Hello, and welcome along to a brand new series of my blog for Football Manager 2022. Before we get started on what I'll be blogging about his year, I thought I'd share a note on format first...

Despite enjoying the production of my fictional 'Trabzon Times' newspaper for FM21, I will concede that in the end it became too big a project for me to maintain, and that ultimately put me off writing it as often as I'd have liked. I enjoy writing about Football Manager, and while I hope you also enjoy what's on the page, to be honest that's not the only reason I do it. I find it therapeutic to empty my thoughts and musings into a blog and when I'm put off writing, I also get put off playing the game as well, which isn’t ideal.

This year, I'm returning to a more traditional blog format where I'll share updates from the in-game world of Frank M. Athlete. These will include, but won't be limited to, how the team are performing on the pitch, any exciting player developments from the youth setup, and my general approach to troubleshooting when things will inevitably go wrong for us!

About the Save

You may recall my FM20 save was a series entitled 'Down the Danube', whereby I loaded up all the playable nations that the River Danube flowed through and I played a journeyman career at various clubs based in those countries. In truth, it wasn't a strictly accurate save, in the sense I travelled randomly up and down the river (as opposed to just 'down' it), and most of the clubs I managed weren't near the water at all in fact.

My FM21 'Trabzon Times' series was great fun, and being at one club allowed me to get further into the details of how the club operates, which is something I don't normally do. While I enjoyed the change in approach, I've missed that sense of career progression you get from a journeyman save, particularly when you're starting off at the bottom and working your way up to the top.

So with all that in mind, this series I'll be returning to Europe's waterways and will be working my way up the football manager ladder in a typical journeyman fashion along the River Rhine. Learning from my experience with 'Down the Danube', I'm planning to be a little more prescriptive this time, if only to add a bit of an extra challenge to the save. I'll be loading up all the playable nations the River Rhine borders or flows through, and I'll only be managing clubs from towns and cities that are situated on the river itself. By my count, that's a total of 21 clubs from twelve leagues in five countries (technically it's six countries, but we'll get to that later).

A Geography Lesson

Before I go through the clubs and leagues I'll be playing in, I just want to give a more detailed introduction to the main character of this series, the River Rhine. For full transparency, I ditched geography at school as soon as I was able to and so I'm far from an expert on the subject, but naturally a quick look on Wikipedia has told me everything I need to know to now be able to educate you on the subject anyway.

The River Rhine is Central and Western Europe's second longest river, behind the River Danube. It is approximately 1,230 km (760 miles) long, and flows from the mountains in Switzerland through to the North Sea coast of the Netherlands. You may notice that I have referred to the river with it's English name, the Rhine, however it would be remiss of me not to mention that in Europe, not everyone uses the English name for things (insert "shocked" emoji) and so it is known by many other names, including, but not limited to, the Rhein (German), Rhin (French) and the Rijn (Dutch).

The river itself begins in the Swiss Alps, and although there is often debate around the true source of rivers, Lake Toma is often referred to as the source of the River Rhine. From here, it meanders out to the Swiss border to the east along what is dubbed the Alpine Rhine, where it meets Liechtenstein and then Austria before flowing into Lake Constance on the Swiss-German border to the north. The river here is known as the High Rhine and heads west into Basel, before turning north again and becoming the Upper Rhine as it runs along the French-German border through Strasbourg and on to Mainz and Wiesbaden.

Now the Middle Rhine, the river angles out slightly and heads in a north-westerly direction to Bonn where it becomes the Lower Rhine as it moves through Cologne, Dusseldorf and Duisburg on it's way into Arnhem in the Netherlands. As a centuries-old major shipping route, there are many towns and cities along the river's course, but the majority of industry can be found along this stretch of the Lower Rhine where historically the vast majority of goods were imported in to.

As the river heads into the Netherlands it merges with two other major rivers, the Meuse and the Schedt, to form Europe's largest river delta. However, before it spills out into the North Sea, it splits into several other key waterways that work their way through the north, central and southern regions of the Netherlands. For the purposes of this FM22 series, I'll be using the two largest bodies of water on this stretch of the river as the "main" route of the Rhine. These are the Waal and the Nederrijn (and their major tributaries downstream), both of which reconnect near to Rotterdam before emptying into the sea to the west.

The main reason for me limiting which parts of the river to follow, is that if I included all the diverging and interconnecting rivers and waterways along this section then I would inadvertently be including every single Dutch football team in the save as well, which essentially goes against what I'm trying to create for this series.

