Unfortunately, due to an electrics issues on my end, the Santa Clara save has come to an end.
Over the New Years holiday, I spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning up my computer and my external hard drives, trying to get all the files for all the games and programs I have into some semblance of order. Now I have one dedicated to games other than FM, one dedicated to other programs, and I have one dedicated to everything FM, and about a week ago, it died. No idea why, it’s less than a year old, it just stopped working. Took it to my local shop, they said “It’s dead Jim,” but he thought he could recover the data.
The somewhat good news is that he could recover most of the data, the bad news is none of the files he recovered will open for me. The save file I have for the game loads half way and crashes to desktop. All the notes I had typed up for each season that I use to help compile the recap as well as the screenshots I took are gone as well.
And its frustrating, because although I just finished up Season 5 in Santa Clara, I had just finished playing thru season 10, and as a result of the hard drive crashing, I’ve lost 5 seasons worth of saves, notes and screenshots. The one save file I do have left is from the beginning of season 9, so what I thought I would do is just take screenshots of the seasons, the transfers, the schedules, maybe look at where some players ended up and to see how close we came to toppling the Big 3 of Portuguese Football.
The 2027/2028 Season
Firstly, GIMN has released the dark version of his Musterman Skin, and I love and will be using it from this point forward, and the screenshots are from that. You can fins it on the SI Skinning forum or any of the FM fan sites.
Transfer wise, this was the first season when I knew my scouting had paid off:
Barcelona came after Şirahman Kudaş and had no problems paying his release fee. Eintracht Frankfurt making a move for Terceros was unexpected, but we got very good money for him. The bad news was we were still getting just 10% of the transfer revenue, and the pot was never that deep to begin with.
Seasonwise, we did very well:
Our European group was very tough, but beating AEK, Rosenborg, and CSKA Sofia while drawing with Nantes and FC Rapid saw us go thru to the latter stages. Domestically we were beating the teams we were supposed to be beating for the most part, but losses the Belenenses and Casa Pia were bothersome.
In the Spring, beating Brugge and Roma was very nice, but Fulham thrashed us in the round of 16. We made it to the Cup final, where we were thrashed by Benfica, but we ended the season in 5th place again.
Player wise Ibrahim Machorro, my young Mexican International I wanted to be a back up, he started most of the games for us and did very well. But consecutive top 6 finishes in the Premier League and a deep run in European football did two things for us: Put us on the Map, and put us on the Map.
The 2028/2029 Season
The Summer transfer window was quiet. The January transfer window we made a bit of a splash when Paulo Bernardo went to Milan for 18.25M. for someone we picked up on a free thats good business:
Schedule wise, we got off to a very good start. The highlight of the season wasn’t just doing well in the League phase, it was drawing with Benfica right before Christmas.
One of the things I aim for over the course of a season is that I do not want to rely on one or two players for all off our offensive output, and as you can see in the screenshot below, we did a very good job of spreading the wealth around:
I didn’t take St. Pat’s seriously, and it almost cost us, but from Mid September on we hit our stride, not losing any games across all the competitions. Now, maybe out Conference League group wasn’t the strongest, and yeah it took a 95th minute goal to beat Genk, but we beat them, and went into January with high expectations.
Seven games in February, one game every four days, saw us stumble into March. Lyon is definately a better team than we are, and it showed in our Round of 16 matches against them. Coming back to beat Vizela in the Cup was an accomplishment, but we still got drilled by Porto in the final. Against the Big 3 this season, across all competitions we went 0-2 and 5…however going undefeated in April and May in League play meant when Sporting stumbled at the end of the season:
We eked out a 3rd Place Finish, and Champions League football.
The 2029/2030 Season
Our transfer and payroll budgets were growing, but not by much, and we were still only getting 10% of the outgoing revenue. Even before the season ended we had some big teams coming after our standout players, and I triied as best I could to prepare for that in the Summer window. I was partially successful.
I was prepared to lose Gaspar, his performances over the last two seasons had been stellar, he made a name for himself as one of the best young DM’s in the game, and last season across all competitions he 40 appearances, 5 goals, 4 assists, 5POM’s and a 7.57 rating. Teams starting making offers for him before the season ended, but noone met his release clause until Arsenal did. I was also prepared to lose Machorro, last season across all competitions he allowed 52 in 50 games, had 21 shutouts, 2 POM’s and a 7.14 rating. Magnus Jorgenson was a young keeper with very good attributes who wanted out of Silkeborg, and getting him for 9.75M was a good deal. However, none of the teams after Machorro came anywhere close to his release fee, until the January transfer window when West Ham made a huge offer for him, and of to Blighty he went. In his defense though West Ham has become a Top 7 team though…
The season was a mixed bag, and while we played some teams well, we lost to others I don’t think we should have lost too:
Our European Group was tough, Juve, Tottenham, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Hoffenheim, Marseilles, Rennes, Ludogorets…we beat Ludogorets and Rennes, drew with Hoffenheim, and lost to the others. I could take some small comfort in that of the losses, we really only got blown out by Madrid, but we were bottom (or near bottom of the group) and didn’t qualify for the next round.
The New Year started off well, but the wheels fell off in February and March. We made it to the Cup Final again, but again were thrashed by Benfica. This year though, we had some success against the Big 3, going 2-1-5, beating Sporting and Porto in League play.
Somehow, and I am not sure how exactly, we did enough to finish in 3rd Place again:
I did play thru the 2030/2031 season, but do not have a save for it, the last good save I have is the 29/30 season, and I played up to the 32/33 season before screwing myself over when reorganizing things.
On the whole though, this was a very fun save. 29/30 was a tipping point year for us, as I recall we started beating the big 3 more often, but the highest we were finishing was 3rd. Some of the youngsters I brought in panned out really well, others didn’t, but we were making progress and I was quite happy with it, in another 3-4 years time I feel comfortable saying we would have been challenging for the League.
The other takeaway from this save is that I had fun doing it, and I think doing a blog save while I am also doing a Youtube save has been quite the experience, so in another week or so I will be starting up another save here on the blog. The problem is I have so many ideas for teams, I don’t know which one to do, I’ll probably just put them in a hat and let my better half decide.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you all come back for the next story here on my blog!
FM Jellico
THE FOOTBALL MANAGER BLOG OF FM_JELLICO 