turnip

Šeašon 13: Dinamo, Croatian First League July - August (and a bit of September) Transfers The outs first. Samir Ashraf was never going to stay as soon as 6 Premier League teams got wind of him; Palace were the first to make a move - in addition to the fee, we've got 40% of next sale. Pisciotti was going to play a less important role this season, so a healthy profit sale to Southampton was useful - again, 40% of next sale is ours. Jaime Silvestre was going into the last season of his contract and I didn't really want to renew, so it made sense to cash in. Husic - annoyingly - had a £3m release clause to foreign clubs, which I only became aware of when Stoke activated it; he's always been antsy about playing time, so I couldn't get him to renew. Everyone else who left was basically shoved out the door by me. We had a Dutch forward on high wages, who missed a lot of last season with a serious injury, saw his attributes take a nosedive and still felt the need to whine about not playing; after an entire window of trying to get rid of him, he agreed to mutually terminate his contract. Good riddance. Our most expensive signings of the window were made to bring back to players sold by one of my predecessors. Regetas and Karacic are both Home Grown, and both more than capable of doing a job in Europe. We had to pay a lot to get Karacic, but my scouts and coaches think he's got room to grow, and frankly I'm going to need all the good Home Grown players I can get for the next couple of seasons. Doumbia was one of two young attackers we picked up from ASEC (they joined before St Bosman's Day). Annoyingly, we had to promise to play him as an Advanced Forward, when his flexibility is one of his strengths. Ah well. Meanwhile, Vujosevic is our backup DR who can slot in at DM. The other chunky signing was Grigoryan, from Zenit - a useful left-sided winger who's yet to have a good game, but I'm sure his parents are very proud anyway. Meanwhile, having decided to go kind of all-in on Set Pieces this season, it made sense to revisit a player I'd identified but been unable to sign while at Reggiana - Akaki Nozadze - who an uncharitable person might describe as 'limited', but I like to describe as having a unique skillset. Fixtures We've gone a bit ham with our new formation for this season - a good old-fashioned 4-2-4 - and although we don't play it in every match, you can probably work out the ones where we have. The ongoing love affair the AI has with the 4-2-3-1 (DM) formation I despise so much means that our 4-1-3-2 still gets used plenty, mind you. The CL qualifiers could have been worse, although the first leg against Odd had me a little worried - their DR scything down our AML from behind 12 minutes into the second leg made it a lot more comfortable than it could have been. We've avoided any banana peels so far this season in the league, and a point in Split (against a Hajduk team who lost in the Conference League against a Dinamo freaking Brest (thanks for the coefficient help, assholes)) was fine by me. We've got a reasonable draw in the Champions League, too. I reckon there are 4 winnable games there for us. That said, I can see our backups getting a proper hammering in matchdays 2-5. The bookies have us at 10,000-1. Miscellany Last season, I made 3 separate requests to improve Junior Coaching, only to be met with a "nah, bro, it's fine" on each occasion from the morons on the board. So you can probably imagine my surprise when the end-of-season suggestion these dimwits came up with (you know, the one that's usually all "Hey, how about we increase the possible wages for Loan Managers, bro?") was to... improve Junior Coaching. Personally, I'd argue that my performance is better than a B, but when dealing with idiots... 'What a great idea, guys, you clever you all are.'

It's absolutely your right to put minimal effort into a complaint post, but if you do, you shouldn't expect more of an effort from SI into 'fixing' the thing you're complaining about.

I wouldn't say it's impossible to get an attribute from 5-15, but it would be very hard and almost pointless. It's only likely to happen with a Physical attribute, and realistically only if you started focussing on it the moment the player came through your Youth Academy. As to why it's pointless, Physical attributes take so much Current Ability to improve that going from 5-15 would use up most of the Potential Ability of any player you achieved it with. So the Technical attributes would barely improve at all over the same time period. Meaning you'd end up with a competent athlete with minimal footballing ability. If a player has the right attributes (hidden and visible) you can get someone from, say, an 8 in Pace or Jumping Reach to a 12 or 13 without too much trouble. (Although they'll often spend the entire time whining about it.) And that's kind of what I use it for - trying to iron out flaws in a player's skillset.

We got him! That's quite a lot of money, but that's quite a lot of Target Man. Make The Most of Set Pieces, sayeth the board; thus do I deliver.

