FM12: Playing Arsenal at home

This season has been alright for Darlington, however, I thought we would be doing a little bit better than we are. We had a shaky start but thinks got better as we played more games. On the league we are currently in 4th place, which is good for our goal of getting promoted this season. We just need to keep it up for a few more months. Aside from that we unfortunately ended up losing to Grimsby 0x2 on the 2nd round of the FA Trophy, which apparently pissed off the board. However, to make up for that we had some amazing results in the FA cup. We were not supposed to get past Scunthorpe in the 3rd round of the competition, but we ended up tying the first game and winning our home game. We did not expect this great of a result. This led us to a 4th round game against Arsenal, which was crazy. We had no illusions about getting kicked out of the competition by them, however such a big club brough a full house to our game, which luckily was at home. We had 25033 people watching our game, not even counting TV viewers. This brought us a total of 535608 pounds for just one game, which is such an amazing boost for our finances, we even managed to come out of the red. Currently we have 220K in balance, which might even be enough to keep us afloat to the end of the season. If we do well, we might even be able to spend some more money on salaries next season. What a great thing this Arsenal game was.

FM12: no you can't work in this country!

 After a very solid pre-season campaign, for some reason we didn't actually have a good start. On the positive side, at least our attendance has been improving from last season though. We have also made quite a few changes to the roster, with the addition of some great new loans as well as a few contracted players. Of which I would highlight Franco Miranda (WL/ML), who is quite well rounded and should bring something positive to the team. Loris Karius (GK), who was cut from Manchester City, and I had to snatch him. He's a young goalie with a lot of promise, I think he could easily become our new starting goalie in time. I didn't know who else to show here since I actually like most of our new players, so I picked the Brazillian forward with a lot of good physical attributes Edicarlos (ST).

I also learned that I can't just hire a lot of Brazillians if they don't have appropriate work permit, which made it so I couldn't pick up about half of the players I tried out during pre-season. The lesson there, make sure players are allowed to play for you before you invest yourself emotionally to them.

FM12: Summary of season 11-12

 So here is some more info on how season one played out. I posted upper leagues as well so people can check it out, but also since I plan to making my way up to those leagues, it's good to keep track as well.

Furthermore, I just got the best eleven list from my first season and not too many surprises there, except for Greg Taylor, which I didn't expect to make that list over Arnison. I have made quite a few changes for season two though, I'll probably post those after the pre-season.

Financially, the team did mediocre last year, with a total turnover of £1,597,780, Spending £1,937,828. Our wages alone cost £1,099,926 resulting in a net loss of £340,048. Not great, but it is a hole we can definitely come out of.

FM12: One season in the pocket

Season one has concluded, and here are the stats for my players this season. Now the challenge is to look at who I am going to keep, as there are a lot of contracts comming to an end. I am not being given a whole lot of new funds to keep my team doing well so I will need to make some cuts to keep things moving along. I ended up reaching my boards requirement of making to the playoffs and that was my personal goal as well. To be honest I did not want to get promoted as I feel that next season will be the season we really try to push for a stronger squad and better results. Therefore, I am counting on a promotion next season, and ideally a nice boost in ticket sales.

Overall, I can't say our results look too bad. We had a strong run at the end there, with no losses for quite a while, and close to the playoff we beat some of the top teams of the league without too much effort. Looking at the stats a bit closer I noticed our team had the best record of the league in terms of goals conceded, so I'm pleased with that, only 45 goals agains, with Stockport at 46 and Luton in third with 48. We were 7th in attendance with 2228 on average, but Luton was much higher with 6244 in first place. The biggest stats were probably in the goals scored. We scored 66 goals getting 10th place, where the top team was Fleetwood, with a wooping 117 goals, which is nuts. Luton came second with 90, Lincoln with 89 and York with 85. Fleetwood really stands out in terms of individuals too, with Magno Vieira being the MVP of the league and scoring 42 goals, which was just spectacular, no wonder they won the season. Second came Luton's Stuart Fleetwood with 34 and Jason Walker (York) with 24. Quite a range just at the top 3. Our best players were Liam Hatch with 10 and Ryan Brooke / Adam Rundle with 8. Kris Taylor, one of my favorite players scored 7.

