Um, hi. I'm alive. If I recall correctly, by the way, I won promotion with Pro Vercelli. Well, I won promotion with _someone_, I have the achievement in Steam to prove it. I can't actually remember who.

I stopped playing FM for years. Bought FM2012, never played it. Bought FM2013, never played it. Until about 2 weeks ago. Bishop's Stortford in Blue Square North. Bishop's Stortford is a weird LLM team for me. They were the team I played in my first proper LLM game and I got sacked when I issued the board an ultimatum 4 months into my time there. I then went to a German team and decided I forever hated German soccer rules and will never so much as load Germany into my game again. The German team also sacked me after I lost 4 of my first 6 games, despite telling me I had the entire season to rebuild the team. I forget what happened after that. I think I went to an Irish team.

Bishop's Stortford, though, needs to be revisited. I need to prove what I can do with them. My original LLM game was in (I think) FM2009. Yeah, the team in FM2013 is totally different, but I still need to prove something.

I'm kinda over that whole "Don't name players!" stuff, so no more Godly DC or New Star Striker for me. Let's do a recap, I just started my second season, but the first ended earlier this week, so I remember it well.

Season 2013/2014
Media Prediction: Midtable
Actual Finish: 6th
FA Cup: First Round Proper
FA Trophy: Fifth Round

Bishop's Stortford is a good team. I liked Reece Presteridge and Blair Sturrock a lot. Carl Pentney was underwhelming as a GK, but he was a damn lot better than that awful loan GK the team starts with. I forget his name, but I ended his loan early. Matt Johnson is a madman freak of nature and the powerhouse behind my midfield.

The season started off with Alli Abdullahi whining and complaining he doesn't play first team enough. I agree to give him a chance. I look over my players and decide I need a new DC. Enter Godly DC, Mark 2 aka Adam Bailey-Dennis. Funny thing, this dude signed for Bishop's Stortford in real life in 2015. I didn't know this when I signed him. In real life, he's kinda sorta-average-medicore DC. In my game, he's the second coming of Daniel Passarella. I signed Irish striker Carel Tiofack and Irish Attacking Midfielder Daryn Hennessy. I don't know why, but I always end up with a lot of Irish players. I released Jack Lampe early in the season because I'm an idiot.

After releasing Lampe, I sign Italian DL/ML Andrea Zola. I also pick up a young English midfielder named Callum Webb. I pick up Jack Barton on loan. Astonishingly, that's about all I need to do.

I pick an odd formation, a 4-4-2 but not what you just thought of. 4 defenders as you'd expect, 3 central midfielders, an attacking midfielder and 2 strikers. No wings, fuck them. Center all day! I narrowed up a bit since we don't have any wingers and it worked pretty well.

After he stopped being butthurt, Ali turned into an awesome player, especially when I switched up a bit mid-season and started playing him as DMC. Matt Johnson was a madman. Him and Reece were an excellent duo. Assists all day. Rick Sappleton went on a crazy hot streak just after midseason, scoring 7 goals in 4 games, overall scoring 12 goals in 8. He went ice cold after that,  and I ended up playing Blair Sturrock and swapping between Tiofack and Sappleton the rest of the season. then there's Lewwis Spence, Mr. Insanity. Sometimes he'd be on fire and create the strongest LLM midfield I've ever had along with Matt Johnson and Reece. Sometime he was a bum who I'd sub out for Callum Web. Darryn Hennessy and Reece could both play MC and AMC. I tended to swap them around between the two positions, since they both seem to play slightly better as AMC.

I fell as low as 18th, but went on a hot streak in the second half of the season and with about 10 games left, found myself in 10th. I battled until there was only 4 games left and I was in 7th. If I could draw one and win the other three, I should be able to snag 5th place and an entry in the Playoffs. Here's the problem: I was facing the #3 and #1 ranked teams in that stretch. Won my first game, drew me second. I have to beat this next team. I _have_ to.

I lose. Stupid Altrincham. I manage to draw with Bradford PA (#1) and end up in 6th place, two tantalizing points short of 5th.

