Asking the Right Questions

Should I buy a £1m Striker or Spend £1m on the stadium?

I think this is a question that a lot of managers are asking themselves and the answer is:-

A £1m striker will change my team makes us more competitive and I'll think about stadium another day.

Ok, well first of all that's the wrong question, in Shearer a £1m striker buys you a FINE striker £20k Wage Demand jobby, so if you look at it from a 28 Day Projected point of view.

Striker - 28 Day Projected DOWN £1m Fee + £20k Wages = DOWN £1.56million.

So is the question should I spend £1.56million on a stadium then? NO, you spread the cost of the stadium over 8 weeks.

So is the question should I spend £3million on my stadium then? NO, £3m will improve your income by at least £20k a day (if you do it when the time is right) and takes 10 days to build, so 20 Days @ £20k a day = extra £400k. Double that as we're looking at eight weeks

So the correct question is:-

Should I spend £4million on my stadium or £1m on a striker?

The Shearer End of Season Shuffle

We won the SFAU21 and SFAU19 leagues again and it left me a bit cold, then I watched the team collapse once more at senior level and decided enough. The youth game is great etc but it's a waste of resource at current prices there are teams that focus on this part of the game solely so I thought I'd do an end of season shuffle! Most of the kids are on £1 Auction and I've just retained a competitive youth team.

Bidding went high quite early so I got a £200k High Profile on £10k a day left back for £600k immediately. Subject to the cash / projected coming in I'll try to add a MC and maybe even a DR. Same sort of player.

Meanwhile in Beta we've finally ramped wages up to £130k but I'm still chucking money at the stadium. So now we can break into the top 100, have got into the Premier League and still rolling investment in to a long term future. Some big cock up's I made here though.

I took wages upto 100k from the off which held me back a season and I built on the 1 Tier Basic Stands which I then had to knock down, this wouldn't have been so bad but the seat prices were tweaked during the beta so paid double what they are now.

Looking at it Stadium investment is really a four / five season thing and if you go short term with wages around £140k you won't really get hit until season 5. In saying that in season 5 your pretty much done and you'll either have to do really well trading or cut your wages drastically.

The graph looks a bit grim due to being in close season, Premier League / Media money should bring around £250k more and those stadium payments soon tail off to nothing!

The beta has remained quite active and prices for players have gone WAY high and slowly have come back, during the wage auctions I was after a DC the first one went for £33k (Wage Demand £10k) by the fourth day I picked up a £150k High Profile 29 Year Old for just over £10k a day, sorted.

Not much to do - Tick Tock

I get stadiums I think I know it's a long term investment but I get it. The thing is though you can't really do much in the interim to speed up progress.

Currently in Shearer we have a decent competitive squad which looks set for a top 7 finish in the Premiership which isn't bad, it's where we should be. In six weeks or so we will have finished the stadium and have a massive disposable income so next season we're their to make the numbers up and really waiting for Luiz / Ashkan to hit their prime combined with bringing in another big name player.

The thing is I can't really do much to accelerate this progression, I guess I could really focus on the remaining league games to try and push for 4th spot but the prize money difference is £50k, once the stadium is finished at current wage levels I'll be making £150k a day PROFIT.

In the meantime we'll just have to settle for watching Alonso knock 60 yd balls for my strikers then curse as strikers duly hit the ball at the keeper :) Our current form is deadly consistent it goes like this WLDDDDDDDDWL.

We do have quite a lot of talent coming through from Season 1 of the U17 squad who are looking good for the U21 title with only one of them being yet 21, most are 19! They are going to be very scary in a few seasons.

Super Duper DM?

Back from a Weekend away

I got a few bob for the £1 auctions I left running, now have wages of £100k but the rep will collapse unless I replace one or two. I'm going to try and play a diamond 4-4-2 with an AMC and DM instead of the flat variant.

This type of formation will put even greater emphasis on the DM (who in my opinion is the key to a 4-4-2) so that's the target.

