Not only kids. I was 19 and fucking buzzing when Chelsea actually brought Victor Moses and Marko Marin after I got them in the team on my FM save, lol.
I did the same in FIFA 13 playing as Real Madrid. I bought Dani Carvajal & Isco in my second or third season...
After doing that, they actually moved to Real Madrid from Malaga and Leverkusen, in the summer.
It was such a great moment!
> Alen Halilovic
Woah, talk about a blast from the past. That name immediately reminds me of late, half-drunken nights in a dormitory common room, with a roommate’s Xbox 360 in front of me and dorito crumbs under my feet.
Ha I remember years ago, Ireland U-21 vs Spain U-21 in a friendly at the RSC in Waterford, our club had won tickets or something, and I was absolutely buzzing because we figured that Bojan would be there. Turns out he wasn't there, and we only got to see a bunch of nobodies like Jordi Alba, Azpilicueta, and Daniel Parejo who never really surmounted to anything of note.
True haha I can remember the pictures on Facebook where Messi and Ronaldo where next to each other, below Neymar and Bale and below Halilovic and Ödegaard.
For Fifa career mode in 2011 I had a notebook with a field diagram on it, and I would list each player I had for each position and what I'd like to upgrade to, quite influenced by which players were having a good irl season.
EDIT: [Found it.](https://i.imgur.com/awZOlKZ.jpg)
I still play FM2007.
Granted I mess around with the editor to create new stars every now and then.
Any new game has a 14 year old Harry Kane and a 15 year old Virgil van Dijk now for instance.
I was messing around with FM 2012, and I had every notable player in the EPL born from like 2000. I think the game stopped at like 94/95 birth years or some shit.
Same but I'm 26 and use Fifa 18 (not the ideal one, I know). I also keep a spreadsheet with all my stats for the whole career since Fifa wont do it for me
I have been chipping away at a fifa 21 milan save. In my 4th or 5th season now and zlatan is about to turn 44 and is still rated at 81 (+5) overall right now, and is leading the league in goals by quite a margin. He keeps suggesting he's going to retire at the beginning of each season, but then he'll sign a 1 year extension that same day. Not sure if it's a glitch because he's been 81 overall for every season but the first one I think. His value is going back up lol. Never gets injured, despite being "prone". Still under contract for 2 more years and his tag is still just listed as "A great veteran", and hasn't yet changed to "retiring at end of season".
Is funny because giroud retired almost immediately.
Anyway, if it wasn't for zlatans invincibility in this save, I'd agree with you about career mode being boring and repetitive.
I don’t mind bugs, if anything, bugs made 15 CM even better :D For example, some players, even though they had low overall and low potential, somehow became absolute 90+ beasts (my favorite one was a CB from Ligue 1, don’t remember his name but he was insanely good). Another one was that clubs let their stars’ contracts run down so I was able to sign Neymar, Ronaldo and others for free (because I got Neymar, I sold Hazard and later signed him for free :D). Good times
I don’t know, if just the gameplay didn’t feel so cheap, they would bring back banger soundtracks and didn’t try to be cool and removing the fricking cutscenes when signing players, I would happily buy it. But right now, it just sadly doesn’t appeal to me. Though it might be also because I’m not into football as I used to be.
Sorry for long text :D
I signed Jonathan David and within two seasons he became a 98 overall, just insane.
Also have some 21 year old from my academy named Carlos Martini who is a 96 overall already.
I played a fair bit of CM from fifa 14-21 and there have definitely been some anomalies that emerge and become absolutely insane players. I think I'm these new career mode where you can have "development plans" for your players, you can get them to their potential and beyond way faster. Like, it's so easy to get any player up to 5* skills and weak foot, whereas before, those things seemed pretty set in stone.
I think the average overall rating of my starting XI right now is like 92 hahaha
I do something similar but looking for very young outliers on senior national teams. If a player is already playing for a mid tier national team at 18, they are probably quite promising. I also like to scout U21 national teams as you can find promising young players there who haven’t necessarily broken out yet and are sometimes still quite cheap.
what you should do is go to World -> Transfers -> All Transfers filter to Youth Intake and check out the list of all regens from all teams every few months.
i personally add them all to a shortlist, remove all players that have 1 in any of the physicals, all players under 1.80m, and scout the rest.
every few months new regens are added to various teams, depending on which leagues you have enabled, and you can find the absolute best new players in the world within weeks of them being generated if your scouting team is big enough
long term, save all players with 80+ scouted potential and approach them when their first contract expires
as well, Portugal doesn't have any non-EU player rules, so you can sign any number of international players and you'll still be able to field a legal squad for league games, even if you have 0 Portuguese players at your club
Ugh, my friend does this and it's the worst lmaoo. Whenever we play on the same save, I'll see all these random scouting reports on regens.
