Three seasons with Yokohama F. Marinos in Football Manager (2024 FIFAe World Cup format)

For those living under a rock for the past few days, Football Manager is now an esport. The FIFAe World Cup with Football Manager was hosted in Liverpool, England last weekend, where twenty contestants from 19 nations were invited to compete for the inaugural championship. Those twenty managers (along with an assistant each) were split into four equal groups, and each had its own designated club to manage across a three season save. Seasons were capped at 9 hours playtime, with scoring applied to various achievements across the competition formats. After the three seasons, the tournament broke off to become a Fantasy Draft. Whereby the top four managers from each group played one another. But I didn’t watch that because I was at the beach all day.

Why Yokohama F. Marinos?

I wanted to do Japan in FM since it was launched at the start of the year…I just needed inspiration in getting me there. Well, that inspiration came in seeing what the five managers in Group A did at FIFAe. All five were good, but Germany were extra quality (SEHR GUT). They won it all: across 219 games (all comps) they lost only 5 times and finished the three season save with an astonishing 92.7% win rate. Is this unbeatable? No. But do I think I can come anywhere close to this level of elite FM’ing? Absolutely no chance, but I will give it a go.

It’s also the Group at the FIFAe I watched the less, with no English speaking representatives…I found myself naturally gravitating towards the two English streams and the French one. But most of my time was actually in Zealand’s stream, who rekindled his sports broadcaster love to do a brilliant job of summarising the event as a type of NFL Red Zone broadcast. If FIFA are reading (they won’t be) then please get him back next year.

So, not watching a lot of Group A has strangely made me attracted to playing the save afresh, experiencing the league + seeing how good I actually need to FM in order to maintain that insane win-rate! I mean, 92.7% is utterly ridiculous isn’t it? 👏

Save Premise

I cannot replicate the in-tournament conditions that Germany were experiencing (basically RDF shouting from the rooftops whenever he had a scorgasm). However, I’ll start with exactly the same save file that the guys started with, which can be downloaded from the FIFAe website. My seasons will be capped to 9 hours of play, but because I have a job, busy life and kids…I will have to undertake the save in 2 hour stints across the autumn of the FM24 life cycle. I broadly plan to devote the allotted time in this order, but I will ensure I use a timer on my iPhone:

Hours 1-2 (session one) - Backroom staff, Scouting, Squad Evaluation + Tactic Building and Training.
Hours 2-8 (sessions two, thee and four) - The season! Games on Key highlights, six hours of fast paced FMing to get done in time. Will it be enough time? No idea.
Hour 9 (session five) - Squad Evaluation, Contracts + Player Signings.

Scoring Mechanism

In keeping with the FIFAe competition, I’ll apply the same scoring methodology to see how far off I am from the Germans…

Note - the ‘Daily Challenge’ is as follows:

Day 1 - beat local rivals.
Day 2 - get a player to 12 assists.
Day 3 - sell a player for 2.5 million euros (no installments) to an European top flight club.

Below is the breakdown of how Germany did, and my seasonal FMing…which will be posted as-and-when I finish the seasons (if not sacked)!

Season 1

Here we go…you can listen to me talk about Season 1 via my Apple AirPods:

Here is the 4231 narrow tactic mentioned in that video…

Here are some trophy wins, which takes me to 124 points (which puts me level with Türkiye in 2nd place)…

League position - 1st (50 points)
All-Japan cup - Winner (10 points for reaching final + 5 points for trophy)
Japanese League Cup - Runner Up (6 points for reaching final)
National Supercup - Winner (5 points)
Champions League - Winner (20 points for reaching final + 15 points for trophy)
Challenge of the day - completed (5 points)
Managerial Rating - B (8 points)

Season 2

I did well, but not nearly well enough to keep up with the likes of the FIFAe contestants in Season 2 of Yokohama Marinos. Amassing 94 points in total for Season 2, the points score took me to a combined total of 218 from S1 and S2, placing me 5th behind Germany, Türkiye, Belguim and Norway. You can hear me talk about it a bit more below (soon)…

Here is a closer look at some of the players recruited as part of the monstrous €30m squad rebuild: