David — FC Nantes Introduction and Pre-Season

Hello and welcome to a new story!  Unfortunately my Ultimate European Challenge game has died a slow and painful death.  However, this means I can start a new game in a country which I have rarely played in before — France!

France is a bit of an odd nation when you think about it.  They have a superb youth set up and very decent National side yet you don’t hear many people raving about the league.  My aim is to familarise myself with the nation and bring up the reputation of the league so the best players actually stay in the country (hopefully in my team!)

Why did I choose Nantes?  Well, I did spend a lot of time deliberating who to be and managed to whittle my selection down to 3 teams.  Auxerre, Toulouse and of course, Nantes.  All have excellent training and youth facilities.  Auxerre has FM11 legend Yaya Sanogo in their ranks (but he has a broken leg at the start of the game), Toulouse has Moussa Sissoko and Etienne Capoue in midfield who I was sure I could build the team around.  Nantes don’t really have anyone of note!  I eventually chose them because they are in Ligue 2 so I can use them as a long term project with the aim of getting them promoted.  I also remember when I used to watch Eurogoals on Eurosport in the early to mid nineties where they had a decent team which contained Patrice Loko!  Legend!  Plus I quite like the Yellow and Green striped kit…..

I decided to set myself some ground rules with this challenge.  The main one is that I will only sign French players and ending up with a predominantly French squad.  I will be bending this rule slightly by including French colonies in Africa too.  For that reason,  I have loaded my game up to look like this

I have deliberately not loaded up any other nations which will force me to stay in France!  I am undecided on whether to include other French speaking nations such as Belgium and Switzerland though.

Another rule I will impose is that any club comes with a bid of around double what the players valuation is, then I will sell them no matter how important they are to the team.

Before getting my teeth into the game, I thought of a suitable French pseudonym.  Let me introduce you to……

….. Mr Au Revoir!  Sorry, i’m terrible when it comes to making up aliases!

Finally, lets get into the game!  As mentioned earlier, FC Nantes have very good facilities which is part of the reason why I chose them.

Obviously, as time goes on, I will try and convince the board to improve these further.  Having good youth facilities, the youth academy and the established recruitment there will enable me to develop my own youngsters.  In theory, this will help with my first rule with having a French squad.

First impressions of the team are that it looks fairly promising

I am quite pleased with what I have got there.  Majority of the squad are French.  Most of the Africans have French dual nationality and those that do not, at least speak French.  I have 3 players who are not from France or Africa and they are Brazilian, South Korean and Serbian.  The latter being Filip Djordjevic who is possibly my best player.

The screenshot is just of the first team squad.  I also have 10 players in the reserve team and my under 19’s team is slightly bigger than the main squad.  Every one of them having the potential to play first team football!  The problem I always have with FM is that I hoard players and with this big squad, I could have a problem!  Hopefully rule number 2 of letting anyone go at around double their valuation will help with this.  Despite this I made a couple of transfers in anyway!  I felt the team still needed a left back and a right winger.

Really pleased to get Lucas Digne in.  I have managed to include a 1.8 million buy clause in on it too so maybe I could make the move permanent.  Jean-Jacques Pierre was 29, Haitian and contract expired at the end of the season so it made sense to cash in on him now.

So with what looks like a good strong squad and with just the 2 additions, I will be going into the season quite confident

Not much help from the board though!  Whatever option I chose would give me no money to spend and the same wage budget.  I chose top half finish.  I am right up to the limit on the budget which doesn’t help so I will see if I can loan some players out or even sell.  I did approach the board about increasing the wage budget but it is greyed out.  When I hover over it, it says that we have a restrictive budget.  Not sure if this is self-imposed or the league restricts it or if it is just that we don’t have enough cash!

Before starting the season, we played a few friendlies.  I hate friendlies.  I really should pay more attention to them to maybe tweak things but i’m not that clever!  I just use them to get everyone fit.

Bit of a mixed bag really.  Draws against Feyenoord and Werder Bremen are encouraging whilst a draw against my reserves is concerning.  I am using Darren’s 4-5-1 formation but done a couple of changes to the players roles to better suit my players.

Next update will be at the winter shutdown in France.  Hopefully I will be challenging for honours straight away but I see this more as a long term game.  I also hope to have a tan by then but Nantes is in the North West of France so it is unlikely!

If you would like any screenshots, don’t be afraid to ask.  Also, I would love to hear from you if you have any tactical advice.