momentum and moral levers kicked in and we started climbing up the table. It found us in this quite absurd position (based on our preseason expectations, wage bill, and general squad ability) with 4 matches left: Fortunately for us, we had (on paper) the easiest run in, playing 2 properly poor teams and 2 mediocre ones, while the 3 of the 4 others had a much tougher run in: What followed was a truly mad scramble and what would have been one of the craziest final 15 minutes on the last day of the season in Ligue 2 history. At kickoff the Top 4 were: VAFC (74), Dijon (74), Niort (73), Le Havre (71) With 15 mins left the Top 4 were: Niort (76), VAFC (75), Le Havre (74), Dijon (74) With 8 mins left it was: Niort (74), VAFC (74), Le Havre (74),Dijon (74) After 90 mins +5 it was: Dijon (75), Niort (74), VAFC (74), Le Havre (72) LIMBS! Niort go up at the first try of asking! A 14 match unbeaten streak to end the season and some serious squeaky bum time and there we have it. This is waaay ahead of schedule (and really a testament to FM's snowballing momentum influence) we've got a squad nowhere near ready to Ligue 1. With only 12 first-teamers (maybe 7 of them decent enough for the step up) under contract after all the '23 contracts expire and only 8 under contract until '25 or '26, we'll sure need those better club loanees next season. On the plus side I get to catch my breath as I'm out of town for a week starting tomorrow, hopefully I'll remember what we need to do when I get back!

New post update save, 30 matches into 1st season and penalty percentage makes seems fine IMHO: Had a look at the 'Top 5' European leagues and they are all scoring them at a good clip

Oh sure, squad depth is important, but this is during France's 1 week winter break and as I pointed out it's a nonsense injury based on what was actually happening. Agree injuries are an important part of the game, but when there is no rhyme or reason to them vis-a-vis training it makes for a poorer simulation IMHO. In matches for sure, hard challenges, if you use get stuck in, playing Stoke type teams, etc... for sure, but the total randomness to them in training is stupid.

Seeing we have a match on Boxing Day, the least I can do is give the squad the 24th off and then a typically light prematch day: Ah yes of course, the weights session... in training the last 2 days... maybe eventually an FM version can finally line up training injuries to actual training instead of being wholly abitrary:

BVB and Ajax? Finished clubs mate, finished clubs. Take a real player to do anything with them

Some of the player attribute updates (based on starting a new Ligue 2 save with Niort, after getting 3.5 seasons in on the previous DB) IDK where they are coming from? How could it be so off the mark that you take a player with a 15+ Determination and switch them to 8 or less? (Wayne Caddy & Lesley Ugochukwu being 2 examples) Another example, Ryan Bakayoko going from 15 Composure to 8? These are just a couple players I wanted to check, so I don't know how widespread these massive swings are, but it's not particularly great.

IMHO I agree it's a little zippier. I play 2 notches up from the middle on Data Analyst view and everyone scoots around a bit quicker than before.

Noirt Season 1 22/23 (What? 1?! Yes. Back to the future!) I want the winter updates from the start of the save. Being able to actually loan in Ligue 1 reserve club players is a big deal for my club, seeing as we're only using domestic players (bar 2 wildcards) and limiting how big of cities they can come from. Instead of coming in 3.5 seasons in. So everything remains the same... except unfortunately Bakayoko. They nerfed his acceleration and composure to be single digits, so I think 100 goals in 106 matches is out, but maybe this now gives me a chance to loan someone else. We do have a very solid LWB (Quentin Bernard we didn't have before, so swings and roundabouts). Maybe we won't win Ligue 2 either, but as long as promotion can come by season 3 we'll be no worse off. Time will tell, on y va! ETA: that quality LWB you ask? Ofc. We're basically paying him 6k/pw to rehab and then get released, ugh.

Agree. They have to do some degree of calibration - they have all the data obviously - over and above any guidelines or you'd get player ratings all over the shop. It's an English-derived game and there is going to be some over arching bias, as long as they don't get too carried away it sorts itself out over time.

I feel this. The 'best' is having guys get injured for a month on a day with 'Match Tactics' and 'Match Preview'. Those highlighted how incredibly arbitrary training injuries were.

