turnip

Weird new skin for CM 97/98

The scouts just give your their impression - it's ultimately your decision about signing a player (unless you're playing a DoF challenge, which it doesn't sound like you are). You should also be checking their attributes before making a decision. With young players, I try to use the logic of "how much better would this player look with +1/+2/+3 in each of his key attributes?" when a scout comes back with a glowing report. This then helps me work out how much money to spend on them. If they only need +1 to look like a much better player, they're a fairly high priority and I'll consider spending a reasonable amount to sign them. If they need +2 to look like a much better player, they're a lower priority and I'm unlikely to spend much to sign them. And if they need +3, I'm basically only going to sign them if they're dirt cheap and have a good personality. With older (22/23) players, it's a bit harder. As you say, scouts seem to find these players' Potential harder to unpick. So really, it's only worth signing these players if you think they can contribute to your team even if they don't improve.

Yeah, my routine of shouts usually goes: "Focus" Followed a few seconds later by "Oh for [goodness] sake you morons"

Austria has squad registration, but there aren't really any rules on who you register (other than for Europe, of course). Bulgaria allows no more than 5 non-EU players in a match squad, which leaves plenty of wiggle room. Hungary seems very chill about who you put in your 25-man squad. Poland likewise, but you do need 1 Polish under-22 player in your match squad (and two for Cup games).

You hate to see it lol

Just set your GK to take Direct Free Kicks. That'll get the numbers going in the right direction.

Eh, I saw a team in an inactive (English) league who had 16 goalkeepers in their Senior Squad. Plus a couple in the U-18s.

Chininha is pretty good for me. He plays RPM from DM.

Scouts are only as good as you let them be or make them. A Scout will go and check out a player. How a Scout views that player will depend on the Scout's JPA/JCA, the player's CA/PA, the player's form and the player's Reputation. It's very possible for an otherwise excellent Scout to misjudge a high PA player because he's got terrible Reputation or is playing poorly (or simply playing for a team that loses a lot). Still, the Scout will come back to you and give a judgement. I would always advise that you check out a player's attributes before deciding whether to shortlist or ignore the player. As has been proven hundreds of times on these forums, it's quite possible to massively overachieve according to your team's CA if you have the right kind of players. I've had a 4th-tier-quality DC get a 7.2 average rating in the top tier because we were set up to get the most out of him. I had a fairly mediocre goalkeeper perform like he was playing a different sport . Honestly, I'd treat your scouts like a somewhat clueless relative: they message you telling about music/games/TikTokers they've heard are really good. Sometimes the message is "Have you heard of Coldplay?" and you think 'I mean, yeah the Safety EP was good, but it was all downhill after 'Shiver'; and sometimes you get a message about Nærvær and you've made a bid before you even realise it.

The other other alternative is signing players who you think you can flip for a decent profit after 6-12 months. It's riskier, but if improving your club's finances is a priority, it can often be worth signing someone on high wages if you think he'll play well enough that a club will be willing to pay 2-3 times what you've paid him in wages. You get the money, and hopefully some good performances from him in the meantime.

The value of a sell-on clause isn't in how much he is sold for, it's in how much he's worth after a year at his new club. If he makes a jump from a 'who are they?' club to a Premier League club, it's almost always worth cashing in after a year. Unless he was already at his PA, he'll have made some progress after a year at a better club, and his new employers will think he's got good value. Yeah, you could hold out for him to make a big money move, but unless he's good enough to get first-team football at his new club, it seems like you're almost always better off selling that clause at the first possible opportunity.

Yes, the World Class Goalkeeper hasn't lived up to his promise, at 23 years old.

In my Belenenses save, I've taken my GK off penalties because he's been absolute crap from them for the last 18 months or so. He's still on free-kicks, though, which is sometimes a very good thing.

Off-Season When we sold Gonçalo Galvão for £4m up front a season and a half ago, our board went totally librarian poo at me. I'd like to think my manager got a sulkily-apologetic text from the board members when this payment hit the bank. £25m for a player with 6 months left on his contract. Who's your daddy, you gormless chimps? Liverpool, meanwhile, have made a couple of uninspiring bids for Fernando Santos. Bid more; I know you have the money. World Cup 2030 Nothing interesting happened. Definitely not in the second round, anyway.

