The story of an attempt to break the World Record for longest FM save ever. 242 years in! This is the story so far!

This has been posted with permission from the original author SMoorey77 from reddit

As you can see from the title, this will be a rather long story, there is a TLDR at the bottom if you want to skip this all, but hopefully you find this interesting enough to read!

My current save is in the year 2258, my 242nd season in Football Manager 15, the save is over 7 years old, has over 300 days of in game play within it and I have played over 88000 days in game, with only 203 days holiday. And I am still 91 years off the record.

To give some back story into how this save started, I need to go back to FM12, my first FM game. I wanted to start making youtube videos after watching the likes of Jake Cave, TTV2 and ofcourse EvolvingMick1986 if any of you remember them. The problem was, I didn’t know what save to do. So I loaded up FM and recording program on my old laptop and loaded 5 leagues, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland. I decided I would use the “Pick Me” function, which picks a random team for you. I decided I would click it 5 times and do a save with whoever it landed on. You can actually watch the video of me doing this, it’s still up on my Youtube channel as my first ever video if you ever want to watch it.

A very grainy photo of me choosing Afan Lido!

And so, on the 5th click, a small Welsh club appears, Afan Lido, I had never heard of them before, I’d never even thought of the Welsh League before, but I thought, this could be a good save, let’s see how far I can get with them.

Afan Lido were predicted 12th out of 12, so that my first challenge, avoid relegation. Thankfully, we did and I went on to win the league with them within a few years, my attention turned to Europe. Could we win the Champions League? That’s a good goal, getting a Welsh Premier League Team to win the Champions League.

So for the next 3 FM’s, I attempted to win the Champions League with Afan Lido, and failed each time. It was incredibly difficult to do, due to a number of challenges/bugs that I encountered, such as no one being interested in signing for my club. You could be playing in the Slovakian 2nd tier but apparently 5 time champions league semi-finalists Afan Lido couldn’t match your ambition! Or I would run into one of the overpowered English sides that would always dump me out. The furthest I got was the semi finals of the Champions League in FM14. Then FM15 came around, and this would be the year I thought, lots of new features in the game and this year I would finally win. The was only one problem. Afan Lido were no longer in the Welsh Premier League, they had been relegated the year before in real life, and because Football Manager 15 only had the top division of Welsh football, I had to simulate the first year until the new sides could be promoted and then meticulously save and reload until Afan Lido came up and add myself as manager.

From what I remember, the team was absolutely awful, and I had to sign many players to even be competitive, but we did well. If you’ve ever played lower league football, you know that the more you put in the more you get out, and that’s what I did, I would spend hours on scouting trips going through every European nations under 21’s, under 18’s, every club, looking for young players I could potentially get in on the cheap. As time went on, we eventually started doing better, winning the league wasn’t too much of an issue, TNS were the dominant side, but after a few seasons we were winning the league so our attention turned to Champions League glory. That first Champions League group stage is a landmark moment in any small nation save. A sweet 6.8mil prize money in FM15, immediately doubling my finances, and from there its very easy to dominate domestically and focus on European glory.

It took many attempts, but finally, after an incredible 3-2 aggregate vs Barcelona with a goal in the 94th minute to win in the semi-finals, I had made my first ever champions league final with Afan Lido, who would we be facing?

Manchester City. A dominant Manchester City, led by prolific Italian forward Flaviano D’Orazio (I actually still remember his name which is crazy) who still, 200 years later, has the record for most goals scored in a premier league season. One of their bench players cost more than my entire squad, it was truly a David vs Goliath, but could we do it?

No. We lost 3-0.

Heartbreaking, they were just better on the night, I reckon on another day we could have done it, but things didn’t fall right for us, and that was it, a final loss. To be honest most sides don’t win their first Champions League final, Manchester City just lost their first to Chelsea, who lost their first to Manchester United, so we would just have to try again and see if we could win it the next year.

0-0 at Halftime but 3-0 by Fulltime, unfortunate for our first Champions League Final

Incredibly, we were back in the final just one year later, with another win over Barcelona in the semis (4-4 on away goals this time), but this time we faced Inter Milan, I knew less about them, they were good, but not Manchester City good, so I thought we had an even greater chance.

If you want to watch the game live, I recorded it for youtube, spoilers ahead. I went all out by the way, pre match interviews, pre match graphics, the whole shabang. So I suited up for my second final and pressed play. Spoilers ahead

One of the big issues before the match is one of my starting CM’s was injured, so I had a choice for who would be in midfield, I had a young Norweigan midfielder called Vegard Henriksen or Czech midfielder called Jindrich Kudela, I went with Henriksen, and it proved a fantastic choice. As after a goalless first half, he popped up with a header from a freekick in the 50th minute to put us 1-0 up in the final. Our first ever goal in the final, and our first ever lead. Things took a turn for the worse though as not 10 minutes later, Mileta Krstic, our left back, got a second yellow and was sent off in the 58th minute. We would have to play the last 30 minutes a man down.

