(FM22) – The All Nations Challenge

I bet you weren’t expecting this were you?! Rather tentatively, I’m back writing again, I have no hopes or expectations with this new series, I just want to play a save and chart my progress along the way, if you all enjoy it and join me for the ride then that would be fantastic!

I’ve had an up and down FM22, I’ve had my amazing Tiers of Joy save, which rather abruptly stopped after a game breaking issue, then “The Quest” which filled a gap but I never really got into it before I found what has been my favourite save I’ve ever had in any version of FM. My 22 seasons in charge of Leicester was all charted over on the FM Library Discord, it was nice to do something different, not only save-wise but also in how I tell people about my journey.

But now I’m back on the blog, for one last hurrah on FM22, could it be my last series I write about? I’m not sure, I do want to branch out when FM23 comes about and try something different, that may mean the save updates disappear, but let’s not look too far ahead and keep in the here and now. I have a new save!!

THE ALL NATIONS CHALLENGE

This is something I kind of did on FM20. Within my achievement hunter save I also set myself a challenge of getting a player from each UEFA nation to play a game, score a goal and get player of the match. I managed it in around 25 seasons and it was great fun.

This was a challenge I was introduced to by couple of my good friends from the past, Kibworth Bull (James), who managed to do this with every nation in the World in his fictional Island of Sodor save on FM19 and Alex Parkin who did it with FC Europa but just did European nations.

So I can’t lay claim to thinking of this challenge idea but I do love the premise of it, so here goes!!

My aim is to get a player from every FIFA nation to:

• Play 10 games
• Score a goal
• Win Player of the Match

Overall there are 227 Nations in the game, continent wise they are:

• Asia – 47
• Africa – 56
• Europa – 55
• Oceania – 18
• South America – 10
• North America – 41

An impossible task? Possibly! But I do like to set myself rather mad challenges.

A side note: There may be errors in the list but this is what I was given off a fellow FM player.

To give myself the best possible shot I needed to find a nation where the squad and league rules were relaxed enough to be able to have a large proportion of foreign players in my ranks. Most countries in the World have some kind of restriction whereby the club can only have a certain limit of foreign players in their matchday squad or squad in general.

I found a couple of nations where there were no rules and one of them was Germany, a nation I briefly managed in during FM20 when I had 8 seasons at FC Magdeburg and a country I’ve wanted to manage in again since.

I wanted to start my journey at the bottom end of the German league system and that means starting in the 3rd tier which is 3.Liga, the reason for this is it means I can hopefully bring in players from the very small nations, i.e San Marino, Tuvalu, Suriname, etc and they should be “decent” enough to get into the first team. Once I’m in the Bundesliga these players won’t be anywhere near good enough. In my attempt on FM20 I ended up at Newcastle, winning the league every year but needing to tick off San Marino and the Faroe Islands, it took years, because the quality of player just wasn’t there.

So now I need to find a club that takes my fancy. I could’ve gone with Magdeburg as they are in 3.Liga but decided to go a different route and that route takes me to Berlin.

Viktoria 1889 Berlin

This was a club recommended to me by one of my Discord buddies, The Last Throw, his exact words were “become the best team in Berlin”. Challenge set!!! We’re coming for you Hertha Berlin!

Viktoria Berlin were only formed in 2013 after a merger between Lichterfelder FC and BFS Viktoria 1889. The latter was one of the dominant clubs in Berlin during the 1900s and won the German Championship (Bundesliga equivalent) twice between 1908 and 1911. The club were promoted to 3.Liga in 2020/21, they were top of the Regionalliga when Covid struck, ending the season after only 11 games, the club at the time had won every match and were promoted when the season was cancelled.

So a new club on the face of it but one of the merged clubs has a rich history dating back to the 1900s, let’s get them back to being the best team in Berlin!

Ground-wise the club currently play at the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Stadion, this isn’t technically their ground but due to the clubs original ground not meeting the specification for 3.Liga they were forced to find alternative arrangements. The ground holds 15,000 spectators but due to permit reasons the capacity has been lowered to 10,000. The clubs actual ground is called Stadion Lichterfelde but only has a capacity of 4,300, way below the 10,000 required for 3.Liga.

In-game the club seem to have the history of BFS Viktoria 1889.

Facilities wise the game has put the club into the Friedrich-Ludwig stadium which has a capacity of 19.708 but only 10,490 is used for games. I’m not sure if this will change. The club also has below average training and youth facilities alongside average academy coaching and fairly basic youth recruitment, don’t expect any decent newgens coming through the academy for a while!

So here we go, Steve Robbins is the new manager, bring it on!

The first thing to look at is the playing squad and it’s nice to see we have a mix of different nationalities in the squad, this is very helpful for the challenge.

As you can see we have:

• Germany
• Japan
• Turkey
• Cameroon
• Finland
• Brazil
• Latvia
• Georgia

So that’s 8 nations in the squad to try and tick off as quickly as possible.

Overall the squad is pretty decent, especially for a club expected to end in the bottom 4. We do have a couple of really good players.

Franck Evina – Winger/Striker

Cameroonian international Evina looks really good, a hard-working, aggressive forward who can also play on either wing.

Cebrail Makreckis – Attacking Midfield

Uncapped for Latvia but it won’t be long before he gets his maiden start for his nation. Makreckis looks really good, mentally strong but does need some work on his technical attributes, interesting though that he also available to play for Egypt.

Falcao – Striker

No not that Falcao! Mentally he needs some serious work but I feel he has the base for a decent player, he will at least be able to tick off what I need in the challenge.

I’ll go through more players as and when they do something incredible or tick off what’s required for the challenge.

I mentioned before that we are expected to end in the bottom 4 in 3.Liga, we are a newly promoted team so it’s not unexpected.

I really don’t expect to be pulled into a relegation battle, we surely have enough to push ourselves well clear and looking upwards.

League-wise the bottom 4 go down with the top 2 winning promotion to the 2.Bundesliga and 3rd place going into a promotion/relegation playoff 16th in 2.Bundesliga.

So now the hard work begins. Success in the league is just one part of this, the main thing is to bring in players to tick off the nations as quickly as possible, starting with those small obscure nations IF there is anyone available.

I now need to try and get as many players in the game as possible without blowing my laptop up! I have added national players from all continents and top players from Asia, Africa, North America and Oceania. This gives me a player pool of around 75k. I know when James (Kibworth Bull) did it he really struggled with a couple of the tiny nations so we will see how it goes!

Blog post wise obviously I will put a post out at the end of each season, most of you who are reading this know my style, I play quick, so expect blog posts every week. As for the style of the post, I’m not sure, I don’t want to bore you with the same stuff each time, transfer, results, etc, so I’m going to try and concentrate more on the challenge in my posts, talking about how I’m going to find these players but will also talk about how the club is doing as well.

Wish me luck!!!