A Bit of Home Cooking

In my rather long history of playing Football Manager Live I have had several different "approaches" to the game. When I started out playing in the beta Gameworld 3 and later for my first several seasons in Clough, my approach was what I think you could call the "traditional" strategy for the game - to get as many good players as I could by any means necessary and try to win as many competitions as I possibly could. Despite a reasonable level of success that included an FA Championship, I began to get disillusioned with this approach to the game. While I enjoyed competing at the top level, I didn't feel any sense of attachment to my players. This effect became more pronounced as the seasons advanced and the Real World players retired and regenerated players began to take their place. My players became only a name, a position, and a set of attributes rather than a collection of individuals that I could feel attached to and proud of.

In order to combat this apathy, I tried a number of alternative approaches to the game by imposing rules on myself and my team. First, I created a single-nationality squad of entirely Dutch players. While this was fun for a while, I found that it was very hard to compete for a number of reasons. Firstly, the number of Dutch players in the database was relatively small compared to the major nations. In order to build a competitive team, there were really only 4-5 players per position that I could target. This limited supply of players meant that people could drive their asking prices much higher in the knowledge that my options were limited. Secondly, limiting the effective size of the database that I could access for the purposes of playing the game really left me with less to do than I would otherwise have.

My third approach was the one that I stuck with and the one that I will be talking about today. It was introduced to me by a mod and friend from Clough gameworld who loosely took this approach from the beginning of the gameworld. I have codified it into a specific set of rules for my own use. I think it presents a very good challenge for even the most experienced FML players while still maintaining a level of flexibility whereby one could conceivably have one of the very top teams in the gameworld if they were able to plan accordingly and make wise financial decisions.

I call this approach the "Homegrown" approach to the game.

WHAT DEFINES A "HOMEGROWN" PLAYER?
To be honest, the definition of a homegrown player is a bit flexible and open to interpretation by the user.  When I used this approach in Clough, I made it very simple on myself and said that any players that my team purchased from other clubs had to be at or below 21 years of age.  This did lead to a couple of shifty purchases that, while following the letter of law, didn't necessarily honor the spirit of it!  I remember 2-3 players that I bought at age 21 just weeks before the "aging" code kicked in and made them 22.  However, looking back, nearly all of my players were purchased from the FA market as new regens or purchased from other clubs around 17-18 years of age.

For my second try at the Homegrown approach in the newly launched GW Völler, I was determined to make my rules a little more stringent to match the UEFA definition of "homegrown":

UEFA defines locally-trained or 'homegrown' players as those who, regardless of their nationality, have been trained by their club or by another club in the same national association for at least three years between the age of 15 and 21.

Enforcing this rule is a little more complex than simply limiting purchases to U21 players, but not by much.  Basically, if you are to purchase a player from another club, he must be at or under the age of 19.

There are some other exceptions that I allow myself for simplicity's sake when following my homegrown approach.  Firstly, I allow myself to sign free agents who have not been a part of any other club in the past (this includes the free agent players who become "unlocked" for the first three seasons).  The reasoning behind this is that your youth academy system needs several seasons of initial lag before it can kick in and in order to stay competitive, it is almost required that you purchase some additional talent above and beyond your starting pool.  I look at these new free agents the same way I look a the veteran players in my initial starting pool - we can imagine that they were once academy products of the club given that they have no prior history in the game.  Note that only free agents who have not been on another team are allowed - if a great 25 yr old striker shows up on the free agent list but was on another team last season, I don't allow myself to sign him.

So, to coalesce the above paragraphs into a simple series of applicable rules:

1. Your entire squad must consist of homegrown players at all times 
2. A homegrown player is one who spent at least 3 years at the club between 15 and 21 years of age.
3. Free Agent players of any age can be signed and used as homegrown players only if they have no prior history at any other club.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF FOLLOWING A HOMEGROWN APPROACH? 
For me personally, the benefits of following a homegrown approach are threefold:

1. Increased attachment and identification with players
2. Additional challenge
3. Increased satisfaction with success due to points (1) and (2)

The increased level of attachment is an intangible benefit but for me personally it heightens the playing experience greatly.  Looking at your side several seasons on and seeing players that have been with the side since age 16 is a great feeling, as is looking back at a player's history when he reaches retirement age and seeing only your club on his history!  Another great moment is when your youngsters are finally ready to make the leap from U21 play to the senior level.  I even like looking back on the former youth players that I sold on to other clubs and seeing their performances and how they have matured into solid first team players!

