Hello friends, welcome to another update of my West Ham story in FM12. I have decided this will be my last season managing West Ham and FM12. After that, i will take some rest and patiently waiting for the release of FM13. This report will be a long one as i included the results of the England showing in World Cup 2022. We begin with an update on pre-season activities in my West Ham team. First of all, lets take a look at this season’s expectation from the board.

Season Expectation

For the first time, i don’t have any choice as the board fully expect us to win the league. The transfer budget is a huge one 246m and the wage limit is 2m/week. Though this is my last season, i will restrain myself to spend over the top. Frankly speaking, all my departments are very strong and i don’t believe they require any strengthening.

Transfer Out

We released a lot of players but most were squad and reserve players. Only four were in the first team. Turkish midfielder Ferhat Kaba and Congolese left-back Christ Baldi both left for Liverpool for a combined value of 27m. Right-back Argentinian Rolando Noguera wanted to leave for a different challenge. He joined AC Milan in a 27.5m deal. Koray Muller, a young German prospect returned to his homeland joining Stuttgart for 12.5m. In total, we received a total of 81m this season.

Transfer In

We spent 40 million on seven players. All of them except for two will be first team regulars for us. Most of them are young players with hot prospect. The two who will be joining the first team are Alberto Murillo and Jose Lopez. Coincidently, both of them are Spanish. Here are their attributes.

If i have to choose the weakest position for the team, it would have to be the left-back. 23m was parted to secure the signature of Spanish International Alberto Murillo from Malaga. He is excellent in going forward. Though he is not that strong in his aerial side, but he makes it up on his high anticipation, composure and tackling skills. Automatically first choice left-back from now.

Jose Lopez grown up from Barcelona youth academy and had been their first choice for several seasons. I know his ability very well as he always performed brilliantly against us. His reflexes is awesome. The only weakness probably is his speed of sweeping through balls and handling high balls. He refused to extend his contract and i got him for nothing. He is signed to provide competition for Luis Guilherme and keeps him on his toes.

Friendly Games

The team is getting better. There are a few big wins over some huge continental side. The most notably one is the match against At Madrid, our opponents of last season’s Champions League. 9-0, certainly our biggest friendly win to date. If we can show the form likewise, i don’t see any team can stop us in making another clean sweep this season.

Premiership Odds

The bookmakers still never learn. They insist on putting their money on Man City to win the league but i guess it will be sixth title in a row for us.

Community Shield

Starting from 2019/20 season, the fans are going to see two familiar teams in the community shield. This is the fourth straight season which see us up against Man City in this curtain raiser game before the season starts. We seem to improve leaps and bounds as the game turned out to be a dominance for us. An early lead under two minuts set us underway and Leandro increased our lead as he hit a brace as the game progressed. Man City put on a poor showing and we avenged the loss to them last season. As we awaits for the commence of the new season, i’ll take you along for an update on how England did in the recent World Cup tournament played in June.

World Cup 2022

There wasn’t too drastic changes for us in the squad. It was almost the same batch of players in the last European Championship. We were placed alongside Holland, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia in Group D.

Brazil and Portugal were made joint favorites in 2022 World Cup. At 14-1 odds, it will take huge effort from the players to bring back the trophy.

Group Stage

We began the tournament playing Nigeria in our first game. The game was not as easy as the scoreline suggested. Nigeria made us worked very hard and their counter-attacks were dangerous as there was a lot of pace in their side. A goal in each half kicked off to a good start. Next was against Holland who could be our closest challenger. The Dutch took a shock lead in 5 minutes and the players took some time to settle into the game. Credit to them, they recovered and dominated the match. We hit two goals under seven minutes in the first half. The rest of the game saw no goals and we qualified to the next round with the two wins we had. Last game was easier for us as we thrashed Saudi Arabia 5-1.

We progressed to the next round with a 100% record. Nigeria who beat Holland 3-0 in their last game joined us to the last 16. Our next round opponent was Egypt who should be easy for us.

Last 16

To summarize, one word, DISAPPOINTING! We were all over Eygpt and created 40 shots, 11 were on target. Yet we couldn’t find a way past their goalkeeper in normal time. To make it worse, it was Eygpt who took the lead in extra time second half. We were lucky to escape with an injury time goal by Phil Jones to bring the game to penalties. The teams under me have become penalty specialist and this was also shown in international stage. We didn’t miss one spot kick and went through to the quarter finals when Egypt missed their fourth. Our quarter final opponent was Spain. I guess we couldn’t complain much as there was no weak teams in the quarter final.

Spain was technically superior compare to the England squad and and we found it hard to wrestle the ball back from them. Most of our chances came in the first half and bad luck certainly played a big part stopping us taking the lead as we had few clear cut chances. The defenders were guilty of not marking a Spanish player tightly during a long throw. A cross was made but the ball hit a player and deflected into the net. Spain was 1-0 up. Second half was boring as chances were few and i was pretty disappointed with the players attitude in the second half. We lost to Spain and were sent back home in the quarter final. Spain went all the way to final and beat Turkey 4-1 to lift the World Cup.

After another disappointing tournament, i decided to end my reign as the England manager.

I will now fully focus on the West Ham job and aim to leave on a high.  Two more post to go before i call it a day on FM12. Thanks a lot for reading this long post and i look forward to your comments.