Career Les Bleus Chotel [Season 5]

[Scratch]

My first FMM23 career was Tezgel at Celtic and lasted 3 seasons. My second was the Esposito and Vignato brothers combining at Inter and lasted 2 seasons. My third was Duran Duranville at Anderlecht (Duranville providing the assists, Duran scoring the goals) and lasted 1 season. 

Welcome to my 4th career: Chasing after a DT double 2KC as per the challenge thrown down by @Rob. At this rate, it will probably only consist of this initial write up before I abandon it, but it's the first one I've actually written up, which is surely a good sign.

I've no idea whether a DT double 2KC is even possible. I mostly think not, especially with the corner tactic nerfed somewhat, but let's see how it goes.

 

The Club

I'm guilty of overusing Celtic, but it really is the perfect club when you are doing a crazy save and need every possible advantage. They have UCL football, a nice budget and are in a poor league. And they have a lot of fixtures. So, Celtic it is!

I did briefly consider Beijing, but I really prefer European football, definitely easier to immerse myself in that. I also considered a Belgian club after recently finding there are actually 40 league games in Belgium, but they aren't as rich as Celtic and the league is a little better and they only have 1 cup - so in the end I couldn't look past Celtic.

 

The Players

Meet the lads:

Neither player fits my typical striker (a tall TF), but both players are around 6-foot, so they aren't shorties either. I'm hoping I will still be able to develop their Aerial skills and at the very least, I know they are top notch players. Cho is marked as Lazy, but I'll get Quagliarella onto him to sort him out!

I did look at a lot of other strikers that fit my mould a little better, but to make this target I'll probably need the ITN job, meaning both players have to be the same nationality. Finding two players I wanted to use (with same nationality) was a lot harder than finding one. If Tezgel could have been called up to the Turkey squad, I probably would have gone for him and Semih Kılıçsoy - but he refused to switch in a test I did and that pair would actually be even shorter than Cho & Tel.

Speaking of which, I like how their names go together. Chotel. Telcho. etc. Lots of cute naming possibilities...

 

The Approach

I honestly have no idea how the tactic will evolve, but I will start with a variation of what I was using with the Esposito and Vignato brothers:

That will almost certainly change as we go, but it's a starting point. That in itself is a variation on my TT Blaster tactic. Actually I've only just now realised that it's very similar to the tactic I settled on last time I did a DT, way back in FMM20.

Apart from the tactic, I will be bending FMM as far as I can to help make this crazy target. That means using every last transfer trick, morale boost, mentoring benefit, etc that I can (within the rules of course). 

I've gone with 3 leagues: Scotland (obviously), England (so those pesky youngsters aren't free agents) and Spain (for some minimum clause goodness, work permits permitting). 

First thing I did was make sure I had all gold staff. That did mean I ended up firing some staff I'd just hired (because they didn't pass the gold badge test), but thankfully labour laws don't exist in FMM... I've left the facilities alone for now as I'll need all the money I can get to make sure I land the main two players, but I'll be back to upgrade them as soon as I can.

And... that's where I'll leave it for now. I've started buying players, but it's a slow slow process trying to find which players might be right for this.

Wish me luck! 

 

Edited February 27, 2023 by Scratch

[BakaSotong]

All the best, man! I'm actually trying this challenge as well, frankly I agree with you that it may well be impossible, but where's the fun in giving up without trying? =P

Tel & Cho seem like a great combination BTW!

 

[Woody]

Good luck mate. You'll need it 🤪👍

[broodje kip]

Good luck. I hope you fail this miserably  

[Scratch]

39 minutes ago, BakaSotong said:

All the best, man! I'm actually trying this challenge as well, frankly I agree with you that it may well be impossible, but where's the fun in giving up without trying? =P

Tel & Cho seem like a great combination BTW!

 

Thanks, haha, yeah, may as well give it a go! Might be possible and there's only one way to find out! 

[P.Rahul]

I think 2 german strikers is best for this challange and they r just 16 with aerial of 13-14 and  both r free.

