It wasn’t easy to decide where I will spend my main time with the Football Manager 2022. But, in the end, I decided to play in one of the nearby nations of my own nation. I will play in Poland. It’s a nation where I was not as many times as I would expect but I was there and it can be counted as another one where I was in real life and I will play here within my FM save.

If I will go back in time a little bit, my first choice for FM22 was Spain. But I decided against it due to a couple of reasons in the end. Another option was to go home and play with one very good custom database down to the Czech 7th tier, just one tier above the competition where I play in real life. The main reason why I turned this option down was that I would probably spend a couple of weeks of real-time just building the squad for the first season.

There were some other options like PEC Zwolle, FK Sarajevo, CF Vaslui, FC Thun… there was always some reason because I told myself that’s a no, think more about it. But I always (except the Czech 7th tier, that would not be possible) had one thing in my mind. The one thing I wanted to try and apply within my save. The Twin towns - Sister cities.

I had two teams/towns in my mind when I decided it will be Poland. The first one was LKS Lodz from the 2nd tier. It was mainly because I spent some time in Lodz when I was around 14 years old and I thought it would be good. But the fact that the board except for the immediate promotion to the Ekstraklasa put me off. I like to start my saves in the 2nd tier or lower but I decided it will be better to select my second choice - Warta Poznan from the top tier/Ekstraklasa. It’s the smaller club (right now) from Poznan as you probably know Lech Poznan more.

Warta is two times Polish top tier champions but these league titles are from 1929 and 1947 = really old. Warta Poznan as a club has worse facilities in comparison with Lech, less money available, worse players in both senior and youth teams and problems with the stadium. Same as last year with GAIS in Sweden (they share the big stadium in Göteborg with other teams), I decided to edit the stadium before the save with Warta started.

Warta is unable to play Ekstraklasa matches at their ground (Stadion Warty Poznań (Warta Poznań Stadium),[2] also known as Stadion przy Drodze Dębińskiej (Dębińska Road Stadium) and nicknamed Ogródek (Little Garden) - thanks Wiki) because of licensing issues.

The stadium and the complex of training pitches and facilities overall are under reconstruction in real life and I didn’t find the info when it should be finished and when the club should play either top or 2nd tier at their own stadium.

That was the reason why I renamed the stadium “Nowy Ogródek”, set the capacity to 4,000 with the possibility to expand up to 16,000 and that’s it. Nothing groundbreaking. And I really like the stadium I created, small and comfy.

Warta is in the relegation battle in real life and we are expected to finish in 17th from 18 teams in Ekstraklasa. For me, it’s another nice challenge because of a couple of things including the club culture:

• Make the most of set pieces - it’s always nice to challenge me to create something new

• Sign Polish players - it’s nothing weird if I play mainly with domestic players, I’m sure it will work out

• Develop players using the club’s youth system - always a pleasure to do it

Twin towns - Sister cities idea

I don’t know when I got this idea but it’s not so long time ago. It’s probably connected to one of my travel “shows” on Czech TV as I think it was mentioned here briefly when there was something about one town and as it’s connected in multiple ways with a different town. The connection between towns is various. Some are based only on one thing like culture. Some are based on many more things like sports, travelling, culture, study programs, exchanges.

London is connected with New York, Bogotá or Tokyo. Glasgow is connected with Turin, Rostov-on-Don or Havana. Madrid is connected to Lisbon, Seoul, Sarajevo or Abu Dhabí. And I would be able to continue like this forever.

And Poznan has some interesting towns connected too from around the world. For example Hannover, Rennes or Kharkiv. An ideal combination for this side project.

How it will work in my FM save? It’s easy. I selected 13 towns from the list of sister cities and I selected and added one football club from this city as an affiliated club of Warta Poznan in the pre-game editor. The system is easy - clubs with a higher reputation (based on the default FM database) are the senior affiliate clubs of Warta. The clubs with less reputation are under Warta.

There are not only European cities but also teams from China, the United States and Brazil. A nice touch is that I found Brno (the 2nd largest Czech city) is among the twin cities of Poznan. There are currently two clubs playing in the 2nd Czech tier - Zbrojovka Brno and SK Lisen. The first one is more reputable and more famous but I decided on Lisen.

I set some rules in my head and in the pre-game editor:

• Senior Affiliate clubs - Hannover, Metalist Kharkiv and Rennes are able to send players on loan to Warta.

• Warta players can go for a loan to affiliate clubs in other countries (I will aim to send players on loan to Gyirmot and Lisen probably).

• Players can’t go on loan to China, the USA and Brazil. And vice-versa.

• The connection/affiliation with non-European clubs was set to help both parties in marketing relations

• All clubs share scouting knowledge with each other.

