FM18 Chongqing Career Mode

[CMurray04]

Introduction
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Hello everyone! Welcome to my first ever FM story. I've always enjoyed reading these adventures, and decided to try one of my own! Before we go on, there's a couple of things you guys should know. Firstly, I am not one of these people that have the game nailed down and can take North Ferriby to the Champions League in 10 years. I'm hoping my lack of ability at the game will make this an interesting story seeing as we'll have no idea how it'll go. Secondly, I tend towards being more realistic in style with my gameplay. I'm not the type to go on a spree of buying wonderkids and that sort of stuff.

With that out the way, let me introduce you to the team because it's probably not one most of you have heard of! For whatever reason, I always like to entirely randomise which club I play at - it's kinda exciting to be thrown into obscure leagues and aome of my favourite career modes have been in countries which I knew nothing about at the start (my all time favourite was managing Kelantan in Malaysia on FM17). So, this time I ended up with Chongqing, in the Chinese Super League (the 1st tier). China's pretty interesting due to the huge influx of money and top players in recent years. The rules mean that you can only include three foreign players in your starting 11 which leads to an interesting situation where teams field a bunch of pretty poor Chinese players with three or four superstars from abroad. We've been told that the board expect a mid-table finish, and the media are predicting a 12th place finish. Seeing as there's only 16 teams in the league, with 2 going down, I'm feeling like surviving would be a good start to be honest! We have £2.2M in transfer budget, and a £160,000 wage budget, but we're spending about £500 over that so I'll be looking to get that under control in the first season. Our star player is 27 year old Brazilian striker, Alan Kardec, who's previously played for Benfica and Sao Paulo amongst others. He's worth a cool £20M so hopefully he can bang in some goals for us. Below is an overview of the club.

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I'll probably update monthly in game, once every few days in life because I'm also doing an international career with Honduras. I may post a story of that too at some point because it's a pretty interesting country to manage! That's it for now, I hope you guys enjoy the story!

i'm going to ask a question via poll every update, to keep things interactive! Vote on today's if you like!

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[CMurray04]

February 2017

February 2017
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Hey everyone! Since I started this story a couple of months in, the updates will be daily until I catch up. We started off in January but since we were near the end of the month and all that happened was a game against our reserves I decided to lump it in with the action from February. Due to the board being pretty stingy, I have no wage budget to bring in players, and to be honest I'm pretty happy with our current squad. I'm not usually a fan of mass upheaval in the first window, so we'll probably see more action in the mid-season window. As you may have noticed, I have some mods installed - just a skin and logo/kit packs for increased realism. I always think the game is much more immersive with the proper logos and kits, although about half the Chinese teams seem to use red as the home strip (surprise, surprise)! So, with no transfers to talk about, let's get to the games. We only had a 3-game pre-season, starting in January against our reserves, before a tough game against South Korean outfit Jeju and a more winnable game against Shenxin, who were relegated from he Super League last season.

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A decent run-out in a game we obviously need to be winning. Especially nice to see Alan Kardec grab 2 goals - I have a feeling we'll be relying heavily on him this season.

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Jeju are a much better team than we are, so I was expecting a tough game. They dominated it for large parts, but I was really happy to see my substitute come on to score a late equaliser.

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A hard-fought win over one of the better sides in the league directly below us. The highlight here was a brace from 19 year old Nan Song. Due to a rule requiring one Chinese U23 player in the starting lie-up each game, I'm thinking Nan Song could be that player and is likely to team up with Alan Kardec up top.

That's it for February. The next update will probably come tomorrow and will include the first two league games as we complete March. If you would like to see a screenie of any pages, or have any other suggestions, please let me know! Also, please vote on the poll from earlier about whether I should do story on my current international save with Honduras too! I'll leave it open for 48 hours.

 

[CMurray04]

March 2017

March 2017


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So, with pre-season done and dusted, we move on to March and the start of our league campaign. We have a light schedule with just 3 games this month. We started off with a home game against newly-promoted Quanjian, but they're definitely no pushovers with the media predicting a top-half finish for them. Throughout pre-season, I've pretty much settled on a regular team for the league.

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Not the best start and the scoreline flattered us a bit to be honest. Liu Yu had an awful game in CB, missing a crucial penalty. We were 3-0 down and playing very poorly. We mounted some sort of comeback in the final 25 minutes of the match as two of my half-time substitutes, Hyuri and Fernandinho (no, not that one), scored the between them, but in truth the result was never in question. Never mind, we'll move on to our next match which is a tricky prospect as we travel to Shanghai to face Shenhua whose team contains the likes of Freddy Guarin and Carlos Tevez.

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I felt this was a really positive point in a tough fixture. I gave Fernandinho a start after his 2 goals against Quanjian and he impressed again, winning the PoM award. A slight concern that none of our 4 goals so far have come from our two starting strikers though.

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Back to a home fixture to end off March. Despite his good form I've been having off the pitch problems with Fernandinho as he wants £10K extra per week on his contract and with us overspending on the wage budget as it is I had to decline - he's causing problems in the dressing room so he's been benched. Changchun are predicted to be finishing in the bottom half so I felt this was a great chance to grab our first competitive win as Chongqing boss. As it was, we were lucky to escape with a point as they took a 3-1 lead and we had to battle back in the dying moments of the game. 19 year old Nan Song really impressed today with his 2 goals though. We're doing very well going forward, scoring 7 in 3 games but we're looking very frail at the back.

An average start in the league, taking 2 points from 3 games which leaves us 12th (right on our media prediction). Sorry I couldn't provide a screenie of the table - I'd already played past this point when I made the story but from next month I'll include them. We have a very busy schedule in April, so I'll see you then!

 

[Ralph2211]

Good luck mate. China isn't the easiest place to manage. Finding decent Chinese players is difficult.

 

[CMurray04]

Good luck mate. China isn't the easiest place to manage. Finding decent Chinese players is difficult.

Thanks mate! Yeah it's tough with the match rules too. GK has to be Chinese (so inevitably you're stuck with a **** keeper) and the 3 foreigners in the line up rule + the having to have 1 Chinese U23 player rule makes picking a good team pretty tough sometimes. Finding it fun though, although it kinda seems like Guangzhou and Jiangsu are a whole level apart from the rest of the league.