No, that's the system working as intended. The game is saying, "Hey, these are the best players at your club in these positions." Then your scouts go away and find some better players and gives them good star ratings. You sign these players, and your coaches now tell you "Hey, those other guys you had before aren't very good anymore. But these new guys are the best players at your club in these positions." If you keep signing players with 4*-5*, your team will keep improving. Having your players be compared to others in the league just leaves too little room for variation. If you're managing in, say, Portugal and you get promoted to the top league, all of a sudden your players would be getting compared to the best players at Porto or Benfica and what's the point of that, because you haven't got a hope of signing anyone remotely close to that level of ability for probably a few seasons - they'll get 5* ratings and everyone else except a couple of other teams (maybe Sporting and Braga) is going to get 2*-3* because that's the gulf in quality. How does that help you? Now you'd just be annoyed that your scouts aren't finding any 5* players (because they wouldn't want to join). The system more or less works at the moment, it's just too opaque.

Season 9: Liga Portugal Bwin; end of season We had a good end to the season. Injuries did start to bite as the season drew to a close, but we were able to eke out some good enough performances to stay ahead of Benfica. Our fixtures helped - the matches against Benfica, Porto and Sporting were all at Home (although we lost to Sporting in the 97th paid-for minute), while the tricky fixture Away to Braga ended in a less-comfortable-than-it-seems 0-3 to us. In the Cups, Casa Pia took our first team to penalties only for us to lose to Braga in the semi-final of the Taça de Portugal, while the second-string team ground out a mostly deserved 1-0 over Benfica in the Beer Cup to send us head-first into a 1-2 defeat at the hands of Porto. In Europe, Bayern were just too good for us. I could have prioritised and sent the first team, but I'm not sure they'd have done much better. We needed a point from our last two games to wrap up the title. Our last ever match at Estádio do Restelo saw us draw 2-2 against a Famalicão team who might have pushed for 3rd if they hadn't had to sell their Spanish wonderkid striker in January. We then slept our way to a 0-0 on the final day against Estrela. There was final-day drama, though, as Portimonense got a highly-suspect 4-2 win over Benfica to stay up on Goal Difference; Benfica's Goalkeeper of the Year contender Kovac shipping 4 goals for a mighty 5.8 rating. Performances this season were good again. Manuel Reuter got the league Top Goalscorer award (with 18; 22 in all comps) by virtue of playing fewer minutes than Benfica's main man. Renato Alves bagged 16 and Nelson Gomes finished a very productive first season as a first-team player with 11 goals in 27(16) appearances. But Rodrigo Prata had another storming season, with 11 goals and 16 assists - his Career Stats look pretty great these days. Sidnei Chana was our player with the highest Average Rating across the season, which as any ful no, is the real marker of quality. Our Second XI is actually coming along very nicely in terms of quality. I think they might be ready to start playing league games so we can take the Champions League a bit more seriously. We did have to give a couple of games to one of our young keepers after Tobi got injured, and Veiga did okay. As ever, Fernando Santos has clubs after him. He's off to the World Cup with Portugal, having not yet been capped by them, after another good season. Even with the wage bill exploding a bit this season, we've still got plenty of cash in the bank, so he won't be leaving for less than £30m if I have anything to say about it. Carlos Baldé is also going to the World Cup (with Guinea-Bissau) and is also wanted by other teams; he'd set them back much less than £30m, but I'm still not sure I'd sell him. Club Captain Rafael Tavares, meanwhile, has just finished a full season at DR (which he spent the first half of the season learning) and had his best season with us yet (going by Average Rating, at least) which makes me genuinely happy, because he's not very talented and if he was playing poorly, I might have started looking at moving him on. But he can stay and keep adding to his 296 Career Appearances. Lovely.

Season 9: Liga Portugal Bwin Youth Intake Well, that looks promising, doesn't it? Boubacar is the right-back I wanted. Had I realised the game was listening, I'd have specified that he should have decent Pace, but eh, I'm hardly in a position to turn down someone who looks like a genuine long-term prospect. Xavier has the flexibility to play in a bunch of positions and could probably do a decent job in any of them. I'm training him as a DR for now, since I think there's scope for him to be a viable utility player if we can plug some of the holes in his game. Ussumane looks like a possible marauding CM in the future, if his PA stars are to be believed. His Mentals are a bit hit-and-miss, but I like what I see. Mário is my pick from the intake, though. I like a CM who can tackle and is happy to sit back and ping the ball around. Don't get me wrong - he's not there yet, but if the PA holds and I get the training choices right, he could be a reliable long-term DLP. Interestingly, I signed everyone from the intake. Which is extremely unusual for me. This meant I got the 'Scholars' news item a little earlier than I was expecting. This showed me something interesting: Two players have been upgraded into the 'Elite Talents' part of the list. Wen Bolun is probably never going to be very good. His Mentals are very poor, over all, and I think the 'Either' footedness is doing some heavy lifting on the CA/PA estimates. I'm prepared to be wrong, though. Celso, meanwhile, caught my eye when I looked through the intake and is probably the best of the bunch right now. I'm going to train him as a Mezzala and see what happens.

