Well, my squad is looking pretty good from a longterm perspective, whilst we may not have as many known potential superstars as some teams and the majority of players I have are very young (even at U21 level) the backbone to the side is in place. These guys will now become the core of my team, some are already at a good level, others still need time to develop, but I expect every one of them to become Legends at the club.

GK – Lukasz Fabianski – Arsenal – 23 Years Old.
The young goalkeeper had been at various clubs on trial before we decided to stump up the cash to buy him, there where other clubs bidding for him and in the end it was my £20,000 deal that won his signature. Whilst out at the other clubs he performed very well, but unfortunately when stuck behind my teams in-experienced defence he didn’t quite reach the level of performance he’d reach at other top clubs. Still, at just 23 with bags of potential I’m sure he’ll be an important member of the club for years to come.

DC – Martín Cáceres – Barcelona – 21 Years Old.
The most expensive free agent signing for the club is young centreback Caceres, who we paid £500,000 for in a wage auction. Another player who has been in and out of clubs on trial, until joining us. Immediately after signing for The Warriors he was shipped out on loan for a week so that his performances wouldn’t be lost on such a youthful side, now that hes back in my team with other members of the elite five around him he should prosper. Would you believe it though that he is the top scorer in the official AFA league!

DMC – Sunny – Valencia – 20 Years Old.
The last player to be brought in as a long term investment for the club was Sunny, already a fully developed defensive midfielder with his own touch of class via his many player preferred moves, he was the player at the top of my hit list. The deal to sign him did take awhile, and also increased in fee. In the end he cost my team a record transfer fee of £700,000, with a 65% future fee. As I didn’t have that amount of money to pay cash up front, me and the other club set up an instalment plan, this was in the form of a £300,000 deposit and then the rest (£400k) one week later.

MC/AMC – Maríin Gálvan – Cruz Azul - 16 Years Old.
Ah, where do we start with this kid? Snapped up stupidly cheaply in a wage auction, the surprise was the amount he’s contracted for, wages of just £4,501! I’d already been tipped off about this youngster after reading a article involving Miles Jacobsen (MD of SI) on the Sky Sports website, Miles believes this kid is set for stardom in the near future. A quick look at him and most people wouldn’t think much of him, but that’s true he’s by no means the finished article, yet. As anyone with FM09 may have noticed he is the youngest member of the -10 Club, putting him up there with Pato, Bojan, Anderson in terms of Potential. At my club we have several squads of different ages, I’ve put Galvan in the lowest one (U17 Squad) as I don’t want to break him in to fast, slow and steady is the way forward for him.

FC – Adrián – Deportivo – 20 Years Old.
The spearhead of my team, who is one of the most valuable players at my team with a market value of £1.3million! Right now he looks ok for a striker, but hes not scoring that frequently, which is understandable with a lad so you, im sure once hes got a few seasons of senior football under his belt he’ll be ready and raring to go. He does hold what I think of as the key to any FML Striker, and that is Acceleration, Pace, Dribbling and the all important, Determination. If you look at any of the top strikers in FML they will all have three of those four characteristics.

Theres also a lot of emerging talent in the rest of my team, Striker Terry Dixon the former Spurs youth is improving nicely, attacking midfielder Christian Mendéz is pushing himself into my first team as a regular now and hes only 18, defender Leandro Molina has so many green arrows I think the drug testers will be wanting a word with him soon, Majd Younis my left back isn’t improving as much as id hoped but he is developing steadily, but probably the biggest surprise is André Augusto da Silva…

Just 15 years old and Silva already looks good and has plenty of green arrows, not bad for a regen, the biggest shocker came this morning when I got a training mail which said…

Your coaching staff have indicated that Brazilian midfield playmaker André Augusto da Silva, spurred on by your cutting edge coaching, has been showing remarkable improvements recently.

Their report went on to indicate they feel he is ready for regular first team football and are delighted that you share this view and are featuring him regularly.

…they want me to give him REGULAR first team football!? At 15 years old!? Wow! Maybe Galvan is gonna have someone to pair up with in the heart of my midfield, or will it turn into a Lampard-Gerrard partnership? When all these youngsters start needing senior locks it locks like im gonna have some hard choices of who to keep and who to sell on.

