FM18 Epilogue | BFC Siófok 2017 - 2045

The long journey has ended. It was one of the longest save I've ever had. And thanks to many reasons also unforgettable. BFC Siófok will always be in my memory as a club I enjoyed managing. Despite the (forced) sacking in the end...

I don't want to repeat myself and I don't want to write about the specific years and specific eras of the save. Not all of you like success and trophies 😜

One of the main key moments of the save was surely the promotion to the top tier but also the fact we won the first league title in our second season in the first division.

And we won it 24 times in a row. MTK Budapest was the runner-up for the most times.

The league titles meant Champions League football. And Champions League meant more and more money.

But it was not as easy as in the domestic league. We finished third and fourth in the group in our first Champions League participation but after some time we were better and better.

We won the first title in 2035 when we beat Tottenham and we beat the same team in the Final after five years to win it for the second time. This trophy was the first of five in a row.

As you can see in the picture below Manchester City was our bogey team but we also beat them three times in the Final.

It had to be City who beat us in the last season of this save as we lost 1-0 on aggregate in the Semi-Final.

Siófok changed from the very average second-tier club to the most dominant club in the country.

I'm sure if I would play it for the next six years I would win six other league titles and we would have 30 league titles same as Ferencvárosi, the most successful Hungarian club in terms of league titles.

But never mind, that was not my dream or my aim. I changed the recruitment policy several times during this save. It went from "Around The Lake" to the more international-based squad and back to the domestic-based squad in the end with 98% of our own players.

Same as we have dynamic rivalries in the game (we 'made' a rivalry with MTK Budapest and Puskás during this save) players and staff are always add to favourite personnel, icons and legends.

At the end of the save we have five people included between Legends - Gerardo Paolacci, György Benedek, Dominik Szoboszlai, Manos Pasas and Keysi Rensie.

Dominik Szoboszlai has a big part in my heart thanks to this save after he signed for BFC Siófok in 2025 and played for us until 2037 before he became a U19s coach and first-team assistant manager later.

Paolacci was my favourite foreign striker, Benedek was our long-serving master at right-wing and Manos Pasas was our record signing from PSG and he won five Champions League titles in five years.

There were a lot of other players I liked and I refused to sell them and waited until we will have enough funds to give them big contracts to keep them around.

We sold 173 players for €1.94B during this save and we bought 161 players for €393M during this save. Just only Manos Pasas was bought for €115M...on the other hand, our own newgen striker László Szalai was sold to Real Madrid in 2035 for €75M what was the club highest fee received.

If you want to know how much we paid to agents, it was €38.5M. Probably the cheap area...

One of my favourite thing within this save was to try to get the affiliate clubs from different nations.

I always had one domestic affiliate in the second tier, some of them were promoted to the top flight thanks to our players who were on-loan there until I made a link with Nyíregyháza Spartacus - an ideal average club in the second tier for 18 or 19 years old players to give them playing time.

But during the time I also arranged a link with clubs in Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Spain or the Czech Republic. And at the end of the save we also had Sydney FC, New England Revolutions, Henan Jianye and FC Hiroshima. Many foreign nations with many newgens who could appear in our own Youth Intake.

🤑🤑🤑

The club developed into an absolutely monstrous thing financially during the time. We had around €1.3B in the bank balance in 2042 and we had more than €1B on transfers and €26.5M on wages per month. 

Board decided to deposit €115M in 2043 and €250M in 2044 into a reserve investment fund. I never had this message before, this is how finances look in 2045.

And we are almost at the end of our journey because we can talk about the biggest pain of the second half of this save.

The club board decided to build a new stadium in 2022 and we moved there in 2024. The Siófok Stadium was great during the first years and the 12k capacity was absolutely fine but as we grew up we had 9k season ticket holders and I'm sure we would be able to have a bigger stadium. At least with 20k capacity...

When I asked about the possibility to have a new stadium again I found out it usually takes at least 20 or 25 years before the board will think about the new stadium again. 

Just in the half of the penultimate season of the save I realised I can finally ask about a new stadium.

The board rejected my request due to a small fan base.

If I take it from a selfish point of view, it's absolutely stupid. But it's probably right in terms of how the Football Manager is set up and 'coded'.

This is not an official statement of SI but I think the fan base in FM works within the specific area so as we are a small area near the Lake Balaton we are unable to attract the same amount of people as in Budapest for example. 

And that's probably the reason why they rejected my request four times due to the same reason. When it happened for the last time in June 2045 I decided to leak this into the press.

The board invited me to a meeting and I was sacked because I criticised the board publicly. And that's the end of Keysi Rensie's journey and relationship with BFC Siófok...

It took 10243 days, 1110 wins, 268 draws and 155 defeats. BFC Siófok scored 3460 goals and conceded 1166 goals. Keysi Rensie ended his Hungarian journey with a 72% win percentage, 24 league wins and 42 cup trophies.

Life Around The Lake after Keysi Rensie...

Keysi Rensie didn't leave the game immediately and he decided to follow BFC Siófok for next years. Mainly because of his sons Jiri and Robert...

Gary Monk took a charge of BFC in the summer of 2045 and he decided to change the whole squad. He spent €545M on new players during the first season in a charge and sold players for €39M.

What about the Rensie brothers? The younger one, Robert, was sent for a loan spell to Japan where he spent the season with FC Hiroshima. The older one, Jiri, was sent to the reserve squad.

After 24 years, BFC Siófok didn't win the Hungarian first division as MTK Budapest finally won the league title.

