Sushitaka – A Japanese Adventure

Foreword

Anyone who spoke to me about my FM23 plans, will know how absolutely gutted I have been by the errors in the MLS, I’ve pretty much spent my time since then trying to find a save to sink my teeth into, I thought id found one in Bulgaria, but the passion just wasn’t there for it. Genuinely at times felt like I wouldn’t really be doing much until a later update hopefully sorted out America. Thankfully that has proven not to be the case, and after a brief conversation with Cleon about South America, he mentioned on countries name, and I have pretty much been transfixed since then, so a massive thanks to the old man of the group, for helping me find something to really get behind this year.

The land of the rising sun, one country that I have always wanted to be able to manage in, hopelessly waiting for a time when SI would gain the licence to add the league into the vanilla game, I can get really funny about adding additional leagues at times, but desperate times call for desperate measures. This database I will be using has a couple of flaws, but Japan in general has everything I’m looking for this year, from graphical additions needed, to interesting teams, we’ll be looking to conquer the land of fighting spirit.

Toukon or Fighting Spirit, is used to describe a person that is a fighter by nature. It is also used to describe one’s will to fight the battles of life’s myriad of challenges. Toukon is going to be something I look to focus on throughout this save, I will have my style of playing, but one of the core principles that I’m going to look at when recruiting, and when training this year, is going to be on its personality. We are going to be channelling our inner Grasshopper and looking towards players with certain mental stats, players that look to have that fighting spirit within then, to hopefully become more than what their skills should allow them to be, whilst still looking for that sprinkle of flair to create something magical. Japanese football has a rich history of buying Brazilian players to do just that, so this will also be something we look to do, bringing in foreign imports for key roles we cannot find at home.

I do often like to take some form of inspiration from tactics surrounding teams within a nation I manage in, and Sushitaka was one of the first things I found popping up when reading around, it was used to describe the patient passing football of the Japanese national team around the 2010s, and as I had already used my time in the beta building a tactic that fit the mould for this already, it makes sense to try recreate that in Japan, and bring my own sense of Sushitaka to the J-League. The tactic I have created for this save will be one some will be familiar with already, it was tweeted out during the beta, in its early phase, and has been tweaked further, taking inspiration from the current system used by Mikel Arteta at Arsenal

The team that will be helping me realise these ambitions are currently in J-League 2 on this database, and also have a wonderful link with another team in the vanilla data. Albirex Niigata are a team without much past glory, they have spent time in the J-League 1 before, without much to shout about, but there is one little affiliated club that piqued my interest with them, sitting in the Singaporean league, there is a team named Albirex Niigata Singapore FC. Sister team to our own Albirex, our Singaporean friends will take players on loan from us and must themselves register 8 u21 Japanese players within their squad, so not only do we allow ourselves to bring our Toukon to the J-League 1 and try to beat the big teams against the odds, but we can also try to help our sister team dominate the Singaporean league as well. Who doesn’t like the sound of double glory.