Got to say, I am learning so much about this league as a whole given I never managed in FM over here. Then again I learned a lot from all the teams I managed so far in this save. But here given the small amount of teams it made me slow down and really see how nice this league is as a whole.
I learned a lot:
Sometimes the board decide to make home games a fan day where the price is cut down to help families(I won that match because of course we had to put on a show)
Given the small pool of teams in the top league we play each team FOUR TIMES just to make sure it’s close to a real season in other countries
Seeing a huge core of Croatian players being the center of this team. The only place I have to worry about is the Europa League registration because there are no actual rules mentioned for the league like the previous two clubs
And something I noticed about the club in terms of their history that I forgot to check before I applied was that this club was taken over by a local business man. In the types of takeovers clubs can have in FM24 the tiering of them are usually like so:
Tycoon
Consortium
Local Businessman
It isn’t quite the high flying nature of a Tycoon takeover but it is still good enough for a league like Croatia where they love a good home grown squad.
Anyway back to what I wanted to talk about:
I came in for the second leg of the Europa League third qualifying round against Aqsy from I think Kazakhstan and after a dud 0-0 against them we managed to get the job done:
The guy who scored that brace wound up having a release clause which was met by Ohod from the Saudi Pro League and he was nowhere near interested renewing with us because Saudi money is just life changing(I know it from ACTUAL experience)
In the end I wound up replacing him with a good reputation free agent signing who wound up becoming our highest paid player but I have a limit on the wage of people I want to sign so it is within that.
Then we had a back to back against two of the top dogs in the HNL in Hajduk Split and Dinamo Zagreb. Although Dinamo didn’t get a win at all before we faced them which was surprising for one of THE big teams of Croatia.
First was Hajduk Split and it was a smash and grab sprinkled with shambolic shooting accuracy from them.
Being in this league reminded me of my previous save game where I had to offer trials to players to see how their ability stacked up. In there I noticed one player who was already on trial and his ability seemed decent enough to offer a contract and honestly he just sucks 😬.
Next up was Dinamo Zagreb and they almost got their first win. But we came back in the most funny fashion ever 😆
We did dominate them yes but they had their shots to score too and they didn’t take it in the end. Meanwhile we just did this
twice and got the goals that way in the end which made me laugh so hard. But seeing our stats I am concerned about our proficiency in front of goal and it does seem to be a problem.
This is how the team looks like for the time being
The only thing I am worried about is only the striker. Even if his star rating is good he isn’t banging in goals and for me personally goals win games. And even the other options are wildly inconsistent and are just godawful. So I do plan on a new striker possibly for the January window. For the wingers I do have some options in the youth squad who could be given chances here and there to be honest. And the trialist who I did bring in and his backup are genuinely two cheeks of the same 🍑. So I went for a good young Croatian CB who does seem like a good starter that you can see in the lineup. And a DM too who is a good squad option.
We still got the Playoff match to cover for the Europa League and I will be covering it soon.