The blog seems inactive for a few months, but I was actually frequently writing stuff here. The problem was that I was creating pages rather than posts recently.
Admittedly, it is hard to organize stuff either way. And organizing things is hard in general, so I don’t blame Workpress for this. And there are probably a plugin or two that fixes this, I am just too lazy to check them out.
The third consecutive league win. And, with 78 points, it was a historic high among the in-game simulation seasons. Improved financial situation and ever increasing fan base, the game has indeed transitioned into another phase.
The season is also special in its own: it is the first time we win the league consecutively. I am pretty sure this is not yet another random statistical trick to make up things, since that being in the European Championship does seem to have some negative impact to the league performance. Fixture congestion, having to buy more players to avoid people complaining about the lack of squad depth, and having to deal with too many players complaining about playing time as a result, these are all unique challenges to consecutive winners.
And, despite being actually a very shambolic season, we somehow managed to overcome the above-mentioned difficulties.
This is the first season we won both the league and the cup, which is something to remember.
Another season, and financial woes strike back as expected!
The performance was actually pretty good. We ended up at the second place, which was the highest among all seasons where we entered the Champions League. For some reason like fixture congestion, such seasons are always hard. So I guess I should be satisfied.
Going back to the game proved to be fun. I feel I am looking forward to a future FM game as well, perhaps on FM 2023.
Anyways, it is a season with an extremely long streak of games without losing, and a second league win.
More importantly, the financial game plays very differently this time…
There was no update to the game for quite a few months. There were multiple reasons, but mostly because the ongoing real world event had negatively impacted my willingness to continue playing this game. The thought that the save game involves real people who might be completely disgusted with the idea of getting hired by the team I’m controlling, or getting that additional nationality through naturalization, has put me off the game for long.
Later, I thought, perhaps exactly because the real world is full of woes, I should look at the game as a more ideal place. It isn’t reflective of the world, but it is how it should have been. Along this line of thought, then, perhaps, I should just play on.
OK, back to the game.
Many scanned old books come with no table of contents. And Googling how to add tables of contents usually show up less helpful advice such as “buy Acrobat”. To save myself from having to Google this stuff again, it’s time to record it here.
This blog was down for a few days because Ubuntu update screwed the Apache2 PHP mod. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really paying attention.
Season 11 is full of worries. The team is weakened in multiple ways. Financial woes. Unhappy players.
But… it is also the first season I won the premier league.
Victor Hatuka (€1.5M). The deal was to loan him back for a season, which turned to be much worse than I thought. Not only it’s a financial burden, but also his personality changed from Perfectionist to Determined. And AMC is such a crowded position.
Branko Hustic (Free). Yes. That Hustic. His four years at AC Milan was less than successful, but he is still better than everyone else at the position besides Semenov.
Tomas Petras (Free). Felt inadequate because I also had Ovsyannikov.
Matteo di Benedetto (Free). Served as a first-team player.
Nicolas Pohl (Free). Screenshot taken at the end of the season. He was OK as an AMC and OK as an MC, but the pecking order is low for both.
Ivannikov (€450K), Bijlsma (€3.9M) and Kartashov (€1M) because I already have Semenov and Hustic for the position and also potentially Hatuka for the next season, so I do not really need all these backups. They were all sold at discount prices, but I signed them on free transfers in the first place, so no regrets.
For forwards, Osipov (€725K), Galperin (€250K), Larionov (€500K) and Leovac (€475K). Osipov actually produced a few good matches, but he wanted more first team chances which I obviously could not afford. Galperin and Larionov have the potential but not the personality to blend in my squad. Leovac was a sad case, since he was suddenly unhappy about broken promise (about first team chances) near the end of the season, when I really could not afford a morale drop. He was worth at least €3M but obviously I can’t ask for that if he had only two or three months contract left.
Ryzhov was unsettled by Milan’s offer, so sold for a potential €11.5M. However, he would only leave at the end of the season, so I paid another year of salary while largely only using him as a super sub / big match player. All the while he kept improving. Now I feel that perhaps I should have just forced him to stay, since our reputation is quickly improving anyways. But then perhaps I wouldn’t be able to achieve this with unhappy players.
Considering that I also signed Hustic back from Milan, I am pretty sure that Hustic will has a few warning words about being over-ambitious.
Finally, Godfred Donsah to Shandong for €675K.
These sales have left me with very limited options for the central forward, and despite largely retaining the old central midfield pair of Yegorov and Moskvichev, the performance has slipped as well.
I think only Arapov and Andreyushenko are notable this year.
We ended up with 66 points, roughly on par with historical champions.
In the Europa League, we ranked the first in the group stage, and progressed through the first knockout stage only to be defeated in the second.
The Russian Cup drew us and Zenit in an early meeting, so we were knocked out earlier than expected. But losing to the expected champions isn’t really a big deal in my opinion.
All in all, we won the league at the pre-season odds of 19.0. Admittedly that just says if an average bot retries 19 times they would also win once, and there is no evidence that I am better than the average bot, but who cares. I am the player.
The number one improvement goes to Ryzhov, but he is sold so there is no point looking at him.
Semenov is still a joy to look at though. Just don’t look at the negatives about how he feels he wants to move to bigger places.
The season is a milestone moment. When I finish this long game and look back, I would probably conveniently say “the first decade” and “the second decade”, because it is the 11th year in which we reached the top and broke into the European Championship.
However, in the same season we suffered a lot in terms of squad depth. There are a lot to be done to retain the team strength, let alone improving it.