That’s not offside just a free kick
Wests went into Round 27 2 points ahead of me, I won the league on GD after they got 3-3 with Perth (they fucked it up at home). Played them in the GF and won in the 120th minute. Fun times.
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Picked this up on sale recently and have put a solid chunk of time into it.
I started a save with Liverpool and won the league 3 out of 4 seasons, plus a tonne of cups and champions league.
But then I went to start another save with Sydney and that’s where I’m really struggling. Finished 4th first season, won the cup and got to the quarters of the ACL. Then lost half the squad due to loans, and let a few players go.
Second season I signed a few players and tried to develop the likes of Tilio and Ivanovic, but limped to 6th, won the cup again and got spanked in the ACL final. Really struggling to score and doing poorly away from home.
How have people found playing with Sydney?
I’ve found playing with Sydney to be super easy. The only hard part was the first season but I still won the league, finals and Cup. All I added in the first season was Martin Boyle in the January window.
Second season, I found focusing on scouting in the Asian region really helped me more than anything this time around. I currently have a 30 year old Syrian international and a 26 year old Uzbekistan international both signing for free under the cap which helps for ACL commitments.
Throw in a couple of cheap Australian players Riley McGree for 525k and Anthony Caceres for 450k and De Silva for free. Selling O’Neill for 1mil and Brillante for 1.5mil both to China.
Also convincing the board to upgrade the youth facilities and training facilities pretty quickly made the players coming through much better.
I’ve managed to get some solid players come through with 5 star potential and i’ve been game enough to play them. As it stands my back four is currently aged 17,18,18,26 and in the fourth season now i’ve won the league undefeated by 20 points.
The transfers and the scouting I found are incredibly important especially in the A-League because of the cap, you need players that can walk into the team and contribute instantly so I always go into detail with my searches. I play with a poacher as my forward so that’s all i’ll scout and search for, same for every position.
This will be my last year at Sydney and i’ll see what happens when I leave and where I go as to whether i’ll start a new save or continue the save with a different club.
A challenge I always enjoy is the taking a small nation to win the World Cup whilst managing a club in the same country and winning the continental competition with the club.
Update… it took me until my 4th season, but I won the double with Sydney. I was looking at romping the league, but a January bid came in for my star striker Rhian Brewster who I somehow picked up from liverpool, and i had to accept. I then ended up winning the league by 3 points. My replacement striker has really struggled and I’m not looking forward to season 5.
I found A League sides really struggle pressing in FM. As soon as I told them to press less, my team did much better. I’ve got some excellent regens in my youth side who are developing well. Unfortunately none of them perform in the individual roles of my tactic. So I’m having to retrain them.
Sydney is always pretty easy and with a good setup the regens boss the league. I always start as Sydney and go Europe once winning the ACL.
Started the 2022/23 5th season last night. Got done in the semi of the cup by the Tards away, and picked up 8 points from 4 league games. Season now breaks for 2 months for the Qatar world cup.
My regen striker from the youth side wasnt performing in my support pressing forward role, but he does well in the attack pressing mode. I feel like adding another individual attack role has made my side more open at the back though.
Been trying to sign an Asian player for my champions league campaign, but I cant find any who want to come who will improve my side.
I relented and bought FM19 on Mobile as it’s only $4 now and had iTunes credit wasting away. Using it to kill time on the commute and is a nice little keepsake of the 2019 SFC & LFC squads.
As usual I embodied the spirit of a stuffy Englishman who’s never once satisfied his wife, so Colin Wanker started unemployed and got offered the job at Yeovil the day before the season started. I noted in real life they finished bottom of L2 and are now back in the conference so simply had to accept. Added two EPL youngsters on loan in the front third and they are killing it, offloaded some dead wood in January to balance the books, now just £60 per week under budget but miles clear of the rest in 2nd place behind MK Dons.
Destined for unrealistic promotion at the first attempt, so I see not much has changed since ‘17.
Finished up after 7 seasons at Sydney. I won the league 4 times straight, but had a horrible record in grand finals only winning once. I won the FFA cup multiple times and the ACL once, and finished runners up to Barcelona (6-0) in the CWC. I was also manager of the Socceroos in the 2026 world cup but didn’t make it out of a group containing 2022 world champions Denmark and Colombia. Bizarrely, all games finished 1-1 in the group but Australia was eliminated. I’ve checked all the tie breaker rules, but cannot determine how Australia was eliminated. It really highlighted how stupid that format will be. It cost me a contract renewal.
