El Payaso

Why are people so obsessed about the upcoming update? The previous one was the major update and it is highly unlike that the last update will include anything else but some data updates. You're all good to go with starting a save game.

If you are talking about direct free kicks, then count me in.

Season 1 - Part III Start of the transfer window The start of January means also that the transfer window is now open. This, on the other hand, will allow us to think a bit more about the club's finances. This is even though I don’t feel that the club manager should be responsible for the money. The biggest howler that Palermo had done for this season, in my opinion, was the loan deal of Leonardo Mancuso. The 31-year-old forward was signed for a season-long loan from Monza and the club is paying his full €50k contract for the duration of the season as well as €1.2M extra if we get promoted. Quite an expensive deal for a player who has played 9 games so far, scoring two goals. And of course, this is a deal that we cannot terminate. This is also a significant number in our total wage budget which is less than 250 thousand a week. We have been given €1.2M to spend in the transfer window and even after the arrival of Emil Krafth last month, we have more than €30k per week to use in our wage budget. Former goalkeeper Morgan De Sanctis was hired to work as our Director of Football. His attributes tell me that he could be a really good addition to the club. The first signals The first dip into the transfer window has told us that we might be on the losing end here. Of our regular starters both Claudio Gomes and Simon Graves have been targeted by bigger clubs from Germany and England. We have also received the first bids. The first player to leave the club was 36-year-old Fabio Lucioni, who only featured in 2 two games for us after his arrival in the summer. The centre-back has joined Greek side Atromitos on a six-month loan deal and as his contract will not be renewed by us, he has played his final minutes for the club. Losing Gomes would not be a disaster for us as we would then be able to use the former Juventus midfielder Filippo Ranocchia a bit more. If Graves is going to leave the club, we will probably have to seek for a new centre-back though as the Dane has been almost ever-present for the club this season. Who are our transfer targets? Even though we have scouted actively throughout the autumn season, we don’t have any real targets. The interest from bigger clubs towards our players means though that we have to stay alert as especially in defense every player that we lose also has to be replaced with a signing as we are already pretty short on options. This transfer window is also going to be exciting in terms of difficulty as the early signs are showing that signing players might turn out to be quite difficult for us. January 2024 We started the year with a Matteo Brunori first-half hat-trick. Things didn’t go smoothly though as we lost Brunori himself, Giuseppe Aurelio, and Leonardo Mancuso through injuries. Venezia also almost FM’ed us again by scoring with their two goals from 3 shots on target. The rest of the month went with familiar trends: a simply awful away performance against Brescia was followed by a convincing home victory as our most important player Aurelio was back in the lineup. The Italian of course got sick soon after which would keep him out for the next half of February. Matteo Brunori’s four goals were enough to reward the Italian with the Player of the Month award. The deadline day Departures Claudio Gomes - The Frenchman had been injured at the beginning of the year and thereby missed almost all our January matches. West Ham came in knocking with a €1.3M bid first which we were able to negotiate up to €4.5. Gomes had been a reliable servant to us and he seemed to have the potential to become a good Serie A player. His age of 23 years and balanced personality probably means that he would never have reached this level with us even though he had been one of the best performers in training throughout the short career update so far. He was also a fairly big earner with €21k per week, which is almost one-tenth of our wage budget in total. A good player, but also someone that we could easily replace with someone better. We tried to immediately loan him back for the rest of the season but he had no desire to return to Sicily. Arrivals Nahuel Estévez - I was quite surprised that Parma wanted to sell the 28-year-old Argentinian to us as he had been a regular starter for our rivals. We paid €1.3M up-front as well as €1.7M in installments. The former Estudiantes midfielder is a slightly better option than the younger Gomes and he should be able to fill in for all the roles in our midfield. He is also the first signing that fits our approach quite nicely with his nationality, personality, and attributes. Jon Pachedo - Thanks to our bad luck with injuries, I wanted to make sure that we would not be running out of central defenders during the spring season. The 23-year-old Spaniard was someone that our scouts suggested even though we are not allowed to scout in Spain. As we only had a minimal scout report available for him, we signed him like a