Career Ian attempted the Messi and Ronaldo Challenge

[Ian]

Hello and welcome to my attempt at the Messi and Ronaldo One Last Dance Challenge created by @Rob, which can be found here.

For the challenge we have to take over a Barca, sign Ronaldo to join Messi and try to get the two to score and assist as many goals as possible over two seasons while also maintaining as good a goal difference as we can across all competitions.

I loaded things up and actually forgot to sign Ronaldo for the first few days of the save which wasn’t a great start in truth. I did finally sign him and here he is in the Barca colours.

 

I made a whole load of other transfers too as you can see below.

 

I went with the following system and you can see the first team squad across two teams. Some of the players are on both teams as I decided to go with a really small squad, mainly due to the amount of players we have that can play in multiple positions but it’s a risk nonetheless and one I could pay for later. The idea behind the system was to try and get the two players working together in a bid to get loads of goals scored by one and assisted by the other to quickly rack up points. Even though I’ve used systems of a similar nature to this, it is very much untested so this could be a disaster so I won’t go into any more details on it at this stage.

 

They both started really well as you can see from a couple of the early season games.

 

Both players then picked up a knock towards the end of September just a game apart so I’ll leave things there and return with the full season one update later.

 

Thanks for reading.

Edited September 12, 2020 by Ian

[Rich]

Like the formation Ian, looks really interesting, big changes to the squad as well, they look to have had a good start, looking forward to seeing how they do!

[FMFanatic20]

2-1-4-2-1 

[jthompy23]

Interesting formation but looks effective, always feels strange having an asymmetric one

[Rob]

Love the tactic @Ian and you’ve started like a rocket.

[Woody]

Dude....thats a sick tactic. Hope @Foxy doesnt see it, he will chuck his guts up! 😂😂

Really good start aswell.

 

[FuddledFox]

Great start Ian but that tactic is absolutely deviant and it seems to me that Vibe is being over run by Tactical Perverts!!!

[Manager Temi]

Good luck

[Ian]

14 hours ago, RichDave32 said:

Like the formation Ian, looks really interesting, big changes to the squad as well, they look to have had a good start, looking forward to seeing how they do!

Thank you Dave, I did try to sell Griezmann and was hoping for a mega offer so I could use the money to buy a couple more players as we’re a bit light in certain areas. No mega offer came though so I just kept him and it’s great that he can play in so many positions like Suarez. Just hope we have enough numbers though.

14 hours ago, FMFanatic20 said:

2-1-4-2-1 

Yes, a nice formation.

14 hours ago, jthompy23 said:

Interesting formation but looks effective, always feels strange having an asymmetric one

Thanks JT, yes it can feel strange. I’ve never really tested this but I was just looking at the space and trying to cover most areas. We’ll see how it performs and the fact we have a team of superstars will surely help.

4 hours ago, Rob said:

Love the tactic @Ian and you’ve started like a rocket.

Thanks Rob, we started well but it soon died down a bit and we aren’t going to be mega scoring which I thought might be the case as it’s a bit more balanced than some of my recent tactics.

4 hours ago, Woody said:

Dude....thats a sick tactic. Hope @Foxy doesnt see it, he will chuck his guts up! 😂😂

Really good start aswell.

 

Thank you Woody, I like it and it’s somewhat reasonable and fairly balanced with the inverted wing back on the left and not such attacking roles on the right. See how it goes.

2 hours ago, Foxy said:

Great start Ian but that tactic is absolutely deviant and it seems to me that Vibe is being over run by Tactical Perverts!!!

Thanks you Foxy, I’ve had a DM from a kind fellow asking for the instructions so it seems at least someone else likes the look of it 😂

I’ve nearly finished the challenge but you’ll have to wait as I’m going one season at a time with the posting.

[Woody]

1 hour ago, Ian said:

Thank you Dave, I did try to sell Griezmann and was hoping for a mega offer so I could use the money to buy a couple more players as we’re a bit light in certain areas. No mega offer came though so I just kept him and it’s great that he can play in so many positions like Suarez. Just hope we have enough numbers though.

Yes, a nice formation.

Thanks JT, yes it can feel strange. I’ve never really tested this but I was just looking at the space and trying to cover most areas. We’ll see how it performs and the fact we have a team of superstars will surely help.

Thanks Rob, we started well but it soon died down a bit and we aren’t going to be mega scoring which I thought might be the case as it’s a bit more balanced than some of my recent tactics.

Thank you Woody, I like it and it’s somewhat reasonable and fairly balanced with the inverted wing back on the left and not such attacking roles on the right. See how it goes.

Thanks you Foxy, I’ve had a DM from a kind fellow asking for the instructions so it seems at least someone else likes the look of it 😂

I’ve nearly finished the challenge but you’ll have to wait as I’m going one season at a time with the posting.

