The fact that I wrote the last post about my Football Manager 2022 save with Warta in the middle of March 2022 says enough about the enjoyment I had and I have with this edition. I only made an exception and wrote about my corner kick strategy a couple of weeks ago.

I like the save I chose last year, that’s not an issue. Poland is absolutely fantastic destination for long-term or semi-long-term saves and it’s challenging in terms of improving the club/nation coefficient to boost your chances to progress in European competitions. But the game itself made it really hard for me in combination with all the real-life shits around us. No wonder I was not interested to play the game and concentrate on what I was doing when I played it.

I have to say a big thank you to everyone who was connected and involved in the La Copa Club World Cup tournament recently as it was the main reason why I decided to play the game again and it allowed me to get back to the mood for playing the game.

2025 - 2028 SUMMARY

When I wrote about this save for the last time, it was at the end of the 2024/2025 season. A lot of things happened during the next three years but we all can probably agree that it’s not necessary to write about everything. I/We did the most important things within the save like this when I/We try to develop the club as much as possible. Both training & youth facilities were improved to the state of the art level. The youth recruitment & junior coaching are at an exceptional level and our Nowy Ogródek stadium capacity was increased to 6k - that’s not enough for the matches in Europe and we still have to play Champions League/European League at Inea Stadium which is home of our biggest rival Lech Poznan. That’s something I wanted to change throughout the save but I was not able to do it yet.

The 2024/2025 season was the first one within this save when we won the Polish Ekstraklasa title. We won it also in the next three seasons, which means we had four league titles in a row before the 2028/2029 season. The last four seasons also offered us the option to fight for the Champions League group stage ticket. We lost to Red Bull Salzburg in the play-off on aggregate in 2025/26 and we also lost to Ferencvárosi in the same round a year later. But we played the group stage in 2028/28 and 2028/29 because we improved the nation’s coefficient and earned the place in the group stage for the Polish league title holder.

The nation’s coefficient improved happened mainly thanks to our very successful three seasons in the Europa League. We made it to the Quarter-Final of this competition three seasons in a row (2025 - 2028) as we lost to Valencia, Tottenham and Olympique Marseille respectively. For me, personally, reaching three this late stage three times in a row with this club was like winning the competition.

Poland sits at 8th place during the 2028/2029 season within the qualification places table. The improvement is obvious throughout the save. When I loaded the save file back from 2021 when the save started, Poland was 30th in this table with just 1 place in the first Champions League qualifying phase and three places in the first qualifying phase of the Europa Conference League. The main improvement is not about the number of clubs but the stage when they enter the competitions/qualifications. We have one club in the Europa League play-off phase = security of the Europa Conference League group stage if they fail to beat their opponent in the EL. The same with the one who is entering the Champions League play-off phase.

Financially, we are in an absolutely different world right now in comparison with the beginning of the save. We had around €150k in the bank in August 2021. We will finish the 2028/2029 season above €60M in the bank. The main income consists of the prize money from the Europa League and Champions League. The Champions League earned us around €35M in the last two seasons. That’s phenomenal. The fact we are almost €2M per month under the wage budget says it all. The same as the fact that I failed to pass the board objective to spend the original transfer budget. I don’t remember in which save I was able to spend €35M per season… but that’s a different story.

Tactically, I remained faithful to variations of 3-5-2 with wing-backs/complete wing-backs until summer 2028.

• 2025/2026: Three at the back + WB(S) & WB(A), three central midfielders of CM(S) + DLP(S) + CM(S) and TF(S) & AF upfront. No special out-of-possession instructions. The main focus is to build our play from the back by distributing the ball to centre-backs with a view to taking advantage of individual player traits of our central midfielders like comes deep to get ball or stay wider.

• 2026/2027: The same as the season before but both WB players were changed to CWB(S) and the DLP(S) was changed to RPM. I also removed the play out of defence instruction and I used only take short kicks.

• 2027/2028: The right WB player role was changed to CWB(A) and the MCL player was changed to BBM from CM(S). I also added a higher defensive line/more often trigger press and prevent short GK distribution instructions to make our team more aggressive in terms of winning the ball back. This was mainly after the already mentioned La Copa tournament after I saw most of the teams were much more active than our team.

THE LAST SEASON SO FAR - 2028/2029 - TACTICAL TWEAKS AND OUR ATTACKING GODS

The last season of the save - 2028/29 - brought more tactical tweaks. The main change was that I moved both wing-backs down and I created the flat 5 at the back. The initial idea about this was to use CWB(A) or CWB(S) on both sides of the pitch. But it didn’t work. All players that played as the left defender with CWB(S/A) had the worse average rating no matter the opponent we played against and no matter the final result. These players were also the first ones the most fatigued and they were unable to finish even the friendly match against lower league opposition. It led to a change from CWB(S/A) to just simple WB(S). It resulted in the fact that our main man Konrad Matuszewski was able to perform at his best again and he ended as our third-best player in terms of assists per season.

The second most important change within the player’s roles was that I changed one striker role back to TF(S) from PF(A) as I used the pressing forward role in the previous two seasons. But as I didn’t want to lose Sebastian Musiolik or place him on the bench, I decided to switch the PF(A) role back to TF(S) which is the best suited for him.