Getting two potentially world-class players in one intake is pretty awesome. I do find that, even with very good staff, you sometimes need to have youth players around the squad for a few months for the ratings to settle down. Which makes sense - other than your HOYD, none of the other staff you can get reports from actually know these players until they rock up in the intake, so the best they can do is give a snap judgement (which is why the ratings often reflect CA rather than PA). Once the players have done a few months of training, it makes sense that the coaching staff would provide more accurate estimates. I would get rid of that odd PPM from Bartlett, though. A player who'll probably get to 17/17 Pace/Acceleration and beats the offside trap is gonna have to do a sudoku puzzle while he waits for his teammates to catch up with him if his preference is to pass to them.

Season 9: Liga Portugal Bwin - August to December No major outgoings this season. I probably should have reduced the size of the squad more, but there wasn't much interest (at least for our younger, backup-of-backup players) and I couldn't be bothered trying to drum any up. Fernando Santos had another go at pushing for a transfer but, as with the previous turnings of this particular wheel, nothing an AI club bid was quite in line with what I wanted. In the end, he stayed and then his interest in a move away cooled to the point I could give him a new contract. Santos wasn't the only player making their accountant happy, with Renato Alves, Frejus Yaovi and Sidnei Chana all getting hefty new deals. Oh, so did Tobi (£23k p/w) but I didn't screenshot that. It's nice to be at the point where MFRCs are rarely a point of discussion in contract negotiations. Alex Baidoo-Addae, the potentially talented AMC with a steaming turd of a personality, had been aiming to extend his streak of being the worst player in training, when he missed training (I mean, I guess you can't be the worst in training if you're not in training). I promptly transfer-listed him and sent him to the B team where we don't have any other players. He's barely improved at all. Hearts of Oak came in for him, and he compounded his streak of **** decisions by turning them down. If we can't sell him, I'm terminating his contract. What an arse. Porto had a bad start to the season and haven't been able to catch up with us or Benfica. Our second-string line-up finished second in our CL group (behind Inter, but in front of RB Salzburg and Sociedad). December was pretty brutal, with 9 games in all competitions, and we've got another 7 fixtures in January. I don't fancy our chances against Benfica in the Beer Cup, but we should get past Casa Pia in the Taça de Portugal. Then it should be a straight shoot-out between us and Benfica for the league; they might lose a couple of players in the window (here's hoping). Our own performances have been good, if not exceptional. The wide boy double-team of Prata and Alves is still bonkers in terms of how much they create. Tobi is doing fine between the sticks and has 8 goals of his own so far. Meanwhile, Reuter has continued to be good up front, and even if he's less prolific than last season, his overall numbers for the year were good enough to get the European Golden Boy award: The Youth Intake preview came around as well, and looks promising: Please be a right back, please be a right back. And I got a new contract Which is nice. A decent pay raise over the last one, too.

I don't necessarily see that as an issue. The club has identified the player as an 'okay' option - would add something to the team, but not worth spending a huge amount to sign. My experience is that lowball bidding tends to happen if the bidding club doesn't have great information about the player - they don't really know how much it's going to take to sign the player, so they're putting in a bid that's at the lowest edge of the 'Transfer Value' range. Possibly they haven't fully scouted the player (AI teams often bid before they've fully scouted) or the player's agent hasn't given them a reasonable idea of what they should bid. Maybe the bid gets accepted, or maybe it's enough to unsettle the player and force the asking price down a bit. It's annoying, but it's not unreasonable for a club to try it. If the bidding club had identified the player as a high priority, they'd be a lot more persistent with trying to sign him. Or if it's late in the transfer window and their other targets have already moved elsewhere. You can often get ridiculous sums for fairly average players if a rich AI club has them as a high priority and there's not much time left before deadline day.