I used a left sided inverted wing back in my h2h with Rob to cover my bbm. Worked a treat.

[Ian]

7 hours ago, Manager Temi said:

Good luck

Thank you Temi

5 hours ago, Woody said:

I used a left sided inverted wing back in my h2h with Rob to cover my bbm. Worked a treat.

The two roles do seem to work well together.

[Scratch]

Tactic looks interesting mate. I love how they are best pals already, even getting injured together so they can get some quality play station time together... They'll come back strongly I'm sure.

[Ian]

2 hours ago, Scratch said:

Tactic looks interesting mate. I love how they are best pals already, even getting injured together so they can get some quality play station time together... They'll come back strongly I'm sure.

Thank you Scratch, hopefully the time off together will help them bond and they’ll come back as a truly deadly duo.

[Deji]

Looks like it's off to a great start, but that tactic is decadent😁.

But it does fit in quite nicely. The IWB covers the excesses of the BBM, but doesn't overlap, so a winger is needed to keep the width. I like the fact that the right hand side is less attacking. The Wide Midfielder usually is quite defensive. 

From the looks of it, it seems to work. 

[Ian]

31 minutes ago, Deji said:

Looks like it's off to a great start, but that tactic is decadent😁.

But it does fit in quite nicely. The IWB covers the excesses of the BBM, but doesn't overlap, so a winger is needed to keep the width. I like the fact that the right hand side is less attacking. The Wide Midfielder usually is quite defensive. 

From the looks of it, it seems to work. 

Thanks Deji, my thinking was to put the two in as a T and DLF and then it was just a case of working out what to do with the rest of the team. I liked the idea of having one winger due to Ronaldo being great in the air and the rest just came together. The CM role is usually quite cautious I’ve found so the hope was that him and the WM on the right would just offer support to let the two superstars do their thing.

The first season update should be tomorrow as I’m doing the update to my inside forward career tonight. 

[broodje kip]

Nice work Ian. Feel bad for new players looking at the tactic 😂 You ain’t giving mercy

[Aaron Thornton]

Love the tactic Ian, Messi and Ronaldo will have a feel day, I've noticed you use DLF and T often, I have never used either role in this game, but I like you have so much success with it. 

[Ian]

18 hours ago, broodje kip said:

Nice work Ian. Feel bad for new players looking at the tactic 😂 You ain’t giving mercy

Thanks Lord, we haven’t seen how the tactic performs yet, it might be crap 😂

16 hours ago, Aaron Thornton said:

Love the tactic Ian, Messi and Ronaldo will have a feel day, I've noticed you use DLF and T often, I have never used either role in this game, but I like you have so much success with it. 

Thanks Aaron, the hope was that they’d combine well and we’ll find out soon if they did. I do like the two roles and find they can work well together but I’d usually prefer the DLF to be more of a team player but then again it’s Ronaldo so he can just do what he wants 😂

I’ll be bringing this to a close today with two updates. 

[smoggy90]

Look forward to seeing how you got on mate. Tactic looks great, can’t recall using a DLF much over the years so be interesting to see how you’ve got on. 

[Ian]

2 hours ago, smoggy90 said:

Look forward to seeing how you got on mate. Tactic looks great, can’t recall using a DLF much over the years so be interesting to see how you’ve got on. 

Thank you Smoggy, I do like DLF role especially combined with a T behind.

[Ian]

Season 1

I left things at the end of the introduction with a little preview showing that the two had started well but then both suffered a little injury, so let’s if they could come back ok and how the first season went for the team.

 

Transfers

The screenshots I showed in the intro were from the beginning of the season when I’d got my squad ready but post season, plenty of players came back from loan and I sold a few of them so for confirmation here are the transfers at the end of the season. I decided to keep one or two players that came back from loan for season two such as Coutinho but I’ll mention more on that on the season two update.

Spoiler

 

Team Results

We beat Real in the final of the Supercopa, only for them to get revenge by beating us in the Copa del Ray final which came at a time where we were slightly struggling due to me going in with slightly too small of a squad. Messi scored a brace in the Champions League final against Juve and the league was won comfortably as Real ran up in second place some 20 points behind.

Spoiler

 

Fixtures

We struggled slightly in April with the fixture congestion and one or two injuries but still got through it with decent results and we’ll definitely have a more fuller squad next year which should help in that regard.

Spoiler

 

Manager

A lot of young players were sold which is making my profile look deplorable but no point looking to the future when we’re only player two seasons. A goal difference of 142 so far.

 

Messi and Ronaldo

You know about the start of the season when they both got injured so I’ll start from that point. The two came back well and were well in amongst the goals with this game against Genk where Ronaldo scored a hat trick being particularly pleasing.