With 13 Aerial starting its not as difficult for u to reach 20 Aerial 

signing them is difficult beacause of work permit . U should have signed them . 

Both of them r wonderkids

Edited January 18, 2023 by P.Rahul

[Scratch]

40 minutes ago, Woody said:

Good luck mate. You'll need it 🤪👍

Thanks mate, will definitely need it. That and a few sanity pills (though might be too late for that)! 

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14 minutes ago, broodje kip said:

Good luck. I hope you fail this miserably  

Look, if I complete 4 seasons, then I can consider it a success! 😀

[Tammy lois]

Good luck mate

 

[broodje kip]

9 minutes ago, P.Rahul said:

I think 2 german strikers is best for this challange and they r just 16 with aerial of 13-14 and  both r free.

With 13 Aerial starting its not as difficult for u to reach 20 Aerial 

signing them is difficult beacause of work permit . U should have signed them . 

Both of them r wonderkids

I don’t think 20 aerial is even needed. Around 15-17 has already been enough to get over 100 goals each.

[P.Rahul]

5 minutes ago, broodje kip said:

I don’t think 20 aerial is even needed. Around 15-17 has already been enough to get over 100 goals each.

@Scratch written about not finding Aerial good striker that's why i told about 2 german strikers although signing them is difficult they don't get work permit easily.

Edited January 18, 2023 by P.Rahul

[JamesVilla]

14 minutes ago, P.Rahul said:

I think 2 german strikers is best for this challange and they r just 16 with aerial of 13-14 and  both r free.

With 13 Aerial starting its not as difficult for u to reach 20 Aerial 

signing them is difficult beacause of work permit . U should have signed them . 

Both of them r wonderkids

The only problem with using German wonderkids for challenges, and especially one of this size, is that you can't manage Germany as a International team, and it is likely that at some point, international goals may be needed to complete the challenge. 

[Scratch]

Just now, P.Rahul said:

I think 2 german strikers is best for this challange and they r just 16 with aerial of 13-14 and  both r free.

With 13 Aerial starting its not as difficult for u too reach 20 Aerial 

signing them is difficult beacause of work permit . U should have signed them . 

Both of them r wonderkids

I didn't look at any German strikers because you can't manage Germany and I think I'll need ITN games to make this. It's a real shame the German national team can't be managed...  

My first choice would have been Marko Milovanović and Marko Lazetić as they are genuine TFs, but Milovanović will be be injured way too often. That said, they are lower down on quality than Cho and Tel, who are top notch.

In the end, that was the thing that sold me on Cho Tel - they are both very very good players PA wise and however they spawn in this save file, they will be good enough to give this a red hot go. Anyone else and I would have been compromising on one of them. 

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17 minutes ago, Tammy lois said:

Good luck mate

 

Thanks! I need it! 😀

[Scratch]

8 minutes ago, broodje kip said:

I don’t think 20 aerial is even needed. Around 15-17 has already been enough to get over 100 goals each.

Maybe not needed, but I would prefer it as my tactics currently revolve around that. 

4 minutes ago, P.Rahul said:

@Scratch written about not finding Aerial good striker that's why i told about 2 german strikers although signing them is difficult they don't get work permit easily.

I think Cho and Tel will be able to end up with decent Aerial values. I'll call Carrillo in as a tutor which will guarantee them +2 (ie get them both to 13). And then their PA will be high enough that they will get a lot of updates giving them a good chance of getting close to 20. For reference I got Tezgel to 19 using this method and he starts with 10. 

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8 minutes ago, JamesVilla said:

The only problem with using German wonderkids for challenges, and especially one of this size, is that you can't manage Germany as a International team, and it is likely that at some point, international goals may be needed to complete the challenge. 

Beat me to it, but yep that was the main reason I didn't go Germany (or Holland, which I sort of fancied even more to be honest)

[P.Rahul]

2 minutes ago, Scratch said:

I didn't look at any German strikers because you can't manage Germany and I think I'll need ITN games to make this. It's a real shame the German national team can't be managed...  

