Hello, guys. Christopher here. This is not a post I wanted to write, but in light of recent events, there are some things I have to get off my chest.
I want to talk about feeling burnt out – both with playing Football Manager, and with creating content about Football Manager. But first, it’s time to answer a question I’m sure a few of you will be asking…
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CRACOVIAN CHRONICLES?
At the start of this week, I posted up the prologue for my new Football Manager 2024 blog series “The Cracovian Chronicles”. This save would follow Kamila Deyna and her sister/assistant Joanna, as they took charge of their local club Wieczysta Kraków in the 4th tier of Polish football.
I took about two months off playing FM24 to plan this save. I extensively tested a Polish league database that went down to the 4th tier, and even assigned regional divisions to every club in Poland, so that the youth teams wouldn’t get moved to the wrong regional leagues. Then it was a case of waiting for the Winter Update.
The prologue had been written up weeks earlier and would go live once I had completed my first half-season at Wieczysta. I started the save last Monday (4 March), and after playing for around three hours each day, I had reached that halfway point by Sunday.
I was now ready to announce the new save. When I published the prologue on this Monday just gone (11 March), I had already finished writing Chapter 1, and had almost completed Chapter 2. I’ve now published both these chapters in full, so you can see how the first half of the III Liga season unfolded.
To cut this story short, all was not well. Results had been underwhelming, and Wieczysta headed into the winter break in 4th place – nine points off the leaders.
We were dominating most matches, but we weren’t converting our chances with any consistency. Meanwhile, our opponents’ counter-attacks were so clinical that not even Alisson could have saved us (we started the season by conceding our opponents’ first five shots on target). We had also gone out of the Puchar Polski (the Polish Cup) in Round 2, but more on that later.
I’ve been in sticky situations many times before. Heck, more than half my stories have ended in utter farce or spectacular failure! But I had never underperformed so badly at a team with such high expectations, and I was wondering if my tactics were the problem.
So, on Tuesday, I went to the Sports Interactive forums and posted a thread on the tactics sub-forum, where I got some very helpful advice – and was asked some eye-opening questions. Why are you playing counter-attacking football with the best team in the league? Why don’t you pack the midfield, instead of trying to fit your best AMs into winger roles that don’t suit them?
I took all that advice on board. In the mid-season friendlies, I toyed with using the False Nine role alongside a Shadow Striker, as the F9 would draw defenders out of position more than a static Deep-Lying Forward would. The switch went so well that we played against two non-league teams and scored ONE goal.
Anyway, we won our final warm-up match 6-0 – so on Wednesday afternoon, I was ready to take on Chełmianka in the first league match after the restart. Wieczysta played like utter tripe, went 1-0 down, and we were looking certain to lose until Christoph Knasmüllner scraped in a 93rd-minute equaliser. 1-1 draw.
Next up, we were at home to Wisłoka Dębica – the same team that we had lost 2-1 to on the opening day. After creating loads of very poor shots, we went 1-0 down to Wisłoka’s first shot on target. And then 2-0 down to their second. Then I pressed Alt + F4 and rage-quitted – the first time I’d done that since my Shrewsbury save on FM19.
I’ve been an ardent opponent of rage-quitting for many years, but I replayed the match and experienced the same old dross (create garbage for half an hour, then hit by their first sucker punch). Cue another rage-quit.
That was the last straw. I’d spent two months planning this save… and it hadn’t even lasted two weeks.
This isn’t an entirely new feeling. I’ve abandoned previous FM saves because of failure, disliking the game, or a lack of enthusiasm… but this is the first time I’ve ever quit in the first season out of pure exhaustion. Yes, exhausted is exactly how I feel.
IT’S NOT FM, IT’S ME…
The last seven months or so have not been a great time in the Fuller household. My dear nan Bessie (the last of my grandparents) passed away in August – and then in November, I lost my great-uncle Les, who was like an informal third grandad to me and my sister.
Alongside grieving for two very close kin, I have been trying to lose weight after suffering a couple of health scares. While the weight-loss plan is currently going well (I’m on track to lose a full stone in the first three months of this year), I did have several anxiety-enduced panic attacks early on.
I’ve also struggled with anxiety and stress when it comes to Football Manager. This was particuarly evident during my FM24 beta… no, sorry, ‘Early Access’ save with Millwall. Some matches were so stressful that I had to walk away from my desk for five minutes and take a few deep breaths – lest another tissue box suffered the same fate as Hulk Hogan’s T-shirts.
The Wieczysta save took that stress to another level. I’m more used to managing underdogs or dark horses – not a team that’s 91-1 ON to win its division right from the outset. I struggled to meet those expectations early on, got stuck in a rut, and couldn’t see a way out – even with outside help.