pig in a poke. The first impression is that we made a big mistake here as his mental side doesn’t fit into our philosophy at all. The former Spain U-21 international has not been able to reach his potential so far and this might all be down to the mental attributes. There are also positives as he is quite a traditional product of Real Sociedad’s youth system which means that he will be the first centre-back in this club suitable for playing the libero role. We are also doing our best to develop his mentals here: I have asked Matteo Brunori to welcome him to the club and we also found a mentoring group for him where the effects should be ‘significant’ for him. This signing could also fit into our moneyball approach as we should be able to sell him with a profit if things don’t pan out well with him. We were also just one click away from confirming Matteo Brunori’s departure from Sicily with a fee of 10 million euros as Leicester came in for the club captain. Clicking continue would have been good for the club's finances but it would have also taken the joy out of this save game. So I took the risk of him getting upset which never happened. February Jon Pachedo marked his Palermo debut with three big errors which saw Patrick Cutrone scoring twice against us. Otherwise, we were more than equal against the rather big club with yet another away game with zero bit of luck on our side. The second debutant Estévez came in from the bench and almost scored twice for us. The defeat started a downward spiral and saw us doing our best to throw away the league title. There isn’t anything else to say but that we are poor at the moment. I would claim that the narrow 1-0 victory is quite a good storyteller here. This was the team that we had beaten 6-0 in our season opener as well as in the pre-season. I don’t know if we should accuse individuals too much here, excluding myself, but Pachedo seems to be someone who has only brought us misery. His only good contribution so far was the assist in the winning goal against Lecco. Estévez on the other hand has been good but he also had two short sick leaves due to a minor injury and illness. What went wrong? We are currently doing our best to throw the title away. I think Parma are feeling sympathetic towards us as they also started to struggle after they had caught us. Away form - the last away game that we won was at the end of November. We are still able to match our opponents quite evenly in terms of stats but we make mistakes and cannot score from our chances. Tight games are turning to draws or defeats. Injuries - throughout the start of the year, we have been blessed with a constant amount of 6-7 injuries within the squad. I’m not going to go behind this though but for example not being able to play Filippo Aurelio, who has been the most consistent player for us so far this season, is leaving its mark. Defending of the wide areas - the opponents have learned to exploit our flanks which only consist of one player on each side. I was looking for Emil Krafth to be a dominant force for us down the right-hand side but the Swede has not really been up to the level. It might be wise for us to change the stopper duty centre-backs to wide centre-backs instead to try and balance things up. Another option would be to try and make the midfield more of a hard-working one with the change of formation and roles. Mistakes - I think Pachedo’s debut summarizes this quite well. We matched Como quite well but were punished by two horrendous errors from long balls. Signing and especially playing the young Spaniard has proved costly for us so far. The lack of creativity - our style of play relies heavily on the Libero, Regista, and Trequartista to be able to deliver. Roberto Insigne has disappeared completely after his injury, getting only one assist this year, Jacopo Segre has one assist and the libero role has been quite inefficient in terms of producing anything so far. We have multiple players in the tactics that are allowed to deliver the goods and probably the best striker in the league to finish the chances off. The sad fact is that we are not good enough in this area at the moment and haven’t been for a long time. A new tactical idea? Makes you wonder if something like this could work for us. Even though we might do better in terms of results if we simply just ditched some of the permanent roles, that would also mean that we would throw our philosophy out of the window. The aim of this system could be looking for the lost balance down the flanks as well as creating a more optimal environment in the middle of the park for both our Regista and Trequartista. With Stulac, Estétez, Ranocchia, and Segre, we should have the right selection of players to be able to pull this midfield trio off. We are going to throw this new system immediately to the deep end when we clash against Cremonese at the beginning of March. The third-placed team is currently on top of the form table while we have dropped to 14th. Feel free to give me opinions about the tactical idea! Rest of the season schedule *** Sorry for the lack of graphics in the latest post! Might add some of them later on.

Always have a soft spot for Spanish football careers. Will be following this.

