Dan

'Consistency' is basically impossible to ever achieve. It's why VAR is a waste of time.

https://x.com/Millar_Colin/status/2053531289303572763?s=20 Best tweet of the season. They really have ruined the sport. I hope this is just a bad phase rather than the norm.

It's about here and now for me even with these two. You see the garbage served up by who actually played and it's hard to believe they would've done any worse.

3rd best team in the country want both yet were deemed worthy of a combined thirteen starts - in our worst ever team. They get literally everything wrong. It's a farce.

Thank **** for that.

Hilarious point yesterday - Andrea Donno above, I accepted £2mil and a loan back from Porto for him on deadline day and he flipping turned them down who on earth is turning that move down. I would've been perfectly OK with that going through as well.

What was crap for me with these, and what I think partly led to my crap season the year before the title was that even though I got the money from Europe I didn't really see any of it for another year. I'm not a huge spender and generally get by (I've had to with the dross I choose to manage ) but I did think having our bank balance go from £100k to £3mil it was stupid for the board to not let me see any of it in transfers and wages for another year and it nearly got us relegated. The same will probably happen to you, you'll get a good budget next season. I'd probably advise going for it in Europe to build up more money while making sure you don't get relegated. Again, if you've beaten APOEL, you'll go through. There's some absolute dirge in the Conference League. I beat Larne of Northern Ireland 1-5, we were 5 up at HT, actually 0-2 up after I think 80 seconds which I've never seen before. I think I made about £4-5mil from going to the Conference League last 16 and that completely changed the game for me. It won't be as impactful for you in Belgium but it will definitely help. In Serbia it made me basically the 3rd richest team in the country overnight so the title, while a big achievement, wasn't hugely shocking IMO given Zvezda's drop off.

The wages point is a strange one in Serbia because it's just so out of kilter with virtually anywhere else in Europe bar the minnow countries. No country of its size, to my knowledge, pays its domestic players so poorly. Croes I signed as a bit of a prospect and he ended up fair better than I imagined but even as somebody who got signed as 'breakthrough prospect' he was earning 10 times as much as some of my more senior players. But due to the money influx I had a far bigger wage bill than I needed so I could afford it quite easily. I genuinely don't know how Croes came up - I wonder if it was an agent thing. I'm scouting younger players but I seem to get the odd one crop up, usually in a small Dutch team that's 5 star potential and available on a free. I did similar with Kallithea when I signed Sanders (sold for £4.5mil in the end). My scouting range is only eastern europe, I can afford to do worldwide now to be honest but it almost seems a little bit pointless because only a pretty small pool of players will actually come here. I usually target specific regions. Croatia and Slovenia being classed as South Europe is annoying as it means we're not picking anyone up from there and they would be handy. Even N'Tamon - again I'm not even sure how he's come up. It must be agents again. He just fit the bill perfectly for me beyond being Serbian. The key I guess with a league like this is using the foreign player slots for key, or potentially key players. I've not done too badly with the academy. Vrsac actually have a decent young goalkeeper at the start (Lazin) who I ended up selling to Zvezda for a pittance. Had another number 10 come through who made the same move. I'm quite regularly using three academy players in my squad as well, one of whom is now 20 but admittedly isn't better than Croes. It's useful having these for European registration though and you definitely want to try and get some involved somehow. I've got another attacking midfielder who is 17 and looks pretty exciting. I'm unsure how long I'll actually see this save through for though. Had this hankering for Japan but I did play again last night and got quite into this again. I need that flipping cup.

Relative to what our players serve up and what they're paid to do so our fans are extremely kind to them on the whole. I somehow doubt if it was framed in the same way at either of those clubs they would be quite so supporting or forgiving.

Cheap. I'd want to think it's bullshit but sacked by QPR, sacked by Oxford, to sacked by Peterborough fits the trajectory unfortunately.

I don't think they'll be hugely confident anyway but I'd be even more fearful if I was Arsenal watching this. It's looked more 0-2 than 1-1.

PSG are still the ones aren't they. Absolutely class team. Hope I don't jinx them.

With their track record I'm giving them very little time this summer to show signs of progress. Relegated 15 days ago. Still no indication if Rowett is staying or going. I know it was the same situation with RVN a year ago and plenty met similar criticisms with "he's obviously going" and I agree, I'm about 90% sure Rowett does go - but we don't know it for sure yet. If we don't hear something in the next week or so then strap tight. There's no excuse for it to drag on again and if they allow it to then we're making the exact same mistakes that got us relegated against huge odds a year ago. I'm expecting this to happen though. Track records matter.

Looks very good on the whole this does. What I don't get is how you just seemingly have no money ever. I thought by this point after a couple of years in the top flight you would at least have something to play with and not be at a point where losing your striker for £450k would completely kill you. That being said now that you've hit the conference league proper, that surely gives you something to play with, that was an instant £3mil or so just for being in it for us and if you can beat Sparta / Dun Streda over two legs then you'll definitely pick some wins up which is even more money per win. When I get to the stage you're at I often find the league form drops off and I miss out on Europe the next year, but the money we made from Europe leaves us well set for the season after and in some cases, like at Vrsac here, it's enough to actually get us a league win. Lots of timing involved. I got lucky that Partizan had a bad first half of the season and Zvezda had a bad second. Truth be told though I think the performance of those two, especially Zvezda is unrealistically bad. I think if I managed Zvezda with their wage budget I'd win a minimum of 30 out of 33 league games despite rotating Europe. It's absolutely ludicrous for them to drop points in half of their games. It's harder in Belgium than Serbia, obviously, but I wouldn't be surprised if next season you pushed for the league title - this year will be tricky though. I do find it peculiar how it works in Europe. So often you end up getting given harder games from less expected teams and I think it's a real fault in the game. I mean how on earth are FC Tirana giving me a harder tie than Kobenhavn? CSKA Sofia were a harder qualifier for me than Kobenhavn and Maccabi Haifa. I haven't played as much lately either, been a little busy but I was so accustomed to playing on a slow laptop that I can just fly through on this one I bought about six months ago. Think if I played it as often as I used to I could get through probably 2+ seasons in a week.