Season 4 Winter Break (25/26 Jan Window & Halfway Point) League Progress After that initial barnstorming 4-3 win against Sochaux, we embarked on an 8 match winless streak; however, the last of those winless matches (0-0 against Lille) started the recovery and in the 9 matches starting with Lille we've gone 4-2-3, beating clubs we could/should and getting thumped by those we shouldn't. We're not scoring much and my previous hope of 40 goals is now down to 35. We simply don't have the quality, technicals are too middling, mentals are OK, and physicals are just too slow against the top half teams. Our 2nd half schedule doesn't look the best, as there looks to be a 'big club' match every 2nd or 3rd match which is going to hurt going on those much needed runs. Right now we'd take 34 points, can we get to it playing out the matches, hopefully! Transfers How about that Winter window? Um... yeah. As an indicator of our quality, our 4th CB (who was making noise of not renewing) could only attract a single offer from National league Dunkirk. On the 'IN' front, frustratingly good Ligue 1 clubs don't loan out there good young players. They'd rather them rot on their 2nd teams. Can see why other lesser clubs go to Portugal for their loanees. We're a couple injuries away from having some serious depth issues, so hopefully we remain healthy, finish in 15th, and then someone comes in with some cash in the summer to try and push on some, otherwise we'll continue with YoYo squad quality and do our best.

Ya I've made a placeholder 'sliding doors' save where I can say yes, but for now... I delayed twice and went to the board trying to get facilities improvements thinking it would serve to encourage them to say yes to me, but no. If we go a few more seasons without a decent cash injection, I can come back to Nov '25 and pick up with Reims :-)

Gotta like the final match day title decider! First save I think we've seen with that much separation between the the promoted and playoff teams, normally a dogfight. Nice job @Ronaldo Beckham You can count on Vic Lobry to deliver was disappointing he lost most of a season with an ACL in my save, but left footed and with his abilities he works great as the left-side AMC. Looks like you've got loanees at WB... on the right-side might want to check our Brayann Pereira at Auxerre he's only 5'9", but is a good go-forward option with decent pace, mentals, and crossing. By the time he'd finally come to Niort I'd picked up Assingnon who's another good option, so didn't need him. One other guy worth a look is Thierno Balde, he's a 6'0" track star with OK technicals. Speaking of Auxerre, if you want depth at LWB, Kenji-Van Boto can likely be had cheap. He's my starter, but for ASSE he'd be an excellent squad player, part-time starter. A lefit-field option (who came to France on a free in '24 from Middlesborough) is Marc Bola, mid-20s, plays for DRC and another physical player, with mentals and technical. Might need to wait till the winter window, but he looks solid. The "tycoon" turned into only a consortium and then a consortium that didn't have enough money for the current owners to say yes and sell, so we'll keep hold of our pennies. But interestingly enough I got my 3rd job offer, after a couple nomark clubs this has come up! Keeps the countryside theme - being the heart of the Champagne growing region - and gives me my ready made consortium as they still have the same ownership group led by Jean-Pierre Caillot as IRL. Decisions decisions!

