Please Grant me some success on this Dafuge Challenge

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Wazerblade

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Hello and welcome to my first ever Football Manager Story!

Here I'm going to be chronicling my adventure with Grantham FC or "The Gingerbreads" as they are affectionately known. View attachment 249439

This save will be a Dafuge challenge which is in essence a challenge where you take over a newly promoted team from outside the Conference North/South and lead them all the way up the divisions and eventually into the Premiership and then onto Champions league glory.

Simple right? Well it's difficult for a number of reasons such as:

1/ The teams (well most of them) having low reputations (i'll get onto this more in a sec) therefore it's hard to sign players (some teams in lower divisions can even poach them from you)

2/ Low attendences so finances can become and issue.

3/ Since you've had to holiday forward one year and the newly promoted club has no established scouting it's even harder to find players let alone sign them!

But all of this is a challenge I'm relishing as I'm pretty experienced with LLM in Football Manager and in fact I haven't started a save in FM15 with a team higher than League 1 ( as Bristol City was my first ever save).

Previously I've had success with Crewe (League 2) in FM12, Mansfield and Luton (Conference Prem) in 13 and 14 respectively and in Fm 15 I've played with Barrow (Conference North). But my greatest and most recent success was with Maidstone (Isthmian Premier) who under my guidance lifted the Champions League in 2027.

However, a dafuge challenge is another kettle of fish and I'm very excited to see just how it pans out as I know it won't be a cake-walk!
 
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The beginning.

So, to set up the save I followed the rules of ticking both "Do not add key Staff" and "Prevent the use of the in game Editor" and began the game with only England loaded.

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My first manager was "Holiday Man" a jolly fellow who's job it was to sit around for one whole year whilst I browsed youtube videos. Anyways, I holidayed on til June 24th, this date is key as the League's "advance" on June 25th so to allow myself a decent pick of teams I stopped here and saved.

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I holidayed on to June 25th (since pressing continue makes you overshoot a few days) and had a look at the newly promoted teams each time. An easy way to do this is to go to the "England" nation page and select "season summary" in the dropdown menu under overview (I think). Scrolling down past all the league lets you see all the promoted teams from the 3 regional divisions. I did this a number of times and picked out a few teams I'd fancy managing.

Doing this multiple times I also noticed something strange (well annoying for me at least). In anticipation for the save I looked up a few teams I would have liked to manage, one of them being Grantham, but another was Curzon Ashton and after countless reloads they never seemed to get promoted. That's when I realized that the game only promotes teams who have a reputation rating of 1500 or higher. Presumably the higher the reputation is, the more often the team gets promoted. This meant I saw Maidstone, Margate, Dorchester and Corby (1950, 1950, 2100 and 1800 rep) all get promoted regularly, and teams like Witton, Grantham, Nantwich et al with repuations of ~1500 got promoted sparingly. All of that was understandable, but I just found it weird that no team with a rep <1500 ever popped up which meant the list of possible teams to managed was narrowed.

Anyway, so to get back to my selection process, I ruled myself out of managing the higher reputation teams as this would defeat the purpose of the challenge to me since most of them have higher reps than some of the established sides. So this left me with a couple of teams to manage and I went with the selection ideology I normally go for with long term saves. Which team has the nicest crest and colour scheme... I mean if I'm going to spend 20 years with a team I'd like it to be bearable.

I had a few interesting teams to pick from again assessing them all on uniqueness and all that.

One team that popped up was Dulwich Hamlet. They play in a pink and purple quartered shirt which was cool, and I'd really enjoy making my FM pink for a couple of months but they're a fairly popular team and so they're high attendance would make the team a bit easier, so I opted out. Another reason is that for the sake of everyone's sanity it's probably best I didn't pick them as otherwise I'd just flood this post with Hamlet Quotes and though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t

Other teams I considered were Bognor Regis and Nantwich who play in green. I like green. And Witton Albion who have pick axes on their crest which effing shweeet. Oh and there was also Blyth who are spartans and spartans are awesome but they have the same problem (well it's an advantage to be honest) as Dulwich Hamlet

But in the end I opted for Grantham. Why? Because of reasons.

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Grantham FC here's to a long a prosperous reign.

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Media Prediction: Dead Last. Oh joy.

So here's the lucky guy, ready and waiting to unleash the potential of Grantham into the footballing world.
His name? Guy Incognito. A Sunday League footballer with no coaching qualifications. He's a tactical manager for all the good it's worth. I decided to change up a few things on the manager set up screen which isn't something I normally bother with. I made my adaptability 1 which is true to life as I'm a stubborn ******* and put a good few points into determination, LOD and MM just for the sake of it.