Good to hear! This has been a brilliant thread. Always love career updates where you have clear style and aims instead of just overachieving.

Woops, totally missed that.

If you take suggestions. I would suggest Mourinho's Inter when you get to FM 2009. Along with that famous victory against Barcelona with Chelsea in 2005, I will always remember that UEFA Champions league encounter between Inter and Barcelona. The swift counter attacks in the first leg and the sturdy defensive effort (plus the Busquets peek) in the second one. I think the defensive effort was way better than for example Chelsea had at Camp Nou in 2012.

November & December 2023 Our Coppa Italia journey came to its end in a fairly familiar manner. We controlled the first half of the game against Sassuolo and should have scored 2-3 times to be honest with no luck. In the second half the team became tired and the hosts quite deservedly scored one after a poor clearance. If we had been unlucky often so far this season, the match against Modena was one that we escaped in a bit of a Rocky Balboa manner. The home side’s narrow 4-4-2 diamond seemed unstoppable during the first 45 minutes of the game which saw us reverting to a 4-3-3 for the first time this season. Some good finishing and a solid defensive display in the second half saw us through. The game against Spezia was the first big game of the season which we won. It didn't come easily though as we had to wait until the 77th minute for our substitutes Traoré and Mancuso to get one over the goal line. Matteo Brunori scored once again twice but was ruled offside which had already made his tally four offside-goals strong this month. The month finished with a narrow victory against 18th placed Südtirol where we tried out our new away style of play which is still under construction. This was probably our best performance of the month which was almost ruined by yet another howler from Pigliacelli who vacuumed in a long-range shot from Simone Davi that was directed straight toward him. Mirko Pigliacelli was dropped to the next game where 20-year-old Sebastiano Desplanches had a clean sheet. It was a tight game between two top-tier teams where the hosts controlled for the first 60 minutes but where in the end we had a couple of good chances to snatch the 3 points. This was also a game where Roberto Insigne injured his knee and was forced out of the team for the next 4-6 weeks. Aljoso Vasic wasn't able to do much for us in his first game replacing Insigne and things seemed to get even worse with Brunori when he even missed a penalty in the 30th minute. The experienced forward responded magnificently though by scoring with a confident finish just ten minutes later. This also set us off to beat the team that was placed 16th on the table. Ivan Marcano, playing as a libero, scored the goal of the season so far by taking a powerful long shot from 25 meters out. Emil Krafth joined the club soon after. The 29-year-old Swede, who Newcastle had released had been on a trial at the club along with Felipe Caicedo, André Gomes, and Yann M'Vila for the last four weeks. As both of our starting wingbacks Alessio Buttaro and Giuseppe Aurelio got injured in the same training session, we had to act quickly to fill in the void. The Swedish international had featured in one Premier League game this season after his horrific knee injury that had kept the defender out of the pitch for 14 months. Krafth does not fit into our squad building principles but he is probably going to be a player that we look to move on in the coming summer with a bit of profit. Välkommen till Sicily Emil! We finished the year with a mixed bag of results. This was due to a bit of an injury crisis and the team getting tired. The only victory was against Reggiana where we again reached the level of performance that we wanted, especially in terms of finishing. During this period we were constantly missing 5 to 6 players due to injuries and suspensions and that of course shows. League table

FM 2007. I never got it to work that well though. I think the Italian forward was called Andrea Caracciolo. Other good options that I remember were Nikola Zigic and Steffen Iversen. Bale on the other hand was still a full-back back then. FM 2007 was also probably the last edition where defensive midfielders played with real aggression and could actually be the best players in the team in terms of average rating.

Just a tiny detail but: comprehensive highlights not showing every single offside as a highlight.