CUP RECAP:

FA Cup: Bleah. This was against all non-league. In the 4th Qualifying Round, playing Margate, I had two players red carded in the first ten minutes. I still won 3-2.  In the first round proper, I face Blue Square Premiere team and rival Braintree. They whup me and I go home.

FA Trophy: Did better. Made it to the 5th Round, beating mostly non-league and also H&Y, before being eliminated by a BSP team whose name I forget. Nothing happened worth mentioning, though.

Board is happy, offer me a new contract. I accept. We are making it to BSP next year. I must do this.

I know I haven't updated this in forever. I got a job and thus have no time to play FM anymore. FM was, almost literally, my job prior to this as I was averaging 8 hours a day of playing, 7 days a week. I would have been rich as hell if I could somehow earn money by playing FM.

Anyway, I mind as well bring everyone up to date on what happened before I stopped playing:

I got 6 or 7 job offers, including one in League Two I _really_ wanted to take. However, I decided a League 2 job just wasn't realistic at this point and turned it down. Got offers from minor teams all through Europe and Asia. Was on the verge of accepting an offer from Hong Kong when an offer from Pro Vercelli in Italy came through. I jumped on that one real fast. Won my first game, drew my second. Dropped a few people, signed someone who looked pretty amazing. It's the middle of the season and our record sucks, but I'm pretty sure I can hold out and fend off a relegation. This team really feels like the second coming of Bromley to me. A good team that isn't doing so well, and just 2 or 3 good signings will make it into a contender.

Oh, also, I got an offer from an Irish team that had... guess who? ... Godly DC that I signed while with Bromley. I was tempted to accept it solely for that reason. However, I'm willing to bet they readjusted his stats and he isn't anything special in 2011. It also counts as a form of cheating under LLM rules so I didn't accept the offer.

Now if I just knew Italian, I'd be all set!

CRB, Season 1 (2010)

Season 1, 2010 aka "This shouldn't be too hard"
Media Prediction: 2nd

Actual Finish: 5th

State Championship: 1st overall

Brazil is a strange place. Instead of starting off with the Third Division season, we start off with the State Championships. 22 games not counting the playoffs, I won 19, drew 2, lost 1. I won 12 straight at one point. I really, really dominated. I signed a bunch of players, including a striker from Ghana who I figured was basically God. He was the top goalscorer for the Championship. I didn't realize until the end that, except for ASA (Second Division) every other team was in the unplayable leagues. No wonder me and ASA were completely dominating the competition. I finished first overall, but lost to ASA in the finals on a 3-2 aggregate.

Then the Third Division season started. The Ghana Striker was utterly useless and ended up being sold for 60k, apparently before other teams realized he was actually terrible. I also sold off my vice-captain as he wasn't playing well enough to justify his insane salary. When he's the second highest earner (Ghana Striker was the first) and can only average a 6.1, he has got to go. My little signing spree during the State Championship put me about 4k over wage budget. I released some loan players whose salary I was paying and dropped Ghana Striker and Vice-Captain. Then I was a few grand under budget but it came too late. Ghana/Vice-Captain's transfers didn't go through until September 1st, and they were what was keeping me over budget. I didn't have time to sign anyone before the (extremely short) Third Division season ended.

How did I do during the Third Division season? I lost every game except one, relegated and sacked. doh. I miss Bromley in FM2010.

On the search for a new team! I loaded a shit ton of leagues, so someone somewhere must be interested in me. I think I got enough of a reputation boost from the State Championship run to land another South American job, or maybe I'll go somewhere else. We'll see.

Update

I haven't finished Bromley's 5th season yet (thought at 9 games in, I'm sitting happily in 3rd place), and it's been derailed a bit. Originally, I didn't want to touch FM2011 until next month at the earliest, but the temptation proved too great, since I had preordered it.

So, I now started a gigantic LLM save. 75 leagues across 23 countries. Wow. Just as a sidenote, it took about 10-12 minutes to initialize the game data on my quad core machine. Back when I played CM 03/04, a save that size would have (seriously) taken like 7 hours to initialize on a P3-850.

