Ok, I know I said that my main focus in the transfer window would be  on defence, but… it didn’t turn out exactly like that. In (and for) my  defence I did bring in Ariel Garce for £ 1.3M, who will start at centre  back, and Ibrahima Faye on a free, who I thought would be a first  teamer but looks more likely to play second fiddle to the younger and  slightly better Bastian Oczipka.

The two headline signings of the window were a bit further up the  pitch. The wonderfully named Iraqi playmaker Nashat Akram Abid  Ali arrived on a free transfer and the club’s largest contract to sit in the middle of the park spraying passes left and right (I hope), and up front, as suggested by Shane, I bought Katlego Mphela, a South African striker with an absolutely brutal long shot, for £ 250k.

Out went a couple of squad players to pay for these, and I’m hoping to get rid of a few more before the end of the transfer window as my reserves is full of players who will never get a game and are sucking up my meagre wage budget like a vampiric sponge.

The friendlies were a mixed bag, but overall went well enough that I was confident for the season ahead. We played Meuselwitz before I’d had a chance to buy anyone and were 4-0 up at half time before their near comeback. Against Marseille and Man U I instituted a counter attacking system that worker reasonably well and I’ve kept ever since. And against Kickers all of the goals came from set plays, which was nice seeing as how I hadn’t even bothered to set any routines.

Lastly, a word of praise must go out to my staff. Never in the game have I met a gang of such incompetent malcontents, from the scouts who refuse to recommend anyone above “average 2nd Division” level to the coaches who seem to have a negative knowledge of the game and the Assistant Manager who wants my job and will stoop to any level, including hunting me through the stadium with a crossbow, to get it.

Naturally I had to sack most of them, which might have lost me some money but certainly gained me a certain measure of security. To replace them I brought in World Cup winner Herbert Winner, ex-Singapore manager Barry Whitbread and Thomas Schumacher, who share the nationality and surname of both a man who used to be good at driving cars and a psychopathic goalie. With these trustworthy sidekicks, how can I fail? Don’t answer that.

And as a gift from me to you, here’s Katlego Mphela scoring against United.

Join me next time where we play our first competitive games, and I try to deal with the fact that my four best players all want the same position.

I looked at all your suggestions, I really did. Shane’s suggestion of breaking the Dynamo/Shakthar duopoly in Ukraine was hugely tempting, and would have made for a great story, even if it would have cost me the “I” and “Y” keys on my keyboard. Restoring AC Milan’s glory was another great idea, and who wouldn’t want to manage Ibrahimovic, Robinho and Ronaldinho? Pro Vercelli’s story has already been done, and done so well that I doubt anyone will ever attempt it again.

And through all the other suggestions, my mind kept flicking back to Omar’s idea of St. Pauli. Soon my bookmarks bar was full of stories of this wonderful club, a team with passionate supporters, genuine ideals and a nursery in their stadium. A team who could battle against the odds of being predicted to come bottom of the Bundesliga, and who could prevail. Provided I could get rid of about half the squad in the opening transfer window.

What greeted me on my first day at the fabled Millerntor-Stadium was not too bad at first. The squad is excessively large, especially so for a league featuring only 18 teams, although there is a surprising amount of quality in the side, especially in a forward line containing wunderkind Deniz Naki, on loan Richard Sukuta-Pasu and grizzled veteran Marius Ebbers. However, investment in a new goalkeeper will be my first priority, along with a new centre back and fullback, as I’ve always found it easier to score goals than to prevent them being scored, so a solid backline is essential if there’s to be any success taken from the season.

However, then came the sledgehammer blow. I told the board I could Avoid Relegation, and was “rewarded” with £110k transfer budget and £10k spare wage budget. Hopefully this can be augmented by the huge cull that I’m about to instigate in a bloated squad, but it still means that free transfers are likely to be the majority, if not all, of my buys. This could be harder than I thought. Still, no-one ever got anywhere by being negative. Except Jose Mourinho.

Think you know who I should buy, who I should sell or who I should make a series of increasingly desperate bids for before they sign for Stuttgart? Tell me below.

Where the final choices for the FM 2011 career are revealed, and a vote proposed.

The continuation of the Spanish league yellow cards problem means that I can’t really start a long term save until the hotfix is released (latest from SI says definitely not this weekend, I’d be hoping it is released on Monday). This means that there is two more days to decide on which career will be featured on The Offside. After all the good suggestions on the last post, I’ve narrowed down the options:

1. St. Pauli in Germany: Watch as this ragtag collection of anarchists and left-wingers take the Bundesliga by storm.

2. AC Milan/Juventus: Restoring a kneeling if not fallen giant of Italian football. Leaning towards AC.

3. Sevastapol/Arsenal Kyiv of Ukraine. Break the domination of Shakhtar/Dynamo Kyiv.

4. Newcastle. Been done before on The Offside, but everyone likes Newcastle. Right?

5. A roaming save. Load the top leagues of many countries and spend max. one season at any club, amassing as much silverware across as many countries as possible.