I actually like in this version how the match engine basically forces me to use comprehensive highlights and take nothing granted. Even though I would like to trust my defense a bit more when being one nil up in the end, it is way better that the AI can keep you on your toes instead of seeing those games where you get 25-30 shots against zero and can just go make a cup of coffee or do your laundry while your team wins comfortably without you doing anything. I just had a game which I won 3-0 but had to do a heck of an amount micro managing to actually get a clean sheet that I wanted. On the other hand the match against Parma that I lost 1-0 was probably the best defending I have ever seen from the AI on FM. We controlled the game clearly for the second 45 minutes but were not able to create anything dangerous, no matter what I tried. I also often see the AI teams squeezing the space away from my midfielders and force them to play safe passes back to defense. This never happened in the older versions as the midfield was all over the place in terms of closing down and marking. Not saying it is perfect but in general probably the best and most sensible defending that I have seen on FM. If you exclude throw-ins and other set pieces issues, this ME is actually really solid and for me the best after 2013.

Both look like good signings. Is Cabeza also a newgen? As six years is a long time, it would be interesting to see some information of the rest of the La Liga teams' squads and the managers.

Wow! This story has come far since the last time I properly checked in. Going to be good read for Sunday. Any particular reason why you decided to go back to attributes?

As you are so far already in your save, what is your experience on the mentoring groups? For me it has been a bit of hit and miss. Sometimes you see at least some kind of results quite soon but on the other you can have a player in a group where the influences are 'significant' but nothing noticeable happens in terms of personality. Even though it is a bit of a mystery to me, I still like it more than the other system that was a bit too effective.

I enjoy the Mustermann Iconic a lot. Also tried Statman skin earlier but it doesn't scale well to my 14 inch screen with 110% zoom. As far as I know, the Mustermann automatically scales itself to match your screen resolution. I would never go back to a skin with attributes after trying these two out.

Haha, it's fine. Could have easily won though and looking to get a revenge in the reverse fixture.

Building around the Trequartista, or Fantastista more accurately was one of the key points of this save game along with 2-3 other important roles that I am practically always trying to utilize in my tactical approach. Luckily with Palermo, I had a player like Roberto Insigne who seemed to be a perfect fit for the job. Technically talented, creative, able to produce the end product in terms of goals too, and as a team player just a little bit lazy. An ideal candidate to fill this role. Insigne has been the standout player for us so far in the season. The 29-year-old Italian was rewarded with the Player of the Month award in August and he currently leads both the average rating and assists chart in Serie B after 11 rounds have been played. So far he has contributed 14 goals in 12 appearances for us. The Napoli graduate has played most of his career in Serie B where he has become well-known as an influential wide player. In his 295 appearances so far in three different levels of Italian football, he has scored 60 goals. His best season was in 2018/19 when he scored 10 Serie B goals for his longest-term club Benevento. With his 5 goals already, it looks likely that the experienced Italian is going to have his best season so far at Palermo. Insigne vs Lecco (Click the image to open the .gif) Insigne's best performance so far came in the season opener against Lecco where he scored 2 goals and assisted a further 3. As you can see from the gif above, his movement, dribbling, and final passes were causing the home side a lot of trouble. This is also what I am looking for from him: to be able to bring in the surprising factor and to be able to contribute in many ways to our attacking play. Even though his stats look convincing so far this season, the start hasn't been perfect. Insigne tends to fall into the shadows for large parts of the games and he has been rather poor so far in bigger games if you don't take into account the season opener against Genoa. He also has a habit of still trying to find a pass from the easiest chances, and there have been a lot of challenges with creating a good combination between him and Matteo Brunori. Where I want Insigne to finish is that he would win the Player of the Year award with us and could also hold the highest average rating throughout the first season as well as getting the most assists in the league. The forever player One of the main things I enjoy in all of my saves are long-term players and club legends. This is also why we have been since the beginning looking for our forever player to fill this role. At the age of 29, Insigne of course has 2-3 good seasons left in his career but he isn't going to be our forever player in this save. We have set a scouting focus to find one but with little luck so far. In our squad, we have one interesting player who could fill the void: The young Serbian U-21 international looks like an interesting prospect. Even though he hasn't featured a lot so far this season, he seems to tick most of the spots in our club DNA. We still need to work a lot to improve his mental stats as well as heading ability which could become an asset when he joins the attacks inside the penalty area. Could Aljoša Vasić do the job for us?