Šeašon 12: Dinamo, Croatian First League February - May There was a definite drop-off in performances in the second half of the season. I try to be quite proactive when dealing with formations that cause us problems, but we don't yet have the personnel to be able to do that. So we had to use the "press all the buttons" strategy a few times to get results. It didn't work against Lokomotiva in Feb or Istra 1961 in April, though - we were pretty awful in both matches. The latter match was excused by us having sealed the title with the (also not very impressive) win over Slaven Belupo on 23rd April and the "why am I bothering again?" attitude less professional players learn at that point. In the Cup, we beat a not-good Jarun team to face second-tier Kustosija in the Final. The first leg was a procession, the second a snorefest. Our European dream (sniff) was ended by BMG, who deserved to beat us over two legs and equally deserved to go on and beat Porto (hah) in the Final. Hajduk helped the Croatian coefficient by also reaching the QFs. I was pleased to see Istra finishing 2nd. They were genuinely the only team who caused us significant trouble in the league and played consistently well the whole season. Sadly, I think a European campaign will doom them next season, but hopefully they can use the money well. Youth Intake A pretty good intake. Kind of de rigeur with Dinamo, mind you. 2-3 very promising players, a few others who could be good and a bit of ***** to round it out. Squad & Performances Some really strong performances from the squad, as you'd probably expect. No surprise to me that Piscotti got as many goal contributions as he did while not playing as well as Silvestre or Arsene - he's quite inconsistent, and particularly towards the end of the season, he just disappeared in games. Silvestre is a funny player. I had him early on at Lusitania, but sold him for being a diva when we were in the second division. Even then, he was a good player, but never really made use of his great Long Shots. This season, though, the combination of his attributes and his Gets Forward Whenever Possible trait made him an absolute powerhouse. Casian Arsene was signed for £2.5m at the start of the season to provide cover for Piscotti, but played too well to be dropped. He's mostly played as an Inside Forward, where he can crush defenders on the back post for headers. We're training him as a Target Forward, though. I will have my new Mor Talla Traore Sorry, I got distracted when I found out that Mor Talla Traore - coming to the end of his £135k p/w contract at Everton - would be willing to move to us for £44.5k p/w (plus about a billion extras). He still loves me. We'll see if he loves me more than money, mind. I still want Casian Arsene as well. Casian and Mor, sitting in a tree, p-u-l-v-e-r-i-s-i-n-g defenders. With our other players, I'm probably going to sell Stanciu - he played well, but his CA and PA have apparently now met, thus spelling his doom. I suspect I'll get bids for William (DR), Ashraf (DL), Busta (MC) and Koscak (MC), and I'm only convinced I could hang on to Koscak of that group (although the club's financial position is decent). I wouldn't be surprised if someone came in for a few of the others, but there's been limited interest so far. Ah well, the shortlist is well-stocked again. And signing new players is half the fun for me, anyway.

I'm glad when I see the little notification pop up, since it means I can ALT-TAB away for 15-20 few seconds while the tedious nonimation of players standing around picking their noses plays out, then the replay of the goal, then the replay of the goal again but this time with the lines drawn on the pitch

Players who are actually good as a Libero are hard to find - the AI doesn't seem to develop them often (if at all) so it seems to rely on a player getting generated with the right kind of attribute spread - but the first few times you see yours arriving late in the box from open play it's borderline magical. I had it pointed out to me that they need to have good Decisions to really work as a Libero (which makes sense), so it's good that Antonazi already has 11.

Šeašon 12: Dinamo, Croatian First League January/February transfer window The loss of Smoljo was annoying. I hadn't noticed he had a MFRC, which would normally be fine, except that he'd asked for more playing time and the Promise hadn't completed, so I couldn't discuss a new contract with him. Which was more than a little Dordic had been our rotation DR and really wanted to leave when Genk repeatedly came in with crap offers. I finally relented, if only because I don't think he'll ever be great. Iacomoni had been our rotation DL, but with our new signings, he was no longer needed. Stensland and Molnar, meanwhile, had never been needed. I agreed the deals for these two back in the summer, and I think they're both great! Vega's role will probably vary depending on what we need him for - he's more than useful in central midfield as well as out left. Melendez is a more straightforward DL but could play at DM, too, if needed. If they have much potential to grow into, they could both be fantastic players. Vanja Munic is an AML who'll join us at the end of the season, and Odair Jose is our new rotational DR: he's had two full seasons in the Brazilian First Division (albeit without playing really well) but he only wanted Breakthrough Prospect, which suits me just fine. Fixtures Three easy matches and a game against bottom-of-the-league Slaven Belupo. I jest. Kind of. The game against Sibenik wasn't all that easy.