My first choice would have been Marko Milovanović and Marko Lazetić as they are genuine TFs, but Milovanović will be be injured way too often. That said, they are lower down on quality than Cho and Tel, who are top notch.

In the end, that was the thing that sold me on Cho Tel - they are both very very good players PA wise and however they spawn in this save file, they will be good enough to give this a red hot go. Anyone else and I would have been compromising on one of them. 

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Thanks! I need it! 😀

I dont know about that this challange needs int goals otherwise it become very difficult to achive.

[broodje kip]

1 hour ago, P.Rahul said:

@Scratch written about not finding Aerial good striker that's why i told about 2 german strikers although signing them is difficult they don't get work permit easily.

Haha yeah. Didn’t realise that. Who are the German strikers though? I’m curious.

[Rob]

Best of luck. I love the player choices, and the inclusion of ITN is key. Hopefully you get it after the first World Cup. 

[StuartM]

Going to be really interesting to see how this goes, good luck!

[fotakis276718]

Best of luck pal! If you achieve and this challenge may you have create the next year's version!! looking forward for the next update!! 💪

[Scratch]

Season 1 - Preseason 

Having joined the club and sorted out the staff etc, the next step was to sort out the playing squad.

 

Cutting the Wage Bill

One of the first things I do is to free up some cash to sign other players. Step 1 is see if there are wages that can be cut easily. 

I checked out all of our players out on loan to make sure the loan club is paying their salary. If they aren't, I may as well recall the player and try to sell him. In our case, the loan club was paying 80 to 100% for all our players, so I left the players out on loan for now. I might recall the '80% players' if we get really desperate for cash. 

Next, I checked out the players we'd loaned from other clubs to see how much of their salary we are paying. Abildgaard looks decent, but we were paying £15.5K on a player that we'll eventually lose. That might be okay if he was next level, but he isn't, so I ended the loan. Jenz on the other hand costs us nothing. While I'm not convinced we'll use him much (too slow for my tactic), I decided to keep him around.

Next I looked at who had a high salary to see whether I could either sell them, release them, or renegotiate. I won't cover  sales, I'll leave that for a later section. I tried to release one player, only to have the board block it. Normally this is a good source of funds if the board allows it (note: you have to set transfer balance to £0 so that the payout doesn't come off that total). And I renegotiated Joe Hart's deal so his salary is half what it was before, saving about £8K per week (around £400K extra in our budget). 

Little steps, but it all adds up and gives us more spending power.

 

Finding Bargains

Yes, I do this before I have fully reviewed our squad! And before I've scouted the player. Gotta get in early (day 1) for free agents and minimum release clause bargains, before someone else grabs them or they renegotiate their contracts and the release clause disappears or increases. 

I spent a long long time going through young players based in Spain with low minimum release clauses (lower than their actual value), trying to find bargains and I bid on a LOT of them. Some failed the work permit check, but many passed (a sign that they are likely pretty good). Among those joining us: Canizares, Rosa, Nakai, Llabres, Caro, Aramburu and Saldana. Some of these were on my radar already, some were more long shots.

I also spent some time going through free agents, but not as long as I could have. In the end I only got one free 16 year old left back who had been at Barcelona. Time will tell if he works out, but getting an ex Barca academy player for free was a no brainer. This was the only player I bothered appealing the work permit decision for and I had to do it twice, but I got him in the end. I also agreed a contract with Navarro and he got a work permit, but I pulled out at the last minute as I knew I was buying Rosa and Aramburu at that point.  

I actually bid for these players before fully reviewing my own players, which may mean I have too many players in some positions, but it will still be good value and in most cases the players coming in will end up better than the ones we have now. 

Apart from that I also looked for any bargain players I could see. I picked up Otasowie, a fast young defender I've often used, for £3.1M, Maswanhise to eventually be one of our RWs for £2.6M, Quagliarella for £875K and Rakeem Harper as a long shot in a straight exchange.

