El Payaso

That's well noticed. I wouldn't put too much trust on the preview though. I would think that 4-2-3-1 is going to be the dominant formation within the league. Betis and Atlético will rebel against that trend.

I see many good and easily understandable points in the message above. Representation of attributes definitely is the biggest problem with the match engine. I mean: you can heavily rely on crossing even if you have three 5-foot attacking players attacking the box. They will get you the job done. You can also rely a lot on wing play, even if you have players that can't cross the ball, don't know how to dribble or have good attributes for off the ball movement. This is mainly because as far as I remember, FM has always had this railway for attacking players to run with the ball that the defensive players are not able to defend. It is better nowadays and I don't feel that the wide players are as easy to get to perform as they were in some earlier versions of the game but basically automatically effective wide play is still very much a thing. For me it tells a lot about SI's point of view if the response of a Conference level team being able to play tiki-taka type of football to a perfection is that: even local players in the park can control the ball perfectly, so there is no issue here. This was a couple years ago when I did this for a full season with Ebbsfleet United. 70% possession and about 3 goals per game.

You could say that. Big changes at least. The main aim behind these was to get rid of dead wood, high earners and bad personalities. Haven't talk a lot about the club DNA but basically I am only signing players with good personalities (at least fairly professional) and slowly getting rid of everyone else. I think Juan Miranda and Isco can be an exception for me in this case as a really valuate both of them. Ayoze for example was earning €93k a week which is way too much for a player that I don't see as an ideal starter. The other strikers that we shifted off on the other hand were not up to the level and had bad personalities. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get rid of all of them.

The main things seems to be that Dr Benjy and other Youtubers doing everything wrong and watching key highlights while talking about something else will still perform better than AI Guardiola and Klopp. Because that is what sells, I guess.

Are you really telling us that FM 2017 had a good match engine?

Hasn't it always been? I used to do LLM in older versions of FM and it was always the same: one season per promotion until Championship that might take you 2-3 seasons before you reach the Premier League. I also tend to manage in Finland when summer starts and squads are up to date. My last attempt was with Rovaniemen Palloseura (RoPS) in FM 2019, I think. In real life that season squad was the worst that we have ever seen at the top tier in Finland but I easily won the league and also qualified to Europa League group stage.

Goalkeepers definitely are an odd thing in this engine. I have had the same problem with both Rui Silva and Chelsea's Sánchez. Both can have one magnificent game and then in the next one they won't save a thing. Against Las Palmas they had 5 shots and 3 on target scoring on all of them and against Sevilla the goalkeeper's weird positioning made it easy for the strikers to apply finishes.

Definitely realistic. Assane Diao had 3 star potential with one grey(?) star at the beginning of my save but now he's been progressing well been included in the first team, this has changed to 4 & 5. No idea how good he will turn out to be. I have never understood why some people even want to see the exact PA numbers on their saves and why this feature has been included in some of the skins.

Really like the style of your updates. Also Fiorentina as a team thanks to Batistuta.

I am unable to find anything game breaking in this year's version. Even the match engine is way better than it was on those last ones (17-20) that I have played. I remember FM 19 being decent in that aspect while for example 17 was a real horror story and furthest away from football that FM has ever been. I find it a bit odd that so many people keep raising for example throw-ins as a specific issue in this version when we have been able to "enjoy" this "feature" of the game for about ten years now. When I worked as a beta tester, I raised tens of examples for every version of the game about this and for example wide area defending but it had no effect back then. As SI have been nerfing down many overpowered features of the game already, I hope that player and staff search are the next ones and those will be deleted from the game. I have done this for my skin through a bit of editing but those kind of features as well as all-knowing staff that are able to list players willing to join your club without any talks with players and their agents, should not exist by default.

Yeah. Real Madrid is a bit of a team that is really difficult to contain. Especially if you take into account the general struggles with defending that we had. Modric was basically the one getting us undone as Carvalho was not able to take him out of the games. Joselu on the other hand was a real thorn in our side inside the penalty area. With Betis the summer is obviously going to be a struggle as many teams are able to tempt your players. What surprised me was that for example Bellerín, Bakambu and Willian José and other deadwood players were attracting so much interest. I was expecting it to be difficult to shift them out. There is also a bit of snowball effect with teams like this. I was planning on only signing 2-3 players to fill in for the obvious gaps but as the AI teams start placing tempting offers, you end up accepting them and then on the other hand have replace them. My aim for this summer was a centre back, right full back and a goalkeeper but that didn't exactly happen. The salary is also an interesting thing as we cannot go over 900k per week and many of these players mentioned above were earning amounts suitable for their glory days. I like players like Fekir, Ayoze and Fornals in general but earning around or over 100k a week is a huge chunk of money considering the total limit. This 900k rule was also the downfall of Rodriguez. He would have signed an extension with us but we were above the limit. One week more and we would have been able to keep him. Tactically it is really hard to say. I was having a difficult time in the first season, switching between 4-4-1-1, 4-1-2-2-1 and a deep 4-2-2-1-1 formations with very little consistency. I've tried to keep it really simple with very few team and player instructions and more generic roles but so far no luck, just struggle. I think the new arrivals will allow my to try and build mainly on same principals but hopefully I can also bring more solidity to the defense and some consistency in the performances in general. I'm going to be writing more about the curious case of Rodriguez and my tactical approaches before the start of the season. The aim is to make this career update a bit more interesting for people. At the moment I can see that the current style doesn't apply to many people and I definitely need to improve my reporting and make it more comprehensive.

Thank you. Already found this one:

Excellent stuff once again. It is good to see these career updates where people actuallt struggle. I'm simply in love with my Betis save as there is a strong sense of struggling in that one too.