That was the message greeting us as I loaded up FIFA 20 this week, it’s a totally different world out there than we are used to, life as we know it has changed for the foreseeable future, thank god for games as a way to escape the scary goings on in the world right now.
Things were also very dim for me within my Crystal palace CM, season 3 can pretty much be classed as a write off. After the Europa League final and FA Cup Semi-final last season, the aim to push on was great, the board expected it, as did the fans, what they got was a very inconsistent season and a disappointing league finish.
10th place, no European football again, and that was only due to a late surge during April & May where we managed to go 7 games unbeaten, and rack up a few points to pull us from 15th to 10th, as previously mentioned the FIFER v2.1 gameplay mod really does bump up the difficulty, and I’m still only on Professional level, but the AI is so much more clever, and presses and tackles a whole lot more, space is at a premium and the AI is a lot harder to break down.
Andre Kramaric, once again proved his worth by managing to notch a 20 goal season despite our poor form and him only playing 34 games all season in all comps, he was right up there again for the golden boot as can be seen by the top scorer table below.
He also made his way into the team of the season.
Nevertheless, our form had been so poor, and failure to win a single trophy saw several of my key players take a huge dip in morale and happiness, with around 5 first team players all signalling their desire to leave, unfortunately Kramaric was one of the exodus, and had to be moved on after I repeatedly rejected buds for him, my Chairman stepped in and demanded I sold him.
Grimaldo, my 88 Rated LB also left for Barcelona for £92.6 million, £86 million of which was assigned to my transfer kitty, along with the 20 odd mil we got for a tenth placed league finish, meant I had some decent money in order to try and rebuild, should I still have the job come the end of the season, which I severely doubted.
The above pictures tell a thousand words, The team had failed, several big name, revenue earning players left, the board were not happy, I was facing the sack, but somehow, for some reason, past merits taken into account possibly, they gave me a stay of execution, and kept me on for another season, season four, right, game on, time to rebuild.
Rhiann Brewster was one of several signings made, £42 million was needed to secure him, and on the right, you can see him walking off the pitch with the match ball after scoring a hat-trick in a 5-3 loss on the opening day of the new season vs Man City, he’s proving worth every penny, pace, agility, finishing prowess, early signs are he will become a club legend.
we also signed Semedo (CDM), Puillar (LB), La-Catalla (CB) a backup goalkeeper, and Mason greenwood on a 2 year loan deal from Man Utd.
New Kits, new sponsor, updated stadium adboards, and its all to play for.
A few goals from the back end of season 3 and the first few matches of season 4.
FIFAFX.com 
I like the flick on by Meyer(?) for the Gomez goal. Hopefully your new signings will gel and you will end up in pocket. How is your youth set up looking?
By the way the second picture in the post is quite small, and in the paragraph about Brewster’s hattrick the words “proving worth every penny, pace” have somehow ended up in a span and been assigned a serif font.
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Chris99 – Youth setup is ok, have had a few good players come through, only one has broken into the first team squad though, just scouted a new new players, so keeping an eye on them.
I will go and fix the formatting, put post together at 1:30am this morning on the gaming PC with a wireless mini keyboard.
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Paul – good effort to claw back some league position and it’s probaby what saved the job for you and about what I’d expect, the game is never going to give you the bullet unless you seriously cross the line into the failure zone. Having said that I remember ‘only’ making the playoffs with Coventry in FIFA19 last year and getting sacked, so it can be a very binary thing too.
Lovely new kits, but what the hell is that sponsor logo?! Did you have an attack of cabin fever! I’ve never heard of whatever company or brand it represents so to me it’s just an… extraordinary-looking design, is the best way to put it 🙂
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Paul – re. your comment above, speech recognition software has come a LONG way in recent times. I’ve been using various bits and bobs – voice dictating text messages, emails etc – and the error rate is so low that it’s worth attempting again if you bounced off it before. A text that would take me minutes to write takes half a minute to speak aloud and a few moments to correct any errors (usually just punctuation).
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NG – You mean the King logo ?
They are a mobile games developer, a subsidiary of Activision, they make mobile games like farm frenzy, Jewel clash etc.
I just liked the scripty bold design, it stands out and is something dfferent.
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nG – If you are unaware, PES Chronicles is down. Have Konami got fed up with you talking about FIFA too much?
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Yeah – Error Establishing a DB connection here too.
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Thanks for the heads-upses lads, but I was happily getting a lot of sleep at the time and didn’t notice. It looks like it was down for about 20 minutes in total, a semi-regular occurrence I’ve always assumed is webhost maintenance or the like.
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good effort surviving the sack Paul, and look forward to watching the rebuilding. Nice to see you reunited with Brewster. Or was he one of Darryl’s last year? I lose track.
It does seem like FIFA is a bit more reasonable with sacking these days, a few years ago it could be very harsh which made it hard to survive a temporary struggle while building for the long term. The first couple of seasons in my highly enjoyable current Exeter career saw us finish bottom then second bottom of League 2 which would not have been tolerated previously; hitting all the youth development goals etc seemed to compensate for league failure. Correct decision by the board of course given that we’re now competitive in the Champions League. not-Greg’s FIFA19 episode with Coventry a counter-example though
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Abbeyhill – The PC Mod tweaks the board objectives/sackings to be much more realistic, if you fail an objective but have a good cup run then its more likely you’ll survive, or don’t win the cup but achieve European qualification etc, it also takes into account what you did in the previous season and goes towards you board trust rating.
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