6. A Lower League save, dragging a club from the depths of football (most likely in England, Spain or Italy) up to its pinnacle.

Personally my favourite would probably be a St. Pauli save, reading up on their history and ethos has got me very interested. However, it’s you guys who have to read it, so ultimately it’s your choice. Please cast your votes below and the final decision will be made early next week. Other suggestions are welcome if they’re very special/interesting/cool.

I’ve never been incredibly lucky in life. Electrical equipment tends to explode when I’m around, and I once ruined a mate’s new bathroom by showering before the wall coating had dried. But today, all this has changed. For today a parcel arrived. It was not a prepossessing parcel, nor was it very large, but what it contained was of incalculable wealth (or £24.99, depending on how you look at it). Yes, this parcel contained my pristine new copy of Football Manager 2011.

Now that I have access to the full game and all of its joys, one question rears it ugly head: Who should I be? In my previous excursions into this virtual reality I have always done games with Arsenal, Newcastle and Kettering Town, along with whichever other clubs take my fancy (last year it was Ajax and Corinthians).

As the previous blogger appears to have disappeared from the face of the Earth, it is left to me to describe a career. So, who do you want me to be? Either pick one of my selections above, or make one of your own. Every idea, no matter how outlandish, is welcome. Just please don’t make me be Sunderland.

Comments below.

Football Manager is an annual series, which although undeniably a great thing does lead to one incredibly gut wrenching moment: when last year’s iteration of the game has to be deleted to make space for the new version. You don’t tend to get this with a lot of other games. Some, like FIFA, are principally console games and so the old disc can just be stored on a shelf. Others, such as GTA or COD, release new versions every few years, by which time you have completely drained the previous game of any playability (aside from my copy of SimCity 3000, which has followed me from computer to computer for nearly 10 years now), so the uninstallation is a quick and painless process.

However, FM is nothing like these games, you don’t just play it, you experience it, growing attached and giving personality to your group of statistics. I’ve been going on an almost genocidal cleanse of my computer recently, and decided that with less than a week until the full release and the demo already installed I could no longer justify having FM 2010 lurking on my hard drive, with almost 5 Gb of assorted kitpacks, skins and saved games around it, so today it went.

Before I could select the dreaded “delete local content” button on Steam however, I had to do one last tour of my teams, looking at overall best XIs and re-experiencing one last time those great moments: Messi scoring five against Atletico Madrid, Danny Drinkwater scoring the winner against Manchester United in Kettering Town’s first ever Premier League game and a rejuvenated Johan Cruyff knocking in a hat trick to secure Ajax’s third consecutive Champions League title. The moments that made last year’s game probably my favourite of the series, and one that may well get another chance in the dog eat dog world of my hard drive at some point.

But it is to the future we must look, and for me at least, the future’s bright. I’ll leave you with a clip of Jean-Paul Marna showing the threat that a Flair stat of 18 poses to Blue Square Premier defenders:

Marvellous.

p.s. Have you got any great moments from FM2010? Share them below.

Firstly, some features that I like:

1. New match engine/improved 3D. This has been a big improvement for me, in the two previous versions the 3D views, as well as being graphically unimpressive, were as jumpy as Goldilocks just after the three bears have come home. Now even on my 2 1/2 year old laptop I get to watch Shola Ameobi in all his glorious shaded backdropped glory as he spanks another chance wide.

2. Player/Press/Board interactions are now performed in a conversational style, and it’s awesome. No longer do you have to choose between calling your rival manager incompetent and insulting his squad depth, and no longer do you have to wait another day before asking your full back if it might not be a good idea to try clearing the ball once in a while.

3. Agents. You may curse them when they’re being unreasonable (15m agent fee for Fernando Torres!), but they add variety to what was a fairly staid feature before, and it makes you appreciate it all the more when your under-18 midfield starlet sacks his just before you want to start new contract negotiations.

4. The AI will make offers for your players. For actual money.

And now, in the interests of fairness, a couple of negative points:

1. There’s no money! Well, not as much as there was. This clearly reflects the current financial situation of many clubs (barring Man City, obviously), but it doesn’t bode well for me, given my penchant for selling off as much of the squad as possible in the first two weeks. I also once sold Adebayor for only scoring 59 goals in a season, as Ibra had got 60 and I didn’t need two work shy centre forwards.

2. But the lack of money doesn’t really matter, given that it’s actually quite hard to dismantle a squad, or even sell certain players. Transfer listing Joey Barton led to Kevin Nolan, Alan Smith and Andy Carroll queueing outside my office to complain about his treatment. And the new player interaction system doesn’t yet allow for an “It’s Joey Barton!” response. Instead you have to gradually degrade your man, putting him on the subs bench before easing him into the reserves, until he is desperate to go, pleading with you. Of course, all the while you’re paying him £80 k a week. Go figure.