That damn bank manager in FML, he’s no different from the ones in real life, He’s the bane of all us virtual managers. You get a big name in your sights only to find that despite having a healthy projected cash he’s decided that your club record breaking bid will send you into debt, so no, you can’t have him.
What can you do? Well you could always wait a few days, maybe weeks until the projected cash is actually in your pocket, but more often than not you’ll find someone has beaten you to him. So the search begins again, or does have too?
Not a lot of people realise, much like in real life football you can pay in instalments, and this is something the bank manager doesn’t mind, as long as none of the payments send you over your overdraft of course. Unfortunately you can’t pay for a free agent this way, and it can only be done on a player at a club who isn’t in a transfer auction.
For example, your projected say you’ll have £1 million in 4 weeks, there’s no reason you make a million pound offer for a player and pay the balance daily over 28 days, or pay half now and half in a week, there’s many ways of actually doing it. This is also some managers preferred way of selling players as it means you can squeeze more money out of someone, as long as you have the patience to wait for your cash.
Hopefully at some point in the future this will be expanded upon, and we’ll see bonuses for player performances, payments for promotion, making it into a UFFA competition, scoring 30 goals in official competitions, the scope for improvement is vast.
Now, not a lot of people know this next bit of information, not only can you spend the projected money via instalments, you can go outside of it. There is the option to pay over for example 8 weeks which as the bank manager is small minded and he will only look at your projected 28 days. An example would be having a projected of £1million you could in fact bid £2 million and pay 8 weekly payments of £250,000.
Of course instalment plans have high risks attached to them, if you’ve only got a small squad and you suffer a injury crisis it’s unlikely you’ll have the cash to bring in a replacement, or maybe your daily income drops and you can afford the payments you’ll soon start plummeting into debts as the money will come out of your balance, the other team will get paid on time. Don’t hit the restart button either, as those payments will still come out of your clubs coffers.

I’m a keen reader on the official forums, every week I search for posts by Ov and his FML lapdogs and read every bit of information they release, you really can learn a hell of a lot from ready those guys posts.

Ov tends to read something someone else posts like an idea and the crazy guy comes back five minutes later and says “yeah I just threw that together into the code” probably whilst smoking a cigar “expect to see it in the next release”. For example, coming in a new version of the game we’ll be seeing an extra screen in match that shows us the point where each shot was hit from, to any fan of FM it’s those little things that make the game so awesome, and it’s this kind of dedication and openness to new ideas that means FML won’t fail.

Then there are Graeme Kelly’s posts, not sure what he does at SI, I think has the office Jester, and gets a lot of the blame for things when they go wrong .

As far as I can make out Ovs main job is the financial system in the game, whilst Rob Cooper tends to do everything else, the fun sounding stuff anyway! His posts are probably the most informative ones you can read in the forums, whilst not as hands on in the forums as Ov, it just makes his ones much better when they do come, though sometimes he does go into too much detail for some people. One post I do remember was one saying that you couldn’t export pkms (data about a certain match) from FML and so you wouldn’t be able to do something as simple as watching a FML match offline in FM09…

This morning I stumbled upon a pkm from FML, then worked out that the option was still in FML to export one, though it wasn’t that obvious to most people, if you go to an old match up in the top right is an export PKM button. Which then got me thinking, what’s the worst that could happen if I tried to run that in the match viewer on FM09? Not a lot actually did go wrong, it loaded up and then there it was, my mighty young Mitsubishi Warriors in 3D, battling away! Whilst in the game they were called Ajax, well actually both teams where, and one side was kitted out in red and one was all blue, but the names of the players where intact and running about, passing shooting, scoring!

Awesome, whoever is in charge of getting that into the world of FML the first crate of redbull is on me! There are a few problems with importing the PKM in though, as the two match engines are so wildly different the results can differ, players can get reds that actually didn’t get reds in FML, which is very strange but understandable though.

So there you go, if the idea of stadiums in FML doesn’t get your wallet out then just think how awesome it will be when they get 3D into FML!

Originally my team was just a bunch of young undeveloped players who I planned on selling off to the highest bidder when they reached a point when I couldn’t lock there contracts down, the final aim of the team was to reach a balance of £100million in game.

A few games into Cantona (predominantly loses) I started to think this isn’t fun, how can I get a bit more enjoyment out of the game? Then It struck me, the five senior locks. What if I kept a core set of five players, these could then be the back bone of my team for years to come, whilst the filler around it would be made up of regens and promising youngsters, who with the right development could become the next members of the elite 5.

So, hows is my plan going? Well, ive got 23 year Arsenal player Fabanski in goal, 21 year old Martin Cacares who plays for Real Madrid and also 21 year old Spanish starlet Adrien upfront. Currently we’ve got 16 year old Mexican wonderkid Martin Galvan waiting in the wings to take up his place in the Elite 5, but at only 16 hes still got a long time of being on a youth contract. If I can just get my hands on a good young Defensive midfielder the backbone of the squad will be pretty impressive, and the Elite 5 will be in place.

Whilst I doubt the squad will ever go winning a senior UFFA trophy, we should be able to compete against most teams by the turn of the year, until then its going to be a harsh learning curve for the kids.

