WhiteCat33

FC Elazig Spor Hamburg Season 17 2039-40 Regional Division: North (Tier 4) Competitions League: 4 of 19 [Preview – 10/19 (2000-1)] What a turnaround! I'm not ashamed gegenpressing myself to the top here with a team that is significantly inferior to everyone else in the league. B-U is obviously way better than everyone else as the relegated 3-Liga side. Cup: Semi-Final Defeat Another knockout by Hamm United, who then lost to B-U who did a lower-league double this year to totally dominate T4. Squad: For the first half of the season (before the intake players breach the 16 bar) there were only two changes to the lineup form last year. Tunahan Senol became the man between the sticks, and 16-year-old Sertac Gazioglu stepped up at LB. Suffice to say both were significant improvements, with Senol being outstanding at GK and developing immensely this season becoming the media's top GK in the league. I'm bummed he will leave us in a year continuing to deny any talks to renew his deal. After New Years I was finally able to use Murat Oztekin, last years top-prospect, and he showed that there might be something special there. 9 goals and 4 assists in 17 appearances makes him our 4th highest scorer only playing under half the minutes of the three who tied at 11. CA & Overview: Team Data: This year was the return to form of Efekan Sengul who registered 13 assists and was a join top socrer with 11 goals! He is followed by his rotation option Okan Yalcon in assists at 11. To have my IWs generating double-digit assists proves it was a successful formation shift. Team Demographics: The same graphs for the youth intakes exist for the squad, with an additional 4-pack of graphs that track year-over-year CA by position group and playing time. The minutes distinction is new since I originally played this save, so I only have data for the past two seasons. Statistics Excel: May add later, the question this year like last year is on what to do with strikers. Mehmet Can I really want to keep playing, but I really question his effectiveness without speed especially as he takes away valuable playing time from all our young prospects. Transfers: Tons of loans, but no meaningful departures. I basically loan out the entire youth players I don't see as playing a role in my first team. Youth Academy Youth Intake Preview: Youth Intake: Pretty solid intake, which was attacking focused like I anticipated with that preview. YI Player Highlights: Academy Data: Professional-Ambition-Determination Graphs: Current Ability Tracking & Total Personality: Full Personality Pie-Chart: Academy Overview: Head Coach Didn't notice anything pop up. Club We are still super broke, so nothing is changing here. Manager Thoughts What a year, I knew there was something special in this squad worth a second look. I was confident we would do better this season, but 'best of the rest' was not on my radar. The two things that held us back at the end of the year is: 1) Lack of Depth in all 4 defensive positions. 2) Underperformance by our dedicated strikers. 1) While this won't get fixed in the Fall I'm pretty sure we will be in better shape in the next 2-3 years as there are some decent CD prospects in the pipeline. However, we still have junk for fullbacks so we will be relying on our outstanding GK core to keep us in the hunt till some talent appears. 2) I am starting to generate some promising AFs who are the 'beat the keeper' type w/o finishing, who will probably become the protype #9 for the club instead of the DLF we've historically deployed. Speed in the attacking 3 just is overpowered in these lower-leagues over skill. Competition History:

Can you link the DB? The general rule of thumb is DBs are allowed to enable playing in countries/tiers not available in the base game as long as they attempt to recrate the real world leagues. Thus no fantasy DBs like USA with Pro/Rel is allowed. Those are all great leagues to choose. 3) Yes, use a holidayman who then retires and is never played with. Then create a coach with the minimum experience (Sunday League & No Badges) with any single nationality. You can choose any club promoted into the lowest playable league regardless if they have an existing coach or not.

