Stone Cold

Why do you dislike the removal of dropping down to lower competitions? Well, Ligue 1 was smart. I wish Primeira Liga did the same. We used to have 16 teams in it between 2006 and 2014 and then went back to having 18 teams. 18 teams is too much for such a small country. Oh yeah good point. Dull and predictable? In the last few years you've had Barcelona, Manchester United, Borussia Dortmund and Juventus finishing 3rd, and Atlético de Madrid and AC Milan finishing 4th. And also debutant Moldovan side Sheriff beating Real Madrid away. The CL gets predictable in the QFs, but not so much in the group stage. And the new format isn't going to make the QFs and beyond less predictable, imo. We all know that it's going to be the usual suspects contending for the trophy. I remember that period. I was a kid, so I didn't think about the consequences of fixture congestion at the time, in addition to the fact that Benfica was going through its worst period in history and did not make the Champions League in those years. But if you want an example of consequences then look at the 2002 World Cup. Players like Figo, Zidane and Henry were physically in shambles by the time that competition arrived. There must have been a reason for UEFA to scrap that format after 4 seasons only.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense in a league of 36 teams for each team to only face 8 of the other 35 teams. I forgot to mention that. Well, being 32 years old, I am obviously not old enough to remember the European Cup and football pre-Bosman rule. My earliest memory of football is watching the 1998 World Cup. It is odd indeed to call a competition Champions League when a lot of non-champions get in it every season. But sadly, the precedent has been set a long time ago and now there's no going back. I also disliked UEFA increasing the Euro from 16 to 24 teams. And FIFA increasing the World Cup from 32 to 48 countries from 2026 on is also not a good idea, imo. I do wonder what the football will look like 30 years from now on. By then, if I'm still around, I'll probably be too old to care anymore.

For some odd reason, I've found Sassuolo from Italy and Portimonense from Portugal to be a pain in the last few FMs. I nearly always drop points against them once a season. Watford were a pain in FM21, too. They'd always become Bayern Münich whenever I faced them away, especially in a cup game. Way back in the day, Dynamo Kiev were a absolute nightmare for me in CM 00/01. Would always lose against them in Kiev. What a trauma. As for the top clubs, Bayern is the one I have the worst record against, I'd say. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've beaten them since FM11. But hey, it's Bayern.

And why is that an issue? It's a video game. If the same exact clubs were as strong in FM as they are in real life, the game would be no fun. And it's still mostly clubs from the top 5 leagues that win European competitions in FM anyway. I'm 4-5 seasons into my current save and I've already seen clubs like Slavia Prague, VFB Stuttgart and Sturm Graz cause upsets in the Champions League. Slavia and Stuttgart made past the league stage last season even!

What do you mean by random table positions? When I get FM24, I think I'll download a mod that keeps the previous format. But on the other hand, I do like the idea of teams not dropping down anymore. And I also don't think it would be a good idea to live through a virtual reality farther away from real life than it already is.

Yeah. It never made sense. You finish 3rd in the group stage and are rewarded with dropping down to the "lower division" European competition. What? Was it really? I don't think so. We've had some surprising results in the CL group stage in the past several seasons. I never was fond of the rebranding of the UEFA Cup to Europa League and adding a group stage, though. But I guess UEFA wanted to add some consistency to their competitions. Well, duh. That's all UEFA cares about. Doesn't matter if the quality of the football suffers from it. Clubs like Real Madrid and Manchester City will have more matches to play in the Champions League, which will make millions of people around the world happy and UEFA and those clubs even wealthier than they already are.

Well, there is potential for very emotional last match days, true. While in the current system there will be one or maybe two groups at best that are still open after 4 matches.

As we know, it will change next season. The only experience we've had with it was in FM23 so far. I am not a big fan of the concept. First of all, I love the Champions League group stage and its draw, and I am definitely going to miss that. FM23 is the game we finally get the UEFA competitions licensed and the whole atmosphere of the group stages draw and are only able to experience it in the first couple of seasons of a save. Second, is there not match-up draw? All I get is a mail telling me the teams I face. There's no public draw ceremony. How do we know UEFA isn't just hand picking match-ups in order to favour the more powerful clubs? Third, 2 extra games just add to more fixture congestion in the game and will do irl as well. As if we haven't had enough of a problem in European football with that already. And finally, the position you finish the league stage in doesn't seem that relevant. As in, it doesn't matter if you finish 1st or 8th. You're going through and can face any of the teams that finished 9th-24th and survived the play-off round. Which means you can finish 1st and draw the 9th placed team while the team that finished 8th can draw the team that finished 24th. I'm glad there's still draws in the knock-out rounds but the whole concept is flawed. The group stage was more straight forward and fairer. You finish 1st? You get to face teams that finished 2nd. One positive thing I can say, though: No more dropping down to other UEFA competitions. That's going to be a lot more interesting. I haven't been keeping track, but I'm pretty sure the majority of the clubs that won the UEFA Cup/Europa League in my lifetime were teams that finished 3rd in the Champions League group stage. At least there always seems to be a team that came from the CL in the EL final. You can never predict who's winning the competition when it begins because you gotta wait for those 8 3rd placed CL teams to join it after December, and there's always at least a strong contender among those. The Conference League is going to become more interesting too. In the 2025/2026 season of my current save. the final of the ECL is going to be SC Herenveen vs. Brighton. It will be interesting if the Dutch side win it. But basically, UEFA just want more games to increase profit. They don't care if it's hell on the players bodies since football is a business for them and profit is all that matters. It also feels like some sort of compromise between UEFA and the big 5 top clubs. This seems close to the European Super League those guys wanted to form. That being said, I'm going to wait to see how it pans out in real life to see how it works. And perhaps UEFA will do a few tweaks in their new system some years down the road, who knows. I'm not against change, per se. But are things really changing for the best? The only major flaw I can find in the current system is the fact 3rd placed CL teams drop down to the EL and 3rd placed EL teams drop down to the ECL. But that could easily have been fixed without needing to change the format of the European competitions.

