Biscotti

Gonçalo Brandão | NK Krk | Croatia | 2050/51 (Season 31) Season Summary | League (Apparently I forgot to take this SS, and I don't feel like going and getting it now) Domestic dominance saw us claim the title with 7 still to play, and finally we set a new record points total - beating the old Dinamo Record of 92. I'm a bit pissed off at losing just one game to Rijeka on matchday 33 to be honest. An undefeated season is definitely high on my goals list. As for Europe, we had a fairly tough group, but one I felt we should be strong in, of PSG, AC Milan and CSKA Moscow. Despite this, we only finished 3rd in the group and dropped into the Europa League. In a rage, I sold off a few players that I might have considered "key" during January, and finished the season with a completely different shape. The Europa League saw us see off Dinamo and Napoli before coming unstuck against a very good Liverpool side. All told, disappointing. After selling some of those key players, it is left to the centre-back pairing of Marcos Calla and Eduardo Martinez to take MVP honours this season, along with Francisco. As a talent from my own academy, I'd really like to keep Francisco for the entire of his career. As for next season - I gave that tease of the huge purchase incoming. I'll leave it to speculation for now, but I will say it's an older (29) former player who was named as Ballon d'Or winner in 2049. Things have started well enough for the next season with 5 games played, 21 scored and zero conceded

This is going to be a huge summer buy moving into next season, but I think it's worth it.

We believe in you, @Muggert!! Gonçalo Brandão | NK Krk | Croatia | 2049/50 (Season 30) Season Summary | League Another year of domestic domination, and another year of falling short in the Champions League. This year we topped a group of Marseille, Atalanta and Celtic before putting out Lyon in the first KO round. Real in the 1/4s were once again too good for us in the second leg despite us going into it with a 1-0 lead. Francisco has indeed taken his first steps with Spain this season. Unbelievably, they didn't make the World Cup, so he has to wait a little longer for his bow there. Marcos Calla became the only centre-back with a nailed-on place this season, with my other centre-backs all trading duties between themselves. Miller Barros came back to us from a loan spell in Brazil in January and slotted into the team where a departing Lucas Zalazar was previously. the return of 14 in 23 was solid, but I'll be looking for him to truly stand out this coming season as I once again have hungry young players looking to step up.

I know that pain, man. Keep plugging - you'll probably get there before I do.

93 points and still 3rd is just insane.

Seeded cup rounds are great for padding your striker's numbers:

The "shockingly bad" comes from the fact that the latter half of the season showed that we were so much better than our early season suggested. If we'd kept it together the whole season, who knows how it might have gone? I spent a good 3 weeks in desperation trying to work out what to tweak i the tactics and training to fix it, because we seemed in danger of crashing out of Europe and lagging behind in the league.

Gonçalo Brandão | NK Krk | Croatia | 2048/49 (Season 29) Season Summary | League It may not look it, but this was a shockingly bad season. By early November we were 3rd in the league - about 5 points away from the newly promoted Dinamo, who were flying - and from 4 Champions League games we only had 1 point and sat bottom of our group. Something started working at that point though and we recovered to miraculously still go through second in our group and won the league with a comfortable looking 9 point margin. Unfortunately, we were once again undone in the Semi Finals of the Champions League to Real, after successfully dumping out both Lyon and PSG. As bad as this season was, I feel more optimistic than I did the last couple of seasons. While he wasn't the most expensive signing I made this season, Paulo was by far the most important. I identified a lack of a truly dominant-in-the-air defender last season, and 6'6" Paulo was the man who appeared to best fit that requirement without breaking the bank. It was justified, as he finished the season with 12 goals (from set pieces) and was named fans' player of the season. Lucas Zalazar was the man tasked with stepping in Telmo Silva's role (who didn't look any more likely to sign a new deal, therefore I decided to cash in), and while I don't think he started the season quite on that level, I've seen plenty in the back half of the season to think he will be up there soon. The other man to highlight this season is once again home-grown hero Francisco, who this season broke both the club and league assists record. I am going to be so proud when he earns his first Spain cap, which I don't think it's too far away, but if he keeps getting overlooked then maybe he'll take up his option for Croatian citizenship instead.

Gonçalo Brandão | NK Krk | Croatia | 2047/48 (Season 28) Season Summary | League Considering my angry rant earlier, it will come as no surprise that this season was a little bit of a disaster. We still comfortably won the league and made the cup final, but our performance in Europe was truly hampered by my insistence on keeping the squad small enough to minimise unhappiness. Consider this lesson learnt. I still prefer a lean squad, but I think now I finally understand why top clubs often have 2 or 3 older guys hanging around who you would never place as "good enough" for that team, but who can reliably do a job when required. Telmo Silva was once again our top scorer with 33. Not as good as last season, which is perhaps indicative of the disappointing season we had. With only 2 years left on his contract, and no sign of him having interest in extending, this might be the season I bite the bullet and let him go. I have a couple of players who've shown good promise looking to take his place, so this may be a good opportunity for one of them to seize the chance. Tomislav Duka is a fixture in the Croatian national team and looks like £14m very well spent. Teams have been putting offers in for him all season and he's not shown any inclination that he's looking to leave us. Finally I want to draw attention to a great home-grown talent. Francisco came out of our academy a few years back and had a couple of loan spells away where he did very well. This season he stepped into the first team on a regular basis and as well as being generally really solid he's proven to be a set-piece king, helping him get the most assists for the season at 14. I think him and Duka could be our midfield duo for a fair few years at this rate.

2-meter-Peter (Crouch) was known to be more capable with the ball at his feet than anyone would expect, too

For the first time in 27 and a half seasons, I just got proper pissed off with this game. I tend to keep my squad relatively lean - 2 full 11s of players available in my first team with a handful of promising youngsters hanging around the youth team instead of being loaned out. Going into my last CL group stage game today we were in such a hole with injuries that I had zero left-backs, only one striker and my only right-winger available was a youth player. Then on top of this we picked up 2 more injuries during the first half. I nearly threw my PC across the room. I'm livid.

That's incredible @ashton430! Great work. I'd be very curious to know what sort of tactics you've been playing (I'm not the sort to copy, just genuinely curious) (Also, I see you're still experimenting with your attribute colours. I don't think anybody can tell you what's "best" because it's all down to personal preference, find a combination which makes the good stats sand out to you and I think you'll be good)

Incredible season @ashton430! Rivas is definitely coming along nicely. (Side note, I'm not sure I could get on with your choice of attribute colour settings)

Personally, I've been using the internet long enough to remember when bandwidth was a problem for many people, so loading images in-line on a forum thread was a big no-no. The habit has just stuck with me. I don't think there's any real issue with just loading them into your posts, but if you have loads of them then it might make your posts appear huge and discourage people from reading. There are a plethora of different hosting sites which can do a decent job for these purposes, it comes down to personal preference. I used to use Dropbox, because it meant I didn't need to upload anything to anywhere, but I found there were space and presentation limitations that I didn't entirely get along with. I use imgur now because uploading and sharing is made really quite simple and I am most definitely a simple man.

@ashton430 I like Rivas, but he wouldn't be a pick for me at striker - I value pace a lot more. Depending on your system, though, I could see him being a really interesting false 9 or Trequartista.