Season 2014-2015 has ended in my Football Manager 2012 career, and it’s time once again to check out how the custom team and players did in the game as part of the side-challenges. We’ll start with Universitatea Craiova’s story, since that’s the most interesting one.

Universitatea Craiova

Even though the team managed to win the Romanian First Division last year, Craiova had a pretty rough start in Champions League as they had to start all the way down, from the Second Qualifying phase. They did pretty well against lower rep team Astana (to be honest, I never heard of it) and the similar or potentially stronger H Tel-Aviv, but failed to deliver against FC Kobenhavn (who, by the way, had a storming season in the Champions League, winning their group):

They went to Europa League and had some pretty decent performances in the Group stages, even though I think that they should’ve qualified from second place at least:

In the league, they didn’t do as good as last season and got the second place after fighting against Dinamo to the end, but eventually losing. They still have a chance in the Champions League next season when hopefully they’ll do better:

However, it appears that both some good wheeling and dealing on the Transfer Market, as well as their prolongued participation in European competitions did well to their bank accounts and this year we see their estimated value rise to 10.75 million, one million more than last season:

They also have a pretty good manager (with the team since the game started) and I guess he should do just a little better with the money he has (or had) and the quality of players available, at least for Romanian football:

Their transfers this year were also a bit off compared to last year and we can see a lot more activity on the selling side, where they got 13.75 million from transfers.

Although the team didn’t do as well in the First League this season, they were still up there and can be considered unlucky not to win the title. Overall though, we can say that their performances have improved since they did well in Europe (it their first participation since I started the game) and pretty well in the group stages of Europa League. However, I was personally expecting a bit more from a team that started with 50 million to spend and 4 seasons to obtain something out of the money.

Player challenges

This is the last time I am updating you on the player challenges since no real progress is made here and I am sure that the conclusion could’ve been written earlier. Both players continued their careers at the same clubs, with the lowpotential player being generally ignored by the team (as a side note, I tried to loan him to Chieti, but he refused to come), while the toppotential one is performing wonders for Shaktor. No changes have been recorded, once again, to their stats:

The conclusion we can draw from this side challenge is that indeed Football Manager pays a lot of attention to the potential of the player and if he has a good one (the Toppotential has 200), he will still perform incredibly well even though their ratings are not amazing. On the other hand, a low potential player can never make it to a bigger level.

As I said, this is the last season I write about the players, but I’ll keep watching them and let you know if anything interesting happens.