Šeašon 12: Dinamo, Croatian First League September - December A good start first half of the season. We're 2nd in the league, behind Istra 1961 on results between teams. We were completely outplayed in our match against them, so it's not surprising to see them top of the pile. In Europe, I was surprised at quite how bad Aris were - I certainly wasn't expecting them to finish bottom of the whole league stage. The biggest surprise, though, is how that Tobyl knocked out FC Kobenhavn in the qualifiers - they were very bad indeed. We've had a few injuries that have required rotating around, but there was already a decent amount of depth at the club and the signings to date have only strengthened that. I am glad the transfer window is imminent, mind you we've identified a bunch of players who can improve the squad and we still have a healthy transfer budget. I had nothing to do with this, and the only upgrade I asked for (Junior Coaching) got rejected. Hmph. This, however, is just hysterical:

I'm getting a headache just thinking about trying to watch the highlights on TV

Could it be that the new players impact Team Cohesion? It's why my players always seem to play worse towards the end of transfer windows and shortly afterwards - when the players I wouldn't let leave are kicking up a stink

Šeašon 12: Dinamo, Croatian First League Dinamo had finished last season in 3rd, 14 points behind Rijeka. I'm not sure how you achieve something like that, but I'm sure appointing some random goober to be your Head Coach probably helps. The squad wasn't bad, but overstuffed with a bunch of meh, and not nearly enough young players with good potential - only 10 or so, which is disgraceful for Dinamo. In fact, looking through the players we have clauses pending for, it seems like the club sold off good youngsters fairly cheaply because they had old farts playing in those positions. Cool cool cool. Transfers Galarreta was a good DC who couldn't jump. Bye, loser! Severdija probably would have scored or assisted a bunch, but he wouldn't have improved, so he went. Schnellrieder played pretty well before we flogged him, but Old+High_Wages=SELL. Sanchez was the previous backup DR (after the AI sold Baltic), but was poop, so off he went; Merlin's magic trick was great Natural Fitness but his actual footballing skills suck, and Cirjak was an old GK who was just cluttering up the premises. There are also a couple of loans with potential future offers. The sale of Mustafaraj to Juventus was pretty weird; I'll just assume it's for accounting purposes... The need for new centre-backs was obvious soon when I started the job. Stanciu was on my shortlist from Reggiana and my new scouting team thought he'd be a good pick up. We actually signed another young DC (Novota) before my scouts found Melgarejo, who brings a very different, arguably... Libero-ish energy to the squad. Pisciotti's contract was due to expire at the end of December when my scouts pointed him out to me. I'm not sure he's got the full 2* of improvement my scouts and coaches think he does, but he's a very good striker for us in any event. At the other end of the pitch, Ashraf was a fairly expensive signing to fill a hole at DL that I would otherwise have been filling with trash. I even signed a 33-year old DL on a one-year deal just so we'd have a bit of cover I didn't outright hate in case of injuries. The other signings are mostly for depth, but Martykan and Busta (at GK and MC respectively) can expect to start our most important games. We also have a couple of Central American youngsters joining in January I'm quite excited about. Fixtures There's an argument for saying I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment. Having complained about the number of matches in that last season at Lusitania Lourosa and then choosing a club where we'd played 13 matches before the transfer window had even closed. Still, the European games were pretty easy, so squad rotation wasn't a huge issue, even if we did try to absolutely balls-up the tie against Sandnes Ulf despite dominating both legs. Still, our reward for qualifying for the participation trophy of Europe is another set of fairly easy matches: I expect Aris and Vojvodina to give us a good game, but our coefficient is 56, so we should get a top-8 spot. I'm not sure anyone's ever described Prishtina, Norrkoping or Vikingur as "challenging" before, but okay. Also, Capitoline are still considered the favourites, despite getting knocked out 2 rounds ago by Stabæk. That news item is all kinds of borked.