Meanwhile, I'm so basic I need to use players that actually exist most of the time lol.
i've never played FM with anybody else, i like taking my time with it and managing most aspects of a club. scouting players is only a part of how i run the club, i also like planning trainings and calendars for B and youth teams, carefully planning individual and coach training in detail, try to set tactics based on the strengths of my current players and planning youth development for future needs etc.
i have about 60 years spread around 3 FM20 saves in about 1000 hours, some people have at least 5 times as many years played in that many hours. I don't think I'd be much fun in multiplayer lol
My favourite moment on Sofifa was when there some dude was trying to combat racism by literally claiming that everyone in Eastern Europe is a racist and didn't understand what was wrong with that. And when someone pointed out he's being a massive hypocrite he said that 'It's not wrong because they're racist.' And the million dollar question is - did he get more upvotes or downvotes?
It's everyone who stands to gain or who has a few beers too many after a game. I've seen just about everyone leak everything in every possible direction. Players, agents, managers, club leaders...
Yeah, he scored a lot of goals for napoli and it's not for nothing that he played for them for like 4 or 5 years. Maybe people shit on him because he doesn't score that often for the national team, but he's a decent striker
It's more the fact that Napoli, which is notorious for not spending much, payed 35 million for him, in 2016 nonetheless. Also, he had the impossible job to replace Higuain, and he failed: in 5 years he scored 38 goals in all competitions, while Higuain scored 36 in just the 15-16 season just in Serie A.
Not his fault for neither the price tag, the impossible bar to reach or the multiple injuries, but he still failed to reach expectations.
Also, there's the fact that when he was injured for the first time Sarri was forced to replace him with Mertens as a false 9. Up until then Mertens was considered a mediocre winger, but as a false 9 he scored 34 goals in all competitions just in the 16-17, and went on to reach 108 for Napoli.
This all meant that Milik became the butt of the joke for Napoli not only because he was always injured, but also because his spot as a striker was taken by a small winger. Not his fault, but not good either.
Calling Mertens a "mediocre winger" before he was moved upfront is a bit much. He was highly regarded in the midfield.
The problem was that other players emerged or were brought in midfield (Zieliński, Elmas, Lozano, Róg) so there wasn't a clear position for Mertens to come back to. Meanwhile, the system was working and Mertens was a prolific goal-scorer upfront, so why change it up because Milik returned from injury?
Anyway, two season-ending injuries for Milik also meant that when he was healthy, he was still regaining fitness and form. His goal tally for Napoli during that period has to have that asterisk in mind.
Milik's goal production when he was healthy and in-form was deserving of that price-tag. Many clubs would have taken a similar risk.
I will admit bias in putting milik's name but forgetting higuain. The Argentine certainly had a bigger impact in that season then almost any other striker in history.
But I think Napoli were prepared to spend on milik because he had a prolific season with ajax, I remember he was banging them in for them too.
Mertens' career didn't start at PSV. He was 24 when he made his move to PSV, and had played already 5 full seasons of professional football. He started at AGOVV...
Most of them. Same with FM. As someone pointed out, why collate a giant database of common information like contracts etc when someone else will do all the work for you.
I remember hearing that firmino was scouted by hoffenheim as a result of him being a wonder kid on FM. No idea of how true it is, but there's stuff on Google about it lol.
A couple of years ago someone noticed that Mourinho had FM installed on his computer, during a presentation.
This isn't as childish as it sounds, a lot of people in the sport use FM for (informal) scouting, it seems.
I mean makes sense. They have hundreds of scouts around the world watching players. Obviously you'd never sign a player only due to FM, but it's probably worth the time to look into some obscure players that FM rates highly.
Same with transfermarkt, it’s a good place as a pipeline database. Where else do you go for a complete data base of up to date player approximate contracts, easy to use as well.
Great way to get some ideas and inspirations. On the other hand, if someone actually went and assembled their team only based on FM and transfermarkt.
They don't have scouts.
They find people who are fans of each club and offer them a free early copy of the game if they go to every home match, most away matches and most youth matches.
FM is essentially a massive database of realworld stats, so it's actually quite convenient. I have a friend who works as a scout and he says everyone at his agency uses it to monitor prospective clients from lower divisions
I mean FM is legit a good source as they have proper scouts. They've also predicted a lot of big players coming up (I remember buying Courtois and De Bruyne for peanuts), even though they have some misses from time to time (Carlos Fierro anyone?)
I've got fabregas and rvp in CM before name changed into FM, and then kompany in couple next version,later was goretzka, kai harvetz, ansu fati, pedri when they just 16 years old. Some of FM wonderkids really doing well
Its hilarious to go back to like FM16 and see Fierro just be a world classs striker leading Mexico to greatness, meanwhile in real life he never even got called up to the senior NT.
Pretty sure David Moyes brought Steven Pienaar to Everton due to football manager but that may have just been pub chat that my brain just held onto for some reason.
Everton actually [signed a deal](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/everton-signs-football-manager-database) with Sports Interactive (FM's developer) in 2008 that gave them access to SI's database, so they were using FM for at least some form of scouting while Moyes was in charge so it's not too farfetched.
It is used pretty regularly by clubs and agents, I remember some player talked about how the agent signed him.
He came to the meeting, the agent opened his laptop and started talking about his traits. He was reading his traits from FM, he was like "Aaaa, I see you like to chip the ball over the keeper..."
