FM23 - Glory Hunter

[misterioBean]

Hello everyone!
I've been reading a lot of stories from people on this forum in the last couple years so I decided to post one of my own since I never did it and I think it could be fun.
So for my first ever post on the forum I would like to share my Glory Hunter journey. This is actually the second time I'm doing this (first one in FM22) and I enjoyed it so much I decided to do it again.

However, in last year's edition, I chose which team I would be starting out with (Manchester United) so after reading a thread here from another person starting the same save I decided to follow his steps and use a random wheel to pick my starting country and team. For those unfamiliar with the Glory Hunter it's basically a challenge in which you need to win the league and domestic cups of the 5 "main" leagues and all the european cups aswell. You can also decide to go for the international trophies or not but I don't really enjoy international management so I still haven't decided if I'm going to go for them or not (I accept opinions).

So the wheel decided that my starting team will be France's Olympique de Marseille, so I started the save and picked them as soon as I could.

I started the save with max manager stats because this is not really a challenge in which you want to progress stat wise so it really isn't a big deal.
As I usually do after starting any save, I went to have a look at the current staff at the team and I was really surprised with how bad it was for a team predicted to finish 2nd in the league. So I basically fired everyone I thought wasn't good enough and ended up with this:

Yeah, a lot of empty spots indeed, although somehow we have the best scouting team in the country and one of the best coaching teams aswell, even if it's just me for now. After all the firing I spent about 1h looking for the best staff we could afford and signing with them before any other team tried to approach them.

After this I went to look at the team as I don't really follow the french league so I'm not very familiar with the players. Looking at the current squad, I would say we need some reinforcements due to our lack of depth, specially in midfield and attack.

Also the squad's average age is at 26.5 but most of it is over 26 and 4 of the players aged 26 or lower are only loanees. Looking at everything I really think we need some reinforcements so I went to check our finances...

Well, with just 3M to spend I don't think we will have enough to bring in the players we need, but we will see how it goes.
So, being a little upbeaten with the financial situation, it was time to pick a tactic. I went with a very basic 4-3-3 DM with IW because that's usually my go to tactic in almost every save just because I like the defensive consistency it brings aswell as it's offensive capabilities.

This was basically my first day at the job and I hope the biggest update I will post for a while. I'm thinking I'll either do monthly updates to keep them smaller or mid-season updates but I'll think about it later on.

This concludes the first update of our journey. If you read this far I would like to thank you and if anyone has suggestions or want to do any comment I'll be happy to take them in mind. Happy saves everyone!

 

[misterioBean]

First month in the league and we finnish our preseason with 7 wins and 1 defeat in a very poor performance I must say. Not the most challenging teams in the first 5 games but even against stronger sides we were able to play very good football (except against Sporting). This may be a very good sign for the upcoming season.

With the limited amount of money we had it was very hard to get anyone to come in. I decided to pay 950k for Jean Lucas, a reinforcement to add some depth in midfield since he can play in all 3 roles on a decent level. Also his wages are not too high. Not the best signing but I hope he will be useful for us as a fringe player.

However, we weren't able to sign anyone else so I decided to renew some contracts that would be ending next year. Alexis Sanchez and Kolasinac both got new deals and Sanchez accepted a wage cut on his payroll of about 30k per month so not everything is bad. Strootman's contract is also ending in the end of the season, but I decided not to renew it since he is already 32 years old and he's not a first team contender. Also, he is costing us 500k a month in wages and is not interested in lowering his demands.

I made the administrative decision to recall some players from their loans (Milik and Radonjic). Unfortunately, seems like their loans can't be terminated so if we don't sell anyone we will be going to the first part of the season without a new winger or a striker. We will have to rely on Bamba Dieng and hope he steps up when needed.

Not everything is bad tho and at least we got lucky injury wise, only losing Amine Harit for 2 weeks, but he is already fit and ready for the new season.

I also got an interesting message about the club possibly being in a takeover process. Nothing from the board tho so it might not happen but if it's true I'm hoping for some money injection to be able to get some very needed reinforcements.

With the new season about to start and us being in the Champions League with a small squad I'm a bit worried we will lack in some competitions. If I have to choose any of the competitions though, I'm going for the cup first. The reason is PSG will probably be league champions and very hard to dethrone. The UCL is probably not even a possibility for our team so I'm not putting many hopes in that.

I'll be posting more updates after deadline day. Until then, good saves everyone!

 

[misterioBean]

End of the transfer window and no other transfers to talk about. Due to the fact of the club already having 5 players loaned in there wasn't an option and there were no free players worth bringing in.

We started the season with a very disappointing 1-1 draw against Reims playing in Stade de Marseille, in a game in which we had 19 shots against Reims 6. However, ever since then we have been unstoppable winning every game and even scoring 10 goals in the last 2 games. We also started our UCL journey with a 5-1 win over Salzburg, but that's just the easy match, we still have Man City and Sevilla to overtake. For now, we are 2nd in the league table just 2 points behind PSG.

Amine Harit got injured yet again and will be out for 3 more weeks, leaving us with no backup wingers for at least 3 games.

