Football Manager 2018
Welcome to Football Manager 2018. If you don’t know what Football Manager is, read the next paragraph. If you already have devoted your life and soul to Football Manager, skip the next paragraph.
Football Manager is THE premier sports simulation computer game for managing football clubs. Clubs not teams, I’m talking association football, or as us ‘mericans call it, soccer. You can choose to manage a club in your nation of choice, though for some of the smaller nations you have to download custom databases from Steam Workshop. Everywhere in the world except ‘merica the football leagues have a promotion/regulation pyramid structure meaning that bad teams get dropped to a level below and the good teams get elevated to a level above. To put it in U.S. terms, the Carolina Panthers and Chicago Bears would have been dropped down to Division 1 and Alabama and Michigan would be in the NFL.
Let’s Talk Pyramid Schemes
For this story I am playing in England in the 9th level of the
English football league system. Essentially, at that level it’s a bunch of guys in their late 20s and early 30s trying to (re)capture that glory that eluded them. FM doesn’t come stocked with that many leagues for England (you can go down to the 6th level) so I had to download a databased called “England Level 10 and Cup Competitions” by danseakin. Mad props, dude!
Game Setup
However, because Brixton is a fictional club, I’ve had to add them to the database. The scenario I’ve chosen is that Brixton is owned by a Sugar Daddy who has pumped loads of money into the team, built a highest-quality Youth Academy, built a 7,000-seat Reserve Stadium (that will act as the Senior stadium for now), and is building a 25,000-seat stadium, which will lie on the grounds of real-world Windmill Gardens and HM Prison Brixton, set to open on 1 July 2022.
I’ve also granted Brixton a full complement of coaches because despite loving the endless scouting for players, I just cannot stand scouting for staff. I’ve got an assistant manager (hereafter known forever and ever as an AssMan), a head of youth development, two goalkeeping coaches, two fitness coaches, and five regular coaches.
I added Brixton to the Southern Counties East League, swapping out Rusthall because they had the lowest Reputation (150). I’ve given Brixton a reputation of 1 (out of 10,000) to make things somewhat realistic.
I added 17 players to the database for Brixton but all of them are 15 or 16 years old to simulate a new beginning of players graduating from the Youth Academy.
As far as other playable leagues, I added Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. I also added Belorussia so I could have a mid-March start in order to have enough time to find some slightly older players to act as mentors before the start of the season. So with a start date of 13 March 2017, it’s time to start the fun.
The Write Stuff
A note about my writing style: I’m a professional writer and editor. It’s hard work and taxes one’s brain agonizing over some of the smallest details. Sometimes I need to let my hair down and unwind. Therefore I’m not putting a lot of effort into editing, and I'm writing like I speak, all stream-of-conscious like. So if there is bad grammar, misspelled words, or weird sentence structures…well, I’m not gonna worry about it. :-)
I hope it doesn’t detract from your experience.