• The European clubs can play friendlies against each other - one of the aims/dreams should be to arrange a friendly tournament between these clubs (note * FM2039 on of the 1000+1 new features requests: the possibility to arrange a friendly tournament for more than only 4 teams).

The idea behind this is not to break the game or exploit the game in some way. If it would be a couple of years ago I know I would be able to play the save for 25 or 30 years. That would mean I would be able to fill the screen with affiliated clubs on my own. But these times are over and I just want to play a couple of seasons within FM22.

As I already mentioned above, I usually play mainly with domestic players. It won’t be too different this time. But if nothing has changed for FM22, the sharing scouting knowledge and the affiliate clubs in foreign countries can cause the fact some of your newgens will be from countries where your affiliate clubs are. Or where your scouts/coaches are from etc.

I don’t want to have a golden generation from around Europe with top Chinese talents in every youth intake within the save. I think I’m too old for trying to exploit the game in some way like this just thanks to some edits in the editor. I just like the real-life idea of a connection between nations/cities and I think it’s an ideal combination for FM save. And if 1) I will be sacked by Warta, I can join some of these affilities, 2) if it won’t affect youth intakes, it doesn’t matter, we will have some interesting friendlies every six months at least.

Affiliate Clubs:

• ACV, Assen, Netherlands; Gyirmot FC, Gyor, Hungary; Hapoel Ra’anana, Raman Gan, Israel; JJK Jyväskylän, Finland; SK Lisen, Brno, Czech Republic; Polonia Poznan, Poland (they share our training and youth facilities); Torpedo Kutaisi, Georgia.

Senior Affiliates:

• Metalist Kharkiv, Ukraine; Stade Rennais, France; Hannover 96, Germany.

Non-European Affiliated Clubs:

• Independente Futebol Sao-joseense, Brazil; Shenzhen FC, China; Toledo Villa FC, USA.

Notes from the save

The beginning:

• The first day in the office was on Sunday, June 6, 2021. There were not too much to do except the fact I added two new friendly matches and I decided to mutually terminate contracts of six staff members. “Yes, you have it written on your forehead: Physio with the Physiotherapy attribute of 3 = not good enough.” Should I find the replacements by myself? Should I place the job advert? The second option was tempting but it usually takes too much time. I will try on my own.

• I opened the staff search screen and wanted to find the new physio. The €925 per month available for physio was a great budget to start with. I had to completely rule out the possibility to sign some foreign physio and I decided to limit the search filter to just physios with Polish nationality.

• It was a good decision to concentrate on domestic staff as I was able to hire former Szczecin patriot Stanislaw Mazuro (click to see his profile) and he wanted only €700 per month. The improvement from the Physiotherapy attribute of 3 to 15 is quite big. I went through all other vacant positions and tried to fill everything with better domestic staff than what was here when I started but I knew that if I want to sign some better staff members, I need to make space in our wage budget. And that meant to offload players…

• But in the end, I’m really proud of what scouts, for example, I was able to hire…

The squad:

• When I opened the squad screen for the first time, I also opened my mouth. “Forty-six players? Just in the senior squad? What will I do with all of them?” The eldest one was Lukasz Tralka with 37 years and a €7,5k per month wage. The youngest one was Mateusz Wojciechowski - 17 years old Polish defensive midfielder.

• Of these 46 mentioned players were 19 years old or younger. I decided to check every single player and decided if 1) to keep him in the senior squad, 2) move him to the U18 squad, 3) send him on loan.

• Our U18s team contained other 19 players with 7 of them were already loaned out. Thank God for it.

• The two highest earners of the squad were foreign players. Jayson Papeau (France) with €17,250 per month and Milan Corryn (Belgium) with €10,750 per month. Both of them had contracts until summer 2023. The first one had a transfer value between €300k to €600k. That would be a lot of money - insert :thinking: emoji. I knew I had to sell them if I want to keep everything within the budget and if I want to improve coaching/recruitment/medical team. It was a no brainer in the end when I considered too many talented young players in the club.

• The first transfer window is disabled so I have enough time to find them new home and save some money. How did it end? We will see in the next post…

The opening 2 weeks:

• It was all mainly about setting the individual training for all the players. There are some really exciting young players I’m looking forward to following their development if they won’t be signed by some bigger club.

• It was also mainly about setting and arranging the training schedules, set pieces, individual training, mentoring... all the typical FM admin and it was quite good.

• The second week of the save ended with the first friendly match. We played against Hannover, our senior affiliate, at home. We won 2-1 after goals by our CM(S) and CM(A) players. You can see we used the formation with 2 central defenders, 1 defensive midfielder, two wing-backs, three central midfielders and two strikers. It’s the formation I want to use for most of the time of the FM22 save.

The journey to find the joy from the game can continue…