The Player was confused, he looked at his laptop and it was FM opened haha
Edit. It was [Bojan Vrucina](https://www.slobodna-bosna.ba/vijest/62850/nesvakidasnja_anegdota_hrvatskog_nogometasa_dosli_ljudi_htjeli_da_me_kupe_izvadili_cd_kad_ono.html)
Roughly translation:
"You people don't know my story when my loan in Duisburg ended and I was a Slaven Belupo player, and I was contacted by people from the Portuguese first division Nacional de Madeira. And so we meet in Zagreb, have lunch, talk, then they say, “We’d check on you.” Then they take out a laptop takes out a CD, I said, “Wow, they have my video so we’ll watch it now” ... When the CD is actually the 2006 Football Manager. They put CD inside, load the game and the first thing he tells me is: "Aaaa, I see you like to chip the ball over the keeper ...".
FM isn't just a computer game. For obscure leagues they get local scouts to provide data... so why not look into a player in more detail if the scouting data is good?
Had an injury that took him out for a large stretch of the season so far.
I think that the highlight of his season is that he scored a nice goal against atleti winning the game for Mallorca and sending Simeone to the shadow realm.
Edit:
Goal was at min 91, and since then Atleti has only won one of his last 5 matches 3L 1T. Kubo psychological warfare.
Quick google said he's on loan at Mallorca in La Liga and has played in 11 of 20 matches so I'm guessing he's been injured. Only 1 goal so far as well. He did start last game at CAM so he's at least getting starts.
As one should, it should definitely not be the sole source of information but you'd be a fool not to use such an extensive, and freely available, database of players.
It's like the profs telling students not to use Wikipedia.
Seriously, I'm going to use Wikipedia as my STARTING point of research for practically any topic.
A team manager would be silly to dismiss such a large free repository at least as a way to collect data.
Brilliant. Wolves once signed a player called Tomasz Frankowski, he was a veteran and had 20 finishing and great mental stats on FM, geezer never scored a goal for us, in fact I remember he was dreadful and looked out of his depth with everything he did. I always thought this was a football manager signing.
I think it's part of an intentional marketing strategy to hype up the club to the general population ahead of the WC2026. They were very observant at how crazy the Italian-Canadian population were when Italy won the Euros. They want to capitalize on that submarket of fans.
Toronto has a lot of people of Italian descent and Italy is good so you know the baseline for players you’re looking at is relatively high compared to MLS.
On top of what's already been said, the club likely has a bunch of contacts in Italy already. We've probably established a decent foothold in Italy when we were looking to sign Bradley and especially Giovinco. If we have a bunch of solid contacts there, it makes sense to look for players there first.
In 2012 during the Euros I and a group of others on a forum created a fake transfer rumour about Jong Il-Gwan, a North Korean underage player. We decided to pick him because of North Korea (the absurdity of it) and the club we linked him with was Newcastle (this was during the hype of the Newcastle scout Graham Carr)
I started by editing some webpages using Inspect Element linking him with Newcastle, saying Newcastle were scouting him. Got the group of us on twitter sending some tweets. Sent it to some Newcastle journos who said they'd look into it.
During the course of a couple of days, the rumours took off.
One in the group created a "goals/skills/highlights" youtube video - [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSZxp1qA9wg&t=82s) which after a few days was full of "welcome to Partizan" comments and some serbian language comments.
Seemingly, an agent responsible for bringing Korean players to Serbia wanted in on the action and got involved and he was linked with a million pound move to Partizan. Then PSV were linked too! We didn't create any of these rumours...I can't find some of the pages because it was local serbian language.
Eventually...the Daily Mail included him in their rumour section and gave him a [3 star out of 5 chance of going to Newcastle](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2155866/Transfer-latest-Luiz-Adriano-Tottenham-Liverpool-eye-Victor-Moses-Newcastle-target-Jong-Il-Gwan.html)
This is what they said....
>Newcastle rewarded scout Graham Carr with a new eight-year contract today and he continues to have that knack of finding talent. One of the latest targets of his attention is North Korea international striker Jong Il-Gwan. The 19-year-old has been linked with PSV Eindhoven and Partizan Belgrade but Newcastle have been keeping an eye on him since his hat-trick for North Korea in the Asian Youth Championship against Australia in 2010. Alan Pardew wants to build up his squad and will invest around £10m on second string players who can step up. The added bonus would be the commercial revenue a player such as Il-Gwan could generate.
His [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jong_Il-gwan) page (which we didn't edit) still contains a comment about the transfer links.
>On 5 June 2012 numerous reports surfaced linking the player with a move to Newcastle United[5] with later reports strongly linking him with FK Partizan[6] and PSV Eindhoven.
In 2010, Forocoches (Spanish biggest forum) created a whole fake Uruguayan player by designing a believable digital footprint. Then, they started hyping up the player and claiming that it was going to be Villareal's next multimillion signing. You can still "find" the story of Nestor Coratella online.
If a agent actually hopped on it, it becomes a real possible deal and rumour then. Either he is using it to create buzz for his own players in Korea, or he actually liked it and wanted to make it happen.
Yep, duplicating their effort (when clubs probably want to focus much more on in-depth scouting the site can't offer anyway) seems like a waste of time, as long as you're only using it for easily verifiable facts and not player valuations etc
Insigne is big enough for most clubs, that would be interested in him, to know his contract was expiring. On top of that, his agent would have let other clubs know.