In all cases, I used every trick of the book. I got the lowest possible price by offering a ridiculously low offer with 50% sell on - you need to set the price, set the sell on percentage to 0%, close the dialog, then open it again and set the percentage to 50% and they will tell you their absolute minimum. In most cases, you can either set the percentage back to 0% and accept, or lower the price to two thirds, set the percentage to 0, close the dialog, open it again and set it back to 50%. I also made good use of exchanging players.

Some don't like all these tricks and I don't always use them, but for something like this, if the game allows it, then you need to take advantage (though I don't use the 'sell any player for any price' loop-hole). 

 

Selling Players

With the wage bill cut and a bunch of cheap players lined up, I focused moving out those players I won't likely use. 

At first I just offered them out, but I only actually sold one player (Bain) this way, even though I was offering them at around 50% of list price in many cases. As, always I negotiated strongly for Bain, bringing up the £200K offer to the £800K he eventually sold for - but I didn't have any massive sales like I have in past careers. 

I wasn't too worried about this as better offers come in as we get closer to the transfer day deadline. That said, I got myself into a little bit of a pickle buying Tel and needed to raise cash fast, so I went into emergency overdrive. I sold most of the fringe players: Maeda, Starfelt, Hatate, Mooy, Forest and McCarthy; for a combined value of £25M.

The key to selling player that noone was interested in when I offered them out? I offered them out for loan instead and when the loan offer came in, I changed the type to Transfer and negotiated a price. The price is always poor with this option, somewhere between 50 and 90% of list value, but fortunately players like Maeda, Starfelt etc are over-valued in this year's game, allowing me to get some decent money. This also substantially reduced the wage bill, leaving us with more money to spend than I expected.

 

Getting the Lads

Alright, this is what we're really here for. Could I get both the lads to Celtic?

Combined I would have needed to shell out £40M to get the lads, even with using all the tricks described above. I made the offers before I'd actually sold anyone, so I didn't have that kind of money.

Instead I went with player exchanges: Furuhashi, £2M and 50% sell-on for Cho; Abada, no money and 50% sell-on for Tel. I didn't mind losing Furuhashi as he's not the right shape for my tactic, but I wanted to keep Abada as he is class and I thought he might develop into my RW - but the only way to get Tel was to sacrifice him. Needs must.

Cho was pretty straightforward: he agreed a deal, got a work permit and joined the club. Tel on the other hand was troublesome.

He starts the game on £66K per week, which is really hard to match at a club like Celtic. He was willing to come down, but he rejected Celtic outright on the first offer. I had to make another offer to buy him and increase the maximum salary (via the Finances page slider) before getting to the contract negotiations step. In the end he agreed to a 5 year deal on £55K per week, the absolute maximum I could offer. All good or so I thought.

He got the work permit no problem, but instead of getting the confirmation message for him to join, I got the "FC Bayern's Mathys Tel has rejected the contract offer from Celtic" message:

WTF Tel? We already agreed terms.

The problem was compounded by the fact that I'd already bought a bunch of the players discussed above by this point, meaning when I tried to buy him again, I couldn't afford the same contract offer that he'd ultimately rejected before. This was looking like a very quick career!

That was when I decided to pull the trigger on the loan -> transfer bait and switch deals I mentioned above. I wouldn't get the really good money I could have gotten if I waited until closer to deadline day and negotiated hard, but I would get enough money to resurrect the deal and save the career. And that I did, eventually giving him a £62K per week deal that not only did he agree too, he actually honoured.

My one regret was that I ended up with so much money that I could have bought him outright rather than than having to give up Abada, but I didn't think of that until after he was about to join the club. I thought about rejecting the deal and starting again, but decided that was too risky, so I clicked the Yes. 