I'm not asking you about that time you lead a 4th division Swedish club to Champions League glory. But clubs that have gotten much bigger or smaller when controlled by the AI. Going way back to Championship Manager 00/01, the following things happened at my 10 season save at Benfica and Roma: - Sporting got relegated to the 2nd tier of Portuguese football and didn't get promoted again. - Celtic won the Champions League. - Brondby won the Champions League even though I didn't have Denmark loaded. In FM 11, Sp. Gijón won La Liga a few times in my 17 season long save at Beira-Mar and became the biggest club in Spain. In one of my FM22 saves several strange things happened in Portugal: - Lusitânia Lourosa and Vilafranquense reached the 1st tier of Portuguese football and never got relegated. I'm not even sure if either of these clubs ever played in the Primeira Liga in their entire history. - Estrela da Amadora and Gil Vicente both reached Conference League finals and became sides that regularly finished in the top 5. - Porto practically became a mid-table side and developed competitive rivalries with Estrela da Amadora and Gil Vicente due to fighting with them for the 4th and 5th places. In FM23, in my current Celtic save, Rosenborg fell to the 2nd tier of Norwegian football just 2 seasons in. I wonder what happened... Also, Charleroi won the Belgian league on the 2nd season and finished 9th on the 3rd season. That's all I remember.

Finally the J-League is coming to FM. Something many of us wanted for a long time. But there's still others that could be added. First of all, South Africa being the only country with playable leagues in Africa is a shame. I think at least a couple more African nations should be added. Al-Ahly seems to be the Real Madrid of Africa, yet you can't manage in Egypt. Plus, lots of good players come from African clubs. ASEC Mimosas, for example. Second, as much as I hate what they are doing, SI should look into adding the Saudi league in a future game. It's getting a lot of media attention lately for obvious reasons, And it would be nice to add missing CONMEBOL and UEFA countries. Ideally, every nation on Earth should be loadable and their leagues playable in the games. But that's probably never going to happen.

Ah I see. It's just that I rarely encounter foreigners who know such details about Portuguese football. Well, rivalries in Portugal are very strong. There's a lot of hatred from Porto and Sporting against Benfica and vice-versa. I don't know much about Belgian football to draw any parallels. But would you manage any rival clubs in Belgium? And how strong are the rivalries there? As for Jesus, he went directly from Benfica to Sporting after refusing to renew his contract. Also, he took a lot of shots at us since then. Plus, he's always been a rude and arrogant person, so I haven't liked him since about 2010. Way before he went to Sporting. And I didn't like to see him return to Benfica. Also, he played for Sporting when he was young and has always been known for being a sportinguista. When he was a Benfica manager in his first stint he blackmailed the board to give him a better contract or else he'd go to Porto. So yeah, he's a traitor. As for your argument about managers and players having worked for rival clubs in Portugal, well, they are professionals, first and foremost. And will go to whoever pays them more. I don't get paid to play FM. Even if I try to immerse myself in it and make it more realistic, it's still a video game at the end of the day and I want to have a good time and make the money I paid for it worth it. Managing 2 clubs I hate would not be a fun experience, imo.

The number of countries and leagues I load can differ because it depends on the computer I have, obviously. That being said, I ALWAYS load Portugal (what a surprise), Spain, England, Italy and Germany. And usually load Holland, Brazil and Argentina as well. And then a few random ones if I am confident my machine can handle it, In my most recent FM23 save, I've loaded a lot of nations: Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, England, Holland, Belgium, Scotland, Norway, Denmark, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and South Korea. Custom database with about 100,000 something players. This is the largest FM set-up I've ever done so far. Speed? Half a star, but it's not slow at all. Maybe it will become slower in later seasons. In that case, I can always remove some countries if it becomes REALLY slow. But if it just becomes a bit slow then I'll bear with it. As for the leagues I selected as playable, I did not select Vanarama for England and Serie C/3rd tiers for Brazil and Italy. Also only have the first 2 tiers for Denmark and Norway each and don't have the bottom tier for France. I basically decided to give it a try and see how well my current computer can handle a large game set-up like this. I like to push the computer to the limit always and select as many countries as it can handle. Plus, I like having a lot of options and managers can move all over the world, so this makes the experience more realistic. And I just love a large game world and seeing what happens in lots of different countries leagues. And with Japan officially coming to FM24, that's gonna be another country I'm interested in loading from now on. What about you?

I know. But not everyone is the same. I feel like I'd be committing treason against Benfica if I lead either Sporting or Porto to both domestic and European success. I'm going to guess based on your apparent knowledge of Portuguese football that you're also Portuguese. Surely you are aware of how seriously your average supporter takes football here and how strong the rivalry between Benfica and Sporting/Porto is? Well, I started a save with Celtic sometime ago and I can understand how you feel. Managing Brighton or Real Sociedad would be weird for me at first as well, I imagine,

Yes. For domestic cup matches. It will improve the substitute keeper and also keep him satisfied.

In real life, managers and players often work for clubs that are rivals of their favourite clubs. They try to be professional about it and do their best regardless. Football Manager is basically you simulating the life of a professional football manager. But how far are you willing to go? As a huge Benfica fan, I wouldn't be able to manage Porto or Sporting. It would just feel wrong to achieve success with those clubs. I know it's just a game, but I want the game to be enjoyable. And I wouldn't enjoy myself managing two clubs I strongly dislike. Anyone else in Portugal is fine by me. I've managed Vitória Guimarães and Beira-Mar in the past and those were fun experiences. What about you?