Ten years. Ten seasons. Is it a lot or a little? Firstly, it’s the same number of seasons as in FM20 I played with Celaya in Mexico. Secondly, the last tenth season was already the longest of all (mentally) because everything I wanted was to end the save. That means ten seasons is enough. Third, if I consider there were more than thirty days of intensive work during the EURO final tournament in real life and my second son was born at the beginning of May, playing ten seasons in a combination with writing and trying to keep the enjoyment from playing/writing, is something like a miracle in my eyes.
One of the most visible improvements of the club were facilities 100%. I edited the stadium before the save started and I created my own with a capacity of 8,000 with both stands behind the goals for standing. The stadium was improved during the save and the capacity increased to its maximum - 12,000. The matches in the Champions League or Europa League were unable to play with the maximum capacity as the stands without seats are not allowed for the European competitions. But it didn’t matter, we just had a lot of matches with 10K.
The interesting was that the home matches against IFK Göteborg (our biggest local rival) were played at the Gamla Ulevi stadium because of the big interest from fans of both teams.
The training facilities were improved during the save to the State of the art and youth facilities to Superb, just one step before the top level too. The estimated value of the squad went from €360k to #871M.
Probably as usual in your saves (*longer saves than two-three seasons), the coaching and recruitment team was improved a lot. We started with two coaches and one scout in 2020 and I was unable to hire someone. Or maybe better said, it was hard to convince someone with a real quality to sign for us. But the save ends when the club has 15 coaches and 8 scouts + HoYD/DoF etc.
The promotion from the Superretan was the most important for the club and for the save too. We moved to the top tier in 2021 (in our second season) and we won 7 league titles from our 8 seasons in the top tier. It was very straightforward after that first season and when I settled down with all players, the system and everything around, it was competitive domestically despite not using only the best Swedish or Scandinavian players.
Two Europa League trophies are an unexpected bonus.
If you were a regular reader, you will remember what big European club was very active in terms of buying our young players. It was Bayern with Zinedine Zidane as their manager. The game informed me about the fact Zidane was at our every second or third match as he is interested in some of our players. It wasn’t a thing from the beginning of the save logically.
Our outgoing transfers during the first part of the save were mainly locally-based and mainly loans. Or transfers for small fees. The first wave of big transfers happened in 2025 when we sold players for €9.5M (mainly to China) including the first one to Bayern. It was Gabriel Rehnberg for €2M. It was over €30M next year and €37 in 2027.
But back to Bayern. Rehnberg was followed by Valdemar Harder for €2.5M in 2027. One transfer per year would be probably a normal thing. But they came for the other six players just during the 2028 calendar year. And they bought two more players in 2029, in the last season of the save.
That means Bayern signed 10 players from GAIS between 2025 to 2029 for a total fee of €19,3M. I’m not sure what was the strategy by Bayern, or their transfer policy, but any of these ten players made at least one appearance for the first team. They all played for the Bayern II team in the third Bundesliga. But they all wanted to go here…
“No way he’d be signing a non-newgen at this stage of a save!”
I know many people don’t like to play a single save for too long because of newgens take over the game. Ted_Redwood really is not one of them and the quote above from the recent FEO’s blog post is a great example. TedRedwood belongs to the group of people who like to sign a lot of newgens. A LOT.
And what about me? The FM20 and FM21 saves were both similar in terms of the squad core as I had real players for the whole or most of the time of the save. I’m probably too big romantic or something similar but I like “one-club men”.
That’s probably the main reason why I like to keep some players in the squad for the whole time of the save. Or until they retire. Or until they really struggle to stay in the club, mostly due to no motivation to continue in the club but this reason is not too often now as my saves are not too long as before.
I have 11 real players at the end of the save in the squad of 25 players. Five of them are 30+ including 36 years old keeper Andreas Linde or 33 years old striker Flamarion. All these players had some part in the FM21 story and my save. Defender Felix Beijmo has probably the smallest one as he is the shortest time in the club of all but that’s not important.
I will start with the keeper Andreas Linde, the eldest player in the squad. I signed him in 2025 for €575k from Molde where he was almost 11 years. His 64 clean sheets in 171 appearances are good.
I like having Icelandic central defender Axel Óskar Andrésson in the squad for five seasons too, same as Tom Strannegard for six years as he was able to play as LWB, CM or DLF(S). Maybe that was his biggest weakness - the versatility - as he didn’t have a stable position.
It’s obvious that my standout real players were Anton Snibb, Victor Blixt, Matt O’Riley, Nuha Jatta and Oscar Aga. Sorted by the positions, not by the popularity despite I wrote a separate post about striker Oscar Aga who became my favourite player (probably).
The best thing about these five players is also the fact that I paid almost nothing for them. Snibb & Jatta were already in the club, Blixt was bought for free, Aga for €17.25K and Matt O’Riley was signed for a free twice during the save while we got €1.8M for him after two seasons as Burnley bought him before they released him after four seasons.
