Still doing a good job staying unbeaten in the second season and there are the same suspects at the top of the league with Fiorentina up there with us surprisingly still. And given we had a big start to the Champions League with PSG who are without Donnarumma(By the data update he moved to City) and we had a mega LOL moment. Samu was in really fiery form coming into that match and the manager of PSG said this:
Fast forward to the match and this happens:
HUGEEEE Directed by Robert. B. Weide energy right there.😂 And we backed it up on the pitch. It wasn’t a big win but it was a win nonetheless
The game winning goal assisted by Neves who’s loaned FROM THEM was a double sucker punch 😂. And what’s more amazing is that in January I finally had the correct amount of money to get him in on a permanent deal.
The reason as to why I am attaching the pass map too from that game is to try and understand how I want to set this same system up in FM26 with the introduction of In and Out of Possesion roles.
I think it works well so far bar the gap between Buongiorno and Ake who really compacted the midfield well enough despite him being the Anchor(He has the Brings Ball out of defense trait what can I do?). Same thing with Marin pushing forward covering the space left my Neves. One thing I don’t appreciate is Samu dropping more deeper than the two attacking midfielders in Pafundi and Samardzic. I should think about putting him as an Advanced Forward given the Complete Forward tries to be all forwards in one.
The reason why I mentioned a sliver of hope is because when browsing Job security this happened
But it went back to Stable fairly quickly. Those guys have embraced mediocrity and that just breaks my heart so much given I support them IRL.
Next up was getting this achievement over in Steam
The game in question was the one against Cagliari in the league
Lukaku wound up being the star turn because I chose him over Lucca to bring on in half time when we were 2-0 down going to the 2 striker formation with just one attacking midfielder. And it was amazing to watch. Our two strikers first scored to level things up and Neves popped up with neat finish before Lukaku sealed the points for us in stoppage time.
This was one of the big contributions Lukaku ever made before him, Di Lorenzo and Gaya departed for Al-Ittihad in January. It feels nice to have the Saudi Pro League and all enabled so that I can actually see who they have every time.
And given I also mentioned difficult encounters there were two. First was managing to get an unlikely win against Lazio while being a man down
Buongiorno gets sent off after we took the lead with a last man foul and the resulting penalty got put away which was to be expected. And the winner did come from an unlikely place in Marin but it wasn’t a header. It was a proper shot from the set piece which surprised the hell out of me but we got the win despite being a man down.
The second one was our last group stage game in the UCL against Man United
2 goddamn red cards. 2. FREAKING. RED. CARDS. And one of them was a fresh sub I brought on in and I had to use some mangled formation which still had 3 defenders at the back. Thankfully our domination still carried through despite going 2 men down which just weird. I thought we’d score more but they still managed to keep Lammens who prevented us well enough(Same as his debut IRL got to say)
I managed to make some wonderkid signings to bring more homegrown at club talent if I can for the UCL in the future. That will be more of a long term goal to leave this club in better hands in terms of registration.
And Sylla was a new signing because Marmol wanted more play time and he was loaned out to Barcelona with a 12M optional fee to buy him.