He turned 32 years prior to this season and it was obvious he will not be able to perform as effective in the more aggressive and more physically demanding role. It was one of the best decisions I made within this save and it’s great how it was reflected at the end of the season. I knew it was a great decision almost immediately after the beginning of the season when he had 8 goals and 6 assists in the first 6 league matches.

The last major change I would like to mention is that I stopped using three central midfielders and I moved one of them to the AM slot by using the simple AM(S) role without any individual instruction. Most of my players that played in this position/role have some player traits and that means they all acted a little bit differently so it was not as predictable whenever we rotated the squad or when I made substitutions. The main AM player was one of our third-best players of the season so I would say it worked very well and it was a good idea to try it.

There were also some small changes within team instructions as I decided to try the higher tempo in combination with shorter passing and pass into space. Mainly because I knew I have good enough creators in the squad with very useful decisions attribute who know when and where to pass the ball to both flanks. It worked very well not just based on results, and goals scored/conceded but I also liked what I was watching throughout the season.

I like to check the pass map after most of our matches, especially after games against teams which are at the same or lower level as our team. Not sure if it’s also your own experience but the pass map is very bad and very inconsistent when I play against a weaker opponent. I know there are other screens and other places where to check the average positions of my players during the match but these pass maps after the game are some kind of bonus source where my players were during the game (maybe I’m selecting the wrong words but I’m sure most of you understand what I mean).

It’s also great when I am able to use the same players in more matches in a row as it really helps to get some proper pass map as the team & individual tactical familiarity is higher and better. It can result in something like in the picture after the league match against Korona Kielce from the end of the season.

• Champions League 2028/2029:

  The one and only bonus of participating in the Champions League group stage with teams like Real Madrid, AS Roma and Wolfsburg, are the prize money. We had Real Madrid in the group stage also in the previous season together with Chelsea and Hertha but we were able to finish third in the group and moved to the Europa League. We didn’t have the same luck in this 28/29 season despite we won 3:2 against Roma away from home in the opening group match. We also added one point thanks to a home 0:0 draw with the German side but that was all from our side in this year’s campaign.

  We lost all four remaining matches and finished bottom in the table with just four points. So, as I said, the best thing about the Champions League participation for the Polish club is money. The combination of prize money and TV revenue earned us over €30M this season.

• Puchar Polski and Ekstraklasa 2028/29:

Domestically, it was absolutely different story this season. We won the domestic cup (Puchar Polski) after two years again. We scored 22 goals in 6 matches including four goals in the final against Jagiellonia Bialystok.

This league title was our fifth in a row. But this time, I have no doubts about winning the league from the beginning of the season. The beauty of this save was how the league was tight until the end of the first six seasons. We won the league by 26 points already in the 2027/28 season and that was for the first when the league title was not decided during the last two or three rounds. The 2028/29 season was even more extreme from our side. We won all 34 league matches with 100 goals scored and just 11 goals conceded (three more goals conceded than in the previous 27/28 season).

The pictures below show that we didn’t lose or draw a single domestic match within this 2028/29 season. It was the most dominant season of the save so far. The main advantage to making the season like this one, surely was that we didn’t play in some European competition during the second part of the season. All our key players were available almost every match as we played once per week and there were no fatigue or big injuries.

• Unstoppable attacking trio:

As I already mentioned, we had all key players available most of the season. That includes our main three attacking players: Radomir Cvijan as AM(S), Sebastian Musiolik as TF(S) and Hubert Turski as Advanced Forward. Any of these three players used some special individual instructions within our tactics. The young Serbian midfielder was one of our summer 2028 signings as I activated his transfer release clause and bought him for €950k from Spartak Subotica. As you can see in the picture below, his value is between €9.6M - €12.5M after one season.

He scored 20 goals in 40(5) appearances and he also made 24 assists while being voted player of the match eleven times.

I already mentioned Musiolik and the change of his role. He made 44(1) appearances during the season, scored 35 goals (13 from penalties) and he made 14 assists. The third player, Hubert Turski, scored 44 goals in 41(4) appearances and he added 6 assists. Musiolik was the best goalscorer of the league for almost entire season but Turski scored a lot of goals during the the 2nd part of the season and he ended the league campaign with 34 goals. The record (37 goals) from the 1927/1928 season by Henryk Reyman remains the same, Turski would need two more matches I would say…

Cvijan made 18 assists during his first Ekstraklasa campaign and that means a new league record as he beat record by Milosz Szczepanski from the 2026/2027 season by two assists. These three were unstoppable this season and the fact that two central defenders were best goalscorers of the team, without counting these three players, speaks for itself.

Both Turski and Musiolik were wanted in previous seasons but both remained loyal to our club and they turned some offers down by themselves. I’m sure Cvijan will leave very soon to some bigger nation/league/club because is becoming a complete attacking player and he will be wanted a lot abroad. Luckily, he doesn’t have some transfer release claus in his contract. I’m sure he will that player who will set the new and also the last transfer income record of this save within our club.

I’m not sure if I will play one or two more seasons but I would like to make it to ten seasons, the same as in FM20 and FM21. I won’t have time to play more and with the squad I have now, I don’t think I would enjoy it for a longer time. There is still one dream and that’s a new stadium with bigger capacity than current 6k. We had 15 sellouts in 17 home matches during this last season in the league. I already asked twice or three times about the new stadium but the club board never responded to it and that option just appeared within the board requests again after some time.

But we will see. Everything is possible.

Thanks for reading.