 

Messi then pulled up with a little injury which would fortunately include the winter break so not so bad but it’s the impact it could have on his attributes that’s most concerning.

 

He came back ok again and was contributing but then pulled up again at the end of March and would miss the whole of April.

 

Ronaldo did ok without him though and helped himself to what would become a very important brace in the Champions League semi final first leg against PSG.

 

It was then Ronaldo’s turn to suffer injury as a two week layoff would more than likely mean the end of his season.

 

The two were heavily involved with goals and assists with Ronaldo scoring 61 and assisting another 12 goals and Messi hitting 40 goals and assisting 31. I’m not going to add any scores up now as I plan to do the update for the second season later on today but I’m reasonably happy as the two combined well and were definitely the two stars of the team. I was hoping for slightly more from Messi but the stop start nature of his season couldn’t have helped really so we’ll just have to see what they both have left in them for next season.

Spoiler

 

They both still look okay, it’s their physicals that might be the problem in the second season but we’ll just have to see I guess.

Spoiler

 

I’m not going to add the score up at this stage as I’ll be back in just a few hours with the second and final update so thank you for reading and see you later.

[Rich]

Good effort there, shame about the injures they picked up, hopefully second season (fingers crossed) they keep fit.

[Rob]

Great season considering injuries. I barely got any, which is weird. I’ll PM you about that. Looking forward to season 2.

[Aaron Thornton]

Cracking season Ian, goals galore, I took inspiration from your formation and tried my hand at an assymetrical formation in my Boston Utd save, (I'm in 2039 in it and purely use it for tweaking and testing tactics) it was fun to see the overloads it causes, always have a spare man in the box or in the edge of the box, I see now why assymetrical is the way to go, anyway great start mate, injuries didn't help your case, but surely you'll have better luck next season, KIU. 

[Ian]

4 hours ago, RichDave32 said:

Good effort there, shame about the injures they picked up, hopefully second season (fingers crossed) they keep fit.

Thank you Richard, yeah I was unlucky with the injuries I’d say as I’ve used both before this year and they were very robust on all other occasions. I can confirm they had a better second season in that regard so just how it goes sometimes I guess.

1 hour ago, Rob said:

Great season considering injuries. I barely got any, which is weird. I’ll PM you about that. Looking forward to season 2.

Thank you Rob, can’t be helped with the injuries but i still enjoyed the season and the two did ok really.

37 minutes ago, Aaron Thornton said:

Cracking season Ian, goals galore, I took inspiration from your formation and tried my hand at an assymetrical formation in my Boston Utd save, (I'm in 2039 in it and purely use it for tweaking and testing tactics) it was fun to see the overloads it causes, always have a spare man in the box or in the edge of the box, I see now why assymetrical is the way to go, anyway great start mate, injuries didn't help your case, but surely you'll have better luck next season, KIU. 

Thanks Aaron, It seems to be a fairly decent system, I know most things will work at Barca but often you can just tell when a system will flat out fail at a lesser club but this one felt not too bad. I may try this at a slightly lesser club but with the WM moved back to be a Wing back and see how it goes as that looks like the area where we are most weak and that should help a bit you’d think. 

[Ian]

Season 2

Welcome to the final season of this career where we had to bring together two of the best players in the history of the game at Barcelona and get them to wreak havoc as a deadly duo. I brought them together, set things up and embarked on season one where they did pretty good so now we’ll see how the final season went as both players would surely decline.

 

Transfers

I decided that Pique would go as his pace had dropped so I decided as it’s only a two season challenge to try and bring VVD in. Jordi Alba was valued incredibly highly so I used him as a make weight in the deal and was very happy with how that turned out. I kept Todibo who had been out on loan the first season so he along with Lenglet would be back up centre backs to VVD and Fabinho this season. I brought in Ziyech as another option at AP and Casemiro came in as a back up BBM to main man Milinkovic-Slavic. Andrew Robertson was my replacement for the departing Jordi Alba and we needed a reserve goalie so I went for Mike Maignan who is totally new to me. I kept Coutinho on to be a back up to Messi and Bernardeschi came in as an option out wide left. We had the squad numbers now so the hope was that we’d be able to cope better during any tough periods during the season.

Spoiler

 

Team Results

• A brace of goals from Ronaldo, both assisted by Messi got us off to a great start as we beat Man Utd 4-0 in the European Super Cup.
• The first Club World Cup was won comfortably with Ronaldo helping himself to a hat trick in the semi and a brace in the final where Messi also got himself on the scoresheet. Ronaldo apparently scored for our opponents in the final but just ignore that as it’s a bug.
• Atletico Madrid somewhat embarrassed us in the Supercopa to be honest but revenge was had as we got the better of them in the Copa del Rey final with Messi scoring the all important goal.
• We went out at the semi final stage of the Champions League to Bayern but we were a bit unlucky really. I’ve found this competition to be very random this year I have to say.
• The second Club World Cup went well until the final where Spurs got the better of us. We’d had a scare in the semi where Liverpool took us to extra time so once we got through that I thought we’d win the final but we were left very dissapointed.
• No problems in the league as we went unbeaten but did suffer a few poor draws.

