Ever the optimist

Hello, welcome to the blog that you've somehow stumbled upon. Apologies in advance this probably isn't going to be a hive of exception tactical insight or inspiring success like other FM blogs. You see I'm a bit rubbish.

As it mentions above this isn't my first foray into FM13 management. I had a long FM13 career already, getting to the far future of 2033. I (or more accurately my FM alter ego Rodrigo de la Vega) over the course of the game managed in Portugal, N.Ireland, Ireland, England, Indonesia, Spain, S.Africa, Italy and...some other places. You can see the start of it here. Basically I started well, got some small scale success and then fell into a sort of double trap.

Part 1 of the trap was my own impatience. I love playing career games but quite often there are times in a career game where you're just at a team that is a stepping stone. If things go well then great you can move on, if they don't go well though it becomes hard to stick it out. You don't like the club, you don't have an affinity for it so you want to move. At this point though you don't have the success needed to move up so you move to a club on the same level if you're lucky, or more often than not a smaller club. I did this sideways/downward move a lot. I basically wiped out all the good my few titles and cups had done for my reputation.

Part 2 of the trap was tactical. I didn't adapt, or I didn't adapt quick enough. I started playing like I did in FM12 and it soon became apparent that my cherished tactic 2012 wasn't right. Without realising I had been taking advantage of exploits and it just didn't measure up to the actual football reality and logic that FM13 actually abides by. When I finally realised this (it only took...oh 3 or 4 seasons!) things got better and I found some success. But as I moved and swapped teams I didn't adapt quick enough. Stupidly I just didn't take on board the fairly self evident fact that newly promoted Banbridge or bottom tier Indonesian Persewar weren't going to take well to my champagne football 4-1-2-3.

I did have some genuine bad luck in the career as well that made things even worse. I joined a team that had been relegated from the Portuguese top tier. They looked like a good team to build for success on...until they went bankrupt a week after hiring me, sold off all the 1st team players and didn't come out of administration until the transfer deadline had passed.

But overall I made mistakes. And I decided to draw a line under it (in true manager style, for footballing reasons) and start over.

Check the next post for details on the set up, and aims for the career.