Season 11: Reggiana, Italian Serie B February - June We won the league. I kinda mentally checked-out, but did arrange a few signings once promotion was confirmed. To my surprise, I received a offer of an interview from Athletic Bilbao. I went along with it, eventually getting the job offer, but my due diligence told me that a club wanting to qualify for the Champions League had about 5 players good enough to achieve that. Oh, and a transfer budget of £900k and an available wage budget of -£400k p/w. Fun. The Reggiana board did a spot of begging to see if I would stay and I managed to get an upgrade to Junior Coaching out of that, but I'd already applied for a more interesting job. Shortly after the new players arrived on St Bosman's Day, I got my new job.

It's hard to know why your players aren't getting offers without knowing how your save is set up. If it's just one or two active countries/leagues, then yeah, you probably won't get a lot of offers for players.

It is now your manager's sole purpose in life to destroy your former club. Ruin them. Sack their cities. Wrap the new owners in rugs and ride your horses over their bodies until naught is left but bones and viscera. Or just beat them a bunch of times, if you want to be boring.

Dude, it's called Fashion Manager 24, not Footba- Oh, huh

Half of these "wonderkids" will never be good enough to play in the Premier League. It's a media description within the game; it tells you nothing about the player except that his reputation is above a certain threshold. Much like real life wonderkids, in fact.

Season 11: Reggiana, Italian Serie B January Transfers Mats Brinkmann was a youngster we brought in last season from a random Austrian team for nothing; he wasn't integral to the team, or very highly-rated by our staff, so I was happy to collect. Salvatore Asara - after being a key player for us last season - had mostly featured from the bench; he agreed to join Benevento at the end of the season and we got £50k for letting him leave ASAP. Khaled Hadji was the subject of several bids during the window; I turned them all down but eventually Bordeaux made an offer the board couldn't turn down, so we negotiated an "I can live with this deal" arrangement with Lazio. Guychel Saka was brought in as cover at Centre-Back. I doubt he'll ever be great, but he was cheap and a reasonable player for right now. Swinnen is the replacement for Swinnen. He's a slightly different kind of player - more of an Inside Forward than a Winger - but also looks like he could develop really well if the circumstances work out. Pommella was brought in mostly because I needed a replacement for Hadji, but also because Verratti is only with us until the end of the season, so getting someone in who can start blending with the team is helpful. Meanwhile, Miladinovic came in from the Zeljeznicar you're not thinking of. Midfield reinforcements, with Pettena leaving on loan, but also adds a bit extra with set pieces. Again, probably won't ever be a great player, but could be someone quite interesting.

Season 11: Reggiana, Italian Serie B September - December Fixtures Yeah, me neither. My genius tactical masterstroke has consisted of - and you have to promise not to share this with anyone - playing Positive at Home and Attacking when we're Away. Apparently, this is sufficient for success. In fairness, we haven't only used our 4-3-3DM; we also broke out the 4-1-3-2 that I developed at Lusitania for shutting teams down, which, erm, kind of worked but not in the way it was supposed to against Salernitana and then did a bit better against Spezia. My view was that we are probably over-performing, and the xG table seems to confirm this. I expect our form to level off in the back-half of the season, if only because teams will start defending a bit more against us. We have had a fairly settled team, though. Like last season, I've mostly stuck with the same XI, the only regular change being at DC, since when I brought in our two loanees it had apparently escaped my attention that you can't have 3 DCs with "Important Player" status in a 2 DC-formation and keep them all happy unless you rotate them. Miele's manager has been on the phone a couple of times whining about me not playing him as a No-Nonsense Centre-Back; I've started ignoring his calls. Performances have been good, as you'd expect with the team's results. Puggelli didn't start very well, but mid-September I started playing him as a Roaming Playmaker and that was the springboard for him. Some of the interplay between him, Mbarga coming in off the right, Spasovski dropping deep and Larranaga or Ticinovic is really good to watch, even if it's not exactly intentional on my part. We've re-upped a few contracts in the lead-up to the January transfer window. I was delighted to get Alvarez on a new deal for the same wages, but with his MFRC increased from £190k to £1.5m (he originally wanted a £1.9m MFRC, but I traded that for wages). I'm not anticipating much transfer business, but we'll see what happens.

