Pippadoc - Comments

I think relatable is what you need, the character could be a horrible person but if people can relate to some aspects of him then they'll be interested in his story and will probably find him likable to some extent.

Kinda like Walt from Breaking Bad or Tony Soprano, they aren't nice people if you look at it objectively but they have relatable aspects to them which make people care about them and how their stories unfold.

Particularly if you tell the story in the first person, I think being relatable is the key. I've only read the first link you posted up on here, but I thought through that much the character was relatable. Moments like where Seb first appears and he says something like 'what the fuck or you doing here?' but mentions he's doing that cover up that he actually cares, and the bit after about the troubles of making male friends. They're things I think plenty of people could apply to themselves and that honesty, I guess, makes you like the character.

Doug Martin had a monster day on sunday racking up 272 yards from scrimmage and 4TDs !!!! Even more importantly he earned me 50 fantasy points to keep me with a 2 game lead at the top of The Susie League \o/

The Ravens looked good at points against the Browns. I guess we got a win on the road is the main thing. Richardson ran for over 100 yards, shockingly that's actually an improvement on recent weeks and hopefully we'll start trending up.

Flacco was hit and miss again, two TD drives on our first two possessions followed by, I think, 8 punts in a row before getting it going after we went behind in the third quarter and getting the third TD. We got let off in this one, we'll have to better on the road if we want to make it to the Superbowl because at the minute I can't see Houston not being the number 1 seed in the AFC.

It's taken me a while, but I've finally finished my summer shopping and have a few gems to show for it I think.

First off, the outgoings. Mostly it's a case of getting rid of players that aren't up to the level whilst loaning out some youngsters. Esref Bas in particular wasn't good enough and getting a bit of cash for him was a good decision I feel. O'Hanlon and Cassidy are probably good enough to stay with us, but I've found some promising replacements and they likely wouldn't have seen any game time with us.

Jorge Enrique Lagos.



Samuele Storace



Thiago



Ed Bryant



The other signings are promising young English players, who I'm trying to loan out this season. I have one more target, a free agent who's currently recovering from a hip injury. A failed medical means we haven't signed him yet, but hopefully we will be able to once he recovers.

Cheers mate! Hopefully we can avoid second season-syndrome this year.

Mike Bassett: England Manager !

That's horrible generalisation of the fantasy genre.

There's plenty of fantasy authors that don't follow all these stereotypes. It's just lazy making them, you could easily make similar generalisations about other genres, and you'd be right about some authors but there will be others who don't fit the stereotypes.

What a end to the season, we were Wigan-esque in putting together a great finish to the season. Why we couldn't play like this for the rest of the season is beyond me . In particular, beating Man City 4-0 to end the season was fantastic. It seems Hubert has begun to justify his price tag as well after keeping 6 clean sheets in the final 7 games of the season. All in all it's looking promising for next season.

One of the biggest drop offs this season was out goals from set pieces, in previous seasons we were scoring 15-20 goals from corners and indirect free-kicks. This season we managed 7, with a particularly disappointing 2 goals from corners. Hopefully we can make some head way on that next season.



Overall it looks like Hubert has proven to be an upgrade at GK, he conceded an average of about 1.6 goals a game and 5 cleansheets. Hagberg on the other hand conceded an average of almost 2 goals per game and also kept 5 cleansheets in an extra 9 games.

Defensively there were no real standout performers over the course of the season. Having said that we have a young defence with a lot of potential, so hopefully we will see some improvement in the players come next season.

In the midfield, Patten was a particularly impressive performer having managed to score 7 goals and create 7 at the same time. He also had the most appearances this season, only missing 4 games. That really says a lot about the injuries we've had to deal with this season, hopefully if we can avoid that next season we will see more consistent performance across the pitch.

Up front, really we're missing a true goals scorer. The numbers don't look too bad, but Dombai had 1 goal until February which really didn't help matters - although he has done well in creating chances for us. We may have to bring in a new striker, as I'm not sure Joseph or Almeida will become the clinical finisher we're looking for.

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We got a nice £8.8 million for our finish in the league. Even nicer than that is the news that our board has reinvested pretty much all that money into improving our facilities. We've got a 5,336 seat stadium expansion under way, which see's us ground share with Wigan until that's completedin 8 months time. Also we've got upgrades to our youth and training facilities in progress which will be completed in 5 months time.