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And here's Guy in his full glory

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Now onto the important stuff... So since the club is down to it's barebones with both staff and players recruitment is an immediate priority, but of course I met with the chairman and asked to reconsider my objective, get a brief overview on the clubs history, set up a philosophy discussion and I declined to waste my time with the media.

The history: Riveting.

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Expectations: Of course I have to avoid relegation otherwise the save is over, but it's not really worth and extra 80 a week so I left it as fight against relegation

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Goodbye Holiday Man, we hardly knew ye... and thankfully never will.

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So for recruitment the first port of call is to get and assistant manager, that way I can assess my own squad better and it will enable my to weed through potential staff easier since I can get rid of those uninterested. One easy way to find staff without an ***-man is to set the reputation to something low, that way the candidates will more than likely be willing to join and from there you can assess them and see who's capable.

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I'm mainly only searching for 3 things with my assistant JPA and JPP aswell as tactical knowledge. I'm not too bothered with training yet. I only found two this way and frankly it was an easy choice.

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So that's one boxed ticked, now all I have to do is find coaches/scouts and a DOF (yes a DOF) then retain and recruit a whole squad of players all without any scouting knowledge.... Gonna be fun!
 
Wazerblade said:
Holiday Man was a waster. I'm glad to be rid of him!

And thanks ^^)
Click to expand...

I have no doubt that he will be referenced as a footballing luminary at some point in the future, a true legend of the game!
 
Wazerblade said:
Scouting players is great fun when they all look like this...

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Click to expand...

And I've just realised why....

I've removed points from "Player Knowledge" when adding in my manager thus making him inept at judging players. Never knew this existed and always presumed only scouting determined what attributes I saw when I looked at a player.

Here's the same player on a new save with a new manager having 6 player knowledge and 5 youngster knowledge.

View attachment 249286

****** nuiscence but it's my own fault. Just gonna have to start again with a new manager, will only hold me up for an hour or so but at least I've learned something.
 
Grantham, isn't that where Maggie Thatchers from?

Will the players be getting milk at half time?

Joking mate, good start, hope you do well!
 
Update #1 Post Pre-season

All righty guys, I know it's been a while but I'm back! *Pause for applause*

Anyways, apologies for the delay but I've been busy with other things recently and I'm also a Dark Souls addict ( the only thing that could break my previous fm addiction) so that took up my free time, but I finally finished my pre-season preperations so it's time to return to Grantham!

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So when we last left off I was about to engage in some hiring and firing, and to put it simply, no-one who was at the club when i took over is still there, with the exception of the newly joined keeper Danny East.

I began by hiring my assistant Matt Heywood, 2 scouts in Paul Bloss 14/13(JCA/JCP) and Karl Beckford 15/11 and a DOF Ryan Hindley 12/11.

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I hired a DOF in anticipation of him finding and making offer for decent first team members, but every player he seemed to make and offer to was either regional division standard, play in a position already saturated in talent (eg CM) or have their wages too high to be justified as a backup. However I'm still going to keep him on as there's no harm in him making offers as long as I can still reject them. Moving on from player recruitment I hired to generic coaches to improve training and allow me to go on a coaching course to get my national C license. I should get it around October/November.

In regards to wages, I have a budget of ~3k and the club were currently spending 600 of that, so I had a lot to work with, but still needed to fathom a whole team. Oh, and the club's balance was 43k and barring a miracle it's probably going to be in the red come the end of the season.

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In the meantime I also had the meeting with the board for philosophies. I only went for "sign young players for the first team" as it's and easy one to fulfill and I don't want to be limited to my style of play yet.

So obviously with the team newly promoted, and with the strange way the game handles these teams (no player at the club averaged above a 6.5 last season despite winning promotion) player recruitment was going to be difficult. The quality of the players in the team right from the start really obscured my scout's judgements since any player they recommended no matter how poor was given a flattering scout report so my aim was to try and get players in on trials asap to help rectify this.

Trials are very beneficial for LLM for the reason I previously stated and they also A: let you get a better look at players and B: in general players lower there wage demands over time and trials seem to help this majorly e.g. one player demanded 925 p/w to join, then get him on a trial and he wants 500 a week, still high but nowhere near his first demand. Then over time he eventually settle for 300 p/w.

There are risks to trials however, as since you're taking your time with some players, they may garner interest from other sources and so you can lose them, and playing with a low reputation team like Grantham you're most certainly going to lose a lot of them once another team comes in.

