u/ElBuzzardo

This is the squad i gathered for the, erm, monetarily-challenged side of Bavaria across 5 seasons:

• Got back-to-back straight promotions in the lower divisions, thanks to a very strong and versatile but aging squad;
• Got straight into a UCL qualifying spot in it's first Bundesliga season over a decade (on Ultimate difficulty, mind you);
• Won the whole thing on its second attempt (with two games in hand);
• Just managed to win the UCL against Barcelona 4-2 (the only game this MC i used a restart, by the way - i was already done from this save at this point so i didn't really bother lmao).

So, how did we come to this?

First two seasons the manager decided to plan long-term: the "original" squad was very serviceable for the two first divisions, but it was also very old (the Starting XI had around 30.5 average age at Matchday 1). From this, we got:

• All Starting XI players had at least one Playstyle up their sleeve;
• Our eventual starter keeper, Adam Sommer - world-class by age 19!;
• Late into the 25/26 season, our main striker, Lennart Schröter;
• By seasons 2 and 3 our defensive midfielders Markus Heinze and Anton Wimmer (this turned into a CB to great success in league);
• And several other 80+ prospects such as Urban and Zbinden, who at this point are very effective impact substitutes.

Most of the signings made in this scenario were made thinking long-term via loan-to-buy young players (notably Fenyó and the Swedish Valverde aka Pontus Berqvist, both from Frankfurt - maybe a pattern here, huh?), very few notable ones were on the 10M~20M ballpark by the 29/30 seaso (mainly for the back line - looking at Burnley's Jordan Beyer) when not outright available by their contract's end or as free agents, such as Linton Maina.

With that said, the manager had a very blessed debut in the Deutsch summit as giants Borussia and their noisy, red neighbors at Bayern got catastrophically uncharacteristical seasons - Die Roten even being out of an European competition altogether in season 3!

For the difficulty, I was playing on Legendary all the way up until early season 3, in which i switched to Ultimate; even then, the first top flight season was about tinkering with the sliders as some games felt either far too easy, especially for a ~74 average overall side. By seasons 4 and 5 i believe i got a decent grasp of what i wanted from the game, so i didn't change much into it. Maybe the players' playstyles helped boost the teams' performance, but by season 5, simulating the whole league, the team still managed a runner-up finish with this very squad (the side to beat, more often than not being, annoyingly, RB Leipzig).

Leipzig themselves were the main villains, so to speak, in this save: winning a Domestic Double in the 27/28 season (after a thrilling final against our own 1860 no less), they trailed our sky-blue heroes up until the very end in our triumphant 28/29 campaign, until finally snatching it back in the 29/30 season.

Disclaimer: i am pretty sure such a "weak" team upsetting the most prestigious competition in today's football like that is fairly unrealistic; that said, the 29/30 season for our team was surprisingly convincent: sweeping the Munich Derby 3-nil both fixtures while simming, and also dispatching the red neighbors in the UCL semifinal playing only the away side (keep in mind Bayern consistently underperformed in this save, i don't know why) and playing in a strict no-restart rule up until the very last match of the save - at that point, assumingly, i didn't wanna bother with another season and just call it at that. Ah well, i won't be able to take the Pokal but that's for the other side of town... right?

Disclaimer 2: i did NOT use any mods that interfered or tampered with player development whatsoever - only the "Realistic Simulation Overhaul", which may had altered the league in such a way this chain of events happened and, admittedly, a few loan exploits here and there (only worked out for Wimmer though) - but otherwise academy and senior players had vanilla growth all the way through - which surprised me greatly to see image 2 for the first time lol.