The Random Newbie Challenge

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Okay, here's the deal...
I got FM2010 for christmas and I am going to start my first new game. I am going to make tons of newbie mistakes, including rubbish tactics, questionable purchases and bad financial planning and I'm going to tell you all about them so you can laugh at me. To make things more interesting, I am going to start of as a completely random bad team. I am going to select a country at random and then pick a team at random from their bottom league. Then I am going to play this game for as long as possible and try to do as well as I can. You will be free to laugh at me or, if you are nicer, offer words of encouragement, congrats or commiserations throughout the entire process.

About me
Although I am an FM2010 newbie, I have plenty of CM/FM hours behind me. In fact I was playing the original Championship Manager while some of you were probably still learning to walk. However, I have missed the last few incarnations. The last one I played, you could watch the match but only as numbered dots moving around the screen. I don't give up on games easily. In fact it is often the case that I will only ever start one game and play it until I get bored with the sim completely. I vaguely remember from my past playing 17 seasons as Doncaster, 14 seasons as Dusseldorf and 11 seasons as some random Mexican team.

I will be starting...
Soon. Still installing at the moment, but hope to have my team up and running by Tuesday at the latest.


More, including team selection, to follow soon...
 
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Step 1 - Finding a team!

Okay, so the game is fully installed, it's time to choose a band of barely-adequate ball chasers that I will attempt to lead to glory. As promised, I will pick a team at random from the bottom division of a similarly randomly selected country. A quick count of the playable countries gives me a total of 51, so I found a dice with a lot of sides on it, put on my best Luke Rhinehart face, and roll my destiny...

I rolled a 9

This indicated that I would be playing in China. Well, at least I should have plenty of players to choose from. Might be hard to find somewhere to build a stadium though. Hmmm, maybe I should stop with the racial stereotypes before this thread gets locked. I chucked in a few other leagues as playable too, the top few divisions in England, Spain, Italy and Germany, just in case I got bored and wanted to apply for a more high-profile job later in my career. I know this will probably make the game run like a dog, but I simply have to do it. It doesn't feel right to me living in a bubble in your home nation.

[random aside]
One thing that has constantly frustrated me about CM/FM over the years is what a memory hog it is. It seems no matter how much computer technology advances, the game always seems barely able to run a dozen divisions or so simultaneously without slowing to a crawl. This was true on my Amiga, which had 1Mb of memory, and is still true on my current PC, which has 3Gb of memory. 3000 times the memory, same result. *sigh*
[/random aside]

Anyway, so now I needed to choose a team. Only two leagues in China, the 'Superleague' and the 'First Division'. The first division contains 14 teams, and another roll with another non-standard dice gave me a 4, making me the proud new manager of the poetically named Shenyang Donjin. They look like one of the better teams in the league, although not the best. They have a 60,000 all-seater stadium (*insert another joke about too many people in China here*) They also have a fairly ugly kit that I will have to endure, but you can't have everything.

View attachment 22196

Next post I'll take a look at my team and stuff, maybe even play some friendlies. Sorry for people that like fast-moving stories that would have burned through half a season by now. I warn you in advance that this thread is probably not for you.
 
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Interesting choice on career and a very nice layout so far, very simple and clear. If your layout is as good as your managerial skills then you're on to a winner. I will be following :)
 
Here is my team:

View attachment 22200

As you can see, 3 Brazilians, one Thai and a load of locals. There were three loan players, one of whom (Paulista) was identified by my assistant as one of the best players on the team. I would tell you more about him except that a week into the game, the loan spells of all three players ended and he ****** off back to Brazil. Guess I should have checked the loan periods before I got too into it huh?

My best two players that actually deigned to stick around were both 16 years old, but looked very tasty. Here they are:

View attachment 22203
View attachment 22204

They both play for China under 19s and look very promising.

One thing I should mention at this point is that the Chinese league starts in March and so my game actually started on the 27th December 2009, coincidently only a day before the RL date. In fact, the Premier League was already in full swing:

View attachment 22201

As you can see Arsenal just might win the league, Spurs are overachieving and Liverpool are *****. FM10 strikes a blow for realism in computer games!

