Welcome to Arsenal… and to the start of a brand-new Football Manager 2022 series right here on Fuller FM!
Yes, for this save, I will be pushing Mikel Arteta out of his Emirates hotseat and taking charge of my beloved Gunners… but there’s a twist.
The end goal is to win either the Premier League or the Champions League – with a team consisting mostly of Arsenal academy graduates. Can I complete the challenge before FM23 is released, or will I fail as miserably as Unai Emery?
This first chapter will explain all…
INTRODUCTION
If you’ve been following me on Twitter for a while, you might have seen that I was quite late to the FM22 party. I only bought the full game in April, starting off with a short-term challenge where I tried to save Crystal Palace from relegation when they were bottom at Christmas.
Yes, it was basically a rehash of my “Saving Burnley” mini-series on FM20. In fact, my attempts at “Saving Palace” went even worse – I lost my first TEN league games and Palace were relegated in mid-April.
Since then, I’ve struggled to motivate myself to start a new challenge. My initial plans for a long-term lower-league save fell off the radar because some major issues went unfixed. (e.g. Newgen reputations grow too slowly, AI teams don’t develop their youth well enough, and non-league teams regularly complete 90%+ of their passes like they’re frigging Barcelona.)
International management? That’s still garbage. What about a medium-term save in La Liga – the only ‘Big Five’ league I haven’t yet touched on Fuller FM? Nah, I might as well wait until FM23.
I was running out of options… until Iain Macintosh, who hosts the brilliant Football Manager Show podcast, set his listeners an end-of-season Community Challenge. This challenge just so happened to be revolved around Arsenal.
Even as a lifelong Gooner, I actually find FM careers with Arsenal to be quite boring. My last Gunners save was back on FM16 and lasted for only one season. I also managed them on the FM19 Mobile game, but that ended after two seasons because we had more money than the LIV Golf tour and it became ludicrously easy.
But this challenge is different – it’s very youth-oriented. These are the objectives Iain has set out for anyone who wants to play along:
Note that Iain specifically mentions academy graduates. These are NOT necessarily homegrown players (i.e. players who were at your club for three years between the ages of 15 and 21).
Iain’s definition of an ‘academy graduate’ is someone who has Arsenal as the first club on their CV – in other words, they would have generated at that club if they were an FM newgen. Basically, you just go to a player’s Career Stats page, and check to see what is the earliest entry on that list.
For example, Alex Iwobi DOES qualify as an ‘academy player’, having risen through the Arsenal youth ranks before moving on to Everton. The Valencia and United States midfielder Yunus Musah also qualifies, even though he moved to the Mestalla when he was 16. You could in theory bring Iwobi and/or Musah back to Arsenal, and they would count towards the academy quota.
However, while FM does consider Serge Gnabry to be ‘homegrown’ at Arsenal, he DOES NOT qualify as an ‘academy’ player for this challenge, because he actually started his career at VfB Stuttgart before joining the Gunners. Neither does Héctor Bellerín, because he was signed from Barcelona.
THE RULES
The first goal of this series is to restore Arsenal’s glory days – either by winning a first Premier League title since 2004, or by finally bringing home that elusive Champions League. My long-term objective is to build a winning team with most of the players coming from Arsenal’s Hale End youth academy in east London (hence the title of this series).
To that end, I will be strictly following this rule I have imposed on myself:
For every match Arsenal play in the 2021/2022 season, I must name at least ONE academy player in the starting line-up. I will raise this minimum threshold by one after each season. A minimum of TWO academy players must start each game in 2022/2023… and so on until 2026/2027, when there must be SIX academy graduates in the starting XI.
To help me identify these players, I will add an in-game note to every current or former Arsenal player who qualifies as an academy graduate. Adding a note to a player on FM will put a small (but very visible) gold square next to their name. I will also do this for any player who comes through our youth intakes.
[To create a note, just right-click on your player’s name, then go to Misc > Create Note. You can also create a note from the History tab on their profile. Just type a title and some text – no need to set a reminder – and click ‘Confirm’ to add the note.]
I’ve also imposed some restrictions on new signings – partly in the spirit of the challenge, and also to stop myself signing the same old FM22 ‘wonderkids’ that everyone else buys. I will only sign a player if they fulfil at least ONE of these three criteria:
- Any player who is aged 18 or under when they arrive at the club.
- Any player who has UK or Irish nationality.
- Any player who was either ‘homegrown’ at Arsenal or came through the Arsenal academy.
The first criterion will let me sign any promising youngsters from abroad who can eventually become ‘homegrown’. The second will help with Brexit regulations and allow me to recruit established British internationals. And of course, that last criterion can help me fulfil the academy quota by bringing back any ex-Arsenal starlets who have developed into top-level players elsewhere.