Football on the Rhine

And so, here we are. The main event. If you paid attention in the last section, you'll have counted six nations that the river flows through or borders. These are Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria Germany, France and the Netherlands and in FM terms, five of these nations are playable with twelve leagues between them. Although you can't load up Liechtenstein as a playable nation, we can still play as a Liechtenstein-based team in the form of FC Vaduz who operate in the Swiss Challenge League, presumably because they feel it's more competitive.

FC Vaduz are also the team closest to the source of the Rhine, and so following the river's course, the next club we come to is Austrian based SCR Altach currently competing in the Austrian Bundesliga. Sadly, Austria Lustenau would also have been included here had they survived relegation from the Austrian Bundesliga 2 last season, but it wasn't to be.

From Austria we head back to the Swiss leagues next with FC Schaffhausen, situated 50km west of Lake Contsance, and then FC Basel further west again, who play in the Swiss Challenge League and Super League respectively.

North from here we come to the only French side on the river, RC Strasbourg, who operate in Ligue 1, before reaching our first of nine German teams along the river, with four of them based along this stretch of the Upper Rhine. In the order we reach them, they are Karlsruher SC (Bundesliga 2), SV Waldhof Mannheim (3. Liga), Mainz 05 (Bundelsiga) and SV Wehen Weisbaden (3. Liga).

The Middle Rhine is surprisingly vacant in terms of football and so it is 159km before we get to the Lower Rhine where our next five German based clubs are. We start with 1. FC Köln (Bundesliga) and Viktoria Köln (3. Liga) before travelling on to Bayer Leverkusen (Bundesliga), Fortuna Düsseldorf (Bundesliga 2) and MSV Duisburg (3. Liga). Special mention at this point for KFC Uerdingen 05 who were relegated from 3. Liga last season, but otherwise would have made the list as well.

Finally, to round off our journey, we reach the Dutch clubs, and are immediately greeted by N.E.C. Nijmegen and SBV Vitesse, both of the Eredivisie, and who find themselves on the Waal and Nederrijn respectively. Next up is FC Utrecht (Eredivisie), just north of the River Lek, which we can follow into Rotterdam where we find FC Dordrecht (Eerste Divisie) to the south east of the city, along with SBV Excelsior (Eerste Divisie), Feyenoord and Sparta Rotterdam, both of the Eredivisie.

I think you'll agree, that among those 21 clubs we have a wide ranging variety of different levels of quality, wealth and reputation, which should make the save an interesting one to follow.

Where to Begin?

In previous years, I would have started off unemployed, but since I'm only looking to be hired by one of the clubs listed, it makes sense to start off at one of them and go from there. Given that I want to begin my career at the bottom, it also makes sense that I go with the lowest reputation team available, and so I've used FM21 to help me work out which club that is.

As you can see from the table on the right, FC Dordrecht are listed at the top with a reputation score of 3750, which is similar to that of a low ranked League Two side, and a full 550 points short of Viktoria Koln who are next on the list. By way of comparison with some of the bigger sides, FC Basel are at 6400, Feyenoord at 7000 and Bayer Leverkusen are at 7650.

FC Dordrecht were founded in 1883 and are located in the town of Dordrecht which is situated in the province of South Holland on the banks of the Beneden Merwede, one of the major tributaries of the Rhine. The club are affectionately know as the Schapenkoppen (sheep heads) and have spent the majority of their recent history in the Eerste Divisie, having only ventured into the Eredivisie for a single season in the last 27 years. Despite a barren spell of late, the club have some honours to their name, including two Eerste Divisie titles in 1983 and 1994, as well as winning the KNVB Cup in 1914 and 1932.

It's safe to say that Frank Athlete's first job in management will be quite a challenge, with the club having very little by way of financial resources, and a stadium capacity of just 4,235. If reports are to be believed, the club have also gone through a high turnover of playing staff in recent years so it will be interesting to see how or if this is reflected in the squad dynamics as well.

All that said, I'd like to think that with a bit of hard work we can try and win promotion to the Eredivisie within a few seasons, and I'll look to cover that and other aspects of FC Dordrecht in more detail in the next update.

And that's all there is it to it. I can't believe you've read down this far, but hopefully you did so because you were enjoying yourself and not because you were scrolling down for the "back" button (it's at the top, silly sausage). If you'd like to read more of the blog you can visit CoffeehouseFM, or you can find me @fm_athlete on Twitter and FM Slack.

I've been FM Athlete. You've been "Guest subscriber #134". See you next time.