Welcome Back To Football

8th September 2015 -- Sunderland's manager, Abraham Tan has just announced his decision to retire indefinitely from professional football. His decision has shocked fans and critics alike as the 35 year old Singaporean seemed to be dominating the English football scene with his entertaining, aggressive football at Sunderland.

In his 6 years as manager, Abraham turned struggling Sunderland into a world class football team. His numerous accolades with Sunderland include lifting the Champion's Cup and the Club World Championship for their first and only time in 2012, and coming close again as a runner-up in 2015.

2015 was a year to be remembered for Sunderland as Abraham won the Manager of the Year award, bringing his team not just continental success but also domination of the domestic scene as Sunderland did the double, lifting both the League Cup and winning the Premier League.

It is a sad day for Sunderland supporters as one of their most prolific and eccentric managers quits the scene, leaving behind a legacy that many will remember.

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Return to football

The date is September 2020, and after a 5 year hiatus the acclaimed Abraham Tan is looking to return to football. While still enjoying his time off, he is keeping an eye on the football scene, hoping to join a big club where he can win medals again.

So I got bored with my save game and decided that I would like a new challenge - building something from scratch again. I contemplated starting a new game, but decided it would be interesting to see if I can make a strong team mostly from regens.
I will not be using Genie scout, reloading save games or editing my games so it should be interesting to see if I can find successful players solely using my scouts and my own judgement.

Ideally I'd like to get my job at Sunderland back, but I'll be happy with joining a smaller club as long as we have a decent budget!

A Job Offer

After a couple of months spent job hunting, I got a decent job offer - taking over Owen Hargreaves at Wolves.

I hope I can replicate the success I had with Sunderland, and seeing as I'm joining halfway through the season, I don't expect much of myself.



As you can see the club has been very unsuccessful. I hope to change that.

I've got a very unimpressive squad, most of my players are in fact very old and lacking in quality or potential. I do have two decent strikers, who I will most likely build my strategy around.



My aim for the Jan transfer window is to get a couple of young, promising players and some suitable replacements for my severely aging squad (just to illustrate this, a 37 year old Michael Essien is my vice-captain. His legs are about to fall off!)

Nice. Good luck with that. Monasterio's stats are beast like for a striker in a team like Wolves. 19 finishing and first touch is crazy.

This is a great idea......

Youve inspired me! Not quite the same, but I think Im going to start a new game, unemployed, and go on holiday for 10years, come back and see what has happened

Try making this into a blog, rather than keeping it in a thread

some people prefer to maintain the story updates in a thread, that is why I started this "fm stories" forum mate. so fair play to them
however, i'm working on a little tweak to make managing blogs much easier in the future.
sorry for being off-topic here, just a quick intermission :p

Thanks for the reads and the responses! Will update with a post shortly.

@stam&man U: Good to hear that, I was contemplating starting with a blog but I figured since I'm pretty active I might as well post it here anyway.

Stam, some changes I would appreciate would be basically with the image system, it would be nice if first of all we could edit the width of uploaded thumbnails. e.g. the images I've posted would be more attractive if the thumbnails were larger, and second of all, if the viewing frame wasn't as narrow, because it tends to crop full-sized images.

at the moment, the thumbnail size is fixed to 120 pixels (max width and height). how much bigger do you think it should be?
you are right about the large view. my javascript expertise sucked back at the time of implementation, so i guess a retry might fix this.

regardless of the image system, i know textboxer (basically the textarea with the formatting buttons on top) needs a major revamp... though i've been quite lazy updating it. i really should!

the feature i want to add for blogs (mostly) is that this textarea will have its height auto-resized based on how long your text is; so no scrollbars. the formatting buttons may become a little hard to use in that case, but i guess most people here know their way around bbcode tags.

The Going Gets Tough

December was an extremely painful month for me as I discovered just how weak my team was.



Starting with a home game against ex-giants Man Utd, I looked to assess my team's strengths and weaknesses and hopefully adapt a style. With Sunderland I played a very offensive, quick and short fluid game, but as I soon discovered with my new team, I really needed to rethink my tactics.

We lost at home to West Brom which was really I think the worst game of this month. The passing quality of my team is so bad, we can rarely string more than 3 passes together without losing possession. Many times my players have just kicked the ball out instead of to the feet of their teammates.

I really need to try and turn things around, and morale is at an all time low. Finally a brace came when we managed to score against Middlesborough, and I am sort of figuring out how to make my players work well for me.

Well after a disappointing December month the league table looks like this, with us firmly headed for relegation.



The transfer window starts in a couple of days, and I still haven't got a clue who to sign. I've signed a couple of 3.5 star coaches to help out with training, and my scouts are working hard to find me some players.

In the middle of the month I found a young player who looks very promising, and after a closer look my scouts agreed with me and so I put in a bid and finally settled on 2.6m. He is very young, only 15 and should grow up to be a star, but right now I need someone who can make an instant impact, and this took a considerable chunk out of my budget so I'm still a bit undecided about this transfer seeing as he won't be joining me for another couple of years.

The New Year

Well January was a pretty tough month for me with a couple of tough fixtures (Man City and Everton), and I struggled to make any impactful signings but I think from what I've seen I think with a little luck we can avoid relegation.

Here are my match reports for January.

FA Cup 3rd Round: Wolves vs AFC Wimbledon
Score: Wolves 5 : 0 AFC Wimbledon
Scorers: Donaldson 4, Monasterio 1
Review: Our forwards showed that they can certainly create their own chances in this one as Donaldson and Monasterio both ended their goal droughts with fantastic finishing. This has picked up morale drastically which was much needed for us.

EPL: Wolves vs Everton
Score: Wolves 1 : 2 Everton
Scorers: Monasterio 1
Review: Despite scoring the first goal in the 55th minute, we were not able to hang on to our lead and ended up losing the battle. We are not holding possession in the midfield and this is really something to think about.

EPL: Fulham vs Wolves
Score: Fulham 0 : 1 Wolves
Scorers: Donaldson 1
Review: I'm thrilled. We really showed moments of creativity here.

FA Cup 4th Round: Wolves v Swansea
Score: Wolves 2 : 0 Swansea
Scorers: Donaldson 1, Woods 1
Review: A decent enough game for us against poor opposition.

EPL: Wolves vs Man City
Score: Wolves 0 : 0 Man City
Scorers: None
Review: We were really tested today with Man City's blinding pace, but thankfully they lost a player early on and we managed to come away with a draw.

EPL: Bolton vs Wolves
Score: Bolton 0 : 0 Wolves
Scorers: None
Review: Frustrating to watch as we struggled to keep possession or put away the few chances that we've made.

After those mostly unimpressive games, the league table looks like this.



We're still headed towards relegation with Crystal Palace 4 points ahead of us with 12 games to go. I will need to secure some results in February if I'm going to stand any chance of making it this season. If we get relegated, I'd probably quit the team if I don't get fired first.

We can definitely earn some much needed wins in Feb, with the fixtures looking like so.



If I don't win the home games against Sheff and Preston I'm going to be very pissed off.


Wolves were pretty active this Jan transfer window, and I bolstered my squad with a total of 6 signings, adding some much needed depth to my 17 man squad.



They are all youngish regens except for Welliton, who was a purely sentimental signing. Welliton was my first ever signing at the start of my career in Sunderland, and he was my star player the next six seasons. Now he's old and slow, but he will be my third choice striker and hopefully display some of the brilliance that he had 12 years ago.



Well that wraps up Jan for me, thank you for reading.