[Abe Sargent]

First, I developed Jae-Hwan into a mega star. He was strong, played well on the right flank right away, then I moved him to my Vaz/Sayed role that did so well in my scheme. Jae-Hwan was great. He;s a rock for my team

We have developed Ibrahim. He was a good, solid depth, can start at this level, and now he;s a strong player, and may push hard for time as his finishes growing


Then we have Oliver, still on my squad, still a strong, useful rotation guy

All three of the players I signed for free were great contributors, major players, and then were solid for cash. Lanzini was more than 10 mill, Bamford a few (6?8?, can’t recall at the moment) and Sayed for sigh 30s. That set us up financially to make major moves later on. We also sold Ragazzi for 15 mill and Ouattara for a ton of money, and flipped MIlic and Sueg-Gyu for more.
These early moves my first year, and the sales of the players we got for free or purchased and flipped was incredible, and it allowed me to pick up Ricardo and Mance, Althof, Cecchi and Lopez, Garcia and Valenzuela.

Our free additions, like Dong-Hyuk, El Ghazi, Grealish and Cook helped us a lot.

So we won the first year, as I used that capital from the three sold players to build the foundation of our major dynasty, both in terms of finances and personnel.

Things rarely have good endings.

This is true in both life and sports. It’s one of the reasons we like movies and tv shows and books and games were people live happily ever after. We live vicariously through them. I think our art is often the difference between now and what is not happening. The worse our lives are, the more we like our entertainment to be fun, light, and happy. The happily our lives are, the darker and edgier we want out stuff to be. (I think that may be one reason why rich and upper middle class suburbanites really like gangster rap).


Anyways, like rarely has good endings. Sports too. My Jaguars have never won a Super Bowl. So it’s nice when I can get one for the team in FOF. My Mountaineers have never won a football Championship. Sad. Even when my Jaguars have a breakout year, and make it deep, they don’t win it all. They invariably lose, and me with them.

In real life, we’ve seen clubs win their division and the top domestic Cup the same year. If your league has two or three heavy hitters, it’s actually pretty likely. If you have a two team league, like Dinamo Kiev and Shaktar, on any given year, there’s a roughly 40-45% chance that the winner also wins the cup (adding in the chance for an upstart in the cup),

And we’ve seen clubs win the Champions League and their own home division at the same time. It certainly happens. If you are a club like Bayern Munich or Juventus or R.. Madrid, then it’s very likely that you will win the division in any year in which you grab that Champions’s Trophy. And again, adding in the likelihood for a cup for the treble is totally doable.

So this year, Melilla won all three. And again, this is only my second time winning the trophy. Yay us!

My first time I won with Clube Desportivo Nacional de Madeira was, in part, because a lot of heavies fell earlier. We had CSKA Moscow in the Semis and Benfica in the Finals. We had an easier road. And we benefited from it

This happened with Melilla as well. We had Napoli, Porto, and Olympiakos. Not exactly three clubs that are the heaviest of the heavies, although not chumps. Then in the final, Leverkusen was our foe, a team punching above its weight class. We had an easier run. That happens. The previous year we ran into Man utd right out of the Group Stage, and lost on penalties, and they went on to win, and were the only club that came close to beating them. If we hadn’t played them, maybe we would have gone deeper, who knows.

And the same thing happened in this crazy World Cup.

We came is as a favorite, and we played against these teams, in this order:

Sweden
New Zealand
Ecuador
Australia
Italy
South Korea
Ecuador

Does that seem like a laundry list of the world’s best clubs? The massive upsets in the Knock rounds removed a lot of heavies from the competition, and South Korea removed the last one when they took out Brazil.


I would have loved to have seen my club win the World Cup after a gauntlet of teams like Brazil, Argentina, France and Belgium. But you know what? That was my first World Cup win, and I don’t care if I had to play the Faeroe Islands in the finals, it’s the World Cup.

And I got both a treble and the World Cup in the same year?

Folks, that’s your happy ending.

I have played this game series and I have never gotten this sort of a happy ending. It’s not life. It’s not football. They don’t have happy endings. And neither does FM>

So I am enjoying this.