The additional challenge of applying any set of rules to your approach in FML can not be doubted.  Following a homegrown approach will be difficult and require keen planning and financial management because any decisions that you make will have knock-on effects for seasons to come.  What do you do when you get an exorbitant offer for your star 19 year old striker?  Do you sell him and re-invest the funds to make your youth program stronger or increase the size of your stadium, or do you hold on to him because he is an irreplaceable homegrown talent that could lead your team to greatness?  How much do you bid for that promising 18 year old defender on auction?  If you miss the chance to sign him now you likely won't get that chance again!  For me, it is making the crucial decisions like this that add some interesting layers to the game.

Finally, when you eventually DO achieve success - whether it is winning the Premiership, achieving promotion from League 3, or making it to the final of your FA cup - it is so much sweeter with your group of homegrown players than it would be otherwise, take my word for it!  You can feel pride that the players that you signed and coached for so many seasons have achieved something of real note and that you did it as a stable team of homegrown players rather than a squad full of mercenaries signed on wage auction! :)

Location, Location, Location

As an addendum to my previously published Youth Academies Explained post, I've decided to publish a little bit of the research that I did when researching the viability of the different nations for youth academy placement in my gameworld, Völler. I'll also reveal the methods that I used when gathering this information so that you can, if you choose to, research the academy options in your own gameworld.

DON'T BUILD IN SWEDEN : AN EXAMPLE
As a simple example to demonstrate how I have performed the calculations for each nation, we will use the example of Sweden in gameworld Völler. Sweden is, by my numbers, one of the worst nations that one can build in at the moment and hopefully the following calculations will demonstrate why that is.

As a very simple metric, if we are looking to build in Sweden, we need to know how many other academies are already present in this nation and what kind of demands for youth players they are generating. In order to see this, we need to use the World pulldown on the top title bar and select Infrastructure. This will show us how many academies there are in each nation. You can see from the image below that in Sweden in GW Völler, I can calculate exactly how many new youth players they are demanding per season:


From examining the complete youth academy breakdown, the total number of youths demanded per season is easy to calculate:

total = [#5*]x16 + [#4.5*]x14 + [#4*]x12 + [#3.5*]x10 + [#3*]x8 + [#2.5*]x7 + [#2*]x6 + [#1.5*]x5 + [#1*]x4

total = 5x16 + 4x10 + 4x8 + 2x6 + 3x4
total = 176

So the total number of Swedish regens demanded each season is a whooping 176. Even without further investigation, you can probably guess just from this number that Sweden is not an attractive place to build a new Youth Academy. However, for the sake of this discussion, further exploration is needed - Sweden is an extreme example and it may often be the case that just looking at the total number of youths demanded doesn't give you a conclusive answer on what you can expect if you were to build in that nation.

While we know how many regens from Sweden youth academies are demanding, we don't yet know how many youths the system is "expecting" to create per season. This is a VERY important number in youth academy selection however - 99% of youths that are created beyond the expected number will be low potential garbage (1 star to 2 star potential range). So how do we arrive at this number?

One thing that has been mentioned explicitly by SI staff with regards to the youth generation system in FML is that the number of youths being generated by the system is representative of the gameworld database as a whole. This means that by totaling the number of Swedish players and dividing by some "magic factor" we can determine how many Swedish players the youth generation system "expects" to create in a given season.

In order to arrive at this number, I first totaled up the number of Swedish players in the database from ages 17-45. The reason I choose 17 instead of 16 is because I didn't want the academy products themselves to throw off the database numbers too greatly - over time changes to the database due to youth academy products can filter through to change the number of expected regens but I wanted to make sure that all of the dross that the academies were generating who would probably be retired in a couple seasons didn't pollute the actual DB numbers that I was gathering. I counted a total of 437 Swedish players in the DB. My choice of a "magic" factor was arrived at from a beta thread in which Ov stated the number of "expected" players in the beta gameworld - I attempted to more or less equalize the numbers I was seeing from Völler GW with the "expected" numbers that he presented in this thread. This led to a "magic factor" of 15. This number makes sense as it is roughly the career length for a player in FML (15-30 yrs old). Admittedly though, this is probably an inexact approximation for the actual number of youths generated so don't hold me to these numbers ;)

'Expected' Youths per season = max(# of DB players / 15, 16)
'Expected' Youths per season = max(437 / 15, 16)
'Expected' Youths per season = max(29, 16) = 29

This indicates that although the Swedish Youth Academies in Völler are demanding 176 regens, the system is only expecting to generate 29! This means that 84% of the Swedish youths generated by the FML YA system will be "filler" - low potential players that have no chance of making it on a senior side!!

