The return of Bavarian FIFA Works starts tomorrow

Last week, I put out a tweet to all of you guys asking if you wanted me to return to our series Bavarian FIFA Works. The response was overwhelming:

But, unlike last time, I didn’t want to just roll with Bayern Munich. Been there, done that. This time I wanted to change things up:

After being told which league to pursue, we needed a club.

And so, with my new mandate, I began setting this game and career up. For those that have been playing FIFA for a while, but haven’t bought FIFA 21 yet, you’re gonna find that career mode has undergone some extensive changes. It’s almost gotten to the point where it’s unrecognizable from previous iterations and looks like Football Manager more than anything else. That’s not the worst thing, but in tomorrow’s stream, I’ll explain what I like and dislike about it.

So, I decided to take the in-game month of July to get used to the team, figure the game out and try to see where the team stands. I became the new manager of 1. FC Kaiserslautern and played a few games of the 3. Liga season to get used to everything.

I walked away with one thought: y’all absolutely sewered me with this pick of a team.

There’s a reason why Kaiserslautern are dropping like a rock. The team is full of halfway decent youngsters and aging stars who aren’t going to hit even a 70 rating any time soon. Our best player is a 31 year old left back - Adam Hloušek - who is only a 72 and is at the club on loan.

We’ve offered loans to three players: Borussia Dortmund’s young Spanish right back Mateo Morey, Bayer Leverkusen’s next great central midfielder Florian Wirtz, and Bayern’s own Jamal Musiala. All three of them turned us down.

In real life, FCK are in 16th in the 3. Liga table on 10 points from 11 games. We’re following suit with one point from three games. That draw was helped with intervention from me after going down 2-0 in 39’ to Ingolstadt.

It’s going to be a tough ride, and I hope you’ll join me for it. There’s gonna be a few changes from last time to this one:

• I won’t be playing each individual game. That made things go by painfully slow when we did this back in March/April. Instead, I will be simulating an entire month at a time and picking one game each month (unless we play two cup matches in a month) to play.
• Instead of making blog posts about each game, I’m going to hold off until the end of the week and make one big blog post about each one so you can all catch up in one sitting.
• Schedule wise, I’m going to try and keep it more consistent. We’ll go live every weekday at 2:00pm ET. Exceptions to this will be made around the time of holidays (such as Thanksgiving this week) and on days that Bayern plays a mid-week match at the same time. For example, this week’s UCL match is on Wednesday at 3:00pm ET, so we’ll be streaming up until kickoff.

You can find each stream every day on Twitch at this link here.

I hope to see you all tomorrow in our first episode of: Strasse to Glory: 1. FC Kaiserslautern.