Thank you for reading my latest Fuller FM blog update. As you can tell from the title, I have a major announcement to make.
With Football Manager 2019’s life cycle coming to a close just as my third career story reaches its conclusion, I have decided that it’s time to move on. After this post, I will not write any more FM19 content for this blog.
I will explain in detail why I’ve made this decision later in this post, after I’ve written a bit about each of the three stories I’ve covered here. Before all that, though, I want to get one thing straight…
THE GAME
Lyn left-back Oskar Hansen scores one of MANY free-kicks – this one coming against Nybergsund.
Football Manager 2019 is a very, very good game. In fact, it’s probably the best title yet in Sports Interactive’s long-running franchise, which is rightly regarded as one of the pre-eminent sports management simulation game series.
I’ve already touched on the features I like and dislike most about FM19 in my last blog update. For those of you who haven’t read that, here’s a quick rundown:
I liked the new training module, which gave me a greater say on how my players’ attributes developed over time. I LOVED the tactics overhaul, which similarly gave me more control over my team’s style of football while still not requiring me to hold a bachelor’s degree to use it.
The match engine also got a thumbs-up from me. Every ME has its quirks, but in many respects, this is generally an improvement on all previous versions of the game. I see quite a few FMers complaining about players attempting too many ineffective crosses or strikers being useless, but I haven’t really noticed either of those issues myself.
Conversely, there were a few user interface bugs that rankled with me, and the newgen faces still need attention from the developers. I also noticed that several of my Fiorentina players would ask for new contracts soon after signing their existing deals. For all I know, though, that could be happening at top clubs in real-life, so I won’t hold that against SI.
My support for FM19 has got me into a few heated arguments on the Sports Interactive forums with some users who… don’t hold it in such high regard. Indeed, this has led to some less savoury members of the community giving me abuse, such as calling me a “fanboy” or a “troll”, and even asking sarcastically if I worked for SI.
Many of these arguments have been about long-range shots, with some FMers saying that lower-league players with low Long Shots attributes have no business scoring them. (Eastleigh’s Danny Hollands has a Long Shots attribue of 8 and blows that argument out of the water. Indeed, you’ll see a fair few long-range goals scored every week at all levels of football.)
There’ve also been the usual complaints from FMers who’ve seen their team have around 35 shots on goal, only to lose 1-0 because the AI scored from their only shot. I’ve already discussed “being FMed” in a recent post, but needless to say, it’s got nothing to do with FM being “rigged” or “scripted” or Miles Jacobson trying to screw us over.
Then there are those who see the sheer amount of bug reports on the forums, and claim that they sum up how “broken”, “bug-ridden” and “unfinished” FM19 is. This is just laughable, because for starters, it would be incredibly optimistic to expect a game as complex as FM to have very few bugs that slip through the beta phase.
Indeed, all those bug reports actually show that the community cares so much about helping the developers to fix as many potential issues as they can. Take it from me. I’ve submitted more bug reports for FM19 than the previous six FMs combined – not because it’s an utter mess, but because I want an already great game to become even better.
THE BLOG (AND THE STORIES)
As some of you might already know, I’ve been writing and publishing Football Manager content online since 2014. I spent the best part of five years writing several stories on the official SI forums, and that inspired me to look into blogging.
I launched my first FM blog in 2016, but that only lasted a few months before I lost my enthusiasm and took it down. Then, last summer, I thought about giving it another go – and doing it properly. That’s when Fuller FM as an idea was born.
I started building the blog over the summer and early autumn, before a soft launch in mid-October to coincide with the FM19 beta. My original plan was to give readers an entertaining story – published in a few installments a week – where I would also give them some tips on how to become a better FMer. Unfortunately, things didn’t entirely go to plan.
“Shades of Deep Purple” began shortly after the FM19 beta went live. I took charge of Fiorentina, aiming to transform them over the next four seasons from a sleeping giants to one of the most-feared teams in Italian and European football.
This story was a valuable learning process for me as a blogger. I spread each season over 10-12 separate posts, in which I discussed each match in great detail. Indeed, during the first couple of seasons, I went a bit crazy and would upload as many five posts a week!
Obviously, all this was a bit excessive – and it also led to me suffering some symptoms of burnout. I wisely slowed things down a bit and paid more attention to how much I wrote in each post.
I wasn’t on Twitter at this point, so the blog was mainly getting views from search engines and Cleon Hobson’s now-defunct ‘Tea & Busquets’ social network. My audience was small, but I received invaluable support, particularly from The Wide Playmaker, who had his own long-running Fiorentina blog career on FM19.
My four-year Viola reign ended trophyless, though we were runners-up in the 2020 Coppa Italia to Napoli, who then pipped us to the Serie A scudetto in 2022. Even so, I had still assembled a very strong side and restore some pride to the purple jersey (which was more than could be said of the 2018/2019 team in real-life).
Fuller FM went on Twitter in mid-January, just before the start of what was supposed to be my main FM19 career. In “Floreat Salopia”, I hoped to lead Shrewsbury Town into the Premier League for the first time in their history and establish Shropshire as a hotbed for youth development.
As it transpired, I couldn’t even get out of League One. For three consecutive seasons, I had to watch on helplessly as Shrewsbury’s promotion dreams died in an agonising Play-Off Semi Final defeat. The third season was particularly painful, as two injury-time goals from Portsmouth at Bradford City denied us automatic promotion to the Championship.