A lot of people in here laughing at this process, but this is an example of a hands-on president doing research. You may not agree entirely with the research (e.g, going off how marketable a player is vs. how good they are competitively), but damn a lot of clubs here could only dream of having management - a president no less - that was in-tune to the sporting side.
reminds me of my 10yo self on pes when i did not know wtf was an overall so i just bought the cheapest players from the big teams
Actually ended up with a good team, Kovacic, Naingolan,oxlade chamberlain, Matic and Castolo up top
Call me a hater but I don't see the Insigne move working out. It a huge gamble for 20 mill per season on a single player...this has disaster written all over it
I’ve been researching the French national team myself and this mbappe fellow seems to keep popping up
Will have to write him down for my local rec football league
FM tactics right here lol.
The big Sam scouting tactic
I don't see the corruption component in Toronto's approach...
He bought FM with some embezzled Chinese money
Doug Ford is just about as Big as Sam and likes the gravy on his poutine.
Little bit of crack as well I'm sure, just like Robby
Just load the editor and see which player has the highest PA lol
Clever, until you sign Bale on a massive deal because you forgot that his CA is far below his PA and he'll never reach his PA again.
That’s why you switch the filter to 21 and under only
That’s why you always gotta look at determination, work rate, attitude (professional), and injury proneness too 🤝
select South American U-20 Championship select top 100 players by average rating right-click assign scout
That's the kind of stuff you do as a kid, building a team writing on paper looking at transfermarkt
Not only kids. I was 19 and fucking buzzing when Chelsea actually brought Victor Moses and Marko Marin after I got them in the team on my FM save, lol.
I did the same in FIFA 13 playing as Real Madrid. I bought Dani Carvajal & Isco in my second or third season... After doing that, they actually moved to Real Madrid from Malaga and Leverkusen, in the summer. It was such a great moment!
Did this with Gini back when he was at PSV and had dreads. Ended up becoming a completely different player but was elated when we got him.
YEP haha Gini was supposed to be an exciting winger with fun hair. Ended up as buzzcut CM lol
If Marin worked out like he was supposed to bro we would‘ve been something else lmao
Ah yes. Marin, the German Messi.
Well you've got the former Croatian Messi right now! Admittedly he's playing in centre mid...
Isnt the former croatian Messi Alen Halilovic? Atleast thats how I remember him beeing called before he failed at pretty much every step of the way.
> Alen Halilovic Woah, talk about a blast from the past. That name immediately reminds me of late, half-drunken nights in a dormitory common room, with a roommate’s Xbox 360 in front of me and dorito crumbs under my feet.
He was supposed to be as good as Ødegaard and their rivalry should have emulated CR7 and messi
Yeah, he was so hyped as a youngster, just like Bojan Krkic. Both were the "next Messi", Bojan atleast achieved something but Halilovic sadly didnt.
Ha I remember years ago, Ireland U-21 vs Spain U-21 in a friendly at the RSC in Waterford, our club had won tickets or something, and I was absolutely buzzing because we figured that Bojan would be there. Turns out he wasn't there, and we only got to see a bunch of nobodies like Jordi Alba, Azpilicueta, and Daniel Parejo who never really surmounted to anything of note.
Any Irish lads that we may know?
Halilovic is still only 25 so he could still do something. I don't know how he is playing for Reading though.
>Halilovic sadly didnt. uh excuse you
True haha I can remember the pictures on Facebook where Messi and Ronaldo where next to each other, below Neymar and Bale and below Halilovic and Ödegaard.
Each comparison goes a step worse than the last lol
To be fair, øde might still reach somewhere near those levels, he's looked wonderful here at times.
>Alen Halilovic? Didn't Halilovic's parents/family have a hand in ruining the potential of his career with their constant presence in negotiations?
Probably, there's a new Messi every week, but Kovacic was definitely called it for a bit as well, he started his career playing more as a 10.
They've also got the Lebron James of soccer...
Not to be confused with the belgian Messi, Januzaj
Pre-season legend
Moses had that season where he was a crucial part of a league winning defence, tbf.
Conte with the 3421, Moses, Alonso, Pedro, Diego Costa, Hazard, Kanté...
19 is exactly "kids"
Lmao that's me but with Lacazette when he signed for Arsenal
Lol, I am 29 and I do something like that from time to time.
Yep, 34 and I still get way into FM every other year. The hardest part is having the free time to play.
For Fifa career mode in 2011 I had a notebook with a field diagram on it, and I would list each player I had for each position and what I'd like to upgrade to, quite influenced by which players were having a good irl season. EDIT: [Found it.](https://i.imgur.com/awZOlKZ.jpg)
I did it too! Good times when FIFA (Career Mode) was fun
We were just little
[удалено]
I bought Football Manager 2013 for Steam the other day lmao.
I still play FM2007. Granted I mess around with the editor to create new stars every now and then. Any new game has a 14 year old Harry Kane and a 15 year old Virgil van Dijk now for instance.
I was messing around with FM 2012, and I had every notable player in the EPL born from like 2000. I think the game stopped at like 94/95 birth years or some shit.