Chandler was the 3rd best passed in the season, which was nice, with 83% completion, where Akwasi Asante had 84% and Matty Blair 83%. So really was a close competition here. Ratings were dominated by Fleetwood, with six players in the top ten. Magno Vieira of course led with 7.46, having Sean Clancy second with 7.26. Our top players were Ian Miller (7.05) in 36th and Liam Hatch (6.94) in 66th place.

FM12: season 0.5 results and transfers

Since I joined the team I got a couple of players on loan, such as Jordan Clark (ST - Barnsley), Ryan Brooke (ST - Oldham) and Callum Morris (MR - Wigam). For the most part they have been OK. Morris is probably the only one I'm not too sure about. The board is "okay" with both Clark and Morris, but they have been pleased with Ryan Brooke, who I also think has been useful to the squad. I also brought three players to the team as free transfers, and out of those I still have high hopes for Elebert and Thompson. Elebert has been injured a lot, so I haven't seen him much. Thompson is new, but he's versatile and promising.

The results so far can be found below. I don't think we're doing too well on BSP, as we are on 7th place with 46 pts in 27 games. However, we've been doing well in the FA Cup and the FA Trophy, probably better than expected. So, I think as long as we pick up our game for the next few months we should be able to meet our goals for the season, which are just to reach the playoffs.
 

 

FM12: Half a season with the Quackers

I've played a good half a season with this new game and I'm enjoying it despite the transition period. Darlington is a lower league team (BSP) which I picked because I figured it would be a nice challenging game. Because of their large stadium I thought the room for growth was already there, making this a good candidate for me. On the negative side, this team is pretty lacking on funds, and our facilities are nothing to brag about.

We started off the season with no debt, which at this level I think is actually quite nice. I wasn't given much for buying players, but I don't think this would have been different anywhere else in BSP. Salary wise, I am allowed £14821 but my team was almost maxed out when I got it. I didn't really play smart and ended up keeping the majority of my players (by that I mean everyone), which isn't great for my financial situation. I guess season 1 I'm hoping to just make it to the playoff, and get better for season 2, when I should be able to have more money and ideally better players to get ready for a promotion.

Darlington Arena, as I mentioned is quite big, seating 25k people. The corporate facilities are "good", training facilities are "fairly basic" and I have a "basic youth facility". To compliment that, I have "adequate junior coaching" and "fairly basic youth recruitment". As I said, not great, but I'm hoping this will get better with time.

Tactics wise, I had to play around a bit initially to get a good thing going. I'm embarrassed to say, this too much longer than I'd like but now my formation is the one from the top picture. A simple 4-4-2 with "rigid" philosophy and "attacking" strategy. A few modifications I made to the default 4-4-2 is the Limited Defender I employ at the back, and the use of "defensive" full backs a lot of the time. I'm wondering if this is a wise idea though. In the center nothing unusual, just your average wide midfielders and central mids (one on D and one on Auto). Up front I have a Target man set for support, where usually I keep my favorite striker, Liam Hatch. The other forward is usually a poacher set to attack, in general I try to put less versatile strikers here. I haven't been scoring as much as I would like, so I am still tweaking my attack. My biggest strategic issue for the first few months is the fact I had my team passing more on the short side, and turns out poor sides do better with longer passing options.

Starting anew - Darlington (Blue Square Bet Premier)

So here I go again, with a new series that will likely not have an ending. I'm thinking maybe this will be the one where I take the team a bit further, we'll see. Anyway, I picked a BSP Premier team this time around, I've played lower than that before and it was quite a bit of fun, but I want a team that maybe already have a bit more of a foundation. For that reason I picked "The Quakers", here is the intro I got:

This is my first game in FM12, so I'm hoping to do a bit of a review as I go along. The game looks a bit more polished but I'm hoping thye haven't messed too much with the engine.