I then moved from Sydney and Australia to Tranmere in the Conference League National. I won the FA trophy first year, and stormed the league the second year. I then stormed League 2, and won League 1 on the final day. After 3 back to back promotions, I found myself in the Championship with a really weak squad. I managed to finish mid table first season, 4th second season and was eliminated in the playoffs. About to start my 3rd season in the Championship now, but ive not really been able to strengthen my squad.
Strangely, my board gave me a new 7500 seat stadium in my second season of the Conference League, about 10,000 less than what Prenton Park held. Council wont let me upgrade above 8200. Anybody had this happen before?
Finished the 2019-20 season at Dollingstown. I was not sacked and in fact the players really took to the way I wanted them to play. Pre-season we were predicted to be in the lower-mid table, but still safe (my promise to the board was that we would be safe).
We had a bit of a rocky start, with 1 point from the first 3 games, and then everything clicked. At one point we went three months winning every single game, including both cup and league games. Northern Ireland has four cup competitions and we went on really good runs in two of those, defeating 2nd tier teams quite handily (including a memorable 5-1 win over one of them). We were top of the league at one point on goal difference and really in it. Then we go to about January and everything started to fall apart. We didn’t win a game for two months and it looked like we might miss out on second place’s play-off promotion spot against second last in the 2nd tier.
We managed to scrape a couple of draws together against good teams and then had a big 3-0 win on the final day to secure the promotion play-off spot. We were the better team in the first leg but a fluke free kick went in (my keeper got to it but couldn’t clear it) and we were down 1-0 going into the second leg. In the second leg they didn’t create a single chance against us but blasted in a shot from 35 metres early in the game, basically securing it. Despite going all-out attack we could only bring it back to lose 2-1 on aggregate. Having the huge emotional battle to even get to the playoff meant that losing 2-1 felt so deflating - facing another season in the Northern Irish third tier.
The club also had this amazing youth prospect come through - a striker with 17 finishing and 15 acceleration at the age of 17. I have no idea how a third tier semi-pro outfit even managed that, but as you would expect he absolutely cleaned up in the league - any half chance was basically going in the back of the net. I was receiving offers for him all season but he didn’t want to leave, until deadline day. There were only 3 games left in the regular season and he left for the team sitting behind me on the table (who are, admittedly, a bigger club). As far as I can tell, they didn’t even offer him more money - this is the joy of playing in a league where players are on a game-by-game contract. Anyway I’m not looking forward to playing against him next season - I had become quite attached to him by the end of the season and was interested to see what he could do with a team built around him.
Not sure if it’s the case over there, but in the UK, you can get FM23 for free with an Amazon Prime membership for the next 2 weeks. Downloaded it and started a season with Mantova in Serie C.
I’ve recently picked it up and am smashing through a season in Scotland League 2 with Elgin City. Top of the league by ten points with about two-thirds of the season gone.
I’m not all that impressed with this version, though. FM only has the mantle of best football manager game now because there is no serious competition.
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I’ve not yet even played a friendly, takes a bit of time to get used to how everything works, I’ve not played since FM18 and some things are quite different.
There are so many bloody meetings all the time in the 2 weeks or so I’ve been playing.
Annoyingly, I have a very good striker, Serie B standard, and he had an ACL injury already when I joined, which had just happened, so he’s out for 15 months. Highest paid player by a mile too.
Are you guys finding significantly more player injuries than previously?
I’m 2 weeks into taking over and I’ve had 2 players get injured in training with minor 5-10 day injuries.
Not (yet) in my save. I’ve probably been lucky, and there’s probably less chance of injury by pretty much only playing once a week. That could really ramp up with midweek games included.
It’ll settle down to the point where you probably won’t bother with them after a season. I’m over seeing the same crap where backroom staff suggest a new Head Physio for the 18th time, when a Head Physio is already at the club. Same with other positions. It’s really, really poor.
If they spent a year just cleaning up all of those things, rather than try to introduce anything, the game will be a lot better off.
I only played the FM23 demo, but it didnt seem all that different to the full version of FM22.
You can delegate a lot of the responsibilities to other staff members and schedule your meetings to be far less frequent.
I really wish I didnt see FM23 was free with amazon, because i dont need it in my life right now. Things are going well.
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I’ve been playing FM23 since it came out last year, but haven’t played in a couple of months. Seeing this now makes me want to jump back on…
Wrapped up the League 2 title with Elgin City when only predicted to finish 8th out of 10. My on-loan striker Aaron Reid hit 26 goals in the league from 35 games. Won the league by five points from Stirling in the end, with another ten points to Stenny.
Have made some steady updates to my squad this season. Not expecting another promotion, especially with clubs like Dunfermline and Falkirk in the division. I have a feeling I’m going to see a lot of these this season:
Anyone else think the wording is a bit strange, though?