Anyway, I picked CRB in the Brazilian 3rd Division. We'll see how it goes!

Bromley, Season 4 (2012/2013)

Season 4, 2012/2013 aka "We thought we were good..."
Media Prediction: 3rd

Actual Finish: 14th

FA Cup: 1st Round

FA Trophy: Eliminated Immediately

This season started off poorly. At the end of Season 3, I had worked almost 1.4/pw free in wage budget. I figured I was going to recruit all the best players to replace any weak players. I was going rock Season 4 hard. Then the board cut my wage budget by 1.1k/pw while also demanding I make the playoffs. I didn't even get a choice of season goal. They just told me what I was going to do. Great.

I sold a few more players off to get a little bit more funds to work with and, over the course of the season, brought in a backup striker, a new ML, a backup MR (who ended up being better than my starter), and re-did the GK configuration to deal with the loss of my International GK.

The season started off poorly with me being in 16th place after 6 or 7 games. I staged a comeback and worked my way up to 4th by the mid point of the season. In Round 1 of the FA Cup, I drew Oldham (League 2) away and lost 1-0. This was start of my collapse, I think. I beat Thurrock 3-0 (to extend my league unbeaten steak to 11 games, and that 11 game streak also contained 8 straight wins, a club record.) I was riding high. New Striker became New Star Striker and was completely outclassing my original Star Striker. Star Striker had become an assist machine (mainly to New Star Striker) and was in 1st place in the league for assists while New Star Striker was #1 in goals and #2 in average rating. New Star Striker also set a new single season record for overall and league goals (26 and 23, respectively) by game 24 or so. I figured he was going to smash the record further to something forever untouchable. No, in the remaining 18 games of the season, he'd score 3 goals in total.

I completely collapsed, losing 7 games straight at one point and going on a 11 game losing streak. My team gave me false hope by winning 2 and drawing 1 for a 3 game unbeaten streak, but then went on a giant losing streak again. I lost the last 5 games of the season. My fans are seriously, seriously pissed at me. They had expected me to promote to BSP this season. The board is pissed off at me. As I write this, the season isn't quite over yet as the finals (Farnborough vs Ebbsfleet) hasn't been played yet, but I have an awful feeling I'm going to be sacked. Certainly, they won't be extending my contract which has 1 season left on it. I'm upset because I wanted to stick with Bromley through everything. I hope I get one season to redeem myself.

Since I'm working now, my seasons aren't going to be getting done in 5 days. The next post will (as a guess) be up in approximately 2 weeks.

FM2010: Bromley, Seasons 1-3 recap

I did this a long time ago with a FM2008 LLM save (that saw me go from Bishop's Stortford to Elvesberg (sp?), to Newry to some Scottish team. Blogger erased the entire blog because they felt I was plagiarizing someone. I have no idea how that happened.) But just tonight, I thought I should do it again. Back in 2008, I'd make an update post every 2 or 3 matches until it got to the point where I was almost blogging about the save more than playing it. So, this time, I'll be doing a recap at the end of each season. One season usually takes me about 5 days of intensive playing, but I have a job starting on Monday. I _think_ I might be able to finish season 4 off by Sunday night but am not positive. I have no idea how long a season will take once I'm working. I'd imagine at least 2 weeks. I seem to remember a season taking about 2 - 2 1/2 weeks when I was last working, but am not sure. If this season isn't done by Sunday night, I'm imagining it'll be done by Tuesday at the latest. (Because it'll be really close to being done if it isn't and it should only take a few hours to finish up.) So, anyway, here's recaps for the first 3 seasons as best I can remember:

SEASON 1, 2009/2010 aka "We suck!"

