After managing Real Racing Club de Santander, S.A.D, for some seasons. There were actually 12 of them, before I managed to win the UCL in the dying miuntes, just before overtime. Time went by flying and I was all fun.

I felt I needed a change. Don't get me wrong bringing a club from a bad financial situation from the Segunda División in Spain to the top of Europe is all fun. But somehow everything went a bit too quickly: a 1st place in the debut season, thanks to Atletico Pamplona loanee Marc Cardona that was, wasn't the kind of expectation I had when starting the save in the north of Spain. Neither did I expect to finish 4th in my first season in the top tier fighting already vs. the big guys of the Spanish football.

For the next couple seasons, we kept on improve on and off the pitch to crown the club as champions in the Season 2025/26, and finally overtaking Madrid and Barcelona with 101 points. Slowly we were getting to the top of the pyramide of football, but we still failed to show some good results in Europe, especially in the UCL.

Financially we were making big steps to becoming one of the richest clubs of the world. How did we do that? Signing all the fucking wonderkidz around the globe, especially Southamerican Newgens as they can get a citizenship in Spain after just 2 years. With the combination that you got an obligatory release fee and most of the young lads making it to key players and wanting huge wages (like 15M/a who I wasn't ready to pay) a lot of them decided to join some big clubs around Europe as they had some moderate release clauses. I am talking about fees of 100M+ but Chelseas was happy to pay that like five or six times to be able to sign one of my bargain signings.

One of the first ones who moved for crazy money was Luis Navarro, after scoring 26 goals in 33 league apps after 5years at Real Santander. He joined on a free from Dragon Force in Colombia and moved to Chelseas 5 seasons later for 93M. Quite a profit.

To find to amazing players around the world, I have been using mainly two search filters. Both have been suggested by scouting-legend Vincent Guzman :

Looking for young players in main national team (or the U21s) with a low age:

Selecting all player attributes and picking a low match on them, depending on the quality of player your looking for you can adjust the Attribute-level or matching number to find more/less players

Something that was really enjoying about my save, was that I have found some crazy nationality combinations and some amazing newgens from some random nations. Examples needed? Here is just a few of them:

Random Player	Screenshot
Akono, a cameroonian left back who came through the youth of Torpedo Moscow, Russia
Barbena, the best ever Sammarinese I have ever seen
Miroshnichenko, the best Kazakh I have seen

After reading @SebWassell's various tweets (need to check them out, if you haven't. such a must follow btw thanks to FMSamo and tommysboy007 for the shout, as I would have missed it) I decided to combine the attributes filter with some promising personalities. I added this quite late in the save, so I couldn't really decide how good that worked for me:

A friendly takeover

But the most amazing part I had in my save was the takeover I had. Already after the 2nd season there were rumours about any ongoing potential takeovers, but it took some seasons to pass by until a new president appear. He didn't just take the club and the millions on the bank, no he intented to go full Florentino Perez and was trying to buy to Key Players from Barcelona for over 300M (which wouldn't have been deducted from any budget at the club). Unfortunately only 1 of the 2 players wanted to sign us, but with 120M that was still a hefty presend from the new boss.

That last game

My 2nd UCL finale (we've lost one already) took place in Berlin on a warm summernight on the 29th may of 2032. Just one day before the game, my brazilian star striker Luiz Carlos got injured, a "twisted ankle" after turning sharply:

He was topscorer of the league, having scored a total of 23 goals so far. By being it the last game of the season and a game of such magnitude I decided to give him an injection and put him on the bench. He comes on for the last third of the game, while it was still being 0-0. But then in the 91th minute he puts the ball into the net in one of the last attacks of the game, while everyone in Germany already was prepared for overtime.

Hay Cambio ✈

A few seasons before that game in the Olympiastadium in Berlin, I was already fancing to moving clubs as somehow it got a bit repetitive and I got a bit annoyed that all the players started to request new deals with wages around 20M/a now. As a result of this I did load already some additional league into FM. Mainly Southamerican ones: Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. After winning the UCL finale I resigned immediately as manager in Spain.

As one of the next steps I decided to sign for Everton, Everton de Viña del Mar S.A.D.P. Viña is a city just on the pacific coast. But if you dont know it, here's a brief introduction from wikipedia:

Viña del Mar (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈbiɲa ðel ˈmaɾ]; meaning "Vineyard of the Sea") is a city and commune on central Chile's Pacific coast. Often referred to as La Ciudad Jardín ("The Garden City"), Viña del Mar is located within the Valparaíso Region, and it is Chile's fourth largest city with a population of 324,836 (according to the 2012 census). Viña del Mar is also part of the Greater Valparaíso area, the country's third largest metropolitan area (pop. 803,683, 2002 census), after the Metropolitan areas of Santiago and Concepción. The Greater Valparaíso Area is home to five municipalities: Valparaíso, Viña del Mar, Concon, Quilpue and Villa Alemana.[5]

A personal note: When I was traveling around Southamerica 2y ago I almost made the trip to Viña which would have been me making a coast-to-coast trip starting at Montevideo in Uruguay with steps on the way in Córdoba, Mendoza and Santiago de Chile. But unfortunately I got robbed on the way to the bus station at Santiago de Chile, which would have taken me to Viña and the chilean coast. Instead I kept the next few days blocking my credit cards and getting an emergency passport, to be able to catch the flight back to Rosario in a few days

This save allows me to go there, at least virtually. (I actually wanted to write a bit more about the rules in Chile and analyzing the performances there a bit deeper, but somehow recpapping the 12 years at Santander took too long. Maybe in the next post)