FM 13: My Favourite Ever Game

by Chappers  25/04/2013 | 1:51 0 Posted in Football Manager 13, Other Stuff 

For all you eager eyed individuals out there you will see that this is a post about FM 13 on a site about Football Manager 14, WTF? Don’t worry, it wasn’t a typo, I just wanted to shed some light on my most favoured save ever.

My Football Manager 13 hour clock is now over 600 hours, usually what happens with me is I start one game (usually with Arsenal), get bored after a few seasons, potter around with a few lower league and foreign games then return back to my original game to carry on for eternity. Though I followed exactly the same trend with FM 13, the end of the story changed somewhat.

As normal I returned to my original Arsenal game but had a thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a game where you only bought British players? I thought about it for a while, every now and again I have these challenges, I feel it is needed to keep the FM flame alive, the last one was to sell ANYONE at 28 and over and ONLY buy players under 20. I loved that game right up until the 3rd or 4th season when Rooney was available for 20mil, couldn’t resist, it ruined the magic and only played a few more games.

This challenge I will stick to, its going great and to be honest I think it is my favourite game since my Fiorentina save in 2010.

Im about 10 games in to the 3rd season but I did cheat slightly, heres what happened.

I wasn’t sure who to be, I didn’t want to be a top 4-6 team because with all due respect to Stewart Downing and Co you are not good enough to be starting with a team at that level.

My little cheat came straight away, I had the majority of the day to get through my starting tactics, training and transfers etc so I thought I would start in Jan 2013 instead of the usual 2012 summer. I would then choose my team, probably have a bigger transfer budget and have 2 windows in fairly quick succession to run the rule over my chosen team.

January came, I had to decide, my shortlist was Newcastle, Villa, West Ham and Swansea based on a good solid Prem foundation, decent enough following and the ability to attract a decent level of player, but then it hit me, my favourite young players are both at Southampton, my favourite club (Arsenal have a few players that are British and have Southampton in their favourite clubs) so that was it, now I just had to see how they were getting on in the league.

Bottom, 7 points behind safety, bugger. I could’t resist, I had to do it and now after scraping Prem safety on the last day of the season and a 5th place finish in seasons 2 I have a great little team that I am proud of, I love it, its much more of a challenge.

I must admit though that i have bent the rules slightly to allow foreign players in on loan only. In total with 2 foreigners in my squad on loan, I have 3 non-british players. I am yet to find a buyer for the final player I need to let go, Gaston Ramirez, him being amazing probably has something to do with it, he isn’t leaving for less than £30m! lol.

Anyway, here is my team, currently 4th in the league after a dozen or so games in the 3rd season, you may be quite surprised about how ‘decent’ the team looks:

GK: Butland, R Green.

Def R: Jenkinson, Nathaniel Clyne

Def L: Kyle Naughton, Luke Shaw

Def C: Vertongen (loan), Smalling, Shawcross, Dawson.

Mid C: Mccarthy, Xabi Alonso (loan), Lampard, Jack Cork, Shelvey, Nick Powell, James Ward Prowse

Mid R: Nathan Redmond, Snodgrass

Mid L: Tom Ince, Gaston Ramirez

Strikers: Agbonglahor, Darren Bent, Steven Fletcher.

I hope to bring in the likes of Wilshere, Ramsey, Chamberlain and Walcot in the not too distant future, plus all the Man City English guys are bound to end up on the transfer list sooner or later!

Try it, go British, you won’t turn back!