With the news that Football Manager 2025 was being cancelled, I got my thinking cap on for a new adventure that would see us through the remainder of the seemingly neverending FM24 save cycle. One that immediately stood out was a recommendation in our top 10 challenges guide – the A To Z Journeyman, aka the Alphabet Challenge.
The challenge, which we ranked as the most difficult on that list, was one that I toyed with while mulling over my recent EuroTrip save. The main objective is to win a major trophy – a nation’s primary domestic league or cup or a major continental competition – with a club whose name begins with every letter of the alphabet, from A to Z from any league worldwide. Broader considerations of the challenge include:
Minimal Experience: The general rules are pretty loose, but you have to begin at the bottom of the football management world, find a job and begin building your reputation. From there, you can take on higher-profile jobs, with the ultimate aim of ticking off every letter of the alphabet.
Longevity: This challenge may not initially sound that difficult. However, the fact that you have to manage at least 26 clubs, win a trophy with 26 clubs and, realistically, have a career of at least 40 years in-game makes this a seriously tough task. Additionally, one of the biggest challenges will be finding, let alone managing, a club whose name begins with Q, X, Y and Z – so we’ll be leaning on Football Databases for some assistance.
Club Discovery: We could feasibly encounter problems trying to land a club beginning with a specific letter. For starters, there are only four clubs in the world whose name begins with X, and none of them are in the playable version of FM. Therefore, we’ll have a little creative licence by making Spanish Jerez (also known as Xerez) and Swiss club Neuchatel Xamax our X representatives. The other option was to use a custom database to add the Guatemalan league, which has two teams beginning with the letter X, which I wasn’t comfortable with in a long-term save.
I also considered spinning a wheel to decide the next letter we have to tick off. But, in practice, that proved far too challenging and meant we could spend months, if not years, simply job-hunting. So we may keep that idea on the backburner for future saves.
Starting Nations: Given that we will be beginning our adventure with a manager who has a very low reputation and no experience, I figured it would be best to start out with leagues of lower reputation. So, for no particular reason, I’ve decided to start with:
Australia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Finland, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Norway, Peru, Poland, Republic of Ireland, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay and Wales.
Getting Started With The Alphabet Challenge
To get started, I loaded up the newly updated FMInside database and downloaded all the latest kits from FM Slovakia to make it feel slightly more like a ‘new game.’ The only thing remaining is to fire up the game, add our managerial protagonist Trebor Mahtal, simulate through the first season to start in June 2024, and then find a starting club. To do that, we’ll be back with Part 2 this afternoon.
So join us at 2pm today as we begin the epic Alphabet Challenge in earnest!
Football Manager Addict 