Each of these five players will somehow stay in my memory when I will talk about the Football Manager 2021 in the future.
⚽️ Oscar Aga because of his goals and clinical finishing.
©️ Anton Snibb because he was my main captain of the save.
🦸🏻♂️ Nuha Jatta mainly because he never wanted to leave the club even when Chinese money was flying around Göteborg and he became the true one-club man.
🔎 Matt O’Riley was that kind of player I didn’t think about before the save but he became that player I wanted to sign when I thought about the combination of Sweden and English players, despite the fact he decided to take Norwegian nationality during the save.
🌟 And Victor Blixt was that wonderkid I found randomly in the Swedish third tier and he moved to Helsingborgs in August 2021 in real life and he already made his Superretan (Swedish 2nd tier) debut already. (Helsingborgs still had the chance to win the promotion to the top tier when I wrote this post with 7 games to go.)
The 3-5-2 formation was the only one I used during this save and during the ten seasons/years with GAIS. There was only a short spell when I moved from the version with the wing-backs to a flat midfield with 5 players. It was because we had all full-backs (natural and retrained) injured for a couple of weeks or months and I didn’t have any other option. I didn’t even have enough youngsters in our reserve team or U19 team to promote them to the first team.
I experimented with the central defender with stopper and cover duties against different opponents - mainly when they played with one, two or more strikers to stop their attacks. I enjoyed searching central defenders to make them our set-piece threats via my set-piece search filters. I enjoyed swapping Cross From Deep instruction between the left and the right WB players depending on the opponent’s formation and if they played Mezzala or not.
I liked using two Advanced Forwards during one season before I realised I will always rather used the Deep Lying Forward because it’s easy to just turn around the slow defender and pass the ball to Oscar Aga…
But when you look at the pictures of the formation in the slideshow below, the main basics of the formation always remained the same. The last season of the save was played almost instructionless as I felt it worked the best with just a couple of simple tweaks.
I’m not sure what will bring the new edition of the game and how it will work but the less is more rule will always be the best for me.
*The pictures with formations go from 2020 as the first one to 2029 as the last one.
Nine years and 215 days. That’s how long this save lasted since I hit the create the new game. I already mentioned the promotion from the second to the top tier. In the end, the league titles or cup wins are the most important. We won 8 league titles and 10 cup competitions.
The Svenska Cupen was our 7th time in a row between 2022/2023 to 2028/2029. And we were also runner-up in 2021/2022. I think it’s clear to say that my obsession with winning the domestic cups is still alive.
We scored 917 goals in 461 matches during this save and conceded 373 goals.
Overall stats: 65% win percentage
I had a couple of aims of the save and I mentioned in the opening post a months ago when I started the save. It was nothing complicated and most of them are based on what most of the people do no matter if they write about their saves or not. I just like to review how these aims went for me in the last months. It’s some kind of therapy and some kind of self-report if I enjoyed the save or not.
Develop & sell within Sweden or to other European countries ✔️
The manager records screen tells me that I sold 62 players for €110M during this save. I won’t count all of them how many of them went to other Swedish clubs and how many went abroad. But I would say it was around 60% Swedish (or Scandinavia) and 40% abroad.
Create the scouting network around Scandinavia nations ✔️
I signed 93 players during this save (for €37,5M). A lot of them were young prospects who I wanted to develop and sell. I experimented with worse players in terms of their attributes but with a positive personality, or vice versa. Some of them were released, some of them sold for small fees and many young Danish newgens I bought during the save went abroad for big fees. It’s also important to mention that I tried to sign most of the young players for the lowest possible fee.
Be tight financially as always ✔️
We had -€663,048 bank balance in December 2020 when the first testing season of the save ended. We had just €23K per month available in the wage budget and we had no money in the transfer budget. It’s funny that despite we ended the first season in red numbers, we still had almost €100K profit that season.
How the bank balance looks in December 2029 when the save ended? €133M with a €17,7M profit at the end of the 2029 calendar year. The transfer budget is over €67M while 2029 was the fourth consecutive year when Spend the original transfer budget aim in the club vision was rated by Very Disappointed.
If something can prove my financial strictness and boredom in one it’s the final state of the wage budget and how much we spent at the end of the save. The wage budget was €4,693,588 per month. At the end of the last season, we were spending €490k per month. That means there was still around €4.2M per month available. If only I would be able to buy some car or house within the game for all that money…
Develop solid 3-5-2 formation ✔️
I wrote about it more above in this post and I’m sure that if you consider all the results and goals we scored/conceded and trophies we won, we can say it was a successful try.
And that’s it for FM21 and about the save with Göteborgs Atlet- och Idrottssällskap aka GAIS. It was a nice save. The Football Manager 2021 had a lot of PROS & CONS.
I will rather not talk bout everything. Some previous versions were more enjoyable in my eyes, something was better in FM21 in comparison with past. I hope some things I like, and they didn’t work in FM21 properly, will be fixed and I will enjoy the new edition even more. Hopefully.
Thanks for reading and take care.