Here are all the transfers at the time of writing:

Spoiler

 

That's where I'm up to at the moment. I still need to:

• Sort out the Team Dynamics by cutting the chaff (releasing all the youngsters having a bad influence on the team).
• Top up the bargain squad with a couple of quality signings using our excess money. 
• Buy Carrillo, now that I know I have enough to afford him.
• Set up some mentoring.
• Select two starting elevens and save them as Selections.
• Select the penalties takers, corner takers, as well as the captain etc.
• Come back to improving the training facilities.
• Double check everyone's training regime.
• Play a couple of friendlies (easy teams so we get some form leading into the season). 

And there's probably something I missed, but I'll leave it there for now.

 

Thanks for reading! 

 

[Scratch]

1 hour ago, Rob said:

Best of luck. I love the player choices, and the inclusion of ITN is key. Hopefully you get it after the first World Cup. 

Thanks mate. I hate you now. 🤣

Not really. But next year can you please make your crazy challenge something easier? I can't seem to help myself falling for your cunning traps...

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1 hour ago, StuartM said:

Going to be really interesting to see how this goes, good luck!

Thanks mate. Fingers crossed we at least do well. That's all I can hope for at this point

[StuartM]

Great insight as always Scratch! Releasing the 'bad egg' youngsters with the transfer budget at zero is a good one. Why didn't I think of that?!

[Scratch]

55 minutes ago, fotakis276718 said:

Best of luck pal! If you achieve and this challenge may you have create the next year's version!! looking forward for the next update!! 💪

Thanks mate, we'll see about that. I might have given the game up by then! I'm having a few gentle digs at @Rob for talking me into doing these crazy careers, but I actually I was burnt out on FMM until this, so he's rekindeled my enthusiasm. Don't tell him that though. 😀

[Scratch]

1 minute ago, StuartM said:

Great insight as always Scratch! Releasing the 'bad egg' youngsters with the transfer budget at zero is a good one. Why didn't I think of that?!

Thanks mate. I have trouble dedicating time to write ups like I used to, but wanted to try to document some of the smaller things I do and never think to mention. Some of that is just second nature to me now, but while some of it is stuff everyone knows, there's probably some things that aren't as common. So I decided to go all in on this update. Whether I can keep this up is another story!

[MikeF]

Tel is a beast, great work getting him for free. How is his professionalism after signing? I found he was a brat because you have no choice but to pay him high wages from the off. It can be sorted out though.

Guess i better post mine now...

[Scratch]

3 minutes ago, MikeF said:

Tel is a beast, great work getting him for free. How is his professionalism after signing? I found he was a brat because you have no choice but to pay him high wages from the off. It can be sorted out though.

Guess i better post mine now...

Oh yeah, I know what you mean with the "lost focus message". He didn't get that for me. Not sure if I'm lucky or if it's because he is still taking a pay cut(only 4K but still). I'll have Quags on the case though to sort that sort of stuff out. 🙂

Yes please, you better post that! 

[Titjes]

Good luck @Scratch 😉

[Scratch]

4 hours ago, Titjes said:

Good luck @Scratch 😉

Thanks mate! Definitely need it. Fingers crossed I get to bug you about some new records for the store!

[Lagom]

Good work getting Tel to Celtic! 
 

I’m languishing because I can’t get my preferred player to even negotiate with me as Celtic 😩

[Scratch]

8 minutes ago, Lagom said:

Good work getting Tel to Celtic! 
 

I’m languishing because I can’t get my preferred player to even negotiate with me as Celtic 😩

Thanks. It wasn't easy! He wouldn't even negotiate with me on the first pass either. Just straight up "not interested". But I could see the values he wanted in the negotiation screen, even though I couldn't negotiate.

So I negotiated with the club again and immediately threw all the money into the wage budget BEFORE pressing continue (I missed that part above). That was enough to make him think maybe he would come here after all... Then I had to move the slider back a bit so I could get him a higher sign on fee and I finally got him to agree. Of course he reneged on that, I couldn't really get him until I'd sold some players and had more money!

Hope you can do something like that for your guy, but some players just won't want to come. With Tel, he didn't really want to, but he was willing to if the money was right, but some players just won't fancy it at all..

[Kanegan]

Let's go mate.