All in all it's been a brilliant season, and we've exceeded expectations with this late season surge. Hopefully we can manage a similar finish next year as well as upgrading our other facilities and maybe even get ourselves a youth academy.

Haha, at least you can buy alcohol now!

Happy Birthday mate

How is that a bad thing??

There's so much room to do something original within the Star Wars setting, that it would be good if they moved away from the characters that have been running through the previous films. But if they try and make something that's taking place shortly after Episode VI they'll just be forcing too much from it.

If they make something with fairly little connection to the plot of the other films I think it could be really good. I think people have to look at it as a completely separate film within the same setting, if people compares it to the originals they'll just be disappointed.

We were absolutely dire against Liverpool and Chelsea, but I guess that's too be expected given their competing at the top of table and we're battling relegation. Despite that, and the poor morale that came with 5 game winless streak, we bounced back brilliantly to thrash Blackburn 5-1 and leap-frog them out of the relegation places. We've got 7 games left play and we're three wins away from 40 points, it's doable, but it will be tough as we still have to face 5 of the top 8 sides in the league.

We had the new intake of youth this month, unsuprisingly it was pretty uninspiring. However, I decided to take my assistants advice and sign the majority of the players in order to give ourselves a reasonable sized youth squad now we are making a strong profit on a monthly basis. Hopefully in the summer, I will be able to poach some strong youth talent as we need to start trying to bring through our own homegrown players.

We managed to get some much needed wins on the board this month that's kept us in contention to stay up. It's still going to be a tough ask though as we have some hard games still to play. In particular our next two games, which are Chelsea followed by Liverpool. After that we'll have a little reprieve when playing some of the other relegation threatened side, so fingers-crossed we won't be cut adrift by then.

Unfortunately, it's looking like my big money signing isn't proving to be a huge improvement on whatever we have in goal. Maybe Cheik's right and I have wasted some money there

I guess Balotelli had a good Euro's and that usually counts for quite a lot.

In all honesty, I couldn't tell you what games the pictures are from or whether they were dives or not.

Pull your head out your arse - Just because Sam said Gerrard isn't innocent of not diving after he had a whinge about Phil Neville doesn't mean he thinks every United player is innocent of diving.

This seems to be the standard response to every Man Utd when they criticise an opposing player or manager (probably everyone else as well, but it seems to have happened to the Utd fans on here quite a bit recently). Just because someone supports a particular club doesn't mean they blindly support the actions of every player at their club. For instance, I support Newcastle, but I don't any of the shit Nile Ranger gets up to is acceptable.

Turnover number 4 less than two minutes into the 2nd quarter and it's a Pick Six!

Dallas have just given up there third turnover of the 1st quarter against the Giants

Cheers for the comments guys!

I think I might have over-paid a little for Hubert, but panic did set in a little bit near the end of the transfer window. He's not played a match for us yet, but hopefully he'll end up a good signing. I find GK's the hardest position to evaluate on FM by looking at attributes, I generally take my scouts and coaches word on who's worth having, so maybe I got led astray by them a little bit

Dreadful month for us, and it brings our winless run to 10 games (9 in the league). We REALLY need to stop the rot immediately and get some points on the board fast. Next up we've got a crucial game against Newcastle, hopefully we can pick up the three points and use at as a catalyst to boost morale and get us on a run of good form.

To try and help the situation, I've managed to pick up a couple of signings to improve us defensively. Although again I struggled to find quality players who were willing to sign with us. Hopefully I've added enough to keep us up, but I think it's going to be a close thing.



My most expensive signing ever, and hopefully a goalkeeper that can keep us in a few close games. I'm a little disappointed to have to stop playing Hagberg as he's been with us since the Blue Square Premier, but we've got to change something around if we want to stay up.



Vilar has massive potential as well as being our second best central defender already. Fingers crossed these two players can help us enough to stay up this season.



I'm not sure how much playing time Bilozor will get. I was planning on loaning him out after he played in the FA Cup game, but he managed to pull a hamstring after scoring a debut goal. Fingers-crossed I will still be able to get him out on loan for some first-team experience before the loan window closes.

Cheers for the comments guys! Fingers-crossed we can stay up.

At the halfway mark we're above the dropzone, so in that respect everything is going according to plan this season.

