Lessons From Two Youth Academy Challenge Seasons

Things that surprised me about Football Manager

Lessons From Two Youth Academy Challenge Seasons

After two surprisingly successful seasons with Hallam in my modified Youth Academy Challenge save, I learned a few interesting things about Football Manager:

Pace and acceleration aren’t everything. We were able to win despite having a team that wasn’t all that fast. Squad cohesion seems to be a lot more important than most of us think.

Consistency isn’t everything. Many of our players are extremely inconsistent - and yet we’ve been able to do much better than most of my other saves. Again, I think this might be due to cohesion.

Tactics aren’t magic. Though I used a tactic that is known for having good results, we still struggled from time to time. Most notably, our struggles seemed to correlate with either periods of heavy injuries or periods in which key squad players were upset.

Playing with limited resources is more fun. I don’t think I’ve ever had a save quite as much fun as this one has been so far. As much as I love transfers, being forced to play with less than ideal players is a lot more fun than doing everything the efficient way.