This was hell, Inter Milan changed to a 343 with 3 strikers, an incredibly OP formation on FM15 and we went to a flat 441 and basically parked the bus. And then I had to watch highlight after highlight for Inter Milan as they peppered my goal, already convinced they were gonna score. But they didn’t and as time went on I grew more hopeful. An offside goal for Inter Milan in the 92nd nearly honestly killed me, I may have stopped playing FM altogether if that had stood, I think I celebrated the offside more than our own goal. One last highlight in the 94th minute scared me, but we won the ball and Henriksen broke free into the middle and the final whistle was blown.

I fell to my knees, I Couldn’t really shout as it was 2am and I still lived with my parents so it was a silent celebration, but it was my greatest ever achievement in football manager, I had taken a welsh side who weren’t even in the start of the game and taken them to champions league glory.

A massive celebration at our first ever Champions League win!

So what next?

I had fallen in love with the players I had bought and played with, so I wanted to see if I could win it again, or if I could improve Wales ranking in the euro coefficients. One thing I did notice was that our fans attendance actually increased, for the first time ever. Now, the question was, could I build a new stadium? I asked for an extension and for the first time ever it was granted, we were upgrading our capacity. So, from this point on my goal was now to have a stadium named after me. After the first Champions League it seemed to get easier, the coefficients rose, we got more money and we started to dominate the UCL, every year our attendance would increase and I’d keep asking for stadium expansions until we coulndt any more. And that’s when I asked for a new stadium. It was accepted surprisly, and The Moore Stadium would be built, a 30,000 seater stadium.

Moore Stadium, the first of many stadiums named after us

We moved into Moore Park, but my attention was already turned to the next goal, could we get a 100,000 seater stadium? The problem is, in FM15 you need to wait 20 years at least until you can build a new stadium, so it would take some time before I could ask again. I kept playing, and I kept dominating and finally, permission was granted for the 100,168 seater Moore Arena to be built.

The first ever 100,000 seater stadium in Wales!

Finally in 2077, the Moore Arena was finished, so what next?

I had started to get rather bored at Afan Lido, we absolutely dominated the Welsh Premier League, we were like Bayern and PSG on steroids in the welsh league, no one could compete, we nearly went 1000 wins in row. We also dominated in Europe too, so I thought about what I could do next, and that’s when it hit me. Another welsh club.

Port Talbot had just sacked their manager at the end of the season, and I thought, well if I built one team up, why not another? And took the heavy decision to resign from Afan Lido and apply to Port Talbot. I got the job, and upon getting the job the realisation hit that I had just moved to Afan Lido’s local rivals, like literally both clubs play in Port Talbot, it would be like Sir Alex Ferguson moving to Manchester City, so I was a massive Judas basically. But who cares, Port Talbot was a new project and this project was to see if I could do the same with them, except this time it was harder as we had to face Afan Lido down and beat them, the super team that I had built.

It was a crazy world moving back to Port Talbot, at Afan Lido there was very few 5 star players, at Port Talbot, everyone was, there was a completely new market available and we also didn’t have a unlimited budget so I would have to spend more frugally. It would be an interesting challenge.

I will speed up here a bit as you don’t need to know the entire Port Talbot story, we had to compete with Afan Lido for our first win, we got smashed a few times but eventually we overtook them to become the dominant side in Wales, we actually won the Europa league with a 4-2 victory over Torino, the only cup I never won with Afan Lido, and then went on to multiple Champions League glories. We ended up with a 65,000 seater Moore Arena too.

Our first win vs Afan Lido, a smash and grab if I've ever seen one

It was around this point, when I moved into the 2100’s that I started to look at what the longest Football Manager save was, I remember seeing the old article about Darren Bland who had the first record, 154 years with Fiorentina, I was close to that already so wanted to check it out. It was at this point I found out his record has actually been beaten twice by this point, and the new record holder was Michael Leniec with Lech Poznan, who had taken them 221 years into the future. This was the point where I decided I would go for the record for longest Football Manager save ever.