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Now, the players. http://imgur.com/a/mP8ma Imgur album of all players signed so far

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The squad. Still a few trialists left.

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Edit: I tried to post the pictures of my players with my reasoning for signing them etc but it was rejected and the pictures are attached below. No reasons though and I don't want to type it all out again :P... any questions just ask.
 
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Update #2 August's results part 1.

So August has come and gone and with it we've added some new faces to the ranks of Grantham Town and there's been some exciting games to say the least.

So, before the season began let's have a look at how we were expected to perform.

Our season prediction was 22nd. Dead last.
Our wage budget is the 6th lowest in the league. That's 40k P/A higher than the lowest team, Gloucester, and 410k lower than the highest, newly relegated Chester.
Oh and our attendances have been an average so 272 so far. So let's see if this improves with some good results!

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So how was I going to tactically approach these games? Well imo versatility is important in LLM, and you need to change things up depending on certain fixtures so we've been preparing 3 tactics focusing on Standard and Counter mentalities. The mentality I start each game with depends on whether or nor we are home or away and if I think I can beat them or now. I also like to look at how both teams set up and adjust from there early on in the match and change to attacking if needs be.

Primarily our formations will be 41221, 442 and 4321 with wingers. 41221 is set to short passing play and the others slightly more direct but again, I change it up on a game by game basis.

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So, to kick off our season we were home to Harrogate town and we did pretty well in fact. The scoring was opened by Kyle Wootton who controlled a low cross from Rhys Sharpe and place it in the far corner. 1-0. Our lead was doubled before the break as Callum Terrel vollied home from a Mahlondo Martin Cross. The game was sealed in the 57th minute by Wootton who easily slotted hom from 6 yards after Terrel did well to put in a low cross. 3-0 it finished

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After this match we added some new faces to the dressing room... well they were always there, but they just weren't getting paid for it. Both Ollie Colman (DM) and Kevin Toner (CB) joined on contract term and will add some decent depth to the team.

Our 2nd game was against Chester, and we knew it was going to be a very difficult one as they are top dogs in this league. The game was won in the first half really, and despite and early 2nd half goal Chester were able to see it out.

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Some more new signings! With Colman being our only player able to play in the DM role we needed another since one of our formations relies on it. I looked around and found Jonathon Worthington who previously player for Halifax in the Conferance Prem. Worthington being 32 is the oldest player on our team.. In fact he's the only player older than 23!!

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That's it for part 1 of the August results!
 
Update #2 August's results part 2.

So with two new DM's at the club I wanted to play 41221 in our next match and see how it would pan out. Our opponents on the day would be Glouscester, previously mentioned for having the lowest wage total in the league, and it would show.

We hammered them 5-1 in a spectacular performance by the Gingerbreads. Including 2 goals from our cb's from corners and a brace from Callum Terrel who played wide right due to or lack of depth in this position.

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After this game we signed the young winger Adam Dawson from Leicester to hopefully sort out our right wing problems.

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The penultimate game of August saw us play away to Gainsborough. Unfortunately we were not up to the challenge and Lynton Karkach tore us a new one.

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Our final signing of August is Jamie Hanson A fine defender who can also play as both a DM and a CM but defense is where I'll more than likely play him but his versatility is what drew me to him over other CB trialists.

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So 41221 obviously did not work too well for us last time out, so I created the 4321 formation to hopefully allow us to improve on our away performances. This is a formation I have played successfully with Maidstone in a previous LLM adventure so I hope it brings me further success.

To try out the new formation we were pitted away to North Ferriby and it was our very own Yorkshireman who opened the scoring. The Leeds' loanee tucked away a rebound after a fine move involving our wingers and advancing cm's. North Ferriby rebounded without hesitation however and equalised straight from the kick off. After this however, and perhaps it was luck through the sending off of D'Laryea early on allowed us to dominate thereafter.

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So after August's antics we're sitting pretty in 6th place I'm really hoping we can build on this. Up next however is 2nd place Oxford City so it might be a difficult hurdle to overcome.

Player stats

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Player of the month: Alex Iacovitti

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CraigWL said:
I have no doubt that he will be referenced as a footballing luminary at some point in the future, a true legend of the game!
Click to expand...

Holiday Man really is the Alan Smithee of FM, isn't he?

Great start storywise, though - looking good so far in the table. KUTGW! (H)
 
General update

Real sorry for not updating guys. My keyboard broke last week and I've only just replaced it. I did continue on with the save however and we won the league ... Yay.

Not sure yet if I'll continue on with the updates yet.
 
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