I can still see your images btw. Regarding players, worth putting a couple of faces to names. These are my personal three faves: I still think speed is king in lower leagues. Croes, Donno, and Gotea (who spoiler alert, I didn't buy permanently, I just couldn't pay £1.1mil) just ripped teams to shreds and N'Tamon covered against other teams doing similar to us.

I use snipping tool and just paste them into here if that helps.

I often think friendlies even against rubbish teams can be a quite good measure. You're going to win the game, but how convincingly it's done is often an indicator. With the two new January signings of Mateja Premovic (goalkeeper from 2nd tier Smederevo) and Elie N'Tamon (Ivorian CB from Stade Brestois) I thought I'd plugged probably our two main weaknesses, and very encouragingly we beat Bulgarian 2nd tier Bdin Vidin 0-9 in a friendly before a 3-0 win over 2nd tier Radnicki. We have a storming February and March, winning all bar one game with yet another loss to Radnicki Nis doing the damage meaning we got just 1 point from our 3 games against them this season, but on the flip side, we had 7 from the Zvezda games. We had clearly gone up a level. I saw very little weakness in our team at this point. Bubanj up front was quite streaky but passable. The trio behind him though... goodness me. Three pacey teenagers and nobody in the league bar Radnicki Nis seemed to have an answer to it. The Romanian Gotea had really settled into the team after an injury hit first half of the season. Australian Donno on the left was dangerous even if the average ratings weren't massively showing it. But the star of the show was Aruban winger Jayden Croes. Taken as a bit of a risk free punt in the summer, he was absolutely ripping the league to bits and I felt it was kind of inevitable one of the Belgrade clubs would pinch him off us. Enjoy him while he's here I guess. What was becoming clear though was we had a genuine shot of the league title. Zvezda were having a pretty mediocre season. The cluster of teams at the top had broken up and the title looked like bar a miracle it was heading either here or to Partizan, who had also massively picked up in the new year. We have another pretty flawless month in April bar a draw with struggling IMT and a 1-0 loss at Partizan. We were scoring for fun. The wins over Vojvodina and Cukaricki the obvious highlights. These are clubs that at the start of the game were probably ranked 3rd and 5th respectively in Serbia. Not only have we taken two of Cukaricki's better players but we're now absolutely massacring them in games. I said Bubanj was streaky and I wasn't joking - he got 3 against Vojvodina, 2 against Radnik Surdulica and 4 in the Cukaricki win including the eventual goal of the season winner at the end of the game where he dribbled from his own box near enough, unchallenged granted, and curled one in from 25 yards. We were taking the piss. But Partizan were matching us every step of the way. At worst, we were going to finish 2nd. We also had a cup semi final away at Zeleznicar Pancevo - funnily enough our home ground. This felt like such an opportunity. We win 0-1 in the semi final, admittedly totally dominating, but we're into our 2nd final in 3 years and will face, surprise surprise, Partizan. We're then hit with the old foe of the save. Macva bloody Sabac. It's just funny at this point against them. It doesn't seem to matter what I do, how we're playing, how they're playing (they've gone to pot after a good start), we just do not beat this team at home. That's 7 attempts and we're still yet to beat them. We've only scored in 3 of the games. This just feels a cursed fixture. We do only need 4 points from our final 2 games to seal the title though and one of the games is against already relegated Mladost Lucani away, who we swat aside with tease. We just need a point on the final day at home to TSC, not the easiest fixture, to be sure of the title. Partizan strangely host Zvezda on the final day. Good luck to the authorities. We make bloody hard work of it, and a bumper crowd of 1,872 (....) witness history. Partizan ended up losing anyway so it didn't matter. But we got it. It did require buying virtually an entirely new XI but we earned that money as far as I'm concerned and pretty much every signing nailed it. Bubanj won the golden boot with 23 goals. Cvetkovic and Jankovic in midfield were perfectly balanced. The trio behind the striker were great and Croes ended up getting 25 G/A from 30 games - in-fact his average rating from January onwards was north of 8.00. N'Tamon and Premovic I think did make the difference and allowed us to play even more aggressively, N'Tamon acting almost like a poor mans Van Dijk in style. The one blot, however, is another cup final defeat. And honestly, it was a miserable showing. We were comfortably 2nd best and lucky it was only 1-0. I do think Partizan are better than we are (well them and Zvezda obviously have better players), but we capitalised on them. What it does mean is that if I'm sticking true to what I said in that I want to go into these leagues and win the league and the cup, then I have to stick around here until we've secured the latter. But I've got a bit of a hankering for a save in the lower leagues of Japan for some reason. I will stick with these for at least another year, but I think that's where I'll head next.

This whole thing needs more attention and investigation.

All three domestic trophies! It's one of the main reasons I don't want them winning anything tbh.

I couldn't believe it was both him and Alvarez.

Massive underachievers in Europe.

Sorloth ****ing hell. That's a great chance.

Lucky ****ers Arsenal.

You would like to think it's some sort of silly rule preventing it happening. If it's seriously to do with not thinking it's worth it then fair play - they're somehow even more stupid than we thought.

Why did we not activate that buy clause in January? And then just sold him regardless in the summer?