Today im gonna talk about how to hunt down that regen without banking on the lottery that is Potential Skill. First you’ve gotta get the right net set up to save you time, you don’t want to be checking every single regen as sometimes (especially when you have lots of scouting skills) that could take ours. Heres mine that I use…

As you can see if set it to find players with some determination and natural fitness as those two are key for any player and they barely progress, ive also told it to filter for atleast 10 in all the key positional skills (passing, tackling and finishing).

Next you need to take into account the rule of 5, what this means is any attribute except for flair/determination/natural fitness can raise by 5 points, sometimes they can rise even more but those cases are very rare.

Looks good don’t he? Or does he? Hes very heavy in set piece attributes which gives the impression that’s hes got lots of high attributes, set piece attributes are meaningless on regens, anyone can get them. He also has awful mental attrbutes…

Not exactly gonna be applying for mensa when hes developed is he lol. Personally if I want a regen im looking for a nice spread of 9-10 across the board with a 13 in key areas, and maybe PPM thrown in for good effect. On a side note with PPMs have a look at a players attributes that complement the PPM, does he have the PPM likes to TRY and beat offside trap? Well hes gonna need speed and decisions otherwise hes gonna fail miserably every time for example.

So retail is well underway for FM fans everywhere, I was “lucky” enough to be chosen to moderate in the first to go live nearly two weeks ago. As a moderator in FML, tho this post could well spell the end to that! Hopefuly not as the game has such good prospects and its great being involved. Onwards and downwards with my post…

Well quite frankly, the game is heavily bugged still, and as a mods we’re finding it quite hard to explain away all these bugs, in the Beta tests we would repeatedly say everything will be sorted in time for release and that finding these bugs now would help make the retail release all shiny awesome, how wrong could we be!

Right now my young Warriors are suffering a crisis, a plague is running through town taking down players left right and centre. My squad has had 7 injuries two days running, there are many other teams with the same problem, strangely we’re all youth teams, whats causing it is some bright spark at SI decided that U21 games shouldn’t count towards the activity rating which governs how many injuries a team gets depending on how often you play, so what’s happening is all the Youth teams are getting hit hard by injuries as we play as few senior games as possible as we don’t want to harm our youngsters progression. Unfortunately there’s no official word from SI on this matter maybe we’ll get a response like the FM2009 injury crisis, which was we don’t think there’s a problem and we’ll look into it, at least SI are showing continuity between releases.

A few weeks ago we where told that we wouldn’t be able to take skills between Gameworlds and would have to restart them unless we moved to a Pro Gameworld. Sounds fair enough as skills can be perceived a big advantage when others have none, but whats happened, someone at SI was rumoured to have forgot to put the measures in place and people have been jumping to new Gameworlds with their skills intact.

Elsewhere we’ve got a bug that takes more money than it should and with cash being so tight in the first season its really hurting people financial standings. What’s happened is the game is having problems where it should be applying transfer negotiation skills, and is causing people to pay over what the price is for free agents, or its not taking off discounts where it should. Oops.

Another weird one we experienced in Gameworld Cantona was when the Season started some players ages changed when they shouldn’t have done, well that’s what we where told in beta, players wouldn’t age until the start of the 2nd season, a bit of back peddling from SI and they’ve decided that’s what should have happened! Hmmmm are they sure? Expect a change of mind soon as some players have actually managed to get younger, is that another part of the plan then?

Well there you go, some glaring bugs hampering what at the core is a great game, personally if you haven’t yet joined the FML experience I wouldn’t bother, its defiantly not worth it, and someone said recently “its just like paying for Beta” ouch. I think people are better off waiting until January/February and getting the game then as there will be new features that and hopefully a bug free experience!

Everyone seems to talk about how great FML, but what is there to dislike?

At the top of my list is corners and how getting a good header and jumper can get you a goal return from corners that a striker would be proud of. Basically it involves the player to challenge the keeper. But because of skills namely the tactic skills this can be overlooked by a lot of managers in FML, many a time my big centre back can be the difference between drawing and winning, the individual corner instructions are a must for every FML manager who wants to win games in the game.

Another thing a hate is the fact that contracts are only two seasons long maximum (and only one season long in your initial squad), I want to build my team up and keep them together as long as possible. You cant do this in FML, you can lock 5 players to your team but what about your other players? Well prepare to either sell them just before they’re contract is up or lose them to a wage auction where you can guarantee that some will put in a stupidly high wage bid and the player will move for the peanuts that are acquisition fee which is a fraction of a players market value.