However, we are on a bad run of form right now that we really need to end soon. It's been an odd season so far, in the sense that we've either had a fantastic run of games or a dreadful run of games with no middle ground. Having said that we have struggled with injuries throughout the season far, and it's unfortunately tended to be concentrated at certain postions, we've had periods of the season when we've lost the majority of our central defenders to injury as well as periods where we've been missing most of our right midfielders, right-backs and central midfielders.

I'm particularly looking to improve defensively in the second half of the season as a couple more clean sheets would pretty much get the job done in the second half of the season. If we can get past the injury issues and have consistent back four and centre of midfield I think that could help us a lot. I'm also looking to bring in an established older defender in, but finding one who's interested and not asking for absurd is proving a little difficult at the moment.

If we can just turn a couple of our ten losses into points I think we'll have a good chance of staying up this season.

I was disappointed when out of the League Cup to a non-Premiership side, but to be honest the only goal for this season is to stay up anything we do in the cup is just a bonus.

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That's us up to date with where I am in the game now. So updates will be a bit slower now.

Out of curiosity do you apply the same logic to Italian domestic football. Is it ridiculous to assume any game in Italy isn't fixed?

I think Wiggins is clean, but you're right that you can't say 100%. But the same is true for any proffessional athlete really, you can't say for sure any of them aren't doping.

I was planning not to go too crazy on transfers, but I must admit I was expecting to spend a bit more than we did. A lot of the players I was looking at who would be interested in joining us we're aging or just didn't have enough upside to justify how much they were asking for in wages a lot of the time. There's been a fair few transfer listed players who had the ability or potential and were a decent age who just weren't interested in us, and we had a couple of deals fall through thanks to failed work permits.

All in all not an ideal window in terms of players coming in. I'm hoping if we can survive this season then our reputation will get a nice jump, our scouts can get a better idea of the european-regions we've just been allowed to visit for the first time and we can pick up some players more to my liking next summer. There's some serious risk of this back-firing given a lot of our players have been with us since before the Championship, hopefully if it's going horribly at January we can sign some players and have time to turn things around then.

The outgoings consisted mainly of getting rid of players who just aren't going to cut it anymore at this level, or never broke into the first team in the first place. Making £850k from Ghasemi and Williams was a good return on two free transfer signings. Most of the deals also have percentage of next sale clauses attached. In January there's a couple of other players I'm hoping to get shot of as well.

That's probably enough rambling for now, so let's take a look at our 6 new players.

Borja Aketxe



Santiago



Tommy Kenwright



Francisco Almeida



Iosu Ugartetxea



Jon Bird

Fantastic first half of the season there mate! Looks like you've signed some class players during the summer as well. Good luck maintaining your form in the second half of the season

Cheers mate! If you get a run like I had going it's pretty good fun, I imagine if I was spending 4/5+ years in each tier I'd have lost patience by now.

I was keeping an eye on it on the old forum, since the change over I haven't spend much time in the FM sections. I'll have to have a catch up.

As some of you will remember, I've been playing as FC United of Machester on FM12 with the goal of getting them to the Premiership and maybe eventually becoming the best team in Manchester. And so far, so good! On the old site my last update saw us win the Championship and acheive my first goal of making it to the Premiership for the 2020/21 season.

It's been a great rise up the leagues for us, far quicker than I expected I'd be able to do it. But it helps when you can pick up a great keeper and some top strikers on free transfers during your rise up the leagues.



The club isn't in too bad shape heading into our first Premiership season, we've got a positive bank balance and the TV Revenue from playing in the Premiership should be a massive boost for us. Plus we'll have one season in the Premiership to grow our reputation before our main and additional kit sponsorships and a general sponsorship need renewing, so hopefully we'll see a big jump in them.

Our facilities, however, are well below the general standards of Premiership teams. We have a tiny 7164 all-seater stadium, fairly basic training facilities, basic youth facilities (no academy), fairly basic youth recruitment and good junior coaching (the highlight of our facilities).

So as well as establishing the club as top flight team, we also could do with improving our facilities significantly. Which poses some questions on how to use our finances to acheive both. In recent years stadium expansions have lowered our bank balance enough to force youth facilities upgrades to be cancelled, so I'm looking to keep the bank balance under control for now by not spending too big on transfer fees or wages in the hope it will help us get some much needed upgrades finished for a change.


Next Up - 2020 Summer Transfers

Wasn't there some american bird a while back that got scared off as well