FC Elazig Spor Hamburg Season 16 2038-39 Regional Division: North (Tier 4) Competitions League: 13 of 18 [Preview – 18/18 (1000-1)] Ending the season 10 points clear of relegation makes it seem like a safer season than this was. I struggled significantly to get a formation to work with this team having forgotten how it played as well as coping with a gaping hole at LB. I must have anticipated issues as I had drafted a 4-3-3 instead of a 4-2-3-1 that was less aggressive. It however was disastrous losing our first 3 games. I then retried our 4-2-3-1 and lost 3 of 4 league games, so that was bad as well. My final plan was to strip the team back to basics and go a 4-2-4 long ball with 6 players back at all times and attack with 4. Of course we lost the first 3 games this way, but by 1 goal and the team looked more stable. I stuck with it and we pulled ourselves up from dead last to unquestioned survival with the ugliest football you've ever seen. Cup: Quarter Final Somehow we beat Hamm United in Extra time and put together a solid cup performance for such a dire season. We of course got the hardest team in the tournament in the QF with B-U and we did well to lose 1-0. They easily beat the next opponent and went on to win it. Squad: CA & Overview: Season Stats: End of Season top lists helps see who actually was contributing to our success. Here you can see both my strikers were fairly poor with 11 & 12 goals in ~2500 minutes. Biggest disappointment is actually our star winger Sengul is at the bottom of the assist table and not on the goal table so was not utilized effectively in the season. Squad CA by Position and Gametime Breakdown: I like this to point to me where the team is weak depth-wise. Helps for planning. Downside is I rely on the game telling me where a players ideal position is, so it isn't necessarily where they play in my system. Team Data: Statistics Excel: Strikers: Of the 4 2 played up top (Mehmet Can & Feridun Altintas). The other two (Vural & Gezgin) were 2 of our 3 AMR players. They would sometimes feature as subs as strikers but were never the first choice. In the first movement/creative stats the surprise for me was Altintas actually had a reasonable chance creation, generating assists and converting them. Both of the AMRs did really well actually generating chances which was a pleasant surprise. That optimism for them gets bleak fast when you look at their scoring statistics. I truly don’t think I’ve ever had players that horrible at scoring in an offensive position like they were in. Granted, they weren’t the strikers but still that is just horrendous. You can see though that my strikers weren’t a whole lot better. Altintas actually got himself into good positions generating a lot of NP-xG/90 for the league, and then turned that into a number of shots. However, his accuracy was poor and his conversion even worse which is why his Gls/90 was pretty bang average. He’s let down by poor Composure & Decisions, which I am training him on but its slow developing. At least he’s Professional. Transfers: I did my best to loan out my players to get them some game time. Unfortunately, the Slovakian club that took Seman did him dirty and didn't give him a single appearance which did nothing to help develop him. On the flip side though, Senol had a breakout season with SV Elversberg leading them to a League Win + Promotion as well as the Regional Cup Trophy! Senol vs Kuru Comparison: Pretty even GKs overall with a couple different benefits to each. What I like more about Senol is his Decisions & Concentration as well as the fact he’s 6’4”. Yes both have the same jumping and aerial, but the physicals I think are better distributed for Senol. Performance: Goalkeepers are both easier and harder to compare than field players. Each team only has one in the dataset (usually), so you can use the main table instead of the breakouts. However, I have more trouble judging from the stats the difference between good and great goalkeepers. Here it is even harder to compare my two GKs as Senol played a tier lower for the top side, while Kuru played at a higher tier for a bottom side. Kuru: Senol: The three big statistics for me that made me take the risk on swapping GKs for the next season is that Senol had 23 shutouts in a 30 game season with an average of only .27 Goals/Game. What's even crazier is he created .25 Chances per game (from I'm guessing long kicks over the top), which is extremely high for a goalkeeper. Obviously, he didn't have to work nearly as hard as Kuru who made well over 100 saves this season compared to Senol's less than 25. The other fact of why I'm giving Senol the chance now is he only has 2 years left on his contract and since I started the save he's considered himself too-good for a new contract with us. Kuru on the other hand I have for 4 more years (with extensions), so one or two years out on loan in Turkey is fine. Youth Academy Youth Intake Preview: Youth Intake: YI Player Highlights: Academy Data: Professional-Ambition-Determination Graphs: Looking through my saved exports it seems I'm missing a year of data, which is fine as you can still see the trends. Academy is doing great in producing Professional players. Current Ability Tracking & Total Personality: What's interesting to me is only how recently the academy isn't generating completely trash players. We even got a 36+ CA player this year for only the second time! Full Personality Pie-Chart: Disgusting I know. Academy Overview: Excel does not like the Turkish special characters, so apologizes for all the broken names. Head Coach No accolades, just glad the board never brought me in for a talking to. Club Finances: We had a boardroom shuffle this year that honestly made things even worse. They restructured the debt in a way that generated a paper 1.7M profit, which we will now have a 230k tax on next year. At this point why not, what even is money anyways? Manager Thoughts Next Season Formation: The big task is developing our formation for next season to do better than ‘just not fail’. I've developed a 4-2-3-1 Gegen Press that will take advantage of the teams high work rate, determination & aggression abilities. The main Issue is my “star” striker Mehmet Can had an awful season up top and I really think his 5/20 movement is just not good enough to get behind the defenses I’m facing. Instead, I think I’m going to try a more GP 4-2-3-1 that is still cautious but uses a high line and drops Can into the 10 slot to take advantage of his great mental attributes instead of sitting up top in a DLF role. He should function fairly similarly in this configuration.

