The most common scoreline in FIFA08 is 1-0. That also happens to be the most common scoreline in the real game of football. It’s day 4 of FIFA08 week on PES Chronicles, and I’m re-immersed in my Manager Mode career with Coventry City.

I started this career in the weeks leading up to the release of PES2008, then roughly abandoned it as PESday neared. Now here I am, back with my tail firmly between my legs…

Manager Mode on FIFA08: All the real teams, with the real kits, with the real players, playing in their real leagues. This much is well known. It’s never meant anything to me in the past and it means nothing to me now.

Gameplay is the most important element of a football game. The second most important element of a football game is gameplay. It’s also the third most important element.

After that point, yes, I’ll admit that presentation and licensing might count for something. However, there is evidence to show that some things might have been a little rushed…

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I started out in the Championship with Coventry City, with the real squad made up of the likes of Ward, Tabb, and Adebola et al. Stunning mediocrities all. (Sorry, lads, if you’re reading this, but you are.)

I started on Semi-Pro. After a few games, I went down to Amateur. I didn’t come back up to Semi-Pro for about ten, twenty games. Something like that. It took me that long to get comfortable with the core mechanics of FIFA08.

I was mid-table near the end of my first season, but then I put together a run of results that lifted me up to 5th place and a playoff spot. Er, in theory anyway. Imagine my extreme disgruntlement when no actual playoffs took place. Suddenly it was the next season. I was still in the Championship. The third-placed team had automatically been promoted to the Premier League.

Bad, EA. BAD. I trust that there have been red faces among the development team, and not a few smacked bottoms. The English league non-playoff fiasco is just one of a number of niggling annoyances in FIFA08. Thankfully, the majority of them are off the field of play. Read ‘em and weep, Seabass.

Here’s my current FIFA08 First XI:

Unlike my PES2008 First XI, this one is pretty constant. You can upgrade your club’s fitness coach stage by stage (at a progressively higher cost) to the point where your players are almost always fully fit before every game. Extreme fixture congestion only has a slight impact.

Until I started to get good players, I played a 3-5-2 in almost every game. FIFA08 is all about the build-up play. It’s a rare goal that isn’t preceded by a good deal of passing - thus, midfield dominance is a necessity.

I have a pretty solid bench as well. Among them are the likes of O’Shea, Pedro Mendes, Stevanovic, and Chamakh. I’ve never heard of some of them but they’re very good…

It’s pretty easy to accumulate enough cash to build a great team with Coventry City within a few seasons. I got automatic promotion in season 2008-09, and started battling it out in the Premier League. I have finished 8th, 5th, and 3rd in the past three seasons. Currently, in the middle of season 2012-13, I’m challenging for three trophies: League, Cup, and European Cup.

PES2008’s holy grail in Master League is the Treble. FIFA08 offers the crazily ambitious football gamer a mouth-watering prize, at least in the English League: the Quadruple.

Sadly, the Quadruple is over for me in this season. I have just been knocked out of the League Cup by Burnley. My team of quasi-galacticos was out-muscled and outplayed by the Championship upstarts in a grim encounter at Turfmoor.

That can happen in FIFA08 - a bit too often, actually, for my liking. You can play superbly against Chelsea one week and beat them 2-0 ( a great result in FIFA08), then take on Northampton Town in the Cup, struggle to keep the score at 0-0, and finally win 8-7 on penalties after extra time. I know because it happened to me on Saturday night.

Michael Owen is my top striker. I’ve had him for two full seasons now and he’s scored 20+ in both. Another roll-of-the-eyes FIFA08 moment: after signing him, Owen ‘held a press conference’ where he gushed about playing for Coventry City and said he had supported the club ever since he was a boy… Groan.