Anyway, we played our first game against our own reserve team and it didn't go according to plan:

View attachment 22202

Oh dear. We have a glaring weakness at left back and also a shortage of numbers in central midfield and strikers once our loanees went home. I sent our scout out to look for some local talent. In a country containing over 1.3 billion people, he should be able to find something worth telling me about right? Right? I will also be looking at the local classified ads to see if any more players want to come and join us on loan. The chairman has decided that we should get promoted this year, so we will need all the help we can get.

Next time - Some more friendlies and, hopefully, some new talent.
 
January 2010

Thanks for the words of encouragement so far.

We began the month with a backroom staff meeting or, as I have now christened them, "The AI tells you how **** you are meeting". I went with many of the recommendations including anything related to training as I haven't even began to explore that area of the game yet. The boys also highlighted some players that I might want to consider buying and I considered one or two.

Much of the time recently has been spent pursuing some new faces for our team. I'm not one who likes to wade into the transfer market too much during the first season of a new game, but we had a lot of holes to fill, namely:

1. A starting left back (our incumbent starter is horrid)
2. Another central midfield player to act as a reserve/sub/project (maybe a youngster)
3. A warm body up front as we only have two strikers on the roster at present.
4. A better goalkeeper (although this is a low priority right now)

In fact, speaking of goalkeepers, there is a very strange rule in Chinese Division 1, check it out:

View attachment 22400

No foreign Goalkeepers allowed in the squad? In the whole **** squad?! .... Why? What is so special about having only Chinese goalkeepers? I'm all for encouraging homegrown talent, but what about the other 20 or so players in the squad? The rules lawyer in me started wondering about this rule. What defines a goalkeeper? What if you brought in a foreign player and then retrained them as a goalkeeper? Is that even possible? Ah well, I guess I'll just learn to live with it for now, strange as it is.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, transfers. There didn't seem to be much available on the open market, it was difficult to find a player that had the right age, position, price, skills and availability. I had a decent transfer kitty of about £125k, but I didn't see any point in spending it aimlessly on cack. I did manage to tempt the following player to the club:

View attachment 22403

I love players that can play multiple positions. It not only gives you more flexibility on match days, but also allows you to run a smaller squad if you have utility players filling up multiple positions on the depth chart. Li will probably start at Centre Back when everybody is fit, but will be able to fill in for injured strikers as necessary. My long search for a decent left back was largely fruitless, but I eventually managed to tempt the following guy to sign on loan for the season:

View attachment 22404

Nothing special, but fills a need until I can find something better. To put it in perspective, my scout says he is twice as good as my existing left back :)

The start of the season is approaching and I am still looking for another striker and midfielder to fill out our match day squad. Given the lack of talent for sale and the ridiculous prices being asked (I was asked for £150k for a player worth £9k) maybe I'll try to get a couple more loan players in.

We have played two more friendlies in the last week or so, both at home to Chinese Superleague sides. The first was a 3-1 loss to Changchun, where we played reasonably well but just fell apart a bit in the second half.

View attachment 22401

The second was a 0-0 draw against Liaoning, where we played pretty badly and were quite lucky to escape with a draw. Still, it looks like we can hold our own against teams in the higher division, so that must bode well.

View attachment 22402

The season starts in a few weeks. Maybe I'll get to that point before my next update, or maybe it will have more friendlies, transfers and other random stuff. That's the thing about being a newbie, it's kind of tough to predict :)
 
Like this thread mate. Very interesting. The only Chinese goalkeeping thing made me laugh :)
 
I'm liking this one mate, keep it up. It's a good read.
 
In Australia, there is a rule that says, You Can't Buy Players That Are In Your Division. WTF. It is like saying there is no transfer window.

The no foreign goalkeepers rule is very lol
 
I'm from China and my Mum is from Shenyang!!!!!! So good choice there :P
 
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Errrrrrrrrrrr noooooooo sorry. I think they are **** though :P
 
February 2010

Right, let's bring you through the rest of the pre-season so we can get started with the meaningful games. We still had 4 friendlies to get through, plus we were looking for a couple of bit-part players to fill our squad.

