I did it!

It's only my first season at Bromley, and I've managed to get them promoted from Blue Square Bet South!

I finished second behind Ebbsfleet –– who was pretty much untouchable –– after an amazing unbeaten run at the end of the season. I was pretty much a low-mid table team for the first third or half of the season, and slowly climbed up the table. I earned my promotion through the playoffs, and beating Eastleigh in the final after extra time.

I actually didn't know how the promotion/relegation works all the way down the leagues; apparently, since Blue Square Bet has North/South, only 2 teams get promoted (champion and winner of playoffs). The next league up is the Blue Square Bet Premier; from which the bottom 4 teams are relegated, 2 to North and 2 to South. From Premier, there's League 2, and then League 1, Championship, and finally the Premier League. Current plan is to take Bromley all the way to the Premier League, maybe make them a decent mid/top table team there, and then take back my Manchester United.

That's one gone...

I have no idea what Jose Mourinho is doing with the Manchester United that I left, but only 2 years later, 5-6 of my starters want to leave the club. Four of them have had their transfer list requests granted.

The first one to go? Justin Bennett.

It's even more difficult than I expected to stop myself from taking my United back. These are great players that deserve to start for Manchester United. Bennett, especially, got through United's youth system; made it into the first team at the age of 18/19; he...he should be a United player until he retires! :(

This is much harder than I expected

In my last FM12 game, where I resigned as Man Utd manager, I decided to take the job of managing England national team for World Cup Qualifiers. I wanted to manage a lower league team, and since I had to add those leagues, I had to wait until the current season ended before those leagues were added to the game. That meant I had about half a season with nothing to do, so I thought why not.

I think I'm doing pretty well as England manager.


However, once the lower leagues had been added, I looked for an opening at a Blue Square Bet North/South club. I randomly picked a club, and it happened to be Bromley. I had pretty much no budget; wage budget £575 per week, and no transfer budget whatsoever.


Hopefully I'll get the hang of it by the end of the season, and start moving up the leagues soon. It's quite a learning curve, going from Manchester United arguably the best team in the world, with plenty of world class players, to a team with players hired on no contract.

My current plan is to take Bromley all the way up to the Premier League, and maybe play a season or two there, before taking United back, if possible. Or maybe by that time I'd be too attached to my Bromley players?

It actually hurts a little

With all the news about FM14 coming out, I got excited in starting a new FM game, with a new challenge. My last game was actually also a new challenge, and it's going pretty well. But I wanted a new one. First, I tried Classic Mode on FM13 Demo, and I got about halfway through the season in second place to City.

This time, I thought, why not create another save for my first game, in which I'm doing very well in the 8.5 years I was there, and resign?