Thank you. I enjoy the save too so this is pleasure to write. A win against Parma would have been good but we lost.

Roberto Insigne marked his Serie B debut for Palermo with two goals and three assists in an away fixture against Lecco whom we had already beaten during the pre-season. Otherwise, the start of the season was marvelous as we won all our first four games, yet some of them were tighter than we would have hoped for. Matteo Brunori's good recent form in front of the goal meant that we were well-prepared for the first big fixture of the season against Parma. Parma had disappointingly started their season as they hadn't yet won a single game. With three draws and a defeat, they were in 14th place in the league table. Sometimes you make the mistake of overthinking things and that is exactly why we lost this fixture narrowly. Instead of using one of our usual approaches, I opted to go with defense in mind for the start of the game. We didn't produce anything during the first half and also sadly conceded a goal from a precise cross in the 16th minute. A hairdryer treatment and opting to go back to one of our usual styles saw us dominating the second half of the game but Parma defended strongly despite not going forward a single time during the second 45 minutes. We had two late chances through Liam Henderson but the Scottish loanee was only able to hit the bar in the 85th minute. What often happens with one loss is that the whole form takes a dip. This also happened with us as we dropped points in three of our next 6 games, all of them in so-called big fixtures and more often than not both undeservedly and with late goals by the opposition. We have to admit though that the level of our performances has gone down a bit too and we have become too predictable for the opponents. On the other hand, we also had quite a bit of luck in two of our fixtures as we didn't deserve to win the games against Brescia and FeralpiSaló who both gave us a good fight. What is encouraging again though is that Matteo Brunori again found his scoring form in the last two fixtures and grew his scoring tally in the Serie B into 6 goals which is decent at this point, I guess. Our Trequartista Roberto Insigne has been the standout player so far though as the experienced Italian has scored five goals and provided eight assists so far this season. The new arrival was selected as the player of the month in August when he scored 3 goals and assisted another 3 in just 3 games. Tactical tweaks so far As I already mentioned in my previous posts, I start tweaking with player and team instructions only after the real games have started. This is also easier after the season has started as I manage pre-season games with only key highlights and change back to comprehensive when the campaign has begun. The first thing that I immediately noticed was the fact that giving our defenders the freedom to choose their passing option was a mistake. As we do not have defenders who are good on the ball, all the longer balls ended up being a waste and we were just gifting away the possession needlessly. This is why I immediately applied the play-out-of-defense instruction to all our tactics. The second big thing that popped up quick quickly was that our three-man defense did not step up enough to close down the opposition’s wide and center forwards dropping into pockets, which meant that I have changed our wide center-backs now to center-backs on stopper duty while the libero and sweeper keeper is responsible on dealing with the through balls. This has been good for us as the movement is now much more like I desired and so far we haven’t conceded any goals from the opposition getting through on goal. The third bigger change was changing the half-back role to an anchor as I felt that we didn’t have enough numbers in the midfield during our buildups as the libero’s movement was quite inconsistent and also because I wanted to utilize Claudio Gomes’ ball-winning abilities higher up in the pitch. The fourth one is recent as I have changed our short passing to direct which has looked good against both FeralpiSaló and Sampdoria. The idea behind this is to become less predictable and also encourage the team to hit the opponents more on breaks. The good When starting the season, I didn't know much about the team, and playing games with key highlights in the pre-season didn’t help much. After three months I am now much more familiar with the team and know how each of the individuals performs. I’m going to exclude our key players from this part as I have already talked enough about them. Chaka Traoré - The 18-year-old was set to start the season in our under-19s team but I immediately promoted him to the senior side. The winger has been playing as a striker, attacking midfielder, and even as an attacking wingback and he’s done well so far. The promising Milan loanee has scored 4 goals and contributed 2 assists in just two starts and seven sub appearances, which is a fantastic result for the young man. Simon Graves - The 24-year-old Dane has solidified his place as our right-sided centre-back. In terms of his defensive performances, he has even been better than Pietro Ceccaroni who was supposed to be our best defender with quite a big margin. Leo Štulac - The Slovenian international started the season in rotation but has since been promoted to the starting eleven thanks to the injury of Jacopo Segre. In his 10 appearances so far the 29-year-old has been solid in terms of his passing and he has also contributed with two goal assists so far while Segre still has zero in the league. And the bad The Insigne & Brunori partnership - It might seem odd, especially considering Insigne’s form. But the duo is still not functioning in a way I would have hoped for. The passing combinations between the two are still quite rare and Insigne has so far only assisted two of Brunori’s six goals which are both disappointing numbers. Brunori is an excellent can-do-all but I have many times thought about changing his role to something else than a complete forward who seems to participate too much in the build-ups as well as drifting too far from the goalscoring sectors. Mirko Pigliacelli - The experienced sweeper keeper’s average rating is for some reason above 7 so far this season. So far he has only saved 1 shot every 90 minutes which is an extremely low number. When needed the most, the 30-year-old has not been able to make that one game-saving save for us and secure us some vital points. The only really good performance so far was the clean sheet against Feralpisaló where he had to make 4 saves in total and turn their xG of 0.88 goals to zero. The specialists in failure? Even though we are currently on top of the table and doing above expectations, we cannot be totally happy about how the first three months have gone. Above are the stats from all four games where we have dropped points so far. All of them have come in these so-called ‘big games’ against teams that were predicted to finish in high positions and even fight for promotion. When we take a look at the stats, there is a clear pattern and an even clearer reason for not being happy. In my opinion, we have dropped way more points than we should have so far. In practically all of these games, we have (in my opinion) been the better side but managed to concede from practically all the chances that the opposition has created against us. Parma scored from a close-range header, Cittadella from their only shot of the game, and both Venezia and Sampdoria from late corner kicks. There are two clear patterns: conceding from low goal expectations and throwing the lead away with late goals. It was extremely frustrating to watch practically all the highlights coming our way and when we finally scored one after all that hard work and control, we ended up conceding from all the chances that the opponents were getting. Sometimes it even feels like we could just play without a goalkeeper to control the games even more. After all, what do you do with a keeper who is not making a single save? What also worries me is the fact that especially Roberto Insigne has almost totally disappeared in our big games so far. He has zero goal contributions in these four games and three of his four performances have been marked as below 7.0 rating. The lowest were against Parma and Sampdoria where he recorded 6.3s. Our next big test is already on the 1st of November when we meet Sassuolo in Coppa Italia’s second round.

