Dan

As I've been saying for at least two years now - our fans need to put every single effort into at least making their lives as miserable as they make ours. The club is literally dying in front of our eyes and that is their doing. Make them feel the wrath of that. Our fans are far, far too soft. We've shown we can be bullied.

On that first two? 24th comfortably.

He's gonna...

Worst result in our history all considered?

Should be immediately. We knew what we were getting. Unwelcome here. Get him out.

"Will boss League One" 😭

Could we 'actually' do three in a row?

BUMP. Some of the receipts in here. Deary deary me.

Genuinely smash the place up.

People fell for this

Tripe.

Just give me a cohesive performance where we create a lot of chances, for once, I swear.

Lot less time in the window than people appreciate. I'd say it's nearly certain at this point we leave ourselves short - again.

Honestly I think I'm pretty tactically limited for how long I've played the game for. I see some people can just come up with something on a whim and it works a treat. It's hard to gauge whether I am just limited at this or whether I'm pickier about it. I think back to the Athens Kallithea save where it took me three years to get out of the second tier - I think on 24 I had so many go to ideas that I could just have gotten them promoted immediately. Morale had never been an issue for me until late last season - we hit a genuine blip of bad underperformance. I was really sure I'd lose the cup final but I think I threw them, ironically, contradictory - with a tactical switch. I do think the ratings are often linked to your tactics. You can have players with fairly low average ratings where it doesn't really matter massively even though you think it is doing. In this system I'm playing now my left attacking midfielder, playmaker, gets decent numbers but the average rating game by game is pretty bad unless they assist or score. I changed the role to just an attacking midfielder, the average ratings got higher but I think the overall performance of the team dipped so I just decided to take the hit and change it back. I think against Mainz I simply threw the game. The game had 'sussed' our 4-2-3-1, hadn't really accounted for us playing 4-1-4-1 attacking and gaps opened up. I am just playing attacking against most teams now but I do feel it'll be penalised against the very best still. The United Europa League semi was a sign of this - they were good enough to pick us off.

Rudkin produces about 3 sackable offences a year. A complete freak of a situation he's still in a job.

That's about my entire list. With under two weeks to go. There's no chance. They're leaving us short again.

Don't think that's really true at all. We're definitely worse for it than most. Now unsure if I'm just contributing to it by saying this

I agree that sacking him already would make us look such a basket case that nobody would touch us for a while. We've made our bed with Martin. We've probably got to lie in it for a while now. That isn't me pretending I'm on board. I never have been and any chance I am is pretty low as well. So far I've seen little to think I was wrong. Disappointingly for the Martin doubters is that they have clearly wanted this bloke for a long time. He's very much their man. He'll get greater leeway than the likes of Cooper and Cifuentes did. Really wouldn't surprise me if we were 8th in January and he was still in charge, for example.

