Career Scratch and Club 150 [Seasons 2-4]

[Scratch]

You've all heard of The 100 Club right? A great place to kick back with a few cigars and late afternoon or after-dinner drinks with the old boys...

I like it, but didn't bother to renew my membership this year.

I have my eye on a different kind of club: Club 150. Kicking back with the ladies in the VIP area...

Club 150 has all the same rules as The 100 Club, but to get in, well you need to be a high roller, worth at least 150 club goals in a season. Otherwise, don't bother to apply...

There's no actual address (or leaderboard) for me to point you to, it changes location all the time (one week in an abandoned warehouse in Stockholm, the next in the Forbidden City in Beijing) - but if you're in, you'll know where it's at.

Anyway, with that out of the way, this career is going to follow me joining the club. I'll be back with some more details later...

 

Edited November 7, 2021 by Scratch

[Scratch]

As mentioned in other places, I recently came across a tactic that would work really well for a 1KC:

 

I tried it out on an old save and got Scamacca to score 137 goals in a season in Serie A. I was thinking I might go for a 2.5KC (or even a 3KC), but there's not enough time before FMM22 drops, so I started thinking about Club 150. 

I could have tried another season with Scamacca, but he had just hit 30 years old and already had lost some attributes, so I thought I'd start fresh. I thought about going with a top striker (like Lukaku), but I'm not sure that would be possible. I think it will be much easier to build a striker (and team) up to truly world class level.

So... I decided to start a new save with Sebastiano Esposito at Celtic. Yes, I know, I use Esposito a lot and I use Celtic a lot too, it's very boring. But to reach 150 goals, I need to pick the right combination. 

 

Why Esposito?

Esposito is just about the perfect striker for a 1KC. He has a good base, a low starting CA and a high PA - a combination that means lots of development AND it will be early on in the save too. He is guaranteed to get 5 or 6 updates in the first season, just because his starting CA is so low. In fact, in this save he got an update even before our first game. 

As for his PA, there is a range of course (anywhere from Vardy's level to Cavani's), but even if he comes out on the lower end, he will still be fantastic. And of course, my tactic relies on Aerial prowess and Esposito is a player I've trained to 20 Aerial before. He also is very rarely injured and decent at penalties and free kicks.

You can't go wrong with this guy.

 

Why Celtic?

Celtic just are about the perfect club for this sort of thing. Serie A (where Scamacca fot 137) is actually pretty easy, but Scotland is next level on the easiness charts. And Celtic has some good players already, a decent budget and the ability to sell players like Edouard for big money. You can turn them into truly world class in 3 to 4 seasons.

The only easier option would have been China, which is super easy and where the budgets are huge, but I decided I'd enjoy Celtic more.

 

How It's Going

I'm in January of the first season now and I've brought in a pretty good supporting cast for him (Pavon, Vignato, Netz, Livakovic, Henrique, Thorsby, Menino, Ghion, etc and Carrillo to mentor him in Aerial).

As for how we're doing? Well...

How it started:

 

How it's going:

 

Thanks for reading...

 

[Dai_]

I have no doubt you'll hit 150 in a season. Probably quite early too. Good luck.

[Scratch]

3 hours ago, Dai_ said:

I have no doubt you'll hit 150 in a season. Probably quite early too. Good luck.

Thanks mate. Pretty sure I'm going to get 100 in the first season which I've never done before. So I think 150 will come at some point.

This tactic is so much better than what I used in my previous 1KCs - that was good, but this is way more attacking and the bulk of the goals still go to the striker (which I'd had trouble with before). Also, we get a lot of corners and the approach of having him mark the keeper and getting everyone out of the box is magic...

[Dai_]

37 minutes ago, Scratch said:

Thanks mate. Pretty sure I'm going to get 100 in the first season which I've never done before. So I think 150 will come at some point.

This tactic is so much better than what I used in my previous 1KCs - that was good, but this is way more attacking and the bulk of the goals still go to the striker (which I'd had trouble with before). Also, we get a lot of corners and the approach of having him mark the keeper and getting everyone out of the box is magic...

Wow! 100 in the first season is ridiculous. 