It's worth pointing out that if there is at least 1 YA in a nation, the expected number of regens for that nation will NEVER be less than 16. This is what makes obscure nations a better choice than overpopulated nations in some instances - as touched on in my previous post.

Youth Academies Explained

There has been a lot of moaning on the official SI forums lately from players who are upset at the lack of quality coming through their youth academy. These players are upset because despite building very expensive youth academies in well-known and talented footballing nations, they seem to be getting a constant stream of very low potential players rather than the promising youngsters they were expecting. While I don't blame them for being upset at getting so little end product out of such a large amount of investment, it is clear from some of the posts that many managers still don't understand how the Youth Academy system in Football Manager Live is meant to function.

I hope to reveal the mechanism behind how the Youth Academy system in FML functions as well as demonstrate why it is sometimes better to build in a very obscure nation rather than an established footballing power.

HOW DO YOUTH ACADEMIES WORK?
There was a rather popular thread in the beta forums when the testing for 1.5 was occurring where Ov Collyer explained a lot of the details behind the inner workings of the Youth Academy system. Although the ways that the YAs in beta were functioning was slightly different than the way that they function now, the concern voiced by the beta community was actually nearly identical to some of the complaints showing up on the Subscribers forum now: there was a lack of quality players being produced by the large number of youth academies. One of the replies that Ov crafted demonstrated why this was the case in beta as it is now:

I've been having a look at Miller this morning, and the fundamental reason, not surprisingly, why so many players appearing in YAs are of low PA is simply because pretty much every nation is over-subscribed in terms of academies.

Some examples, to illustrate:

Bolivia - academies are demanding a total 38 players per season. However, the system expects only 3 of these to be 'normal' (given a realistic PA), so the other 35 will be given a low PA to make up the numbers and simply to fulfill demand (but with a 1 in a 100 chance of being given a realistic PA).

When I say the system expects, this is based on the composition of players-per-country in the starting GW DB, so basically Bolivia should be churning out 3 regens per season.

Some other examples:

Brazil - academies demand 1230 players per season.
System expects 198.

Serbia - academies demand 180, System expects 35.

Belarus - academies demand 62, System expects 8.

England - academies demand 1010, System expects 438

Holland - academies demand 295, System expects 60

Poland - academies demand 80, System expects 32

The pattern is pretty conclusive, just a handful of nations are not over-subscribed (and no, I'm not saying which ones )

Bottom line is there are way too many academies and so once the system has created the "system expects" figure above, the rest are, by and large going to be rubbish.

Simply put, the youth generation system only creates a fixed number of "normal" potential ability youths every season - just what comprises a "normal" PA youth is a little unclear so for the sake of argument we will assume it is 3* potential and above. When academies start demanding more youths than this system is able to provide, all of the remaining youths that are generated will be of low potential. As you can see in the example above, the academies in Miller beta GW were demanding thousands of more youths than the system was set up to provide - this result in large quantities of "garbage" youth players being generated by academies. The same thing is happening in Voller GW today. Although I do not know the exact number of youths that the system is looking to generate, I think that the numbers I have gathered are around what is correct for the gameworld:

• Argentina - academies demand 541 players per season, system expects 79 players
• England - academies demand 578 players per season, system expects 91 players
• Sweden - academies demand 176 players per season, system expects 29 players
  

You don't have to be a math wiz to see that having an academy in these countries will result in a very large number of "garbage" youths coming through your academy. On average, a youth academy in Argentina in GW Voller is set up to have 84% of the youths that are generated be "garbage" youths with low potential.

WHY BUILD IN AN OBSCURE NATION?
At first glance, given the numbers above, building a Youth Academy in an obscure nation may seem like a very bad idea. After all, if Sweden is only generating 29 players per season, surely Nepal is generating less than 1? Although this line of thinking may intuitively make sense, it does not accurately describe how Youth Academies work in FML.