The target was set: 221 years

The problem was, I was already a bit bored at Port Talbot, so I decided to move on again in 2123, this time to Pen-Y-Bont, another Welsh club, but I decided to make it more interesting but setting myself a challenge, I could only use my youth system. The problem in FM15 is that Wales youth rating is awful, so there was never many good players, but I was hoping if I focused on my youth team this would help boost Wales’ national team to international success. This was a much harder challenge, taking on the two giants in Afan Lido and Port Talbot and then also only being able to use a select few players. It was tough, it took me much longer to win our first league and Champions League than other clubs. But we finally did it, a youth only side winning the champions league, and then I started signing whoever I wanted as I had suffered enough. I kept going with Pen-Y-Bont until we got a very annoyingly sized 64,583 seater stadium, which I cant officially say is 65,000 seater, and then decided to move on to my 4th club in 2170.

A strikerless youth only teams that won us our first only European title

With my fourth club Havefordwest, I decided I would only be signing free agents, no transfer fees allowed at all. It was actually relatively easy, much easier than Pen-Y-Bont, but the league gets harder every time we do this as theres an extra super team in the league now, but we ended up winning the league and the champions league in a decent time and started to get to work on building new stadiums. And we were getting closer all the time to the world record. I was only about 30 years off 221 years when I was scrolling twitter, and a news article caught my eye. A new person had broken the record for Football Manager longest save ever. “Shit” I thought, that’ll be another 20 or 30 years onto the save then. Boy was I wrong.

Sepp Hedel had broken the World Record for Football Manager’s longest save by a whopping 112 years, and had set the record at 333 years. I was stunned, how the f*ck had someone got that far into the future? To be honest I was fuming, I was even more fuming when I read how he had done it. He had started in England and FC United of Manchester, then moved to India for 200 odd years, then back to England with Hereford. I was pissed when I learned that India only have 18 game seasons, I was very confused when I found out that he had only spent 1940 hours in the save, that worked out to 6 hours average a season, I know India is short but I had more time in my save and I was only a third, I got more confused when I found out that he had only signed 684 players over 333 years, that’s only 2 players a season? At some points I would sign over 40 player in 1 season! Something was up and I knew it. That’s when I found it, this game was done on FM Touch. I was furious, how could they count that as a record when it’s a completely different game? Apparently the only rule for saves was that you had to have less than 5% holiday, so it counted. I couldn’t believe it, I was probably only about half a year off in real time from breaking the record and now I has over 140 years to go again, it would take years to get there.

The new world record. 333 years.

To be honest at this point I took a break from my football manager save, I went and played the new games, but never really got into any. After a few months I had calmed down and opened the save and got back into it. I had mellowed out, and I had steeled my mind that I would break that record no matter what, if it took me another 10 years I would do it. So I kept continuing. I ended up staying longer at Haverfordwest than any other clubs, I stayed there from 2170 to 2240, a full 70 years, and at the end of it I had a nice new shiny 103,349 seater Moore Arena. And then I promptly resigned.

I decided it was time to move onto my 5th club, and I ended up landing on Barry Town, to give some history on them, they used to be a dominant force in Welsh football, but ended up going bust, so this new Barry was only created in 2013, so I was to bring them back to former glory.

One of the big changes though was that I had decided to start streaming this save on Twitch, I had been thinking about doing it while I was at Haverfordwest but knew I would be finishing up there soon so wanted a new start to start streaming with, so we can go through all the trials and tribulations of being a small club again. I also had another challenge in mind for Barry. I couldn’t sign any players from the top 15 ranked nations in the world.

In newer FM’s there's a lot more randomness and spontaneity of regens from smaller nations becoming World Class, so you could have a Cape Verdean World Player of The Year or something. In FM15 this is much much less common, most good players come from the big 5 nations, France, Germany, England, Italy and Spain. So I decided I wanted to use lesser known nations and see if we could win the Champions League with them, so at the start of every season, I would look at the Top 15 ranked nations and for that year we could not sign anyone from those nationalities.

The Top 15 Nations for our first year at Barry!

I am now 18 years in with Barry after streaming it for a good 5/6 months, It was tough at first, competing vs the other big clubs in our league, something I hadn’t mentioned so far, an AI club in Wales Aberystwyth somehow became a super team all on their own without any influence from me, they’ve even won a Champions League on their own, so instead of facing 4 super teams, it was 5. It took a long time, but we finally won the league, and in our 10th season, we won the champions league, beating Benfica, with a hat-trick from our Paraguayan striker named Juan Manuel Barrios, (renamed Juan Manuel Poggers by chat) to prove you can do it with smaller nations, we ended up going back-to-back-to-back in the UCL, but then a couple of losses to French clubs (PSG have ANOTHER tycoon owner) stopped us from going further. We are currently UCL holders though in our most recent season, and have been attempting a fully unbeaten season. We have kept our top 15 rules in place, and are going to make them harder in our 20th season to ban any South Americans, as Argentina fell out of the top 15 for a good few years and now half my team are Argentinian. We also have a new stadium, not named after me though, but the intention is to keep playing and eventually get a 100,000 seater stadium with Barry before moving onto our 6th club and try and do it all again.

