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FM12 Quest.....; ............the story so far....
Topic Started: Nov 11 2011, 09:42 PM (594 Views)
Aljarov
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I decided to start with MLS, England, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Iceland all playable.

I started as Canada coach, guiding Canada to the World Cup playoff with New Zealand before missing out on PKs. Heartbreaking, and a classic FM cheat if I do say so, I absolutely owned them all game before missing 4 of my 5 pks.

I jumped into the vacant Vancouver hotseat (before my CSA tenure was over) but was ordered to field and retain only Canadian talent (ok, so that was entirely my challenge to myself). A real challenge. In my 2 years in charge I helped develop a lot of talent but after my WC heartache I started to itch for a new challege. I put together a very strong roster, but i couldn't seem to get over the bump. Guys like DeRo were getting old and retiring and there wasn't enough talent to draw on to make it exclusively Can-Con. So I resigned.

In September 2014 I took over Adria in the Slovenia 2nd Division, a team who were winless in 10 to start their season are projected to finish dead last. Afetr securing their safety I left and looked for a new job....finally taking the Valur job in Iceland on 20th October 2015.

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My first year at Valur was mixed, an 8th place finish almost saw me sacked, but two semi final appearances (Upper League Cup and Icelandic Cup) plus some tight fiscal manoeuvres saw me retained.

In season two it was full steam ahead, several bosman signings reinforced an already strong side and the league and Icelandic Cup double followed. I also sold a couple of players for a total of $4.8m, a massive windfall to a PT team like mine and one that will give me valuable funds ahead of our entry into the European Champion's League, 2nd Qualifying Round. The loss of Ori Magnusson was painful, and at 21 with 14 caps to his name he could have anchored the team for a decade....but signed for free before the season, a $4.5m bid from Malmo was simply too good to turn down. he was the only player I had worth over $1m and he was only worth $1.4m I've now sold my four best players to keep the club financially strong and I'm hoping for a move to full time soon. I keep reinvesting in younger, cheaper talent and I hope to continue to parlay those into successful sales until my team is strong.

I'm only utilizing about 40% of my available wages, and am yet to spend anyof the $1.8m transfer funds available to me. I'm stuggling to find EU talent good enough to join me, though I've found a few diamonds in the rough from around Scandinavia. The domestic talent is not strong, so building long term could be an issue.

It's now January 2018 and my third season in charge is about to start.........more to follow.
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Coasterkoa
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A rather strange career you've had. You couldn't do anything better than Slovenian Second Division after leaving Vancouver? Talk about digging deep to get a shot at Europe.

Iceland is a league I love managing in, good luck in the CL next year.
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Aljarov
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Coasterkoa
Nov 13 2011, 02:49 AM
A rather strange career you've had. You couldn't do anything better than Slovenian Second Division after leaving Vancouver? Talk about digging deep to get a shot at Europe.

Iceland is a league I love managing in, good luck in the CL next year.

I was offered a lot of jobs, I like LLM, but my club (Adria) was just too small to ever have any hope of developing into a decent long term game. Iceland was where I'd wanted to play but it took that long for a job to open up.

Oddly, while I waited for the Valur job to come open I was offered a variety of positions, especially in England (Fulham offered me $1.6m a year, while ended up on $60k part time at Valur!)
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Aljarov
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Season 2018

After adding a half dozen quality Icelandic Premier League bosman signings, Valur inked Brazillian FW Junior to a deal at $99k a year, a massive contract by IPL standards.

And despite a plague of injuries to FW's during the campaign (at one point, all 6 FWs were out, 3 long term, but the only injuries on the club which was bizarre) the season ended in possibly the most fantastic way imagineable....

An unprescedented quadruple of domestic trophies - Upper League Cup, Super Cup, League and Icelandic Cup augmented by a CL group stage place (and 2 wins no less in the groups, both over Fenerbache) meant a tremendous year (not enough to get me coach of the year though - WTF?!)

The financial windfall, not just of the sale of Magnusson in preseason, but CL group qualification meant more than $16m into the club, financing a proposed more to professional (not happened yet but board says coming), the conversion to an all-seater (only 1200 of 4k currently seated) and upgrades to both the youth and training facilities. Also been able to get more staff yet still can't scout outside of Scandinavia for some reason.

I have about $2.5m in transfer money, but until my team's reputation increase kicks in I'm struggling to further improve the squad. I'm only using about 1/3 of my wage budget but my new found wealth means I have a deep squad and carry about double the payroll of the 2nd team.

The league was a challenge, despite winning 16 of 22 games, I only won by a point...as the AI gave me a rather unrealistic challenge for the title (some 34 points ahead of 3rd place). I guess it kept it somewhat interesting.

Suffice to say, another big haul and I'll be bored in Iceland....starting to eye up EPL jobs, though not sure I've got the reputation for one of those yet. Still aiming long term to get the Spurs job and CL success but for now, enjoying putting Valur and Iceland on the map (despite a 7:0 group thrashing at Chelsea). Was a very easy passage into the group stage if I'm honest....SlovN bratislava, a Macedonian side and then Dinamo from Croatia were all modest opponents.

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Aljarov
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I should add I came within a minute of drawing against Bayern M at home before a late goal robbed me, and lost only 2:0 at home to Chelsea.

I'm fully pro now, and my first major coup was Gylfi Sigurdsson, fresh from a stint at Napoli and at 29 FAR too good for my league. He accepted $350k a year (my max) despite wanting over $1m....(though I did throw the agent $200k to make it happen!)

He's phenomenal by IPL standards, and is ranked the #2 best Icelandic player in the game in 2018. (He's worth $5m....more than the rest of my team combined).
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Coasterkoa
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Is there any good Icelandic youth coming through?
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Aljarov
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Not much....like one or two decent players a year league-wide. I've got one 4 star prospect just promoted which is the best Io've seen directly on my roster in 4 years. The facilities and coaching upgrades should help with that though. If there's not more talent soon it will get increasingly harder, though only about 1/3 of my starters are Icelandic, most are from the main Scandinavian countries (Nor, Swe and Dan)
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