Media Prediction: 16

Actual Finish: 11

FA Cup: Eliminated Immediately

FA Trophy: 4th Qualifying Round

I started off immediately looking to bolster my defensive line. I found a nice Irish DC, who we'll name Awesome DC. Awesome DC was awesome and just him alone made us a better team. But I felt most the players on my existing defense were of 2nd string quality. They'd make fine backups for good players, but couldn't handle it on their own. I then found a Polish DL, another Irish DC (who we'll name Godly DC), and an Irish DR. Yes, I have a lot of Irishmen on my team. Originally, I was hoping Godly DC would perform about on the level of Awesome DC, but he turned out to be on a whole different level from the rest of the team. I cannot believe his original Irish team cut him, I really can't. I acquired an Adequate Striker, and that's about it for the first season. We did poorly at first and, after 6 weeks, found ourselves rock bottom at 22. My team started gelling and my Star Striker emerged. He had no goals at all for almost the first half of the season and went insane and managed to set a single season record for my club (in both league and overall goals scored) in just half a season. He also broke the all time scoring record for my team as well as most goals scored in a single game. This guy's name is all over my team's record book now. We recovered and made it as high as 6th place before ending the season in 11th place.

Season 2, 2010/2011 aka, "Getting there"

Media Prediction: 14th

Actual Finish: 5th

FA Cup: 1st Round proper

FA Trophy: 2nd Round

I knew my team was good, but knew I needed more players. I brought in two strikers who looked promising, but cut one of them by the middle of the season because he was 34 and really wasn't good, though it looked like I may have been able to get one final good season out of him. I couldn't. He's in my record book, but not for a good reason. (Oldest player used in a game) In other areas, I felt like my team was lacking a good GK. The one I had was adequate, but we needed better to get to the next level. By a pure dumb lucky stroke (I noticed his name in a news report), I managed to snag an International GK. He got called up a lot, but he was awesome when he could play for me. I got a great MC as well. I still wasn't content that we had a good second MC, but I rotated a few MCs around and it seemed to work well enough. Not a lot of acquisitions this season, but Star Striker started off HOT and we were sitting in first 5 weeks into the season and never fell below 6th. In Round 1 of the FA Cup we had the great luck of drawing League 1 team Brentford at home and it packed our stadium and, by even greater luck, drew them thanks to Star Striker scoring a goal in the 87th minute and an equalizer in injury time. In the replay, they throttled us 2-0... but hey, holding a League 1 team to a draw is pretty damn impressive for a BSS team. Godly DC continued to completely dominate and he and Star Striker were going neck and neck for highest average rating for a season. Star Striker edged him in the end, 7.23 to 7.17. Godly DC decided to show Star Striker he wasn't the only one who could score and even managed to score 3 goals throughout the course of the season, mainly during corners.

We finished 5th and lost to Ebbsfleet in the Semi Final playoff.

Season 3, 2011/2012 aka "Now we're cooking!"

Media Prediction: 12th

Actual Finish: 4th

FA Cup: I forget, honestly. Probably eliminated immediately.

FA Trophy: Eliminated Immediately

In continuing to bolster my midfield, I snagged a great DL/ML player who I played mainly in ML, but he did play in DL for a few games when my Irish DL was injured. On the off season between 2 and 3, I released the other striker who I got at the start of 2. He just couldn't compare to Adequate Striker. I also picked up an older French striker who was very, very solid. Also, I was alerted we had a potential star youth player, an African ML. I moved him to the reserves and he certainly looked like he'd be fearsome some day. I also took notice of a 21 year old striker who had been sitting unnoticed in my reserves this entire time. The guy was DEADLY. I brought him into the main team about halfway through the season and he made Adequate Striker (who had made the Season 1 Best Eleven) absolutely redundant, and I ended up transfer listing Adequate Striker near the end of the season and he went to a team in Wales. Godly DC and my International GK continued to basically make my team awesome, but disaster struck. Both of them demanded I transfer list them so they could fulfill their ambitions. I begged and pleaded and eventually realized there was no way I could get them to resign contracts with me. I finally agreed to sell them at the end of the season. Both of them combined netted me about 40k. Godly DC went to a League 2 team (Mansfield), International GK went to some team in Spain. I think they're one tier above the lowest, not sure what that is.