A funny quirk with the match engine is my next pet hate, I like to call it Alex Ferguson Time. In previous match engines on FML we would see the ref blow his whistle bang on the end of injury time, it wouldn’t matter wither you where just about to take a free kick or your attacker had just the goalie to beat, that damn ref would blow his whistle. Now that’s been fixed we’ve gone to the other extreme of Fergie time, quite often we now see the game extending well past the injury time, its not unheard of for injury time of 3 minutes to end up being 11minutes. I once was losing 1-0 in a match and managed to score 2 goals to grab the win during these Fergie minutes, only can only wonder how the other manager felt.

Early yesterday the Warriors talisman Fabrizio Miccoli sustained a bruised head following a collision with Kim Jin-Kyoo during the game against Singaporean manager Atilas “Average” Miserly’s inexperienced Tampines Hyperboles. The Italian Stallion has been instrumental in the club sustaining their excellent World Ranking position, contributing a phenomenal 100 goals in just over 150 matches.

The Mighty Micc’ returned to action this morning, and wow did he look as sharp as ever by scoring in his return match. The goal came from a rebound from a Olivera shot which Miccoli pounced on and slammed into the net. After being back just five games Fabrizio already has added a fabulous four goals to his name.

The fans love him and the opposition hate, estimated to be worth something in the region £750,000 im sure that wouldn’t be even enough to pull him away from the club.

The odd improvement here and the odd signing there, the last few days have seen a few in and a few who got away.

Curros Vacas

With Timossi getting on a bit the club decided to bring in someone to cover incase of a injury or retirement. Vacas has all the markings of a good defence minded midfielder who is highly respected and influential amongst his team mates. Curro joined from top XFA side Hammer Time for a bargain £30,000.

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Oleg Husyev

The club at the time was lacking in natural midfield wingers and good right back, after failing in a big money bid for Portuguese prospect Nani the club turned to the much cheaper alternative Husyev. Whilst not excelling at any one technical ability he is well rounded, determined and hardworking individual, who poses two things that wide players need and abundance, pace and acceleration. Signed for £187,000 Oleg has gone from strength to strength at the club and is now reported to be worth between £450,000 and £1.1million after just 46 appearances for the team.

Serge Die

With the right hand sorted out with the signing of Husyev the club then turned to the left hand side, after a short spell on trial, Ivorian Serge Die did enough to impress the club manager and he was signed up for a tiny fee of just £10,000. Hes been impressive so far and could well turn out to the signing of the season for the club!

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Cacapa

When the club noticed that experienced Brazilian Cacapa was in a auction the club decided that he could well be the man for the club to aim those corners at. He joined for a bargain £87,000. And wow has he shown the fans what hes capable of, hes scored an astonishing 7 goals in 14 games, not bad for a centreback! Im sure Katalyst are kicking themselves for letting him go now.

The last few days have been full of transfer activity at The Dungeon, no less then 5 players have been shown the door…

Amdy Faye

On Saturday ex Newcastle defensive midfielder Amdy Faye was shown the door, rumour has it he was paid off to the tune of £63,000 to leave the club. Amdy was one of the clubs original players but failed to hold down a first team spot, unfortunately ex-Roma legend Tomassi has played superbly in the holding midfielder role for the club despite his age.

Aloisio

Also at the same time as Amdy backup striker, Aloisio, was released from his contract. The journeyman Brazilian featured over 50 times for the club mainly all as a sub, and failed to make his mark on the team only scoreing 3 goals. When the club switched to a lone striker formation his chances of holding down a first team place rapidly diminished as was allowed to leave the club. Many fans wonder what might have been as the club have now gone back to a 4-3-3 formation, could we see him back for a 2nd chance sometime soon?

Clodoaldo

Another Brazilian benchwarmer was sold the following day, Clodoaldo was a good utility player, but whilst a technically gifted player, unfortunately Clod was rather lacking in the mental areas so he like all those who have left before him he couldn’t hold down a first team place and was sold to Dimo Utd for £26,000.

Cho Sung-Hwan

After the signing of a new centreback which saw him fall even further down the pecking order, Cho went to his manager to talk about his position at the club. After a long meeting the clubs manager Robert Webb decided out of respect to place the South Koreon centreback in auction, Cho left the club for Red And Blue United for a reported £50,000. The club and fans wish the player all the best at his new club.

Roman Sharonov

Yesterday saw first teamer Sharonov leave the club on a 7 day loan after another centreback was brought into the club. Whilst Roman hadn’t played badly, actually he’d played quite well, but unfortunately manager Webb had lost confidence in him and wanted a big man who was a natural centreback (Roman is a defensive midfielder by trade) who the team could fire corners into. Rumours are bouncing around that he is a marked man and could soon leave on a permanent deal.