Should be fairly easy for the AI to see whether the new players actually fit into the team and strengthen the current squad. And as the transfer market in general is what it is, those are going to be cheap bargains for the human players.

Because negotiating transfer deals successfully is really easy at the moment and with the current transfer it is not possible recreate real-life type of transfer sagas (Mbappe, Hazard and Courtois to Real Madrid for example) I would suggest a couple of changes. A) Ability for the AI to either reject negotiating a deal by simply saying that we are not willing to negotiate a deal at this time. B) Ability for the AI to stall for weeks or even months. If there are more than one interested parties, the AI could just tell you that they are looking to get the best possible deal and thereby not willing to give you an answer at the moment. C) Bigger likeliness for the AI to launch bid for players when the player does and also the AI to offer a new contract to the player who you make a transfer bid for. In older versions of FM the AI practically always launched a bid when you made one for a player that they are interested in. I have no idea why this active approach isn't in the game anymore.

The mods are not SI employees.

Superb! Would be interesting also to see some of these goals and buildups in gifs. Love those times when you actually had to use some time setting up and editing your tactics. And also, no 3D ME.

I think this is my single favorite football match. The Mourinho mind game and the tactical approach with quick counters destroyed Barcelona in the beginning of the game before them coming back to the game. This is what I always used to aim for in FM too and maybe these kind of tactical battles that are currently missing a bit.

Brilliant thread! Those were the times both in terms of football and FM. Really interesting to see in-depth analysis of how well you can implement a desired style of play and how it pans out in the old match engine.