Meanwhile, I was going through a bit of a personal crisis. Losing my maternal grandfather at the end of February took a huge toll on my physical and mental health. The latter wasn’t helped by some frustrating results on FM (including one defeat at Charlton Athletic that my keyboard won’t forget), and I eventually reached breaking point.
In late April, after three seasons of play-off heartache, I ended the Shrewsbury story. That left me with a dilemma about what to do next on FM19. Then, while holidaying through a test save, I had a Eureka moment partially inspired by Bill Withers.
“Lyn On Me” saw me take the helm at Lyn 1896 – a Norwegian third-division club who were national champions during the 1960s before falling into decay. Adopting the female alter ego of Marit Enstad, I was tasked with rebuilding this semi-professional outfit from the ground up.
As far as enthusiasm went, this story looked very promising. The shorter Norwegian leagues would allow me to play through seasons at a quicker pace whilst not rushing my writing too much.
It also seemed to catch the imagination of some Norwegian FMers, as Lyn’s official Twitter handle ‘liked’ my preview post, and a few of their fans started to follow the blog. I even got a couple of positive replies from real-life Lyn players Oskar Hansen and Marius Østvold.
2019 went as well as could be expected; we just missed out on the play-offs on goal difference. After suffering a nasty case of ‘second-season syndrome’ in 2020 that almost ended in relegation (and the sack), we rebounded in 2021, winning our league to at last secure promotion to the 1. divisjon.
We spent a couple of years in the second-tier, and a thrilling play-off win over Sandefjord in December 2023 saw us promoted again – to the Eliteserien. Life was good, both on the game and away from it… but not for very long.
I played those fateful play-off matches on 5 August. The following morning, my paternal grandmother passed away aged 86. This latest bereavement coincided with me suffering a stomach infection and brought my mental state way down again.
After taking a couple of weeks away from FM, I played through the 2024 season to try and keep Lyn in the Eliteserien. Alas, we couldn’t quite keep ourselves away from the bottom three, and Sandefjord exacted revenge in the play-offs to replace us.
At that point, my passion for the save had all but died out, and I had no desire to play through another season back in the 1. divisjon. I’d enjoyed six memorable years in Norway, but the time had come to say “farvel”.
THE END OF FM19
If you’re reading this blog, I’ll safely assume you enjoy Football Manager as much as I do (unless you’re that one person who found my Women’s Soccer Manager review on Google). I’m sure you’ll agree, though, that too much of a good thing can be bad for you.
I started my Fiorentina career on 19 October last year, and played my final match with Lyn on 5 September. Save for the odd week off here and there, I’d been FMing almost non-stop for 10-and-a-half months. Over that time, I played 549 competitive matches in 13 seasons across three separate saves.
That’s a lot of Football Manager, especially for someone who’s typically used to playing the game at a more sedate pace. When I was playing FM13 (from 2013 up until May last year), I don’t think I ever progressed through more than eight seasons over a 12-month period – and that was on just one long-running save.
This increased playing time was largely down to me throwing myself head-first into blogging. My partners in the FM Creators community have called me a “blogging machine” – and with good reason. Over the past year, I’ve released over 130 blog posts containing 400,000+ words (at least according to my WordPress site stats).
As I’ve already mentioned, I was incredibly ‘prolific’ when I was writing and publishing “Shades of Deep Purple”. Posting four or five updates a week was a pace nobody could seriously sustain without burning out completely, so I took things a bit slower for my later stories with Shrewsbury and Lyn.
However, there’s little doubt that the effects of my big early push with Fiorentina were still being felt when I was managing Lyn over the summer.
I made an effort to write all my “Lyn On Me” updates weeks in advance of publication, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about sticking to my own deadlines. This meant I would always play the save one season ahead of you reading about it… if you get what I mean. That’s not a terrible approach for a Football Manager blogger to take, but it comes with its own problems.
Ultimately, this feeling of having to publish posts regularly without getting myself too far ahead in the game caught up with me. That’s largely why I took a week-long break from blogging before posting what proved to be the sixth and final season of my Lyn save.
So… what are the main takeaways from my first year as an FM blogger?
Firstly, I’ve learned that less is more. We all have our own different tastes as readers, but I don’t expect many of you to read a load of story chapters that only cover one season. My 12 updates per season with Fiorentina were excessive, and even cutting that down to 6 or 7 probably seemed like too much.
I’d actually be quite interested to read your thoughts on this. Do you like the slower pace of my Fiorentina story, or do you prefer to get through seasons quicker, like in my Shrewsbury and Lyn stories? Would you even be happy with fewer updates that cover longer time periods – let’s say 3 or 4 posts per season? Please let me know, either in the comments below or on Twitter.
And what about the future? Well… I’m afraid that I won’t be buying Football Manager 2020 on release. I’ve traditionally skipped even-numbered CMs/FMs on the most part, and I’m not yet convinced that FM20 will be a significant enough upgrade on FM19.
I’ll certainly give the six-month demo a go when that goes up on Steam just before FM20’s full release in November. If that wins me over over, then I’ll be back with a brand new FM20 story on Fuller FM, with more details to be announced if and when the time’s right.
You can certainly expect to see more Championship Manager 99/00 content in the near future, to mark the 20th anniversary of that game’s release. I’ll also continue reviewing other football management PC games, from new releases like Soccer Manager 2020 (that’ll be fun) to retro titles.
It’s been a joy to blog about FM19 for the past year, and your support and encouragement has been a huge help to me. I hope you will continue to follow Fuller FM, whatever and whenever the next story is. In the meantime, you can still find me on Twitter @Fuller_FM.
Until next time, this is farewell, but not goodbye.
Fuller FM 
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