You know the feeling, you are smashing through results, finish second in the league and get further in Europe than ever then all of a sudden the AI finds you out and you start to crash like a 5 year old the morning after being locked in to Woolworths all night with the pick and mix. No? Then lucky you, but if you are one of the 1 billion people who have experienced a sudden unexplained halt to a string of gorgeous, unadulterated wins in FM then read on. How we got here As I said, it was all going swimmingly in season three, we’d managed to finish as Cymru Premier runners up for the second year ..read more

“The greatest player I ever saw, bar none.” – Bill Shankly, about Tom Finney Welcome to my new series related to my 1946 start English First Division FM23 database which you can access to play yourself here via the pinned tweet at the top of my twitter feed: English 1st Division database for Football Manager 2023. For those who don’t know about it yet, the first part is a brief overview before I get into the save (you can skip this to part 2 if you know it all already). 1: What happened in 1946 and why make an FM DB? The 1946-47 season was an incredibly unique season for many reasons. Not onl ..read more

I have never been one to let a creative project go and the time that I have spent in the Football Manager universe for many years is no exception. That said, when it occurred to me that I wouldn’t have time to finish the local team project I began late in the FM22 cycle, introduced with the blog post Clifton Colliers #1: a place between places I decided to take it with me lock, stock and barrel into the new FM23 edition, complete with all the lovely pimped- up stats it offers. However, this isn’t without it’s problems as I shall outline below. Problem 1: where to start? Most smart asses w ..read more

STOP PRESS: this is before I did v2.0 which has fake players. You can get that new version from the link at the bottom of the page. So here we go chaps, enough messing about editing, let’s see what it was like to manage with all the complete chaos of WW2. We start with, who else, Bolton Wanderers and their team stripped of 32/35 staff and players after Harry Goslin told 28,000 fans in 1939 that him and the lads were going to join up (on a very side note the fella was to pay for the decision with his life in 1943, and I for one will never forget the sacrifice for our freedom that he and everyon ..read more

1: “We are facing a national emergency,” Harry Goslin told the crowd. We can get the ideas for saves and (in my case) database edits from funny places and we can often dither about in those first few days of a project wondering whether we have made the right choice or not. However, 70 hours or so into the creation of my English WW2 database I can honestly say that nothing I have ever done in FM has felt so right and connected to who I am as a person with my interests. Not only has the topic of WW2 history and playing FM been pretty much my two main hobby interests over the past 15-20 years but ..read more

The earliest record of CLIFTON by name is that in the Pipe Roll of 1183–4, the sheriff giving account of 8s., the issues of Clifton, which had belonged to Hugh Putrell, outlawed“ From https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/lancs/vol4/pp404-406 1: A club borne of Troglodytes, formed in the Earth .. Clifton, that often pissed-wet-through gateway to Swinton and Kearsley, an artery between Manchester and Bolton that has existed for almost a thousand years, serving for most as a mere 2 minutes 41 seconds blip in their car journey ‘twixt the two down Manchester Road (at 30 mph, other times ..read more

So, after a little excursion into tactics in Lifting Wales #3: Analysing to stop losing it’s been a while since the last update for the save proper. That said, let’s crack on and let me show you how my concerted assault to lift Wales’ Euro coefficient from the gutter is progressing. A 5 year ramble in the valleys Yep, believe it or not since the last proper update from the first season I have now finished 5 seasons at my beloved Cefn Druids and have firmly established us as the wonderfully banal “Best of the rest” which was actually a 5th year target from the board but which we achieved by the ..read more

It’s not often that I do a traditional save update season review type blog these days but after the following brief introduction to the finalities of how I am going to approach the whole save objective I feel compelled to do so. What a dramatic start to our first Welsh Premier season, read on and I hope you enjoy. Finalising “Lifting Wales” If you read my last blog you should be pretty fluent with the (quite simple) save concept by now, which even if you didn’t is basically to lift the Welsh league’s European coefficient and in doing so increase the nation’s number of European competition plac ..read more