You'd probably find an updated database for that game or one of the already outdated ones you could buy for 5£ or less if you're interested
Nah, I'm happy with my own db. I've been fiddling with it on and off for over 15 years now.
>I've been fiddling with it on and off for over 15 years now. I also do this with my dick.
Same but I'm 26 and use Fifa 18 (not the ideal one, I know). I also keep a spreadsheet with all my stats for the whole career since Fifa wont do it for me
I have been chipping away at a fifa 21 milan save. In my 4th or 5th season now and zlatan is about to turn 44 and is still rated at 81 (+5) overall right now, and is leading the league in goals by quite a margin. He keeps suggesting he's going to retire at the beginning of each season, but then he'll sign a 1 year extension that same day. Not sure if it's a glitch because he's been 81 overall for every season but the first one I think. His value is going back up lol. Never gets injured, despite being "prone". Still under contract for 2 more years and his tag is still just listed as "A great veteran", and hasn't yet changed to "retiring at end of season". Is funny because giroud retired almost immediately. Anyway, if it wasn't for zlatans invincibility in this save, I'd agree with you about career mode being boring and repetitive.
I don’t mind bugs, if anything, bugs made 15 CM even better :D For example, some players, even though they had low overall and low potential, somehow became absolute 90+ beasts (my favorite one was a CB from Ligue 1, don’t remember his name but he was insanely good). Another one was that clubs let their stars’ contracts run down so I was able to sign Neymar, Ronaldo and others for free (because I got Neymar, I sold Hazard and later signed him for free :D). Good times I don’t know, if just the gameplay didn’t feel so cheap, they would bring back banger soundtracks and didn’t try to be cool and removing the fricking cutscenes when signing players, I would happily buy it. But right now, it just sadly doesn’t appeal to me. Though it might be also because I’m not into football as I used to be. Sorry for long text :D
I signed Jonathan David and within two seasons he became a 98 overall, just insane. Also have some 21 year old from my academy named Carlos Martini who is a 96 overall already. I played a fair bit of CM from fifa 14-21 and there have definitely been some anomalies that emerge and become absolutely insane players. I think I'm these new career mode where you can have "development plans" for your players, you can get them to their potential and beyond way faster. Like, it's so easy to get any player up to 5* skills and weak foot, whereas before, those things seemed pretty set in stone. I think the average overall rating of my starting XI right now is like 92 hahaha
Probably still just as fun for kids if they weren't busy with UT
Berbatov was so smooth on the ball on Fifa too. Idk if you ever played fifa 16, but his ball control was deservedly insane.
This reminded me that Sergio Ramos used to play at RB. I was going to say why would you play him there then I remembered he did lmao
Back when he had longer hair!
This is what I do on FM. Look at the NTs and throw money at end of contract players.
I do something similar but looking for very young outliers on senior national teams. If a player is already playing for a mid tier national team at 18, they are probably quite promising. I also like to scout U21 national teams as you can find promising young players there who haven’t necessarily broken out yet and are sometimes still quite cheap.
this is the way u21 world cups and euros 😂
I see I can never have a unique thought playing FM hahaa
unfortunately no 😂😂, but another thing is to read the transfer rumors involving the big clubs and sneak and get their targets before they do
yes, omfggggg ahahah
In the newer versions you can just filter them by reputation and get some class players that don't neccessary are called up by the NT
how do you filter by reputation?
I am not sure, I think it should be in General -> Player reputation or reputation (I play Polish version so I am not sure)
what you should do is go to World -> Transfers -> All Transfers filter to Youth Intake and check out the list of all regens from all teams every few months. i personally add them all to a shortlist, remove all players that have 1 in any of the physicals, all players under 1.80m, and scout the rest. every few months new regens are added to various teams, depending on which leagues you have enabled, and you can find the absolute best new players in the world within weeks of them being generated if your scouting team is big enough long term, save all players with 80+ scouted potential and approach them when their first contract expires as well, Portugal doesn't have any non-EU player rules, so you can sign any number of international players and you'll still be able to field a legal squad for league games, even if you have 0 Portuguese players at your club
Ugh, my friend does this and it's the worst lmaoo. Whenever we play on the same save, I'll see all these random scouting reports on regens. Meanwhile, I'm so basic I need to use players that actually exist most of the time lol.
i've never played FM with anybody else, i like taking my time with it and managing most aspects of a club. scouting players is only a part of how i run the club, i also like planning trainings and calendars for B and youth teams, carefully planning individual and coach training in detail, try to set tactics based on the strengths of my current players and planning youth development for future needs etc. i have about 60 years spread around 3 FM20 saves in about 1000 hours, some people have at least 5 times as many years played in that many hours. I don't think I'd be much fun in multiplayer lol
[Toronto FC's president](https://i.imgur.com/upYK2ur.png)
Fucking legend hahahaahah
Lmaooooo Chiesa
You dropped this 👑
Dat snake tho
insanely good work lad... feel bad for chiesa man... hopefully comes back stronger
Donnarumma should be 💰lol
Fam this needs a dedicated AGO art exhibit
At least he wasn't on SoFIFA.