In all, FM 2011 is a decent improvement on last year’s game, and well worth the £25.91 it’ll currently set you back on Amazon, the best price I’ve found so far. And face it, for the possible 1000+ hours of gameplay, it’s a bargain, as no other activity offers anywhere near the same cost/time efficiency. Go buy it!

p.s. What new features did everyone else like/hate? How are you finding the demo? And what’s the most you’ve had to pay an agent?

p.p.s. I’ll leave you with this 11 second illustration of my managerial genius, which has nothing to do with the fact that Robin van Persie is excessively good at football. For best quality in the bottom right of the video change 360p to 720p.

Anyway, this is just a quick post to introduce myself to the site, and to explain what I’ll be doing.

My name is Dave, and I’ll be writing features about the forthcoming game. This will include articles on various tactics and strategies for playing FM, on the various new features in the game as well as lists of “top players in so-and-so division”. In other words, the sort of thing that doesn’t necessarily come up in career posts, such as the one to be started by Max, but that still makes for valuable reading about the game.

If you have any requests about features, players or teams you’d like me to write about, all you have to do is ask in the comments section below and I’ll do my best. When I’m not leading Kettering Town to Champions League glory that is…

I like first days. You have to be polite and attentive. You have to pretend you care about what you’re doing, as though this new rung on the employment ladder is the most important moment in your life. You smile, mumble and listen, looking like a foetus in a suit. But that isn’t who you are and that certainly isn’t who I am. It’s hard to make a good first impression so I won’t try to.

Football Manager and I are Sid and Nancy, I can’t stop injecting her poisonous goodness into me; regardless of how much I beat her back. I adore the game, truly adore it. At a time where I have all but given up playing computer games, I’m still clocking up over 1,200 hours worth of time playing Football Manager 2010, in a career that has spanned three decades and taken in over nine different countries, with definite fluctuations in fortune. The joy to be found in having an effect on a team, be that positive or negative, is the major factor that keeps me addicted. If it was purely about the success, then I would be found sat in the special chair managing Barcelona to quintuples every year.

No, my managerial ethos is firmly within the realms of reaping what you sow. I start unemployed with the lowest possible reputation and pray some inebriated fool thinks I’m pretty enough to manage his club. My addiction to this method of play is so sincere I haven’t even managed my own club, Leeds (yes you can leave now if you want), since Football Manager 2007, at least not in the full game, I’m assuming the six month trial in the demo doesn’t count…

Which kind of brings us nicely onto the next iteration of the series, the imaginatively titled Football Manage 2011. When the demo is released I’ll be covering the new features we’ve been promised in more detail, but as it stands the supposed marquee features this year are a new training system (two thumbs up), dynamic league reputation (two thumbs up), social networking features (one thumb up) and agents involved in contract negotiations (thumb up the arse). Not quite as revolutionary the introduction of 2D was, but then compare that to the introduction of the ability to be a female manager and, well, it seems like the wheel was just introduced to the mass market.

Of them all, dynamic league reputation has the promise to offer those of us who toil in the less renowned backwaters of the globe an inkling of hope for our, often fruitless, efforts. The idea is that, as in real life can be witnessed with a league such as Russia’s, better performances from one or two teams on the continental stage can visibly improve the attractiveness and value of the league they play in. Talk amongst the communities is of seeing the likes of Portugal and Turkey rubbing shoulders with the likes of Spain and England, but for the more hardcore (read socially retarded), we have have designs on seeing Iceland, Ireland, Israel and other small countries that don’t begin with the letter ‘I’ up there with the best of them. Although the likelihood of seeing Lionel Messi carving up the Eircom league is pretty slim, given that realistic estimates are that it will take around thirty seasons to take a small country to the top. But having an improvement that allows for an evolving world to exist outside of your direct influence is hugely promising and may add that final piece of immersion that can so often be lacking in the robotic world of multiple choice press conference answering.

I’ll leave you now with the latest piece of FM news, the, erm, trailer that was released today. It’s a bit shit, if I’m honest. The semi-inspiring versions in FM10 and FM09, whilst being pretty average, can’t compare to the level of tackiness produced by the following effort:

Don’t worry, I’ll re-convince you to buy the game in forthcoming updates.

The release date for Football Manager 2011 has been announced, and it’s November 5th, 2010. We want someone to write a blog about the new game here on Football Manager Offside. If you think you’ve got what it takes to make a longterm commitment to blogging about FM2011, then read our application guidelines here and then send us an email.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please put your hands together to welcome Sunderland #9, Fat Ronaldo.

Not a lot of people put their hands together to welcome him. There was a general feeling of ‘what the fuck?’ around the club, and the press gawked at him with the bug-eyed disbelief of mid-western tourists stumbling upon a beached whale at his unveiling. Peasants. They couldn’t see what I saw, their little minds couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of awesomeness that was about to be unleashed. Fat Ronaldo would rise from the ashes like a magnificent phoenix, and deliver me the sword of Gryffindor to slay all those in my path to European domination. And I would call him Fawkes, and he would know me as Harry, and I would make 15 babies with Hermione…