Spoiler

 

Fixtures

We had two poor spells, one in January and one in early May but were pretty dominant overall with just a few poor cup results.

Spoiler

 

Manager

Not much to see here other than it shows our goal difference of 295.

 

Messi and Ronaldo

No injuries to either player this year which was pleasing after the first year.

The first league game of the season saw us play Madrid and our deadly duo combined to great effect.

 

A hat trick for Messi.

 

A hat trick for Ronaldo.

 

Messi had a much better season than the first, largely helped by going without injury and the extra CWC games but still impressive as his physicals were really declining as the season went on. Anyway, 48 goals and 48 assists which I was very happy with. He even beat Jazzy Jeff’s score on my fabled number ten attempt. I know it’s Messi, a different league and different system but it was an ageing Messi after all. Ronaldo couldn’t repeat his opening season which I think was mainly due to his physicals dropping but he managed 50 goals and 16 assists so all in all, a decent season.

Spoiler

 

They look like they are about to mega decline to me so I think this is the perfect time to end the challenge.

Spoiler

 

Tactic

As I more or less played through the entirety of the challenge without changing a single instruction, I may as well post the tactic up. I really like the tactic, I’m going to try it with the wide right midfielder pulled back to the wing back position and if successful maybe use it for another challenge. Only changes ever made were going balanced/ time wasting to see the last few minutes of a game out or going overload to try and come back if behind or drawing with little time left. Messi was on corners, Ronaldo on pens and I split the free kicks with one first choice on one side and the other first choice on the other. I’m not going to go into player attributes for the roles and such as it’d turn into such a long post but you can see the sort of players I’ve used which should help in getting it to work. It’s not an amazing tactic and no doubt won’t be great with a lesser side but it worked reasonably well in getting two superstars to combine as a duo. Ignore the unhappiness of a few players, that was due to Suarez leaving.

Spoiler

 

Score

 

Season 1

Lionel Messi: 40 goals and 31 assists in 46 games = 71

Cristiano Ronaldo: 61 goals and 12 assists in 60 games = 73

Goal Difference: 142 (183GF - 41GA)

Total: 286

 

Season 2

Lionel Messi: 48 goals and 48 assists in 56 games = 96

Cristiano Ronaldo: 50 goals and 16 assists in 57 games = 66

Goal Difference: 153 (200GF - 47GA)

Total: 315

 

Overall

Lionel Messi: 88 goals and 79 assists in 102 games = 167

Cristiano Ronaldo: 111 goals and 28 assists in 117 games = 139

Goal Difference: 295 (383GF - 88GA)

 

Grand Total: 601 points

 

Final Thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge as it was nice to use these two greats together and the fact that they were declining as the challenge went on made it more interesting. I don’t expect this to be a high leaderboard effort but my name will be there and as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

 

Thank you all for following.

Edited September 12, 2020 by Ian

[Rich]

Great effort there Ian, good see them avoiding injuries and I think that’s a great second season, for Messi to be involved in that many goals is brilliant, well done mate.

[Ian]

53 minutes ago, RichDave32 said:

Great effort there Ian, good see them avoiding injuries and I think that’s a great second season, for Messi to be involved in that many goals is brilliant, well done mate.

Thank you Richard, I really enjoyed it as the DLF and T combo can be great to watch. I usually only go text only with replays on but with this I went key highlights which says it all really. There was a lot of Messi taking a corner onto Ronaldo’s head to be expected but plenty of good interplay between the two also. Just wish I could’ve tried the two together in their prime.

[Rob]

Excellent score Ian. I especially loved the quirky tactic created specifically for this challenge and the players involved, which demonstrates how you should really play this game. 

[Aaron Thornton]

14 hours ago, Ian said:

Thanks Aaron, It seems to be a fairly decent system, I know most things will work at Barca but often you can just tell when a system will flat out fail at a lesser club but this one felt not too bad. I may try this at a slightly lesser club but with the WM moved back to be a Wing back and see how it goes as that looks like the area where we are most weak and that should help a bit you’d think. 

Yeah I found the WM in my system to be the weak spot defensively, he is a a world class Winger, but most goals we conceded were balls played long into the right channel, over my WM's head, going forward though he often had the most assists and key passes in a match, so I have a decision to make, keep him where he is for the attack or drop him back for the defence, what would you do?