Another important change made in beta due to the same thread mentioned above was in the way players from obscure nations are generated by youth academies. Some managers were complaining because they had been building their academies in obscure nations and were getting literally NO youths through their academy despite large investments of money. Ov and the SI team agreed that this was not how they would like the YA system to work and made another important change:

Yes, it means that if YAs dictate there is demand for 16 players (e.g. one 5-star academy, or 4 1-star academies, etc) then 16 players will be created and given a normal PA for that nation.

Remaining players will mostly be rubbish to satisfy the YA demand, but with a 1/100 chance of one of these being given a normal PA for that nation.

This change has been made for 1.5.

Simply put, this means that if there is demand (i.e. youth academies) for youths to be created from an obscure nation, the first 16 of them WILL be created with "normal" potential. In other words, 16 is the absolute minimum "normal" PA youths that can be created in each nation. Although this may seem complicated, the implications of this change are rather simple. Rather than creating a 5* youth academy in Argentina and getting 13 garbage youths and 3 capable ones, you can opt to create a youth academy in a nation where none exist so far and be guaranteed 16 capable youth players.

While the example above may seem like a no-brainer, we have to be careful when making the blanket statement that it is always better to build in a obscure footballing nation rather than one that has become overpopulated with youth academies. Consider the following statement from Ov:

This will mean a small rise in ability of the Gameworld over time, but not something too extreme, since the PAs it will generate for small nations still won't tend to be all that great anyway, i.e. Brazil will still generally produce better players than Belize.

So while you may getting 16 quality players building a youth academy in the US Virgin Islands, it is very unlikely that any of these players will ever get to the level of 1 great Brazilian youth player. Therefore, in a fully-developed and realized Youth Academy market, the manager still has an important choice to make - do I attempt to build in an obscure nation and guarantee myself a steady stream of quality prospects or do I build in an overpopulated but higher quality footballing nation and try to hit the jackpot on that one superstar youth per season?

The choice is up to you!

The Special Ones

One of the most important decisions that managers will have to make when starting again in the new Football Manager Live will be which 2 of the 5 skill sets they choose to "specialize" in. Specializing in a specific skill set gives you an advantage in that you learn all of the skills in that set at the "normal" rate of learning - around 7-18 real-life days to learn a Level 4 skill and anywhere from 21-58 days to learn a Level 5 skill. However, non-specialized skills will take MUCH longer to learn (with some level 5 skills taking over 200 days to learn!) Along with the fact that the skill levels are now much less powerful at lower levels and much more powerful at higher levels, this makes a player's choice of skill specialization one of the most important decisions that managers will make in the first days in a new gameworld.

I've thought long and hard about this decision and even at this moment am still less than fully confident about my choice in specialized skills. What follows is my analysis of the 5 skill sets followed by my choice of specialization. Hopefully it will prove a useful analysis to anybody who is still on the fence regarding their choice of skills!


COACHING
Coaching appears to be a very popular skillset judging from some of the reactions on the forums and some polls done in gameworld Clough. However, most of this popularity seems to stem from the fact that the Coaching skill set features the largest number of individual skills out of the 5 sets. While this is true, I believe that the number of individual skills in a given set should NOT be your motivating factor in choosing to specialize in that skill set. Rather, you need to consider the long-term benefit that your team can gain from specializing in that skill.

In order to understand the benefit to specializing in the Coaching skill set, we must first understand exactly what the benefits to the Coaching skills are. Every player in FML has both a Current Ability (CA), which is a 0-200 number representing their footballing ability at the current moment in time, and a Potential Ability (PA), which is a 0-200 number representing the football ability that the player could reach given the right training. As players play in matches and train, they progress at certain rate towards their PA. This rate is augmented by factors such as match performances (small factor) and age (large factor). The Coaching skills serve to increase this level of progression relative to a player's "base" level of progression. So a manager with Coaching Level 5 would have his player improving at a rate 25% faster than a manager who has the identical player but no Coaching skills.

However, what Coaching skills DO NOT do is allow a player to go very far beyond his PA. If you happen to have a player with a low potential, he will not be able to develop into a world-class talent regardless of how good your coaching skills are. Additionally, in my experience, very good potential players will develop well regardless of your level of coaching skills.