The comment sections on that website 💀
Futbin is worse
Futbin is just people screaming Penaldo & Pessi at each other until the world ends.
Change futbin to twitter and it would still be accurate
“I shit on these fun merchants spamming elastico and ball roll scoop using my prime R9 and Mbappe wiva hunter🤡🤡🤡” - futbin
Don’t forget the kids who go on spamming “ratio” every fucking time
They began voting to give that Turkish player who died the Deadeye and Engine chem styles Twisted fucks
Massively underrated. Should be 78/90 at the very least
U love when it's some 26 year old guy in the 3rd division and they still will say "he should be 68-72"
Fucking cancer man
Theyre hilarious tho
Sometimes they are but there's also quite a bit of racism
My favourite moment on Sofifa was when there some dude was trying to combat racism by literally claiming that everyone in Eastern Europe is a racist and didn't understand what was wrong with that. And when someone pointed out he's being a massive hypocrite he said that 'It's not wrong because they're racist.' And the million dollar question is - did he get more upvotes or downvotes?
Love SoFIFA as a data base but the comments are actual cancer on that
I hear Hitler was recently asking the SoFifa crowd to tone down their love for eugenics
I mean, journalists are doing exactly the same to spread the rumours so there's that
Next gen shit with the journos and clubs working together to spread rumors and then sign players
Are you insinuating clubs don’t “leak” info to journalists about transfer stories?
Its mostly agents.
It's everyone who stands to gain or who has a few beers too many after a game. I've seen just about everyone leak everything in every possible direction. Players, agents, managers, club leaders...
[удалено]
[удалено]
Damn I always loved that napoli team of insigne, hamsik, mertens
Don't forget Cavani.
And lavezzi And milik
Milik is a weird one to put in that list of players.
He was great when he was healthy and scoring If not for the two season ending injuries, it could've been a very different story
Yeah, he scored a lot of goals for napoli and it's not for nothing that he played for them for like 4 or 5 years. Maybe people shit on him because he doesn't score that often for the national team, but he's a decent striker
It's more the fact that Napoli, which is notorious for not spending much, payed 35 million for him, in 2016 nonetheless. Also, he had the impossible job to replace Higuain, and he failed: in 5 years he scored 38 goals in all competitions, while Higuain scored 36 in just the 15-16 season just in Serie A. Not his fault for neither the price tag, the impossible bar to reach or the multiple injuries, but he still failed to reach expectations. Also, there's the fact that when he was injured for the first time Sarri was forced to replace him with Mertens as a false 9. Up until then Mertens was considered a mediocre winger, but as a false 9 he scored 34 goals in all competitions just in the 16-17, and went on to reach 108 for Napoli. This all meant that Milik became the butt of the joke for Napoli not only because he was always injured, but also because his spot as a striker was taken by a small winger. Not his fault, but not good either.
Calling Mertens a "mediocre winger" before he was moved upfront is a bit much. He was highly regarded in the midfield. The problem was that other players emerged or were brought in midfield (Zieliński, Elmas, Lozano, Róg) so there wasn't a clear position for Mertens to come back to. Meanwhile, the system was working and Mertens was a prolific goal-scorer upfront, so why change it up because Milik returned from injury? Anyway, two season-ending injuries for Milik also meant that when he was healthy, he was still regaining fitness and form. His goal tally for Napoli during that period has to have that asterisk in mind. Milik's goal production when he was healthy and in-form was deserving of that price-tag. Many clubs would have taken a similar risk.
I will admit bias in putting milik's name but forgetting higuain. The Argentine certainly had a bigger impact in that season then almost any other striker in history. But I think Napoli were prepared to spend on milik because he had a prolific season with ajax, I remember he was banging them in for them too.
How could you leave Callejon out?
[удалено]
Mertens' career didn't start at PSV. He was 24 when he made his move to PSV, and had played already 5 full seasons of professional football. He started at AGOVV...
It's ok, be happy that at least he'll finally get good pizza!
From the best pizza in the world to Pizza Pizza
So good they named it twice!
Had to make sure that people recognize it as pizza.
He's going to finally discover Hawaiian pizza. And he's going to love it.
Serious question, how many teams do you think actually utilize Transfermarkt?
Most of them. Same with FM. As someone pointed out, why collate a giant database of common information like contracts etc when someone else will do all the work for you.
Plenty of them. I've heard a story that some agents even try to bribe Transfermarkt and Football Manager to increase the price/stats of their players.
Real scouts use FM
I remember hearing that firmino was scouted by hoffenheim as a result of him being a wonder kid on FM. No idea of how true it is, but there's stuff on Google about it lol.
A couple of years ago someone noticed that Mourinho had FM installed on his computer, during a presentation. This isn't as childish as it sounds, a lot of people in the sport use FM for (informal) scouting, it seems.
If you watch the first episode of All or Nothing you can see it.
That's exactly where I saw it haha
I mean makes sense. They have hundreds of scouts around the world watching players. Obviously you'd never sign a player only due to FM, but it's probably worth the time to look into some obscure players that FM rates highly.
Jokes on you. Hungarian teams sign players based on only Youtube videos
I mean, that's still more research than [Southampton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfX9gBmsWqg).