Fickle - 17 points Balanced - 16 points Model Citizen - 15 points Fairly Determined - 12 points

I'm making my way through this thread, but thought I could contribute here. I've got a tertiary save going in the 10th-tier of England, with the editor enabled, and one of my players made 17 points of CA improvement in a season. Playing well, in his best position, in a team that was winning regularly. But at a club with 1 for Training Facilities and with godawful coaches. I had three other players who made between 10-15 points of CA improvement in the same time.

I saw your screenshot in the other thread. City picked a team for the Champions League final... and won. Clearly a bug that needs fixing.

Your argument for how the game is too easy is that the AI doesn't over-play their best players until they fall over dead? Sure dude

Unless you're managing at a high level, you can often ignore staff ratings about players. Attributes trump CA (which is how your staff are rating Mbeka) until you get to the point where you start wanting well-rounded players. He's got decent attributes for a DM at your level who doesn't have to run around much, and the fact he can out-jump most players is probably contributing to his good performances. I'd give him the chance to play in the Vanarama National and see how he gets on; I reckon he'll be okay. League 2 might be a bit beyond him, though.

Season 11: Reggiana, Italian Serie B The summer brought about a need for a re-build. We'd cobbled together a good team for Serie C, but another year on, the carefully-curated Shortlists from my days in Portugal were a lot smaller. Turns out, when you can't afford to scout anyone, there's limited value keeping a tab on a lot of them. Serie B is also a bit of a weird league. The strength is usually pretty good, but there are usually a few teams who struggle for whatever reason and their morale goes in the toilet faster than you can say "man, that barium enema was horrendous" and they never escape. We didn't manage to renew any of our loans. I didn't try, either. The club apparently hadn't bothered negotiating a deal for Pellielo's clause, so that's still out there. (A shame; he's worth £13-20m, so we could easily get £5m+ to sell the clause). Meanwhile, the other two players got new contracts from their parent clubs. Transfers Veratti was the main sale. With a modest MFRC, I negotiated the initial transfer value down and - again - went for the 50% ONS clause, which both Empoli and some other club agreed on. He's with us for the season, on a 0% loan. Jallow was the Gambian we couldn't dump and wouldn't use, but we are at least rid of around half his wages, while Nocerina was another modestly-talented player on too much money. Spasovski is our new striker, and looks like a better-rounded player than Pellielo was (if early season form is anything to go by). With good, affordable, DCs in short supply, we got a couple in on loan who'll rotate with Alvarez. As soon as I saw Amir Gharbi, I smacked the "Offer Contract" button so hard, I think my mouse broke; he'll play DM mostly, but can do a good job at MC, possibly alongside Ticinovic who I was delighted to pick up for £50k. My coaches don't think he's great, but I think there's a lot to like. Mbarga, meanwhile, is cover for Spasovski up top, but will primarily be our livewire AMR - he's a bit one-dimensional, but sometimes you just need someone who runs around a lot. Another young player who caught my eye was Khalid Hadji. It's fair to say he has a high opinion of himself, asking for Regular Starter status before I negotiated down to Squad Player. Sometimes, players like him get generated with CA that's actually quite close to their PA, but if he's just a bit of a freak, he could be a hell of a player in a few seasons. Manuel Puggelli, our most expensive transfer, was probably the one I was least interested in - he came with repeated excellent scout reports which I kinda "meh"'d my way through, but we needed another MC and if he's actually got the potential for growth my scouts insist, he should be good value. Otomo, at the bottom of the list, is a Cameroonian (with French 2nd nat) whose agent was shopping him around on deadline day. He looks promising, if raw, but we don't really need him right now. He's going to spend a few more months on loan in Cameroon and join us in January. Hopefully he'll develop a bit in the meantime. August Fixtures A good start to the season. The two cup matches - against teams a division below and above us, respectively - were both fairly even games and the win over Torino we just about edged. The games against Bari and Perugia were both very one-sided; one in our favour, one against. I considered throwing the cup matches, but the next match isn't until December, so fixture congestion isn't really a thing. Attendances being absolute ******* definitely is, though, and the £9.5k money you get for playing is so contemptuous it's actually funny. Not all cups are created equally, but the ones in Italy were all created out of sheer spite.