Well, it's season-end in 2017 and i've just got Como into the Europa League. I'm semi on-track for your achievements, but Christ, I predict a long winding road ahead in unforgiving terrain.

Starting 11 – GK Belec, DR Agrelli, DL Capriotti, DC Di Renzi, DC Rizzo, AML S.Giovinco, AMR Burstrom, AMC Tesarik, MC Tomo, MC Balestra, ST Doroshenko.

An excellent story beautifully written and as others have said above it will be missed.

Thank you for your hours of entertainment over the last 12 months.

I don't think I'd be in the minority if I said that if these stories made it into book form, I'd gladly pay whatever amount for it

I first tried FM several years ago, but found it deathly boring, particularly in comparison to Winning Eleven, then my video game of choice. The first several posts in the Pro Vericelli series convinced me to give it another shot, for exactly the reason you identify (narrative potential).

The narrative of a game of Football Manager is rather unlike that of most other (video) games, which typically adopt the conventions of other forms of storytelling — the novel or the comic or the film — in order to weld a story onto a game, to give pre-determined meaning and significance to the challenges the game presents. By contrast, the narrative of a game of Football Manager emerges exclusively from the gameplay itself. The game doesn't tell you what events are significant, but, in simulating a real-world sport around which fans inevitably build narratives, it creates a world of events and decisions that one naturally strings together into a narrative. It's an emergent narrative. That makes Football Manager a very unique game, and I'm a bit surprised that it hasn't received more attention for that reason, though, given how very rarely I read videogame journalism (reviews of the new FIFA each year, RockPaperShotgun regularly, and not much else), maybe I've just missed the attention. And maybe that emergent quality and the centrality of narrative also make it a better simulation of sport than most games, which typically simulate the experience of being a participant in the sport, rather than the experience of watching a sport unfold over a lifetime — also as a series of events without predetermined meanings, to which we spectators attach narrative significance and assign moral qualities.

This all suggests to me a few important things about the right way to play Football Manager, which will require me to get dogmatic and didactic, and probably say things that aren't strictly true:

1. You must not save and re-load your game. To do so is to attempt to assert too much control over the narrative, and will spoil the pleasure received when you achieve great things in your digital playground.
2. You must make the game challenging for yourself. I suppose this is possible with Manchester United (even United would have to work to retain the Champions League year after year), but the greater the difficulties one encounters, the more interesting the narrative will be. And so I feel fairly confident in asserting that it is simply more fun to begin the lower leagues, which is not to say that there isn't fun to be had managing a team that starts out in a great spot, but that there isn't as much fun to be had with Real Madrid as there is with Alcorcon.

I have a feeling that the use of re-gens would be a good third rule, but I can't figure out quite how to defend it.

Anyways, thanks for writing the series that convinced me to try FM again; I've really enjoyed it.

Thank you. I will forever be playing FM09 because of your posts.

I even had my own Teixeira, though my version was a technical Portuguese right-back with a knack for depositing corners directly on the heads of either of my two enormous, thumping strikers. I also sold him because he was petulant and discontent, then regretted it later when it turned out that corners+technique+crossing was kind of a nice combination to have for your thumping stirkers.

RR — It's amazing how much downtime there is in the life of a professional spy.

1. A student at a University,
2. A full time writer, giving you this time,
3. A brilliant time manager,
4. A stoner (which is unlikely, or well, maybe the most likely)
5. Self-employed,
6. A researcher with tenure.

I wish I had the time to devote to this game, like I used to back in my uni days. I tried with FM 09, and it's hard these days to get into it without feeling guilty.