I've taken a break from FM for a couple months, but with the season starting here in the US & the climax of the continental competitions beginning, I felt the draw back to FM while I watch matches. As I still haven't got FM24 (and honestly might just skip and wait for FM25 at this point) I looked back through my abandoned save folder to see if any old saves interested me. That's when I remembered Turkish player generating Elzaig Spor Hamburg! Having played the save now for over a week and finishing my second season, its fair to say I'm back in it and thus worth posting back in the thread. Few things drew me back to Hamburg: 1) Alt-nation team ; 2) Horrendous Finances & Facilities ; 3) Unbalanced & significantly lower ability squad than division, 4) Difficult Regional Cup, 5) Good Player Personalities, 6) Interesting Player Statistics. 1) Turkish Generating Club - This makes for very interesting player development as loans go between lower German clubs & Turkish clubs. It also helps for higher salary players as Turkey has strict foreign rules, so clubs are willing to pay higher percent of wages for slight talent from us. 2) Ludicrous Stadium Debt - When the club was doing great fighting for promotion from T5 the board decided our tiny 500 person clay field wasn't sufficient. Then in a league where players are on under $100 p/w contracts the board spent over $3M on a stadium immediately bankrupting the club. I return to a squad with a (1.4M) bank balance & $3.3M Loan Debt. 3) 3 Star Goalkeepers but no Fullbacks - The team depth chart is laughable. 3 of our 5 best players are Goalkeepers, so I'm forced to loan 2 of them out so they actually play any matches. We had a star LB, but he wouldn't sign a new deal and I lost him over the summer before this season. For field players the creative genius of the team is AML Efekan Sengul who serves up the lethargic DLF Mehmet Can. We then have a good spine to the team with tall & decent CD with two good DMs. A young CAM/ST rounds out the remaining talent for the squad. Everyone else is 1.5* or less for both FB positions & AMR. 4) Two lower-league powerhouses blocking easy Cup-sweeps - Germany makes it difficult to go on lucrative cup runs as you have to win your regional cup first and then the next year you get entered into the DFB Pokal. We have a sole cup trophy in 2034, but we are coming off our 3rd final defeat this year to one of the two current dominant LL Hamburg Clubs: Hamm United & Barmbek-Uhlenhorst. Both of these clubs I consider our rivals as they have consistently made life difficult for us. B-U is exciting as they were also a viable club for this challenge and last season got promoted into the 3-Liga so are a fully professional club, while Hamm and all the rest are semi-pro. 5) Professional Personalities Galore: This team is young (only 2 players over 25) and is extremely professional: 2x Professional, 3x Driven, 7x Resolute, 13x Fairly Professional & 1x Spirited. Granted a number of these players are trash and will get tossed in short order, but the team is already trending professional and is set up perfectly for mentor groups to correct errant youngsters. 6) Statistics Manager: A way I've tended to play the game in recent years is with two excel spreadsheets to analyze performance of players and club development. To me, starting in the lower part of a dominant nation will provide interesting statistical analysis throughout the life of the save as well as get a proper measure of the improvement of my youth program. Current Ability Calculator Here you can see very quickly the difference between our squad vs Hamm whose player ability I also exported. For reference to where the team was, here is the last post I made in the FM23 thread back on May 2 2023 recounting our first season in the North German Regional Division (Tier 4) after finally making it through the bottleneck of the Oberliga after 5 attempts: Career Summary: And proof its still a Youth-Only challenge.

I'd load in all of his league DBs even if you don't intend on playing in the nations. The only one that might be an issue is Puerto Rico. I know in FM23 a lot of the USA Lower league mods would touch teams there, which would break that league. You'd have to check with TMC if he did or not. It will be obvious when you load up the game as you'll get a big error for the league.

Smart thinking! Now the test is to Sim 10 seasons w/o it and see what happens to league ranks.

Would at least make playing as Barbados Martinique Puerto Rico or Cuba significantly more engaging as they are hard-coded into the NACL qualifying with the bigger nations. Is it a lot of work to split the NACL off into its own additional file? Could at least help narrow down where the bad interaction is happening.

All Lichtenstein teams get the Vaduz treatment, but if you win enough titles you can improve your entry point to the EL from the Conference. Pretty sure it can't get raised to the Champions league. I had a good time in the German Lower leagues until the board built a stadium and bankrupted the club. Cup runs for funds are a lot harder as you have to win the regional pokal first to get entered into the DFB the following season. Lots of cool foreign regen clubs in the city leagues. Hamburg alone had two Turkey teams, a Croatia and I want to say Serbian that all could get promoted as viable for the challenge.