Season 4 Start (Summer Transfer Window & Opening Matches) Transfers So Ligue 1 it is. And after feeding off scraps when it comes to transfer budget and wages, we've got an incredible mouthwatering 3.9M transfer kitty and 125K/pw wage budget! I don't even know where to start with that, well besides the promotion wage increase clauses taking a sizeable bit, but so be it. We added 7 players and got rid of 6 to keep our net spend below our initial kitty, which enabled us to bump up the wages a bit to afford everyone: We added a new AF, RWB, DM, AM who we expect to contribute a lot, plus a proper backup GK and depth in MF, along with converting a loanee CB who should start as often as not. We sold our first 1M Euro player in Lobry, the ACL-repaired MF, and got 800k each for 2 want-away players who felt they deserved more money then we were paying, so it was so long to our backup striker Kitala who is back to Ligue 2 with Dijon and don't let the door hit you on the way out Abdelli who started 29 matches at DM in our promotion season. 3 cast offs rounded things out. Signings Evann Guessand 1.7M Surely the Bakayoko magic has to wear off in Ligue 1? Because of that we acted fast when Nice listed Evann and met their valuation, if not all at once with 950K now, 950K later. Effectively we paid for him with Lobry & Kitala. Now will it be worth it? As long as 1 of them scores, we'll be happy. Mohamed Kaba 2.3M This was a lot of money and hopefully it's worth it. Kaba was bought by Montpellier 2 seasons ago and played 58 matches for them, so we'll see. He is more of an all-rounder than a pure DLP or RPM, so Maziz our converted AM will stay as the DM-level playmaker. What Kaba's signing enables us to do is move Nuno to RCB Lorenz Assignon 1M Chased this guy on loan for 2 seasons to be priced out 1 year and rebuffed the other. Now he is delighted to be joining Niort... funny how that works out. We did just sign a marauding WB in Jan, but 2 is more than 1, which means this is now better. Florent Da Silva 180K Maybe a bit of a lightweight, but for the price we couldn't pass up this promising young player. In the quintuple of player passing attributes (1st touch, passing, technique, vision, decisions) he has 14 in 4 of them, to go with 11 on the last one, so operating as the left-side AM we hope to see some nice through balls. Opening Matches Our Ligue 1 media prediction spot is dead last at 600-1 and the board's expectations are to finish 16th and get into the relegation playoffs. When you look at our wage budget compared to the other bottom clubs you can see why. That said we did take our per weekly wages from the low 80Ks in Ligue 2, to almost 150K in Ligue 1. Thankfully the opening match of the season saw us against Sochaux, who finished 13th last season. It was definitely a 'football, bloody hell' match, as the cursing turned to cheers quickly enough and we headed straight onto the bus and out of town with the 3pts. Since then the other 3 matches have been rear-guard actions. At the close of the Summer transfer window we sit in 14th with a 1-1-2 record; however, after scoring 4 in our first match we've scored 1 in the next 3 matches and if we can hit 40 goals by the end of the season I'd be thrilled. Would say the only way to go is up, but unfortunately that is not the case and we absolutely must collect points against the previous 2 seasons promoted sides (ASSE, Lorient, Sochaux, Clermont) and hope to nick a few others along the way to get to 34pts. One thing that could help that (but maybe take some of the shine off the save) is some sugar daddies sniffing around. Niort being Niort it wouldn't take much to relatively qualify as a tycoon, so we will see how this plays out. Monaco is up next, hopefully we keep them under 5 goals and then it's Clermont. We'll check back in at the winter window and see how things are going.

^No worries, easily enough googleable and findable. Thanks :-)

With the 6 Nations on, Toulouse is a timely club to drop into! BTW I meant to ask while you're still here what skin and badges are you using? I normally cannot be arsed, but yours are nice and subtle, a definite improvement without being OTT. Thanks!

Wholly crap! That is a quick trigger - thank goodness Niort had patience with me or I wouldn't have made it out of Nov in season 1. That's lame, I was looking forward to seeing how N'Dour does in Ligue 1, with a human manager. Gratitude eh? You're going to become the promotion specialist. What's "lift operator" in French?

Now the "fun" starts! Did you notice any increase in player values once promoted? I was not sure whether to wait until the season flips - and some wages increase - if I need to sell anyone or if that is already baked in once promotion is sealed.

Niort Season 3 (24/25) Finish With 4 matches to go this had a very very similar feeling to last season, with the only difference being we'd need too many teams to not drop anymore points to be knocked out of the top 5, but can we hold onto an automatic spot and not need to win 2 or 3 extra matches? Quelle surprise! With 1 match remaining we did it: with a very satisfying display against Bordeaux, which also eliminated them from the playoff rounds. 3 seasons ago we started with a 16 match winless streak and we end our promotion season with an 18 match unbeaten run. Not bad for a team predicted to finish 15th. And of course the report has to bring up the almost sacking per usual, lol, I reckon that line will always be in there, like losing to some obscure team in a cup match a decade ago: The boards response, sums things up nicely, with their 'complete surprise': The Bakayoko show continued, as he captures all the awards and golden boot again and reaches 100 career league goals. There's no way he can continue this in Ligue 1, so whether we can pry NDoure away from Chatearoux or find someone else, we'll have to see. Along with him, our left AM Chambost set assist records, but otherwise our run and gun wing play counter morphed into more of a standard build up attack without any tactic changes, as teams played more cautious against us. Maybe mixing it up with the big boys will bring the counter back. Niort's Best XI 24/25 Niort's u19s Funnily enough, we did the wider club double as our u19s won their league: We had consortium takeover rumours in March, but nothing since. Was hoping that was FM realising we cannot take our 3.7M wage budget to Ligue 1 and have much of a chance, although I guess the automatic promotion clauses will shoot us above that anyways. Well here's to next season in Ligue 1! And to finish the season off nicely, capturing the manager of the season, which sure should happen, finishing 14 places above the expected finish