This is why Souness hates Pogba.
tbf to Southampton is it really worth finding good players if they will just be nicked by Liverpool?
I mean, for £35 you get access to a pretty well established and reliable database, so why not use it?
Same with transfermarkt, it’s a good place as a pipeline database. Where else do you go for a complete data base of up to date player approximate contracts, easy to use as well. Great way to get some ideas and inspirations. On the other hand, if someone actually went and assembled their team only based on FM and transfermarkt.
it's the easiest way to get a ballpark clue on a guy
They don't have scouts. They find people who are fans of each club and offer them a free early copy of the game if they go to every home match, most away matches and most youth matches.
I mean that’s a scout, even if they’re not professional.
FM is essentially a massive database of realworld stats, so it's actually quite convenient. I have a friend who works as a scout and he says everyone at his agency uses it to monitor prospective clients from lower divisions
I mean FM is legit a good source as they have proper scouts. They've also predicted a lot of big players coming up (I remember buying Courtois and De Bruyne for peanuts), even though they have some misses from time to time (Carlos Fierro anyone?)
Professional scouts also have misses. Projecting out how good a 16-18 year old is going to end up is always going to be inconsistent.
Fierro is still a legend 😪
I've got fabregas and rvp in CM before name changed into FM, and then kompany in couple next version,later was goretzka, kai harvetz, ansu fati, pedri when they just 16 years old. Some of FM wonderkids really doing well
Its hilarious to go back to like FM16 and see Fierro just be a world classs striker leading Mexico to greatness, meanwhile in real life he never even got called up to the senior NT.
Let's not forget his partner in crime, Erick Torres
You'd be surprised how many data providers are also part time or full time football scouts. A lot of the data there is fairly legit.
Absolutely. That's what I said, it's not as childish as it sounds.
Pretty sure David Moyes brought Steven Pienaar to Everton due to football manager but that may have just been pub chat that my brain just held onto for some reason.
Everton actually [signed a deal](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/everton-signs-football-manager-database) with Sports Interactive (FM's developer) in 2008 that gave them access to SI's database, so they were using FM for at least some form of scouting while Moyes was in charge so it's not too farfetched.
It is used pretty regularly by clubs and agents, I remember some player talked about how the agent signed him. He came to the meeting, the agent opened his laptop and started talking about his traits. He was reading his traits from FM, he was like "Aaaa, I see you like to chip the ball over the keeper..." The Player was confused, he looked at his laptop and it was FM opened haha Edit. It was [Bojan Vrucina](https://www.slobodna-bosna.ba/vijest/62850/nesvakidasnja_anegdota_hrvatskog_nogometasa_dosli_ljudi_htjeli_da_me_kupe_izvadili_cd_kad_ono.html) Roughly translation: "You people don't know my story when my loan in Duisburg ended and I was a Slaven Belupo player, and I was contacted by people from the Portuguese first division Nacional de Madeira. And so we meet in Zagreb, have lunch, talk, then they say, “We’d check on you.” Then they take out a laptop takes out a CD, I said, “Wow, they have my video so we’ll watch it now” ... When the CD is actually the 2006 Football Manager. They put CD inside, load the game and the first thing he tells me is: "Aaaa, I see you like to chip the ball over the keeper ...".
As much as we would like it to be true, [that was debunked by FM studio director](https://mobile.twitter.com/milesSI/status/799366541112385536)
FM isn't just a computer game. For obscure leagues they get local scouts to provide data... so why not look into a player in more detail if the scouting data is good?
Didn’t work well with PSG and Barca concerning Kubo (Transfermakt had a false date and Real asked the Club)
Oh, unrelated but how's Kubo been? Anyone can shed some light on that?
Had an injury that took him out for a large stretch of the season so far. I think that the highlight of his season is that he scored a nice goal against atleti winning the game for Mallorca and sending Simeone to the shadow realm. Edit: Goal was at min 91, and since then Atleti has only won one of his last 5 matches 3L 1T. Kubo psychological warfare.
Speaking of Kubo goals, [this is a gem](https://youtu.be/KDvtIQuX5M0)
Been ok, Was injured as others have said.
Quick google said he's on loan at Mallorca in La Liga and has played in 11 of 20 matches so I'm guessing he's been injured. Only 1 goal so far as well. He did start last game at CAM so he's at least getting starts.
this guy is a fucking boss
As one should, it should definitely not be the sole source of information but you'd be a fool not to use such an extensive, and freely available, database of players.
It's like the profs telling students not to use Wikipedia. Seriously, I'm going to use Wikipedia as my STARTING point of research for practically any topic. A team manager would be silly to dismiss such a large free repository at least as a way to collect data.
One of us!
I love the honesty
Brilliant. Wolves once signed a player called Tomasz Frankowski, he was a veteran and had 20 finishing and great mental stats on FM, geezer never scored a goal for us, in fact I remember he was dreadful and looked out of his depth with everything he did. I always thought this was a football manager signing.
Fun fact: He is currently a Polish MEP in European Parliament.
Well, I mean, the info is right there you know
why was he focused on the italian national team?