Your MLS teams are doing way better than mine getting to finals more often than not, which is good to see. Always has bummed me out how poor the AI is at handling MLS rosters, maybe they are less incompetent this year?? Hope you get to that first final faster than I did! Man that was a slog.

In last years file it was something about the NACL changes that froze the rankings like you're seeing @XaW. My game only has dynamic league reputation because I didn't add that mod file, which fixes the issue but you dont get the full carribbean cup experience. Having never edited I don't have a clue of what is happening. Real bummer of a glitch.

Awesome domination in the Caribbean! Out of curiosity, how have the MLS teams fared in the NACL for you?

Two major things i do: 1) check for if the AM has set "Endurance" training during high congestion windows and change it to something less intensive. Helps reduce some very frustrating injuries that can occur. 2) NACL has lots of Midweek game scheduling so i go in and make sure the training is adjusted for midweek games, which sometimes requires just reselecting the training set for the week to auto-fix the Rest / Match Practice days. I also handle all individual training, that's where I really target developing my players. At the end when you have maxed out facilities & coaches I'm sure there's ways to optimize squad training to develop players towards your playstyle, but I'm not that skilled at optimization. Maybe next game I'll dive into it.

Increased reputation of the club will eventually allow it to reappear, so any minor Cup trophy you can win while you slowly build up domestic strength will slowly unlock it. Basically the new chairman is the best way due to how broken the weighting is on his Working with Youngsters. GL on the RNG roll when he shows up. Can you get foreign affiliates yet, perhaps the Asian/American Influence affiliate will help as well as foreign tours? Annoying to lose a star like that and then not be able to spend the money how you want. Hope next season is an improvement!

Did they have a Tycoon Takeover or something? Cant say I'd expect that large of a bid from them, or maybe I've just played in the Caribbean too long

I'll at least write up the season I've finished in the next couple nights before I fully throw in the towel. Maybe that will get me back into it a little as I do have a couple winger youngsters in the U18s who could become something given playing time when I switch back to a 3-5-3 Wide. The big downside of the save is there is no Caribbean Cup because I opted for dynamic reputation instead, which make for less exciting competitions. It would make for a fun spending save as we have really high reputation, a 60M bank balance and you get 6 foreign slots in Barbados. Also BDFSP is just now becoming relevant again, so the domestic picture isn't just pure IR and holiday twice a week. Just know the league isn't particularly important, what matters is the Cup as that is what qualifies you for the NACL. Game save is at the start of the NACL, so your team is locked for the Caribbean round but you'll get to register your new signings before the knockouts. Enjoy! https://www.mediafire.com/file/z6eep4k8kfvq9l1/Barbados+YAC.fm/file Also, for anyone that uses my CA Calculator spreadsheet I've uploaded an updated Blank (V6.3) with the new View (CA Calculator V3) into the folder on MediaFire. This folder also has my Statistics Spreadsheet I built when I played my St Louis FC Save and earlier in my lower league Germany YAC. This tool isn't helpful in small nation saves, but for those fighting it out in England mid-leagues this could shed light on how your players are performing and possibly inform on player effectiveness. https://www.mediafire.com/folder/z6k77x3z9wj9z/WhiteCatStats If you have any questions using either tool don't hesitate to message me.

I had a pretty busy holiday season, so even though I played a couple seasons I haven't had a chance to put together the post. Unfortunately, the team is hitting an end of a generation, and my formation change wasn't as strong as I'd hopped so it was a couple of lackluster seasons. I'll probably play the save sporadically until FM24 goes on Winter discount and then I'll start over with the @V50 Caribbean 2.0 to get the full proper Caribbean Island Adventure. So sadly here is to the nearly-men of Barbados, Ricardo Hoyte will live in infamy for throwing away our best shot at glory. https://i.imgur.com/Yuj6EFE.mp4

Getting closer to that Celtic relegation! Love the chaos and your cup win

Next up he'll break his leg skiing...

Costa rica has the strongest clubs in Central America. In my save I also have Honduras active and both countries regularly have wonderkids in the top 10 NxGn. Honduras doesn't keep its talent domestic like Costa Rica does, so has weaker clubs but has generated better players so has the better international performance winning Gold Cups and advancing in the World Cup. As a human manager I'd think Honduras would produce an interesting challenge with top talent (for NA) but true difficulty of keeping them. Maybe with you playing there the domestic league would be stronger. Only one I would avoid is Belize, which is mostly amateur. But I'd say Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama are all decent nations. Would be easier than Jamaica or Haiti to top Mexican sides but would still be pretty difficult. If you actually want to complete the challenge from the Caribbean in under 30+ seasons I'd play in Jamaica. They start with the strongest domestic league and generate the best players out the gate. It will be an actual challenge early game to get to the top domestically, but once you do the Caribean Cup will be yours every season and you can pivot towards the NACL.