Finally, it is important to know that once you learn Coaching Level 4, you can unlock and learn a whole subset of individual Coaching skills all the way to Level 3 at the "normal" rate of learning (Non-specialized skill sets still learn at the "normal" rate for all Level 1-3 skills). Other skill sets feature more desirable and more hard to get "tiered" skill trees (i.e. for Judging Potential Level 5 in the Scouting tree, you need to learn Scouting Level 5 before you can get to Judging Potential Level 5).

For all of the reasons covered above, I have chosen not to make Coaching a specialized skill for my club. However, it can be a good skill to specialize in if you want to have very talented youths at a young age (which can result in a higher sale value and more competitive squads in youth competitions).


PHYSIOTHERAPY
The Physiotherapy skill set is another one that seems to be popular among managers, many of whom are very concerned about the number and severity of injuries in the 1.5 version of FML. I'm not going to lie to you - injuries will be a very real concern for every club once FML re-launches and having higher levels of the Physiotherapy skills will help to lessen the pain somewhat (wordplay!) but before selecting this specialization it is once again important that you understand what benefit it can give your team.

Injuries in FML work in a somewhat mysterious way but what you should understand is that when a player gets injured, the TYPE of injury that he gets is very important in affecting how long he will be out of the team. So while a gashed head may only keep him out for 2-3 games, a torn hamstring or achilles tendon will end up keeping him out for some much larger (14-35?) range of games.

Physiotherapy skills work in 2 specific ways. Firstly, they lessen the chance of every player getting injured by some percentage. Secondly, if a player does get injured, they decrease the length of that injury. However, this second benefit will only reduce the length of the injury UP TO THE MINIMUM RANGE for that specific injury type. So if your player Bavid Deckham gets a Torn Achilles tendon, which happens to be coded into the game with an injury range of between 18-32 games (making these numbers up), even if you have every Physiotherapy skill to level 5 he will still be out for 18 matches. Some people seem to think that maxing out their Physiotherapy skills means that they will be able to sacrifice squad depth; while this is true to an extent, I think you can see from the above example that having substitutes who can step in and perform at a senior level will still be very important, regardless of your skills.

Additionally, you should note that Physiotherapy is another one of those skills (like Coaching) where learning Level 4 suddenly allows you to learn a lot more individual skills up to level 3. So getting all the way up to Level 5 in Physiotherapy is not completely necessary to have a pretty comparable skill level to people who choose to specialize in this skill set. As a further disadvantage, I think I am right in saying that Physiotherapy has one of the smallest collections of individual skills of all of the 5 skill sets.

Specializing in Physiotherapy can be a very good choice if you want to try investing in a smaller number of very good players and run with a slightly smaller squad than most other players. However, I believe this is a gamble that is bound to fail over time and will be looking elsewhere for skills to specialize in.


SCOUTING
We can think of the Scouting skill set as being composed of two skill types: Scouting and Judging Potential. The Scouting skills themselves allow managers to view a higher % of players in the database while the Judging Potential skill allows managers to see an approximation of the PA of a player over time. Higher levels of Judging Potential (JP) allow for more accurate approximations of a player's PA as well as faster assessments (7 days with JP5).

Again, let's examine the benefits of the Scouting skills. Scouting skills themselves allow you to view a larger % of players in the database. At first this may seem like a very useful skill but you need to consider a couple of things. First of all, the players who will be "hidden" by low levels of scouting are all going to be low-reputation players and youth players. Therefore, if you are looking to compile a side full of strong senior players, the Scouting skills will probably be of almost no benefit to you. Secondly, the benefit to having Scouting skills decreases as the number of Youth Academies in the gameworld increases. This is because the youth players with the highest potential are preferentially assigned to Youth Academies rather than released to the free agent list. If the gameworld is swamped with Youth Academies, the quality of youths who appear as free agents will be far lower than in a gameworld with very few Youth Academies. Personally, I foresee a large number of Youth Academies springing up in the new Gameworlds and thus don't believe the Scouting skills to be very attractive as an area for specialization.

However, the REAL reason that many people are choosing to specialize in the Scouting skill set is the (once) very powerful Judging Potential (JP) skills. With high levels of JP, resourceful managers can identify who the youths with the best potential are and buy them at a young age when they are cheapest. These youths will then go on to become the World Famous players of the future. While I do believe that JP can be a tremendously useful and powerful skill when used appropriately, it is not nearly as useful as it once was. Consider that it takes 2-3 days to get a initial assessment on any player, and that this initial assessment is not very accurate, even with JP Level 5. It takes 7 days to fully assess any player with JP Level 5 and you can only assess 10 players at any given time. (Just as an aside, if JP Level 5 allowed you to assess vastly more players it would be very desirable to me. 10 players at a time just isn't enough though, regardless of how fast the assessment is). Additionally, given the introduction of youth academies, most promising youths will now be showing up in Academies rather than the free agent list as was the case in the past.