The owner also denied the takeover rumours so unfortunately there's no financial injection in the horizon for Marseille. Payet basically made an ultimatum for a new contract and being a team leader I had to give him a new deal to avoid a backroom backlash so early in the season. The wage increase wasn't that high so I wasn't too bothered anyway.

Now we need to survive until January with the lack of depth in the squad and maybe hope to sell someone for a good amount so we get a bit better financially.

The next update will be in January and hopefully we won't be lower in the league table. Good saves everyone!

 

[misterioBean]

Welcome everyone to the third update of our Glory Hunter save.

Despite our evident lack of first team depth, things are going surprisingly well in Marseille.
So far we have played 21 league games, having won 16, draw 2 and lose 3. One of the losses was an expected 2-0 lose away to PSG but the other 2 losses against Angers (2-0) and Troyes (1-0) were completely unacceptable. However, every loss we suffered was away from home and despite the 1-1 draw against Reims in the first game of the season we are untouchable at our home. In addition, we only have 5 goals against us while playing home.

We also had a terrific run on the UCL so far, losing just 1 game playing at the Etihad Stadium. When it came to France tho, we crushed Man. City 5-3 on an awesome performance from our team, managing to recover from 2 early goals from the english team. We won every match after the first loss and now we prepare to go against Real Madrid in the Round of 16. Our first run in european competitions may be close to an end but we managed to show we can beat the big sharks if we are at our best so anything can happen.

This is how our competitions look like at the moment:

Heading to the new season after a very quiet summer transfer wise, I was hoping to make some money in January but that was not even close to happening. Not one of our players had interest shown from other clubs. The only money we saw coming in was from a loaned player who saw his deal become permanent after playing 15 games in Brazil. That brought us 8M€ to try to get someone. However, I didn't find any players worth bringing for that price. Out of nowhere, our board decided to increase our transfer budget, so I decided to activate Malinovskyi's buy out clause for 10M€. He has been terrific so far so this seemed like a very good investment.

With this move we were left with no money again because I had to move it around a bit because of the wage budget.

Once again, I was surprised when I got this:

A couple of months after seeing our board denying any takeover rumours we got those rumours coming back. I honestly have no idea what will come out of this so I guess we will wait and see.

I will post the next update once the season comes to an end. Hopefully we will see Marseille keeping the 2nd spot since the 1st seems to be far out.

Thanks to everyone who follows our journey and until the next update I hope you have fun playing your saves!

 

[misterioBean]

Welcome everyone to the final update of the first season in our Glory Hunter journey.

After a very positive first half of the season, we kept our amazing form into February, not losing any of the games we played, including a home 1-1 draw against Real Madrid followed by a 3-3 draw against PSG. With these results, I thought we could eventually rise to challenge for the league title. We also won our cup match after these difficult games so I had very high expectations for the rest of the season.

However, a late defeat against Rennes pushed us to 3rd place, 1 point behind Lens who have been amazing this season. We also lost the second leg of the UCL Round of 16 at the Bernabeu but that was to be expected. We eventually got the second place back after Lens lost points and we had a very good run once again.

We actually went through the cup and reach the finals against Lille. I thought we had this in the bag! But no, Lille scored from a corner in the 23rd minute and we couldn't do anything until the end. We also lost the following match against Lens but at this point we were very confortable in the league table so we just needed to not lose any more points, which we didn't.

As expected, PSG just took the league completely on their hands not losing any games, they will very hard to overtake and I'm not sure if we will be even capable of doing it. I forgot to mention earlier we do have a limited time to finish the challenge. We only have 20 seasons to get every trophy we need so we can't be building up every team we move to.

Looking at our squad, out of the 6 loaned in players we have 4 of them will return to their clubs. Harit and Malinovskyi will be kept for the upcoming season. We will be playing UCL again so I was expecting some more money for next season. We did get it, but the board only gave us 12M€ to spend. From all the players we had loaned out with buy out clauses, only Luis Henrique saw his deal become permanent, so we will get back everyone else. Players like Milik and Radonjic will probably stay. Amavi is likely to stay because we will lose Tavares. Everyone else will have their situations decided when they get here. Sanchez was our best scorer this season scoring 33 goals in all competitions. Dieng scored 13 and showed he could do the job if needed.

The board has once again denied the takeover rumours so our finances won't see any improvement if we don't sell players.
Also, I noticed the deal Payet signed was still ending this season and since he was an important part of our squad I decided to get him a new deal. I was very surprised to see he was asking for 100k less just some months after signing the other contract. That helped our monthly payroll but Strootman leaving will be the biggest relief.

So to summarize, we finished the first season without winning any trophy. We could have won the Coupe the France but we failed. Our finances are't great and the team needs improvements. If there are any jobs from other teams I'll be considering changing teams but for now we will focus on seeing what we can do here.

I'll post new updates next weekend.
Until then, have fun!

 

[misterioBean]

Hello everyone.

I have some sad news. My laptop decided it needed its retirement and quit on me. Unfortunately I didn't back up my save files and I didn't save it on the steam cloud so basically everything is lost.

I didn't take any screenshots but basically I stayed at Marseille and played until mid November. It was going fine and we were once again 2nd in the league just behind PSG.

Not sure if I will restart the save when I can or if I'll only do it closer to FM24.

Thanks to everyone who read my save this far. I'll probably start a new one soon.