The transfer deadline (7th February) was fast approaching, so we needed to pull our finger out of our **** a bit on the signing players bit. We were looking for an MC (that's a midfield central, not like a member of Jurassic 5 or something) and an ST (not to be confused with an STD) to act as backups and subs. I had high hopes for a trial day that I was invited to watch containing a few apparent hot prospects. I went along and watched the whole match because I like the feeling of power that comes from sitting in front of 22 people trying to impress you. Unfortunately none of the likely lads really seemed up to much. Eventually, with deadline day coming and a lack of options on the transfer list at a reasonable price, I hit up the free agent market and bagged this guy.

View attachment 22621

Not a bad player for free, plus the similarity with his name and my other recent signing (Liu Hongliang and Li Hongyang) is bound to cause maximum confusion, which is always fun. To fill in as reserve striker, I just promoted a decent-looking player from my reserves, who could also fill in at MR.

With the deadline gone, our last four games were against two Superleague teams and two South Korean teams. The first two resulted in a 3-0 loss and yet another 0-0 draw respectively.

View attachment 22617
View attachment 22618

Next up was a 3-0 drubbing by some bit-part Korean outfit.

View attachment 22620

At this point I was starting to get worried. To date we had not only not won a single game in the preseason (including one against our own reserves) but we had only actually scored 1 goal. It was at this point I decided to take a look at Tactics. Up until now, I had been playing a basic 4-4-2 with the best player thrown in at each position. I didn't feel I really knew enough about the game to start meddling with complicated formations and tactics straight off the bat. I needed time to get used to the team, the league and, of course, the game. However, after my depressing run of results I decided to attack the new Tactic Creator. I tried not to tweak too much right off the bat, but I changed one of my MCs to a Deep Playmaker (this role would be assigned to our start player Xie Hui) and one of our strikers to a Target Man (our best forward Jon Song-Rim). I also changed our defending to zonal (because we seemed to be giving away a lot of 1v1s) and changed our attacking to slightly favour the wings, to take advantage of our other star player **** Jianlin who seemed to be the source of most of our attacks. I took the new tactics out for a spin in the final friendly of the preseason.

View attachment 22616

Success! Okay, so it wasn't exactly the most convincing result, but a win is a win. We seemed to play far better than in the previous couple of outings. I have no idea if this was down to my new tactics, or just blind luck, but it gave me a bit of confidence going into the season proper.


Premier League Update:

View attachment 22619

Arsenal, Man U and Chelsea pulling away from the rest, with 5 hangers-on chasing the European places. Sorry if this story is a bit English-centric (despite being played in China). If anybody wants updates from the Spanish, Italian or German leagues, let me know :)

By the way, the game is running faster than I thought with these leagues active, so I would like to add some more. Is there any way of doing this once the game starts?

Until next update...
 
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i really like this story. i think it is to do with the way you write. anyway good luck for the upcoming season
 
March 2010

It was time to get started on some proper serious games! The board think we should be getting promoted this season. I listen to the board because they pay my wages and determine my budget and job security. The fans also say we should get promoted. I listen to fans less because 92% of football fans are idiots. Incidently, 73% of statistics are also made up on the spot.

To start off the month we had the first round of the Chinese FA Cup. Unlike the English FA Cup there were no minnows to beat up on. This was a straight knockout between the 30 teams in the Superleague and Division 1 with 2 teams (presumably the best teams the previous year) getting a bye to round 2. I had a tricky away tie against a good division 1 team. The kind of game I might have to find a way to win if I was to get promoted this season. The bookies had us as slight underdogs. This annoyed me a bit so I reported them to the authorities as sports betting is illegal in China.

That'll show em!

View attachment 22838

Oh dear. Looks like the (now imprisoned) bookmakers were right. We didn't play badly, they just scored two, what in context of this league could probably be called wondergoals, which turned out to be the difference.

Oh well, we'll just concentrate on the league.

The league campaign began a week later with an away fixture against Yanbian. Although we were away from home I fancied us to win this game. They didn't have any players that looked particularly scary.

View attachment 22839

!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh ****

That was a drubbing. We weren't as bad as the scoreline suggests I guess. All 5 of their goals came as a result of defensive errors. This included two own goals, one Jamie Carragher style, one that looked a bit like Gary Mabbutt's in the 1987 FA Cup final.

Conceding 8 goals in 2 games was simply unacceptable, especially as we had looked quite good defensively in the preseason. I changed marking back to 'default' away from zonal and moved into April a very humbled manager.
 
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