As a case against Judging Potential, consider that most experienced managers can identify high-potential players from a number of factors, even without any JP! Things such as high levels of CA, rapidly increasing Acquisition Fee and Market Value, and lots of other clubs bidding on your player are generally good clues that he may have very high potential. :) Training reports also have clues in them that illuminate high potential players if you know what to look for. So while JP Level 5 is definitely a nice tool to have, it is far from essential.

I was strongly considering specializing the Scouting skill tree myself but in the end decided against it. Unfortunately this will take some of the drama out of my last two skill categories, as by process of elimination you can see that these are my choices for specialization!


MANAGEMENT (MGMT?)
Of all the skill sets, Management is the one that is the biggest no-brainer to me. It consists of a number of powerful and "expensive" skills that can help any team, no matter how big or small. Nearly every skill in the set is desirable in some way (save for Finance, in my opinion, which is still nice but hardly essential). Specializing in Management will allow you to save/make tons of money (Transfer Negotiation, Contract Negotiation, Finance, Commercial) and provide affect your teams morale and availability (Team Management, Influence).

Many people seem to think that the Management skill set is not a good choice for specialization due to the fact that SI have made the (probably correct) decision to nerf the effectiveness of some of these skills (Transfer Negotiation and Commercial) for the first 3 seasons of a new gameworld. These people are merely being short-sighted. Management is a skill tree with a huge benefit to your team over the long-term lifetime of the game and is now more necessary than ever, with some of the changes implemented in version 1.5 with regards to the price that you will be paying to auto-extend contracts.

I fully expect to specialize in Management upon relaunch and I can't think of a very convincing reason why somebody would not want to do the same. The ONLY instance I can think of eschewing the management skill is if you are taking one very specific approach to the game and think that other skills will serve you better in this specific approach.


INFRASTRUCTURE
Infrastructure is my second selection for a specialized skill and while I don't think it presents as strong an argument as Management does, it does feature some very powerful skills that can help to save you money and improve your team. Specifically, the Construction Level 5 and Academy Expansion Level 5 skills are desirable to me. Construction Level 5 will save me ~3 million off of the costs associated with constructing my stadium once all is said and done, while Academy Expansion will allow me to build lots of small Youth Academies rather than one large one. This might not seem like a huge advantage, but it can be. One large, expensive Youth Academy means that you are committed to that country and changing your Academy approach will cost a lot of money and time. With several small academies, I can adjust to changes in the Infrastructure of the Gameworld with relative ease and little cost while still getting the same number of youth graduates. I can also spread myself across several countries and, depending on the layout of other youth academies, possibly increase the quality of youths I could get as opposed to building a 5 Star Youth Academy in just one country.

The big disadvantage that many of the Infrastructure skills have is that they only provide a one-time benefit. Once your stadium and Youth Academies are built, the Construction and Academy Expansion skills aren't helping you at all. While this is less than desirable compared to some other skills, I still think it is the best choice for me and the strategy that I plan to adopt in my new gameworld. Others may disagree.


I hope this has been a worthwhile guide for you through my thought process when deciding which skills I am choosing to specialize in once the new FML gameworlds open. It took a lot of thought and consideration from me and I hope it does from you as well as it could very well define the success of your club and your FML experience for the foreseeable future!

Just in Time for the Re-launch!

I've started a new blog since Football Manager Live will be re-launching this week and I have precious little to do in the 3-4 days while it is offline being prepared for re-launch!

I'd attempted to blog the escapades of my team (Waukesha 1834, formerly of GW Clough, soon to be of GW Völler) once before but found that the impetus to create new posts was lacking - particularly in the "version 1.0" days of FML when players were traded on a daily basis.

This new blog will concentrate less on the specifics of my team and try to offer a more generalized and objective viewpoint of strategy in Football Manager Live and my ideas on how the game could be improved. I hope to update it on a semi-regular basis so if I am failing in this goal, feel free to drop me a line via email or on Völler and verbally smack me around a bit until I get on back on schedule!