Introduction

So, this is going to be a bit of a slog. I wouldn’t really say I’m a great Football Manager player. I’m not super amazing with tactics so I generally manage based on pure vibes. I’ve been playing since lockdown, so around 4 years now, and I’ve only ever won the Champions League once - in Andorra. I don’t like playing with established clubs, I find it too hard to get into them. I think I just like when the game becomes its own thing when all the newgens spawn and the weird league results start happening, but I don’t have the patience to wait the 3 or 4 seasons for this to happen. And patience is something I’m going to need with this.

My favourite thing about Football Manager is team building, especially developing my own players. That’s not exactly original of course, I think everyone likes seeing their 18-year-old wonderkid grow to win a Ballon d’Or. It’s even better if they come from your academy because it basically never happens. And what about if you had a couple of players in your team who came from your academy and became world-class? That would be so cool.

What about a team of them?

No way, that’s not possible. Surely not.

Well, let’s see if anyone else has done it… holy shit there’s a whole forum dedicated to this.

Yeah, so when I found this out in FM21, I was pretty gassed. Even more so, there were a bunch of guidelines to follow, and it had already been completed! It was possible. In fact, as of writing this, there have been 85 verified completions.

It took one person, 256 years to complete. Fortunately, that is an anomaly.

So, the rules:

You also have to use a club which is not playable at the start of the game, so this means simming a season and taking over one of the promoted teams in the bottom tier of the chosen country.

I’ve attempted this challenge a fair few times over the last few years, with sporadic effort. My first serious save was in FM22 with Donegal Celtic in Northern Ireland who had a youth rating of 79. I did 42 seasons there before the end of the game cycle and, at the end, I was consistently qualifying for the Champions League group stage.

I also had a long save in FM23 with a Lithuanian team, Granitas. I got 25 years with that and I even lost the final of the Europa Conference League in the last minute to Atalanta. A pretty crazy accomplishment considering Lithuania had a youth rating of 71. I even had a world-class winger there until he threw a squinny and pissed off to Roma.

Now, I can’t be arsed to do seasonal updates, so I won’t be doing them. This probably means I won’t qualify for the Hall of Fame - yes, there is one of those - but that would mean I have to complete this first, perhaps an unlikely outcome.

Enough yapping. Who am I doing this with?

Well, considering my lack of experience in winning the Champions League, it’s only right I go back to where I won it: Andorra.

Yeah, this is where the slog part comes in. On average, this challenge takes between 15-25 years to complete, but that is normally from countries which have very high youth ratings, e.g. England (135), Germany (155) or Spain (145).

Andorra has a youth rating of 36.

Now, SI has made the incredible change in recent years of a ‘dynamic youth rating’, meaning you can grow this number based on a bunch of things like continental club performance and reputation. However, this feature is pretty shit because sometimes it grows like 5 ratings in a couple of years but other times it’ll grow 1 rating in 10 years. Not so dynamic.

Saying this, I did find a thread before of someone who won the World Cup with San Marino without using the editor, so I reckon with enough graft it’s possible.

I’ll do updates every 15 years. I’m putting this up here so that I actually see this through. FM even lets you take your save into future versions, so there really is no excuse. Let’s get cracking.

Year 1-15