Team at start of 12/13: Kello B Jones Fonte Zayatte Fox Guly Zimling Schneiderlin Cork Lallana Sharp Subs/the rest: Davis Hooiveld De Ridder Bowyer Lambert Martin Richardson Ephraim and all the youngsters/some newgens. Need to go up... Sunderland and Newcastle came down and look immense.
Most annoying thing when you are top of the league and your top scorer gets ruled out for 2-3 months, No Sam Baldock for that amount of time is scary, lost my first game in 10 in the first game without him, I still think I can cope though as I am 11 points clear.
No they have plenty of money, but they are only allowed to sign players from the Basque region of Spain.
oh wow. that is one hell of a challenge. Why is that? Are there any decent players from the basque area.
The club operate with that rule in real life and have always done as far as I know. Good Basque players include Llorente, Javi Martinez and Arteta, but the youth system at Athletic is awesome on FM so you get some top quality newgens coming through.
Xabi Alonso too. It's worth saying that they're second behind Real Madrid in producing players for the Spain national team, and they've been in La Liga every season since its inception, and again that's only matched by Barca and Madrid. My second favourite team
A lot of big clubs used to abide by it back in the day, but over the years it's fallen by the wayside and now they're left as pretty much the only club doing it. They're extremely proud of it though, and most of the fans would take rather see the club relegated than them drop the policy. It's all about the players being connected to the fans I think, making the players a much closer part of the community and all.
It's called a "cantera" policy. The original reasoning behind it is probably quite nationalistic and silly, because a lot of the Basque people have wanted to be separate from Spain. However I imagine they're just keeping it up now for tradition's sake, and it's pretty cool that they've done so well. Athletic are one of just three teams never to have been relegated from La Liga. I'm sure you can imagine who the other two are.
On the last FM I had (not sure which it was) there was a glitch in that there seemed to be a hugely unrealistic number of injuries. Is this still the case on FM12? Wondering wehther to buy it or not
Haven't had that yet just the league glitch, if you do buy it tho don't update it. The update is bugged to hell atm.
The only glitches I've encountered are with the "add/remove leagues" feature, which is a shame because it's a great addition to the game.
Should I accept Arsenal's approach after guiding Saints to 4th place, an FA Cup and a EURO Cup.... Hmmm
Save it, accept the conract offer and then save it again under a different file name, then you wont regret it either way
I am still top now 12 points clear brought in a few new players, sold a few in the January window, I now have Vokes and Jackson who both cost around 200k and I also brought in 2 centre backs,.