I think it's part of an intentional marketing strategy to hype up the club to the general population ahead of the WC2026. They were very observant at how crazy the Italian-Canadian population were when Italy won the Euros. They want to capitalize on that submarket of fans.
Saw the Euros and thought, alright then, come on.
Toronto has a lot of people of Italian descent and Italy is good so you know the baseline for players you’re looking at is relatively high compared to MLS.
Won Euros.
On top of what's already been said, the club likely has a bunch of contacts in Italy already. We've probably established a decent foothold in Italy when we were looking to sign Bradley and especially Giovinco. If we have a bunch of solid contacts there, it makes sense to look for players there first.
You'd be choked how many top teams use TransfetMarkt....
In general people would be surprised how amateurish a lot of football clubs are. Or just how much influence agents have on smaller clubs.
In 2012 during the Euros I and a group of others on a forum created a fake transfer rumour about Jong Il-Gwan, a North Korean underage player. We decided to pick him because of North Korea (the absurdity of it) and the club we linked him with was Newcastle (this was during the hype of the Newcastle scout Graham Carr) I started by editing some webpages using Inspect Element linking him with Newcastle, saying Newcastle were scouting him. Got the group of us on twitter sending some tweets. Sent it to some Newcastle journos who said they'd look into it. During the course of a couple of days, the rumours took off. One in the group created a "goals/skills/highlights" youtube video - [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSZxp1qA9wg&t=82s) which after a few days was full of "welcome to Partizan" comments and some serbian language comments. Seemingly, an agent responsible for bringing Korean players to Serbia wanted in on the action and got involved and he was linked with a million pound move to Partizan. Then PSV were linked too! We didn't create any of these rumours...I can't find some of the pages because it was local serbian language. Eventually...the Daily Mail included him in their rumour section and gave him a [3 star out of 5 chance of going to Newcastle](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2155866/Transfer-latest-Luiz-Adriano-Tottenham-Liverpool-eye-Victor-Moses-Newcastle-target-Jong-Il-Gwan.html) This is what they said.... >Newcastle rewarded scout Graham Carr with a new eight-year contract today and he continues to have that knack of finding talent. One of the latest targets of his attention is North Korea international striker Jong Il-Gwan. The 19-year-old has been linked with PSV Eindhoven and Partizan Belgrade but Newcastle have been keeping an eye on him since his hat-trick for North Korea in the Asian Youth Championship against Australia in 2010. Alan Pardew wants to build up his squad and will invest around £10m on second string players who can step up. The added bonus would be the commercial revenue a player such as Il-Gwan could generate. His [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jong_Il-gwan) page (which we didn't edit) still contains a comment about the transfer links. >On 5 June 2012 numerous reports surfaced linking the player with a move to Newcastle United[5] with later reports strongly linking him with FK Partizan[6] and PSV Eindhoven.
Meanwhile you and your friends were probably dying laughing back at home. Imagine if it actually went through.
You should make a full post or deep dive article somewhere like The Ringer on this. Amazing how it snowballed to PSV.
In 2010, Forocoches (Spanish biggest forum) created a whole fake Uruguayan player by designing a believable digital footprint. Then, they started hyping up the player and claiming that it was going to be Villareal's next multimillion signing. You can still "find" the story of Nestor Coratella online.
If a agent actually hopped on it, it becomes a real possible deal and rumour then. Either he is using it to create buzz for his own players in Korea, or he actually liked it and wanted to make it happen.
I mean why would a team research on their own to create an independent database of when players contracts expire?
Yep, duplicating their effort (when clubs probably want to focus much more on in-depth scouting the site can't offer anyway) seems like a waste of time, as long as you're only using it for easily verifiable facts and not player valuations etc
This is top tier r/soccercirclejerk content
Crazy that nobody thought of this before. Outsmarted a whole continent of clubs.
Im sure it happens often on a smaller scale. Most club presidents can’t afford players of Insigne’s calibrr
Insigne is big enough for most clubs, that would be interested in him, to know his contract was expiring. On top of that, his agent would have let other clubs know.
A lot of people in here laughing at this process, but this is an example of a hands-on president doing research. You may not agree entirely with the research (e.g, going off how marketable a player is vs. how good they are competitively), but damn a lot of clubs here could only dream of having management - a president no less - that was in-tune to the sporting side.
Outjerked
TIL I'm over qualified to be a football club president.
Dude is playing fifa career mode in real life, Brand exposure +10
>I started writing down players that I thought were world-class, that I thought would have commercial value in this market A.k.a the Man Utd approach
reminds me of my 10yo self on pes when i did not know wtf was an overall so i just bought the cheapest players from the big teams Actually ended up with a good team, Kovacic, Naingolan,oxlade chamberlain, Matic and Castolo up top
Armchair transfer specialists can relate.
My man
proper scouting 101
But was he wrong...
I bet there are more professional scouts doing this than you'd think lol. You have to rate him for coming out and saying it tho
Call me a hater but I don't see the Insigne move working out. It a huge gamble for 20 mill per season on a single player...this has disaster written all over it
I’ve been researching the French national team myself and this mbappe fellow seems to keep popping up Will have to write him down for my local rec football league
Rashford is worth 85mil on that website. Wouldn't put much stock on it mate