Your thoughts process for the other tactics you've used makes sense though, especially "the Sniper". Seriously effective too. It was never in doubt that you would come up with something better.

I don't like you sharing my corner tactics though. That exact system is the main source of my success on FMM.

[Scratch]

2 hours ago, Dai_ said:

Wow! 100 in the first season is ridiculous. 

Your thoughts process for the other tactics you've used makes sense though, especially "the Sniper". Seriously effective too. It was never in doubt that you would come up with something better.

I don't like you sharing my corner tactics though. That exact system is the main source of my success on FMM.

Not at 100 yet, but he's got 81 goals from 42 games and we have 8 league games to go (and maybe 10 cup games depending how far we get in the cups).

I sorta lucked into this as I wasn't looking for a 1KC tactic, it was just a by-product of the split attempts. The Sniper works really well because even though there are less goals, they mostly go to the striker. All my more attacking tactics have a bunch of players scoring - so when I found a more attacking tactic where the striker still scored most of the goals... well I was pretty excited! 😆

As for the corner tactics, I'd seen a couple of people mention marking the keeper, including you (thanks!). I'd tried that before but didn't get any more success than near post, but eventually came back and tried it again. And that time it seemed to work better, but still not next level. Then I realised that some of the other players were clogging up the space and it finally clicked for me. I guess I'm a little slow... 🤣

[Scratch]

Season 1

Alright, let's jump into it. I'll probably try to keep the write-ups minimal, but this one will be more normal.

 

Transfers

Spoiler

A lot of transfers of course, the highlights being:

• We cashed in on Edouard, with Newcastle spending £31M on him (wait a minute, Newcastle still has Ashley in the game, right?).
• We kept James Forrest for half a season, juggling his playing time with Pavon, Vignato and Mikey, but then got a big offer on him (£23M) and of course accepted it. 
• We sold all the other fringe players we could.
• We bought a whole host of young talent as the foundation of our squad, all of whom I've used before.

 

Results

We're already doing fantastically well:

• We won the league, of course, with more than 3 goals a game already.
• We won the Betfred Cup, of course.
• We were knocked out of the Scottish Cup in a shock semi final loss, with an old favourite Hornby putting the nail in our coffin (guess who's joining us in Season 2 as a back up striker?).
• We went on an excellent run to the UCL final, beating Liverpool and Bayern on the way, only for Sevilla to beat us 1-0 in final, despite us having the better of them for most of the game. Shout out to the EUFA / FIFA officials who allowed a clash between the UCL final and the U21 Euros, meaning we lost Esposito, Vignato, Cottrell, Ghion and the on-loan Moriba for the final. 🤦‍♂️

Other screenshots:

Spoiler

 

 

The Lad

This is what he looked like at the end of the season:

He must have had 6 or 7 updates at least and is looking awesome. As per usual, once he got an upgrade on something, I switched the focus to something else, in the hopes that he wouldn't get held up if he was improving a particular attribute too quickly for the game's liking. 

His Aerial went from 13 to 19 over the course of the season. 2 of those came courtesy of Carrillo's mentoring, 2 of those came when we had focus training set to Aerial and the other 2 came as a bonus during the other updates. 

I also started toughening him up for the challenge ahead:

 

Goals

An absolutely storming first season, crushing my best ever, with 102 goals from 52 games:

I normally start slowly and then double the tally the following year, so this is very strange for me.

Partly it's down to Esposito already being way too good for a very weak league, but it's mostly gotta be this new tactic. It's far more attacking than my Sniper tactic, so there a lot more team goals - but I did the math and the percentage going to the TM this season was 69%, which is even higher than the Sniper from memory. 

 

Progress

This is where we stand after season 1:

Season	Goals
01	102
Total	102

Of course the measure of success here is scoring 150 goals in a season, but I may as well add it up because he'll reach the 1K in no time at this rate.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Edited October 18, 2021 by Scratch

[broodje kip]

Wtf is that score Scratchy man?!!!?😂

[Rich]

You are the best after me👀But seriously I like every Career you, you’re the best. 

[Dai_]

That score after a first season is insane! Even in Scotland. Even with Esposito. I think the 150 is a done deal.