Jiri Rensie was released by BFC Siófok in summer 2047 and he ended his professional career later and became Director of Football when he was 33 years old. He became a DoF of Nyíregyháza Spartacus in 2049 and started his new chapter as a boss.

Later, in 2051, he moved to FC Vysočina Jihlava in the same role.

Siófok won the league between 2047-2050 four times and they are dominant again but without some European success.

Gary Monk was a manager of the club until 2050 and there were only five domestic players in the first-team squad after so many changes.

The first team squad included players from Australia, Brasil, Colombia, Netherland, Italia, Portugal, Serbia, Spain...

Meanwhile, the older son Jiri became Director of Football, Robert came back from Hiroshima and he then went for loan spells with Mezökövesdi SE, Nyíregyháza Spartacus and Duna Aszfalt TVSE and he signed for the last mentioned club as a free player in summer 2048.

He is playing the third Hungarian tier and during the 2049/2050 season, he played 30 league matches, scored 4 goals and made 19 assists. In 2050/2051 he played 27 games, scored 4 goals, made 20 assists and helped the club to win promotion to the second division.

In the 2051/2052 season, he played 36 league goals, scored 2 goals and made 21 assists. It looks like he found the right club...

The journey and FM18 adventure of Keysi Rensie end there.

The board of BFC Siófok decided to build Keysi Rensie Stadium with a capacity of 56,102 in 2050 and the club moved there in July 2052. 

The weird and very high Keysi Rensie Stadium during the Hungarian Super Cup between Siófok and Videoton. Keysi Rensie was there but only in the stands, not in the dugout...

Thank you, everyone, for following this Rensie's journey...

FM18 | Watch and learn

It’s not a secret my favourite formation in Football Manager is 4-1-4-1. As I wrote in one previous post I switched back to this formation in my main save with BFC Siófok. I decided to use the one I used in FM17. It’s a very simple formation with fewer team instructions and it was very effective. 

I spent a week in Liverpool recently due to working duties and because I wrongly copied the saved file of my Siófok save to a working laptop I played with Werder Bremen, the save from FM18 Beta.

This is not a tactical analysis or guide on how to do it, I just only made some notes during the matches and decided to put it together in the post.

1st Match

The first match in this post was a home league game against Augsburg. I started with these roles and team instructions were Play Out Of Defence, Mixed Passing, Prever Short GK Distribution. The mentality was Standard and we used Fluid Team Shape.

First issue – mixed passing. As we played with balanced width I saw many wrong passes. There was a lot of misplaced passes from DM/D or CM/S to sides as our players in WM/A and WP/A positions were too far from the central player(s) and the opponent’s players were able to steal the ball very easily.

We were 1-0 ahead thanks to a goal just before the half-time we conceded a goal in the 89th minute and the match ended with a 1-1 draw.

We conceded this goal after we won the ball back after the long ball from the opponent’s goalkeeper but our CM/S misplaced another very easy pass in the middle and Augsburg sent the ball behind our defensive line and Dong-Won scored with a precise strike.

2nd match

The second match was an away league game against Hertha. I made a couple of changes.

We started with DLF/S instead of CF/S, DM/S instead of DM/D with Hold position instruction and FB/A instead of WB/A (on the left side) and FB/S instead of WB/S (on the right side).

As I wrote about misplaced passes and a lot of interceptions I decided to change the width to fairly narrow and we used short passing. We also get rid of Play Out Of Defence instructions and Team Shape was changed to Flexible.

Hertha played this match with only 10 players from the 8th minute after the red card and they went to compact defensive shape. It resulted in many more intercepted passes from our side and we doubled the number of misplaced passes in this match.

The most passes combination was between CM/S and WP/A and between our FB/A and WP/A. We had 16 shots in this match and 9 of them were long shots. Six of these long shots were by our CM/S and CM/A.

It was a very ineffective performance by our side and it resulted in the winning goal in the 88th minute by Hertha after the set-piece.

3rd match

The third match of this short analysis of my thoughts was the last Europa League Group Stage match against Galatasaray. What did I change?

  • Sweeper Keeper/Defend

  • DM/S – Hold Position & Close Down Much Less

  • CM/A – Shoot Less Often instruction added

  • CM/S – Shoot Less Often, Close Down Less and Hold Position instructions added

  • WP/A changed to Inverted Winger/Attack

  • DLF/S changed to DLF/A during the first half of the match

  • Mentality remained Standard, Team Shape changed to Structured.

  • Team Instructions – Shorter Passing, Play Narrower, Use Tighter Marking and Prevent Short GK Distribution.

These changes resulted in a very comfortable 3-0 win over a strong Galatasaray side thanks to two goals by Deep Lying Forward Johannes Eggestein and one goal by Full Back Ludwig Augustinsson.

We had 18 fewer intercepted passes than in the previous match against Hertha. Five of them were by our CM/A and three of them by DM/S. When I changed Sáček to Llorente in the second half Llorente had also 3 intercepted passes during the last 17 minutes.

The second goal by Eggenstein was very nice as both full-backs, both wide midfielders and all three central midfielders participated in this play same as Eggeinstein as DLF/A was included in the pre-final phase at the opponents’ half.

During the next matches of this save I played some other matches and made some other changes and I ended with this set-up and it resulted in these results…

Both wide players have “Cross Aim Near Post” instructions. As you may saw in your own games there are many crosses by wide players aimed straight at the keeper or in the wrong direction.

I tried to reduce these wrong passes with this instruction and it seems it was better.

I removed narrow width as with short passes and standard mentality is it good enough to pass my expectations.

This is one of my favourite goal from the second season of this save. Despite it was scored before these changes I really like it so I wanted to share it…