STARTING OUT
I have loaded 28 leagues from 16 European nations, with about 90,000 players in the database. I’m running the Winter Update database (so no Aubameyang), and the first summer transfer window is disabled (so no more transfers until January). I am using many of the files from Daveincid’s Increase Realism megapack… and another mod that might become important later down the line.
Let’s face it – the new expanded Club World Cup on FM22 is an absolute omnishambles. Players don’t train during the CWC, which means they get fatigued very quickly, leading to loads of injuries in the knockout rounds. This is such a widespread issue that I’m staggered SI never got round to fixing it!
Anyway, I’ve downloaded this mod from the SI forums. It replaces the new, broken Club World Cup with the older, simpler 7-team tournament that used to take place in December. If Arsenal ever win the Champions League in this save, that will be something to aim for in the following season.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s have our first look at the Arsenal team as we head into the 2021/2022 Premier League campaign:
As this is mainly an academy challenge, I will naturally be focussing on tracking the development of our academy players throughout the series. That being said, I will give a quick rundown of how this team stacks up as a whole.
We have a surprisingly stable and talented defence, with Aaron Ramsdale in goal, and Kieran Tierney, Benjamin White, Gabriel and Takehiro Tomiyasu across the back four. Though none of them are academy players, they are all aged 24 or under, so this quintet could be playing together consistently for some time – at least until the Hale End boys start breaking through.
Our midfield is perhaps a weakness. Martin Ødegaard is the standout star, adding creativity and flair to a team that lacks an obvious enforcer. I also have some doubts about our infamously combustible playmaker (and vice-captain) Granit Xhaka, though Belgian youngster Albert Sambi Lokonga could take his place after arriving from Anderlecht.
Up front, our highest-earning player also gives me my biggest headache. Alexandre Lacazette is in the final season of a £180,000-per-week, five-year deal – and although his scoring record is okay, I’m not sure it justifies his exorbitant wages. With Lacazette set to leave before next season, I’ve decided to take the captaincy off him and give it to Tierney instead.
We now come to the three homegrown players in the first-team – all attacking players. Inverted right-winger Bukayo Saka will be keen to put his Euro 2020 heartbreak behind him and take his game to the next level. On the opposite flank, we have the similarly flamboyant Emile Smith Rowe, who can also cover for Ødegaard in midfield if needed.
Then there’s the pacey Eddie Nketiah, who needs to kick on this season if he’s to take Lacazette’s place up front for the long haul. A new long-term contract is the first priority for a promising striker whom the media has “labelled the next Michael Owen”… hopefully without the injuries or the future punditry career on Channel 4.
There are also a couple of very exciting prospects in the Under-23s squad. Deep-lying playmaker Charlie Patino is just 17 but already looks like he could be the English Xavi (having a Spanish dad also helps). I’ll probably start Patino in the EFL Cup and give him a few league run-outs in the first half of the season, with a view to loaning him out in the new year.
Miguel Azeez is another gifted playmaker, and one who has drawn comparisons with Paul Gascoigne (time will tell). I’m also paying close attention to Marcelo Flores, who is naturally an attacking midfielder but has the technique and athleticism to be an even better inside-forward.
Let’s not forget our army of loanees either. We probably won’t see this lot until next season, but winger Reiss Nelson and striker Folarin Balogun could become important first-teamers if they kick on at Feyenoord and Middlesbrough respectively. Brooke Norton-Cuffy is a very talented right-back who’s spending the season at Lincoln in League One, though I’ve not ruled out bringing Ainsley Maitland-Niles back into the fold.
Lastly, here’s a quick rundown of the board’s objectives for this first season. Silent Stan Kroenke – ambitious as ever – wants a top-six finish. I think we’ve got a decent chance of returning to the top four, and ending the Gunners’ five-year absence from the Champions League. That would be a vital first step towards European glory.
We’ve got no European football this season, which should give us more time to prepare for our league games while the other big teams are fighting it out on the continent. The domestic cups aren’t that important, though a deep cup run is always nice. Arsenal have lifted the FA Cup a record 14 times, but have only won the League Cup twice – most recently in 1993!
Anyway, there’s no more time to waste. I’m now heading straight to our training camp in the USA, where we’ll hopefully start pre-season with a nice and easy win against New York City…
Oh. Erm… this challenge could be a bit harder than I anticipated…
And there you have it. I’m really looking forward to this series, and I hope you are too!
If you’re looking for an off-season FM22 save to take on, why not give this challenge a go? It doesn’t necessarily have to be with Arsenal either – you can use the same rules with your own team, whether that’s Chelsea, Manchester United, West Ham, Aston Villa, whoever.
Part 2 will be published early next week, when I’ll recap the first half of the 2021/2022 season. If you want to keep updated whenever a new post goes live, you can hit the ‘Follow’ button at the bottom of the page – and/or you can follow me on Twitter @Fuller_FM.
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