[Scratch]

3 hours ago, broodje kip said:

Wtf is that score Scratchy man?!!!?😂

I've evolved and can now see the matrix:

Or have I got it wrong and you are in fact saying it's too low? 🤣

EDIT: Umm, have you seen the Matrix? Just realised that is now an old movie, watched by old guys...  

Edited October 18, 2021 by Scratch

[Scratch]

2 hours ago, Rich said:

You are the best after me👀But seriously I like every Career you, you’re the best. 

I take great pride in my second best status! Although I think there are some others who might think they are second best instead of me and it would be hard to argue with them...

[Scratch]

2 hours ago, Dai_ said:

That score after a first season is insane! Even in Scotland. Even with Esposito. I think the 150 is a done deal.

Thanks mate. I think I'll get there too, but not likely to be season 2. He scores 5 one week, then struggles to get one the next week. He even had a match rating of 5 a few games ago. He thinks I'm putting too much pressure on him... I swear, if he doesn't pull his finger out shortly, this season will be a write off! 🤣

Although, perhaps I'm over-dramatising it as he is averaging about 2.5 gpg and he just signed a new contract so perhaps he'll get with the program...

[broodje kip]

2 hours ago, Rich said:

You are the best after me👀But seriously I like every Career you, you’re the best. 

That’s a weird way to spell broodje kip

added 0 minutes later

5 minutes ago, Scratch said:

I've evolved and can now see the matrix:

Or have I got it wrong and you are in fact saying it's too low? 🤣

It’s arguably too low for your standard. Those numbers are Rich’s

[smoggy90]

Awesome first season mate, it will be some feat to hit 150 but I have confidence that you’ll hit it. Good luck!

[Scratch]

3 hours ago, smoggy90 said:

Awesome first season mate, it will be some feat to hit 150 but I have confidence that you’ll hit it. Good luck!

Thanks mate. I could never have done it before this tactic, but now I think it's likely. So weird, I remember when FMM21 came out and I was talking to @Rob about how I couldn't make any tactic work at all - and now this 11 months later, it's crazy... Of course, it will probably stop working with FMM22 🤣

[Rich]

Still my favourite FMM player 😘

[JamesVilla]

I've got a feeling this isn't going to take you that long at all. 3rd season perhaps? 😂

That is a cracking start, some of the numbers you manage to reach scare me Scratch ha!

[Scratch]

49 minutes ago, Rich said:

Still my favourite FMM player 😘

Thanks mate, I know I am... 😎

Oh.. you meant Esposito...  🤪

[Scratch]

7 minutes ago, JamesVilla said:

I've got a feeling this isn't going to take you that long at all. 3rd season perhaps? 😂

That is a cracking start, some of the numbers you manage to reach scare me Scratch ha!

I'm in Jan again and he's looking like he'll get around 130ish (barring major injuries of course), so yeah at that rate, maybe third season! We'll have to see - I was expecting it to be 5th season or so before we'd get close enough to seriously go for it.

[Scratch]

Seasons 2 to 4

Well, I was going to write this up properly, but given FMM22 is out tomorrow (it's the 8th here in Australia now), I'm pretty much out of time. So I'll just show you the lad:

 

And I'll show you his results so far:

 

I switched him from a TM to T after a show start to the 3rd season and he thrived in that role and almost made it to 150. Maybe he would have improved around then anyway due to aging up, but it was an immediate and noticeable bump. Interestingly he mostly scores the same sort of goals as he did when he was a TM...

The 4th season was a bit weaker as he had his longest injury (3 weeks) and was slow to come back from it. In general, he's been lucky with injury - although given he's very rarely injured you can hardly call it luck...

Anyway, scoring at about 3 goals a game in season 5, but we'll have to see how it goes...

 

[Rich]

Amazing stuff scratch, hopefully your tactic works for the new FMM 😝

[Scratch]

2 minutes ago, Rich said:

Amazing stuff scratch, hopefully your tactic works for the new FMM 😝

Haha, if it's anything like last year, I won't be able to score jack for a couple of months... Took a long time to work out what works this year...

[Scratch]

Let's face it. I'm unlikely to come back to FMM21 now I'm over on 22... So I guess I finish this year the way I spent most of it - abandoning careers... 

[MikeF]

At least you're consistent