I've been watching youth players of late and I'm fairly sure there is a consistency variable at senior level, some players have huge Aq Fee's and great stats but this variable, consistency, is a hidden stat and is very low at 16 and climbs as they get older. I don't think it peaks until 24/25 and continues to grow until 34/35.

Pretty much every Gameworld I've seen if you sort teams by rank and then pick out lower rep teams that are high in the rankings invariably their older squads. I'm not saying that all youths start low, some will start high e.g. Pato but generally this is why youths don't work so well.

The problem with going this route is that you have a team of depreciating assets although very effective ones. So an old DM is what I'm after! UPDATE: Xabi Alonso signs he'll work I hope :)

Further example of youths / mature players in beta I signed Pierre Wome at 31, Aq Fee £50k ish compare him to my Shearer Left Back a £300k Aq Fee 19 year old, Wome is perfect, consistent, rarely makes a mistake, the Shearer Left Back I'm crossing fingers every time he plays. Mind Wome did only cost £1 :)

I know it's an old saying Rome was built in a day but it is built just not paid for! The Jaksi stadium is now generating £205k a day at 3.1/2 star, it'll scale nicely up for me. I think we've six weeks of payments left now then we go.

Tick Tock, tick tock, we're getting there!

On a break

Sometimes it's too much

I've been playing FM Live every night for a while now and it's great game but it's not without it's issues :) Injuries work wrong and corner goals grrrrr.

Anyway it eventually starts to grind and I think at that point rather then carry on playing and get more annoyed it's best to walk away for a little while. I'm away for the weekend so I'm going to bolt this on to some holiday time in the game.

I'm doing my £1 auction once a season clear out with three previous first teamers up for grabs (high profile £100k Aq Fee+) but I'm just letting them ride without spamming the market place. At least I'll save on wages and when I get back will have a tiny bit of cash.

Oddly the beta world having played it very casually I find much more enjoyable, a little bit more detached from the team and I'm more of a spectator just going with the flow. I sometimes think maybe playing FM Live intensely isn't quite the way it should be :)

A Crafty Git?

I've now chucked the kitchen sink at the stadium in order to be immensely rich is eight weeks time :) I'm sure when the time comes there will be an outcry of users saying how horribly unfair it all is with many stories of rich V poor etc :)

I'm planning on being a right crafty git and I'm about to double back on myself. Pretty much in wage auction if you bid 20% above a players demand I bet you could take whoever you wanted these days.

If you have a stadium and cash when the rest of the gameworld doesn't then you don't want to go splashing that cash around, spent on on player wages and signing on fee's do not give it to another manager so he can catch you up!

However whilst we muddle through the hard times they continue to get very hard, no one wants to buy M'Villa and as he costs so little it's kind of pointless selling to cut his wage :) Ashkan is now out for a week and Gimmy is only just coming back as well. Wendell was on super sexy form but his little injury spoiled that run.

Still we're in no danger of relegation from the Premiership and no concerns over contract locks this season. So sit back and enjoy the drama (which is us mostly losing) but it's still drama all the same!

Up and Down

The signing of Ansaldi saw the the teams fortunes turn quite drastically for the better with a sustained runs of games where we've won six or seven on the bounce. Thankfully Wendell found his form and scored a wonder goal in the League against Wrexham Tigers to underline the point.

I see Fm Live now very much as a journey, it's not so much the destination but the stories that you can tell along the way, some bad some good. Bene's chasing the SFA title last season and coasting at 1-0 with 88minutes on the clock and the nerves of his team as M'Villa at just 18 in the 93rd minute shattering his dreams to make it 2-1 to us.

The stunning De Rossi display for Athlectic Madrid as we went down 6-1 yet managed to survice in Division One of the active league.

The game githeth and the game taketh away
Just as thing were looking all rosey we lost a hard fought game to a late corner goal, then we played in the SFA cup against a team that was inactive (always a danger doing this as they get due a result) guess what corner goal. Then we played in the SFAU19, 3 corner goals lost 3-1. Ahhhhhhh, I logged on to beta and then remembered I'd been daft and left my activity rating drop to 3.5, doh the injuries were piling up.