What To Say
The Football Manager Blogger's Dilemma
What To Say
The hardest thing about writing a Football Manager blog is figuring out what to talk about.
In contrast, YouTube videos are quite simple. If you don’t have anything to talk about, you can always figure something out just by looking at your save. Surely somebody will be interested in the poor performances your left back has had, or in your newgen striker who is scoring the lights out.
Blogging is a bit different, however. The goal is to create something that can last, to write something that people months or years from now might find useful or insightful.
It’s also hard when you create videos faster than blog posts.
Confession
That’s right. My posts are not in sync with the pace of my Football Manager save.
For months I did it the “honest” way. I played and recorded only a single game a day, and wrote a single post for each game.
There’s a problem with that approach, however. Life happens, and sometimes you find yourself in a position in which it’s not easy or possible to write during the day.
The truth is that it’s a lot easier to write two or three posts when you have the time to do so. I learned this on my baseball blog a while back. Write two drafts a day instead of one, and you’ll find yourself far ahead of the work you publish in no time.
However, this becomes very difficult when you try to sync your gameplay up with your drafting. It requires planning ahead of time, and it certainly requires a lot of organization - things that I’m not very good at, I’m afraid.
Hope
There is hope for the future, however.
I’m going to focus my time over the next week or two on looking at tactical development. There is some good material out there, but it seems to be lost in a sea of bad advice and “trust me bro” analysis. Let’s see if we can work together to remove the weeds and find the good stuff.
Look — I know very well that the vast majority of Football Manager blogs don’t update every day. Heck, even the most visible Football Manager YouTube channels don’t publish every single day. I know that there’s a reason for that, and I know I’m up against the odds.
However, this game provides more than enough material for a daily blog. There are tons of topics to get deep into, from tactics to player evaluation to team talks to NPC interaction to a whole lot of other stuff. That doesn’t even touch on fancy things like the pregame editor, stuff that I’ve been hoping to really dig into for a while.
We’re going to go through as much as we can. We’ll take our time if we need to. However, I promise that this ride will be worth it — and I’ve got a good feeling that we’ll start making a lot of new friends along the way.