My top tip is that winning isn't always easy. Sometimes, dragging your squad of talentless hobos across the line to avoid relegation on the last day of the season is an achievement worth more than a Champions League tie. Enjoy whatever successes you can squeeze out of your team.

Yeah, really the big issue is that FM doesn't draw your attention more to this. I had my star striker missing for the Champions League final because Trinidad & Tobago had a friendly against Grenada and I overlooked the notification about it.

The months between updates can mostly be explained by my just wanting something different from Youth-Only. Also, my mildly escalating panic over the future-minus-Augusto-Manuel. Season 8: Liga Portugal Bwin No-one of any importance left in the summer; we de-wormed a bit and sent some more players out on loan. As the Autumn dragged on, I decided that making whatever money we could make from Augusto Manuel and Goncalo Galvao was the most fiscally responsible action. When they actually left in January, the board were immediately seized with a fit of apoplexy. I can kind of see their point on the flogging of Galvao for £4m + 40% of next sale, but the kid's now worth £47m-£74m and at Stuttgart, who aren't nearly good enough to keep hold of him if he continues to improve, so that feels like a transfer that will come through for us. Augusto Manuel for £20m to Bayern is probably worse business in the long-term, but I still reckon that getting £20m for someone who was due to leave for free at the end of the season is reasonable business at least. Rafael Cruz was the other January departure. After 2 seasons of suffering through his execrable performances and utter lack of development as a DR, Marseille came in for him. I'd have taken much less than the £2.1m-£3.5m + 50% ONS we fleeced them for. Competitions We snuck through a Champions League group with Inter, RB Leipzig and FC Kobenhavn, with our backups playing remarkably well at times to ensure we finished second. Liverpool were a tougher proposition. Benfica beat us on penalties in the Beer Cup (we totally blew in the match); but despite the backups getting most of the game time, we made the Final of the Taça de Portugal and then comfortably beat Porto therein. Meanwhile, we just sort of walked the League. Porto were good for 95% of the season, but their manager ****ed off to join Inter at Christmas and the team dropped 7 points in December. Benfica actually rallied pretty well - they were lower-mid-table up until October. This was definitely one of those seasons we aquaplaned our way through. Marcel Reuter started the season well, having had a pretty underwhelming season on loan in the third tier last year. By the time Augusto Manuel left for Germany, I was at least mildly optimistic that Marcel would be able to step up to the task, and he did in style: 29(8) appearances; 27 goals. As with previous seasons, our AMR and AML (Alves and Prata) also chipped in with a bunch of goals/assists. Tobi had a good season as our primary goalkeeper, bagging 14 goals (and missing a few penalties as well). He was also called up to the full Brazil squad for the first time. Fernando Santos is now our best player and had another very good season - he's improved (if Average Rating is any sort of guide of that) every season he's been in the squad. I did also manage to give a few youngsters some game time - mostly in the cups, mind you, but no-one was completely useless. Off-Field Events Youth Intake A good preview and another very good intake. Jaime Rolo was the only one we didn't sign. A few of them got bumped up a little in the old PA star ratings once they'd put pen to paper on contracts. Gilles Skrijelj took a fair amount of negotiating to get a decent contract agreed. The complete lack of strikers was... odd. Not a problem at the moment, but it could have been. Leandro is promising in the sense that he has reasonable attributes. I'm not thrilled about the 10 Tackling, since that's always a pain to improve. Gilles Skrijelj, along with having a name that's very tricky to type and being quite greedy (£1.7k p/w! Sheesh) is probably not as good as he initially looks. Pace & Acceleration get you a lot of CA, but eh, he's fine. Marcos Veiga is another nice GK to have knocking around the club, now that Galvao has gone. A nice basis of attributes to start from (plus, Free Kick Taking of 9 is always tasty). Renato Gomes is the pick of the bunch, though. It's nice to have someone who could be an option if Fernando Santos leaves, but we should probably find something for him to do in the event we keep Santos around. He looks like someone we could turn into a pretty good Roaming Playmaker if his PA holds up. Next Season The challenge will be to see if our 2nd XI is strong enough to let us send the big guns to Europe and still be competitive in the league. I've also got a bunch of contracts to re-up in the summer, and a few big teams will come in for Fernando Santos, so I'll probably end up pissing off a few players.

I laughed pretty hard when I saw how the Champions League final ended.