Video games are meant to be enjoyed, not endured. I’ve abandoned other games in the past because I was either so hopeless at playing them (e.g. literally every racing game ever made) or because an especially hard or scary level was driving me to insanity (e.g. Shadow of the Tomb Raider).
FM can be enjoyable and fun at times, but it can also be all-consuming, especially if you’re a content creator. There isn’t another game that brings out the writer in me. I don’t weave epic tales about my greatest battles on Age of Empires II, and I’ve never written Life Is Strange fan-fiction – tempting as it is to ship Max Caulfield with her lovely cheerleader friend Dana Ward.
I’ve been writing FM stories on the SI forums – and latterly this blog – since 2014. Ten years is a LONG time to commit yourself to something that is ultimately a labour of love. It feels even longer when your content goes into as much detail as some of my earlier stories.
Tom (the erstwhile blogger formerly known as FM Poacher) made a great point about this being more an issue with content creator burnout than FM burnout. The pressures of creating and then publishing content on a regular basis have definitely taken their toll on me.
It has been a very long time since I played Football Manager just for fun. Practically every save I’ve started in the past decade has been with the intention of turning it into a story, a blog, or even a Twitter thread. Playing FM has felt more and more like a full-time job than a hobby.
It also hasn’t helped that my connection with the wider FM community has hit rock-bottom. In these difficult times, I am sick of entitled FMers constantly berating and abusing developers on the forums, or trying to score points with ill-informed experiments on Reddit. The relationship between the player base and SI feels more toxic than it ever has.
Then again, maybe I’m burnt out on social media too.
IT’S NOT ME, IT’S FM…
That’s NOT to say I don’t have major issues with the state of Football Manager right now. Far from it.
My review of FM24 could basically be summed up as: “At least it’s better than FM23.” While I did like some new features, SI’s claim that it was “the most complete version of Football Manager to date” nowadays just feels like insincere marketing spiel.
AI squad-building is still an utter joke. Press conferences are still full of the same old irrelevant questions. Player interactions often don’t make much logical sense. Goalkeeper animations are the worst they’ve ever been. And do I have to mention the match graphics?
I’m seeing more issues crop up the longer I play. About two months into the season, Jacek Góralski started to get “upset” or “troubled” that I was playing him as a Defensive Midfielder, even though he was natural in that position (and role), and that I had only ever used him as a DM!
Also, remember when I said that my Wieczysta team got knocked out of the Puchar in Round 2? The board had expected us to go two rounds further – to the Quarter Finals.
Never mind that we were a 4th-division team that only got knocked out in extra-time by top-flight Warta Poznań! Just because we had a few Polish internationals, the board were upset that we didn’t even get close to winning the damn thing! Another player got so miffed that I basically had to sell him in January, just to stop squad harmony sinking through the floor.
My patience with FM wears thinner with each passing year. Forget about hanging on for 3 or 4 seasons; I now can’t even get through the first season of a new save without feeling like I’m losing my mind!
This series has looked outdated and been in stagnation for some time now. Yes, we’ve been promised major changes with Football Manager 2025 on the Unity engine. I really hope they deliver, otherwise my 25-year love affair with SI might be heading for divorce.
WHAT NOW?
As you might have guessed, there will be no more FM24 content on this blog. Despite that, Fuller FM will continue… for the time being, at least.
If my recent FM experiences have taught me anything, it’s that I appreciate Championship Manager even more. I grew up extensively playing the CM3-era games (and later Championship Manager 4) and still enjoy them today, for all their quirks.
While the older CM games can be just as addictive as modern FM titles, they aren’t as intense or rage-inducing. I also feel more like I can pop in and out of playing and/or writing about CM in my own time.
I recently started looking back at Championship Manager 3 – the very game that got me hooked to this series as a young lad in 1999. “CM3 Revisited” will continue over the coming months, and I will indeed be starting a brand-new CM3 story very soon.
I will also continue posting reviews of other football management games – both retro and modern. I definitely want to take a closer look at We Are Football 2024, which was released earlier this month.
However, I am planning to move house later in the year. If and when that time comes, I will likely have to take a break from blogging, so I can focus on packing things up and settling into my new place.
Looking further ahead, I’m not sure what the future holds for Fuller FM. I do intend to return to Football Manager once FM25 is released, but I will probably focus on just playing the game for the love of it, rather than creating content alongside it.
One thing’s for sure. If I do decide to wrap up Fuller FM, I won’t make a big ol’ Frank Sinatra song about it, or write a soppy 15-minute retirement speech. I’ll just stop posting.
That’s all for now, folks. Thanks for reading.
Fuller FM 
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