Part 1: Chapter the First: A day that will live in infamy.
Volume One: It's a long, long way to TipperaryChapter the First: A day that will live in infamy.
July 16, 2013
Football Manager Classic is a recently introduced mode that streamlines the game significantly. It's for players who don't want to drop 500+ hours into the full life-eating game. I've never touched it. I've never tried the challenges, either. Those are short scenarios where you're forced to deal with things like your team suffering a stunning number of injuries and you being forced to use your youth squad. Which is fine and all, but nothing like the challenge of going from a regional league to champions of Europe. So we'll be playing Football Manager.
All 51 nations enabled. Right now you can see that we have an approximate player count of 22,000, and an estimated game speed rating of 4 stars. That's not going to last.
This next screen determines which leagues are playable, and which will only be simulated in the background. I've set England to playable, naturally. I've also set Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland to playable as well, since I'll want to pick up players from their leagues in order to improve our own. As you can see, the approximate player count has more than doubled to 56,000. If you set every possible league to playable, you end up with something around 150,000 players, which makes the game process slowly on even top of the line computers. As you can see the estimated game speed rating is now 1.5 stars.
I've also clicked off real players. One reason for that is that it will take at least 5 years to make the Premiership, another is because real players won't get into off the field trouble like fake players will. You'll see what I'm talking about when it happens. Plus, this way Lionel Messi won't win the Ballon d'Or 10 years straight like he did in my FM2013 game. The downside is, I won't be able to hire Messi as a coach after he retires like I did in my FM2013 game. On the other hand, every player will get a sweet sweet computer generated portrait.
Now to create the head coach. The most important thing on this page is your “Past Playing Experience”- players, fans, the media, and owners are vastly more likely to respect you if you're a former world class player than if you're some schmoe from the local Sunday league. Since I last played soccer in pickup games way back when I was in college, Sunday league is probably too kind to my past experience but it's the lowest setting there is. I've also changed my place of birth and date of birth, but the picture is real.
There's our team! You can also choose to manage a national team, aiming to win the World Cup, but I find that less interesting than the club game. We have some major advantages over our opposition, in that our stadium is 4-5 times larger, the owner of the team is a Russian mining oligarch, and most importantly that we're a professional team rather than a semi-pro team. Semi-pro teams can only train 3 days a week, which means getting everyone up to speed on tactics takes up most of the training time. If you play Lower League Manager, your first goal is to build up enough of a bankroll to go pro.
This is the news inbox, you'll become very familiar with this window. It's where we're informed of just about everything that happens in the game that matters to our club. Let's take a whirl around the major categories.
The Owner:
Yuri Kropotkin is a Russian mining magnate who became a fan of the club after watching his hometown team in Omsk get decimated during the 1971 Fairs Cup. Now loaded with billions upon billions, he's finally accomplished his boyhood dream. Unfortunately "Nova Abromovich" (as he's come to be known as in the Daily Mail) doesn't have the best business sense, spending 185 million pounds on a player from a team no one has ever heard of.
In terms of what they mean for the game, they're the ones who set the budget and who we have to go to hat in hand for improvements to things like training facilities and youth recruitment. Kropotkin will be a sugar daddy, which means we'll get plenty of cash, but he'll also be impatient to see success.
The Club:
To say that the club has fallen on hard times is a significant understatement. Despite playing top division soccer in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Tackleford City has finally reached its nadir, falling to the Skrill North division. The glory days of First Division football and winning the League Cup in 1985 are long past. The last decade and a half has seen a slide from the moderate respectability of League One to the barely professional level of non Football League soccer.
Also, yes, it was called the Milk Cup. These days it's sponsored by Capital One, which is a downgrade in pretty much every way.
To make matters worse the team was struck by catastrophe shortly before our story begins, when a large satellite fell from the sky during a pre-season friendly, killing the manager and all but two of the players.
Those grayed out players are what the game gives you when you don't have a full compliment of players. They are horrible, and represent what your team could bring in off the street. They will not be playing any games for us. Orson Duchamps and Cyrus Rosetti are the only players to have survived death from above. Pay no attention to their current five star ratings, your players are rated against the other players on your team, so a player who has a five star rating for your team in the lowest league would be lucky to have a 1 star rating for a Champion's League squad. Since they're being compared to the game's approximation of what a bottom rung side could scrounge up they're going to be considerably overestimated. Also, the current Assistant Manager is a complete poltroon who couldn't recognize talent if it whacked him in the head with a bicycle kick.
Those scores are... not good. The other staff are no better. The club trainer is the worst. A physiotherapy score of 2 means he's got the medical skills of a novice Dwarf Fortress doctor. They're all getting fired and replaced by people who at least are in the vicinity of competent.
By comparison, Cyrus Rosetti's far better than our team deserves, but also worth about 2% of his 185 million quid transfer fee. Attributes range from 1 to 20 in Football manager, anything above a 12 is reasonably competent, anything above a 16 is world class. We're not going to have players with many scores above a 16 for a while.
Rosetti costs serious money, earning 40% of our overall wage budget, but he's got better attributes than any other striker in the Skrill North. He's fast, possesses good acceleration, is very good off the ball, and has good finishing and composure. He'll be the best player by a significant amount in the league, and wouldn't be out of place in the Championship division.
The Boardroom:
This is the boardroom screen, where you can see how your board thinks of you, ask for things, and change your budget. The budget will be the first thing we change. Since there's no point in spending millions of pounds on players who'd rather retire than sign with us, we're going to pare the transfer budget as far back as the board will let us, which will allow us to overpay players with League Two talent to come play with our team.
It's good to have an oligarchs backing. In most games, it's a careful dance between setting your wage budget and keeping enough money on hand to buy some players and improve your squad. We don't have that concern, yet.
So that's roughly where we start. Next update we'll be hiring players and staff, setting up our tactics and training regimen, and maybe even playing a soccer match or two. Exciting stuff in the world of spreadsheets, I can already tell that you just can't wait!