I came far too close to the sack last season to not make some pretty substantial changes this time around. Were things stale? Had we been tactically sussed? Were our players too comfortable? Who knows. I've not really suffered a drop off like that on FM for a long time. I went for an overhaul. We already had a pretty generous budget, but it was to become even bigger. Noah Darvich joins Leeds for £5.75mil and Noah Mbamba joins Nice for £6.5mil in what is a pretty steady start to the summer - two players who never properly broke into my team consistently so I wasn't upset to lose either. I managed to sell Christos Mandas, who had been awful for £9mil to Atletico Madrid. Tim Drexler to Villarreal for £6.5mil. Banzuzi I decided to cut my losses on and sell to Leverkusen for £5.75mil - he was not a bad player but something just never felt quite right, he was never quite as good as he seemed he ought to have been on paper. I got what I paid for Caleb Yirenkyi to Atalanta (£12.75mil). Completing the cull were Davor Starcevic (Al-Khaleej, £3.6mil), Lasse Isbruch (St Pauli, £1.3mil) and Kasper Davidsen (Napoli, £6mil). This left in total a budget of around £120mil, but with a huge number of positions to fill, particularly in midfield which had been totally decimated. Working from back to front, to replace Mandas in goal I opted for a cheap option in Moritz Nicolas from Gladbach. Aged 32 he'd been consistently steady for them for numerous years in the Bundesliga. I don't demand miracles from a goalkeeper, but I do at least demand that they aren't substantially below average. He will do for now - as not a lot really seemed available elsewhere that I was particularly keen on. He was joined by Japanese regen Uwabright Matsuhisa to come in as his backup for £2.6mil. The defence actually remained largely untouched, but the midfield was a bigger issue for me. In came Aljoscha Kemlein (Bremen, £3.3mil), Edoardo Biondini (Parma, £6.25mil) and Agustin Sancho (River Plate, £7mil) who were all pretty underpriced relative to their ability. Long time target Lamine Sadio came in from Nordsjaelland for £11mil as an attacking midfielder, with Rio Ngumoha (Liverpool) and Quentin Njdantou (PSG) arriving on loans with a view to permanent moves. I was kind of hoping for a 'slightly' better summer, but I won't buy players for good money who I expect to discard quite quickly and I think we had a mix of a good age profile and potentially a couple of real gems. We do unfortunately start slowly though. Defeat at Bayern in the super cup, and then just 4 points from our opening 5 games in the league - an admittedly very tricky set of fixtures, but losing at home to Wolfsburg despite absolutely battering them was unacceptable. With tricky games against Frankfurt and Bayern up next, I was really beginning to think I could be out the door. Thankfully, we got a solid point at Frankfurt and then got my first league win over Bayern, 1-0 at home. The Bayern win was the first of what turned into a run of 8 straight wins in the league. Are we back? I would say so. We put in an impressive Europa League showing as well, finishing 4th in the league phase and going unbeaten. The highlights being a 0-3 win at Betis and a 1-4 win at Feyenoord. January saw a bit of a hammer blow though, as my best academy prospect of the save, centre back Gavin Derby was taken by Arsenal for £22mil - a club record. This was closely followed by selling Patlan at last to West Ham for £20mil on deadline day. Significant signings of January included Mexican midfielder Tostin Tabaoda (£11.75mil) and Argentine centre half Thiago Silvero (£11.25mil). We still had loads of money left for a rainy day. PSG also decided to sell Ndjantou to Benfica in this window, leaving us a striker short. But that's where Hideki Miwa came in above. I trusted Waehler and Moerstedt, and for the most part, they did OK. The most significant thing that happened this season was a tactical switch, mid game against Mainz at home earlier in the season. I'd read somewhere that a 4-1-4-1 system with two attacking midfielders was effective on this version, and it wasn't a huge transition from what I was currently playing. At 0-1 to a struggling Mainz, I made the switch, we won 2-1 and we never really looked back. This isn't the first time this has happened in a game with Mainz on this save. We finally lost our DFB Pokal dominance with yet another home loss to Wolfsburg, this time on penalties, before remarkably making it three defeats in a row to them in the away league fixture. February wasn't our greatest month, but it did prove to a blip rather than a meltdown. March saw us take Anderlecht out of the Europa League and onto a personal grudge match with PAOK in the quarters - who we beat 1-0 in both legs. I usually start with a balanced mentality in games but often turn it to positive when I need a goal. In one game, after conceding early, I went attacking - completely by accident and we scored immediately. I kept it on and we ended up winning the game comfortably 1-3. Interesting. This new found all out attacking approach was naively put to the test in the Europa League semis against Manchester United, and despite an OK performance, we lost 2-4 needing a bit of a miracle. It never arrived - a 2-0 loss at Old Trafford after largely having the better of the game. Very encouragingly though, we finished the Bundesliga with 9 wins and 2 losses from our final 11 games, and had scored in every single game since the 0-1 loss to Wolfsburg on the 5th matchday. Bayern's dominance was finally ended, but not by the team I hoped for. Despite their ridiculous 104 goal haul, they finish 2nd to Gerardo Seoane's Dortmund. But we were pretty comfortably 3rd by the end, rendering last season as a bit of a blip and things firmly back on track going into the final ever season at the Ruhrstadion. The finances are brilliant. The team is good. The tactics seem to be working. But I feel by now, having played the game this long, that I ought to really be able to push for the title next year. I do wonder how many of the players I'd sold last year would've reacted in the new tactic and whether I could've just done that and kept some of them. But the new buys were for the most part impressive. Nicolas, while not perfect, and not a long term solution was steady enough and better than Mandas. Silvero wasn't as good as Darby but was still OK. Biondini proved a real bargain and was quality, now worth north of £30mil. Kemlein started slowly but grew into a really steady allround player. Sancho was the opposite, starting well but really suffering post tactical switch. Ngumoha proved the pick of the signings, and out of contract in the summer I wasted no time in getting him signed permanently, on a free transfer - our new highest earning player on £86k a week. We're good, but I definitely see room for improvement in the team still.

I do think Leicester people being very self-deprecating is a part of it. You go around and ask people from here what they think of it, the majority will just say "shit, move somewhere else" etc..

Worryingly I still think a midfielder on top of what I already think (which is 2, maybe 3 centre halves and another striker). A want rather than a need is a left back to rotate with McFarlane. Knowing us we will go and sign another right back despite that being probably our 2nd best covered position behind attacking midfield.

I used to have it turned on a while ago where I'd let a member of stuff (usually HOYR) make the odd signing but realised quite quickly it was pointless and that they would just waste money on players I have no use for at all. Goalkeepers have been a chronic issue for me. The stats on the game about them now are just stupid as well - virtually every one of them saves less than they are expected to. I'd be happy seeing them introducing some sort of XG on target kind of stat for this game, surely at this point this is achievable.

It's been massively ramped up this summer as well. So many stories from clubs about this kind of thing. Clearly a targeted thing. I wonder if this regulator will do anything about it. I have my guess.

If you want to be an even bigger pedant it was Tranmere v Rochdale and York v Crawley in the prelim round.

This is the biggest red flag - his signings don't even really supplement it. He turned out a bad egg and he needed binning, but at least with Winks I could see the logical fit. Stylistically he is suited to playing that way. Martin's signings that he's worked with before consist of a goalkeeper that looks terrible on the ball and an attacking midfielder that is not very involved, like a budget Perez. And there is plenty of talk he wants John Souttar too. Possession football isn't really my bag but it's remarkable how despite this being the clearest preference for the owner how many players we have who are totally unsuited to it. Possession football without suitable players is an absolute grim watch and likely to backfire.