We also went into a budget crisis which saw the Board cut my available wages by 1k/week. In addition to the DC and GK, I got rid of a few utility players I felt just couldn't cut it. A Scottish Striker I haven't mentioned before now, a Central American Midfielder who I played as a backup to a backup and the GK I used before International GK. Had I known International GK would demand a transfer, I would have never sold the other GK. I figured I could use a 18 year old GK as backup and save a lot of money. As it turns out, Youth GK sucks. Badly. The number of on target shots my opponents made was the same number as the goals they scored when Youth GK was playing. He was that bad. He let EVERY ON TARGET SHOT THROUGH. Thanks to my strikers going into overdrive, we actually managed to win some of these games. I told my defense (who still included Godly DC) to stop them no matter what, and they did, and the strikers scored enough to outpace the opponents. It was practically like playing with no GK, to be honest with you.

It was overall a good season, but we again lost in the Playoff Semi Finals; this time to Woking, who went on to be promoted. But I knew a 1k/week wage budget cut combined with losing my two best players was going to hurt, a lot. Also, the board didn't give me any transfer funds out of that 40k, so I couldn't buy any players. I pleaded with them to increase either wage budget or transfer budget, but they declined both. And they expected me to make it into the Playoffs again. This looked bad.

Season 4 recap coming soon!

Introduction

I'm an LLM Manager. LLM is Lower League Management. It's a style of playing the Football Manager series of games, though, really, you should be able to do it in any football management simulation. A lot of people will pick their favorite team. The "Big Four" from the English Premier league are extremely popular choices, as are Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, etc, etc, etc. I could spend the next half hour listing teams.

My favorite team is Arsenal. However, when I first started playing Championship Manager 03/04, I felt like I shouldn't manage a team like Arsenal right away as I didn't have the skill to do so well. Surely, Arsenal would never hire a no one like me. So I went to League 2 and played as Southend United. I had a good run. I found a really nice Jamaican GK, found an incredible youth player who became a midfield fixture, I challenged for a promotion to League 1 but didn't quite make it. I had the spirit of LLM, but didn't quite adhere to the rules, mainly because I'd never heard of LLM at that point in time.

Here's what LLM is: You go to the lowest league that exists in a given country. (It could be Blue Square South in England, Serie C in Italy, etc. Something like MLS also counts since the United States only has one league in the entire game, though it's not a popular choice since MLS is actually top tier in the US, it only counts as LLM due to a technicality.) You then play as realistically as possible. By this, I mean you don't look at player stats (as much as can be avoided, on some screens they're going to be right in your face but you certainly wouldn't study them), you certainly don't use player comparison, you rely on your scouts for EVERYTHING. Player Search is generally not used, but there are people out there (I'm one of them) who will advocate it in very specific circumstances. Basically, before you do anything, take a second and think, "Can this be done in real life?"

Head over to SI forums for more on LLM.

Anyway, I've been doing LLM almost exclusively for the entire time I've played CM/FM. In FM 2008 I played one season as Arsenal and actually found it boring. They're already in the Top 5 for the world, do I really want to put time and effort into making them just slightly better so they can move to the number 1 spot? I know some people really love making sure their favorite top tier team wins every competition available to them every year, but that's not my style. If I'm going to manage Arsenal, it's going to be because I've proven myself to be the best manager in the world by taking a team from Blue Square to the Premiership. Maybe, probably not, but that's my goal.

Right now, I'm in the middle of an FM2010 save with Blue Square South (BSS) team Bromley. I'm in my 4th season and, after making the playoffs two years in a row and losing in the semi finals, we're predicted to promote to Blue Square Premier (BSP) this season. I've never successfully promoted a team in any way, shape or form, so doing that will be a giant achievement for me. Should I promote from Conference Football to League Football at some point int he future, it'd be like a dream to me.

FM2011 comes out next week, but I intend to not play it until I'm satisfied with my Bromley save and that I've taken it as far as I want. I have, however, preordered it. I will have it the day it's available, but it's unlikely to be played. It's funny that the exact same thing happened with FM2009. I was too into my FM2009 LLM save to play FM2010 until it had been out for 3 or 4 months.

That's it for now, season recaps will be in their own posts!