FM21: Toiling in Paradise
When I decided to manage outside of the Big Three in Portugual, I knew it would be difficult to impossible to compete with the league’s powerhouse team. What I didn’t expect was how competitive the rest of the league would be. After scrapping through a couple of seasons in LigaNos, I’d group the teams into three tiers:
- Os Tres Grandes (Benfica, Porto, Sporting)
- The Runners Up (Braga, Vitória de Guimarães)
- Everybody else
With only six European places available, and five all but guaranteed to teams in the first two tiers, it’s an all out war for that sixth spot. In a strange way, you end up rooting for the Big Three to dominate, just so your rivals don’t steal any points away. Ultimately, it can come down to a little luck at the end of the season. As my first two seasons show, sometimes the finish is out of your hands.
In the first season we got some luck with the results, especially with Vitória de Guimarães having a down year. Our -3 goal difference suggests a 9th or 10th place could have easily happened. This came to fruition in the next season as Maritimo saw an improvement in points and goal difference, only to see our place in the league drop. Vitória continued to struggle but Famalicão and (maddeningly) our cross-town rivals Nacional both had superb seasons. The board wanted top-half, so we hit our goal, but it was a close.
Why such variance? The Primeira Liga offers no prize money for a team’s league finish. Finishing higher endears you to the players, fans, and board, but from an economic perspective a seventh place finish is essentially the same as a fifteenth place one. Attendance-wise most of the teams outside the top five are roughly equivalent as well. This means that without a nice European run, you’re competing for the same players with the same financial resources as three quarters of the league. Getting an edge over your rivals is as tough as anywhere in the world (damn you Nacional!).
First Silverware in Club History
The league may have been a struggle but it was not all trouble and toil in the early years. A brilliant run of form in the middle of the second season led us to victory in the Taça da Liga (League Cup). Similar to the EFL Cup in England, it’s the third-tier trophy in Portugal, but I’ll certainly take it. Maritimo were runners up in 2015 and 2016, but in 2022 we finally won it, beating Porto in the final. They may have been playing their backups, but silverware is silverware.
The team seemed to finally be coming together after an inconsistent first season. Suddenly, dreams of Europa or even Champions League action didn’t seem that outlandish. Our workhorse Iranian striker Ali Alipour was firing in goals. FM Bowser is a Football Manager genius! What could go wrong?
Ending with a Whimper
As shown above, we ended the 21–22 season in seventh place, just outside the European spots. What was not shown was that with five games left we were in fourth place and riding high. Unfortunately, our form disappeared out from under us, and the team lost all five games to end the season. It was probably where we deserved to finish based on talent, and I can’t complain about winning a trophy, but it was bitterly disappointing to crash out at the end.
In the first two years with Maritimo we hit new heights of success, but there were indications of trouble at the end of the second season. What would the future hold?
In the next post, I’ll describe seasons three and four, as well as go into the tactics that led to our success (or lack thereof). For smaller bits and pieces from the save, follow my twitter account at @FMBowser.