Our first Champions League win with Barry, led by Juan Manuel Barrios

While we have gone a long long way and I am 242 years into the save in the year 2258. We are still 91 years off the world record. At the rate I am going, it will take me another 3-4 years to reach the World Record, so I have set myself the target of getting their by FM25, as it would be the 10 year anniversary for the save.

It’s been an incredible journey so far in this save, and hopefully it will continue to be that. A lot of interesting things have happened in 240 odd years. You’re welcome to come along and join in, I stream to Youtube and Twitch so you can watch live or watch the VOD’s on Youtube, we also do a new thing of doing a watch a long of the World Cup and Euros which are a lot of fun. We’ve seen both Russia and Ukraine win the World Cup recently and Romania get all the way to the Euro’s final.

Another note I have is that I have had the Welsh League open but also all leagues in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain open, so there has been some incredible changes in what’s gone on in the save. A few examples:

Doncaster had a 30 years Manchester United spell dominance winning the Premier League 20+ times in the mid 21st century, and are now down in League 1.

Arsenal went 240 years without getting relegated and are the most successful English side, but on the 241st season got relegated by Chelsea on the final day.

Manchester United haven’t been in the Premier League for the last 25 years, and also been all the way down to league 1

Marine are the only non league side to win the Premier League

Atletico Madrid got relegated to the third tier in Spain and didn’t come back to the first division for 50 odd years

Bayern Munich had their very own Alex Ferguson who won 18 titles with them and now have the biggest stadium in the world named after him which is 110,000 seats

Roma are currently in Serie B, with Genoa having a Qatari tycoon dominating Serie A

Teams such as Ponferradina and Las Palmas have won La Liga

France is the land of tycoons, with Auxerre, PSG, Lyon, Angers, Lille all winning the league with tycoon owners

Chesterfield are current Premier League winners, with the last 3 being Chesterfield, Ipswich and Newcastle

England lost 5 World Cups finals before winning their first in 2114, they also lost in 2066, the 100 year anniversary of 1966 to Germany in the final (talk about revenge)

Paraguay won a won cup, beating England, stopping them from winning 3 World Cups back to back

Slovenia has won both a World Cup and Euros, in 2058 and 2042

Serbia, Chile, Turkey and Denmark have also won World Cups

Mexico have lost 5 World Cup Finals

The World Cup has only been won by European or South American teams so far

The current world cup winners Ukraine didn’t even qualify for the next world cup coming up.

A San Marino striker won World Player of the Year!

An actually good San Marino player! (Apologies for the attribute colours, it was a dark time)

And many many more.

Also some interesting stats so far from the save:

Time spent on save: 310 days, 16 hours. Total: 7456 Hours

Games Played: 13,309

Games Won: 11,458

Games Drawn: 1,004

Games Lost: 847

Win Percentage: 86%

Goals Scored: 24,004 (Potentially bugged no idea its negative for some reason)

Goals: Conceded: 9,566

Players Bought: 3667

Players Bought Value: £6.09 Billion

Players Sold: 2806

Players Sold Value: £31.28 Billion

Leagues won: 196

Cups Won: 837

Hall of Fame Score: 124495

My Manager stats

If you want to know specific details about your club or other things in the save, comment down below, I can do more posts like this detailing specific things or go through leagues history etc. One of the big reasons we go so slow now is that I get distracted looking at cool new things in the save I’ve never seen before!

Also, just a disclaimer, please don’t send any hate or anything Sepp Hedel’s way, obviously I was annoyed at the time, but at the end of the day he was just playing FM how he enjoyed it and it fully counts as a world record, it makes the journey even better for me as now I get to stream the process live and it will be even more rewarding when I finally get there!

If you want to check out either my Twitch or Youtube:

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/smoorey7

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Smoorey7

TLDR: I have a 242 year save that I am trying to break the World Record with that stands at 333 years. I have managed 5 Welsh clubs throughout, winning the UCL and building two 100,000 seater stadiums and others. I am currently 91 years off the record and 18 years into my 5th club, which I also know stream. That’s about it!

Some more Pictures for those interested!

World Cup History:

Euros History:

Current Premier League Table:

Every team in the Welsh Premier ending up in a “Moore Arena” with varying capacity lol.

Hell of an achievement, hope he gets the record as FM Touch does seem kind of cheating!