Congrats @Colossus a nice early holiday completion, onto the next adventure!

Jamaica or Haiti wouldn't be nearly as hard as Barbados but there's always Central American countries when those databases get completed where it's much More realistic to challenge mexican teams

Well done @thomas_e! I agree the bad AI makes things bittersweet when they do dumb things like that.

Congrats @XaW 👏 amazing what a difference it makes when you don't get matched with your bogey team!

FM23 Barbados YAC: Road View FC 2064 Season 42 – BFA Digicel Premier League League Performance: CHAMPION We returned to dominating the league this year. You can see with GD that BDFSP are becoming a viable threat... Cup Performance: RUNNER UP That viable threat really showed up in the Cup Final when our defense did not: North American Champions League: Caribbean Zone: With our increased reputation combined with success in the NACL it seems BDFSP is beginning to get some inclusions into the NACL. This gives me hope we will get the 2nd slot when the cup defeat drops us out in 2 seasons time. We didn't have any trouble in the league zone as we got the easier group for sure. Caribbean Playoff: New-Club got a Tycoon takeover in 2053 and he still is fully invested in the club topping up their bank balance to over 20 Million each season. His patience has been rewarded as they are now completely dominant in Martinique and have put together a squad that is at least as good as ours now, possibly better. Caribbean matches: NACL 2nd Round 2nd Round Away vs Marathon – Honduras! 2nd Round 2nd Leg Home vs marathon – Barbados NACL Quarter Final The kind draws ended quickly as we got the big bad Monterrey in the Quarter Final. 1st Leg: Home Match 2nd Leg: Away Match NACL Tournament Tree: And unsurprisingly guess who went all the way to win? NACL Records: Squad: CA Player List: Excel Graphs: CA By Position: Transfers: This summer will be a big outflow of 25+ squad players who have been part of the loan army. I wanted to hold off selling them to not strengthen opponents, but I think we are ready now to not just loan 20+ players a season and kick-out the ones we haven't used for a few years. Not much has happened yet as the transfer window just oppened. Best XI: FM Screenshots: Excel Tables: Head Coach: Club Improvements: None, board are jerks! Youth Academy: HOYD: Same Youth Intake Preview: Youth Intake: Two solid prospects which will strengthen the back of the formation. Personalities are relatively decent. Lots of Fickle this year with very good Determination. Top 3 Players: Excel Tables: Poached Player: Another poached GK, though its been a while. The last poached player is 31 now and a GK in the championship in england. Barbados National Team: 2063 Nations League B was a walk in the park for Barbados who swept the group to get promoted back up to the top tier. 2064 This year is all friendlies until the late fall when the World Cup Qualifier Preliminary Matches begin. Bahamas as a first opponent is a nice warmup. Hopefully the good form for the national team will carry them through to a WCQ group stage! Road View Internationals: Barbados Main: Barbados Youth: England Youth: Our young star striker Rhys Jackson has unsurprisingly accepted England U20 callups and has been actually playing in the few matches he's gotten the opportunity to this year. He is developing very well for us and is very much the answer the club has been looking for after the retirement of our legendary Pressing Forwards. Compared to those players he is already smarter with the benefit of being almost fully Either Footed. His weakness in comparison is physicality and speed, though he is improving on that front every month. I have him on a 4+1 deal right now w/o a release clause, so he's safe for a few years. Hopefully, he will keep agreeing to deals like this as we have essentially unlimited wage budget to keep him well compensated for remaining in Barbados. Summary Only the Cup defeat stings and signals to me Barbados has evolved into the final stage of the small-nation development where the legacy clubs in the nation finally have built up the reputation and money to become continentally competitive. In the next few seasons we should see clubs other than BDFSP finally upgrade their facilities now that they have reasonable stadiums that generate gate receipts. Tactical Switch:

What a great GK at only 20! The way I've held onto all my players is the DoF trick to drop the fee release clauses when I renegotiate contracts. Sure, I overpay all my players significantly, but in Barbados you don't get surplus talent that's for sure. At least you were able to get him up to 20M so you won't get totally robbed like @XaW - Porto stole that playmaker. What an attacking generation to look forward to as well.