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.