Anyway. Suspension of disbelief and all that. Here’s Owen executing a lovely scissors kick in the box:

Those close-range scissors-kick goals are among FIFA08’s most common goal types. Long punts over the keeper’s head and weak headers are among the others. It’s not a perfect game, not by any means. Sometimes you’ll score a common type of goal for a few games running. You’ll think you’ve got FIFA08 cracked and it ain’t so tough after all. Then you’ll find yourself locked at 0-0 and having to sweat to craft a proper goal, and know that you’re still learning the ropes.

I signed Mathieu just to see what he would be like in FIFA08 after trying and failing to get him for so long in my PES2008 ML career. He’s been great. Here’s a goal from Mathieu in FIFA08:

Yes, that’s a pretty ordinary goal by PES standards. By FIFA08 standards it’s a rarity, and one to treasure. The shooting is that difficult.

For the first time in five seasons, I completed the four-week mid-season negotiation period without signing any new players. That’s how it has to be sometimes.

It wasn’t for the want of trying. I need new players. My squad is a little top-heavy. I have a good First XI, with several established stars and stars-in-the-making (such as Marcos, pictured left). There are some good players in the rest of the squad; a few of them are great players, who I leave out of the First XI for other reasons.

Shaw, with his dodgy Stamina and Body Balance, is a case in point. He’s come on a lot in the past season, as I’ve spent two pre-seasons training him on nothing but Stamina and Body Balance. He’s only a season or so away from being an automatic first choice again.

But looking at players such as Boyd, Folan, Frutos (all three are big, lumbering kinds of strikers, long past their best); Weir and Cafu (Cafu in particular has been somewhat disappointing; he has a shallow development curve that doesn’t peak for about eight more years yet); and even my old warhorse Donadel (despite his excellence in my Division 2 struggles) - all of these have to go, I think, and be replaced by players who can perform reliably week in, week out, if I’m to have the kind of squad that can challenge for trophies in Division 1.

So I’m not buying new players any more just for the sake of buying them. That’s a routine you get into when you start out with the Default players in Master League. They’re so rubbish that you become focused on getting any new players - doesn’t matter who, just anyone - to replace them. Anyone else is better than the Defaults. It takes a few seasons to shake the feeling during Negotiation periods that you must, must, MUST buy new players no matter what.

Armed with my new Team Ranking - ‘C’ - I hoped to at least get past first base in my usual attempt to buy Mathieu. (If and when I finally do get Mathieu, I will speak at length about why this player is so important - even talismanic - to me in PES.) His club has so far blocked all efforts to negotiate directly with the player. This time, however… This time, permission was granted. I was talking to Mathieu!

I slapped in a hefty bid straightaway. I looked down my list of players and decided that Mathieu’s club should find Frutos+7000 points completely irresistible. Mathieu himself should be unable to resist a three-year contract worth 1300 salary points.

I always bring the length of the contract down when I think a player might be difficult to sign for the full five years. After a shorter contract, the player gets a chance to negotiate with you for a higher salary a lot sooner.

Some tipsters in the wider PES community recommend offering key players one-year contracts at ridiculously high wages. They report success using this method, but how crippled is their wages budget afterward? If they’ve offered Thierry Henry, say, a one-year deal at 3000 salary points, after the year is up he’s never going to agree to take anything less than 3000. You’d have to offer 3100 or more to keep him. Then you’re stuck with that ridiculous figure (the salary, not Henry…) for good. Unless you ship him off. In which case, why the fuss to get him in the first place?

So as much as I value Mathieu (and any other great players I’ll be going for in the future) I’m not going to threaten the stability of my entire Master League career by offering them silly wages. No player is worth sending your budget all out of whack for. It’s Master League, not Mathieu League.

I went to the next week, all excited. I hadn’t even looked at any other players. I thought: this is it! I’ve got Mathieu. Bwahaha, as they say.

I was disappointed to see a notification message saying ‘Negotiations broken down’ instead of the hoped-for ‘SUCCESS’. However I was cheered to see an encouraging message in the main menu window. It looked as if I was on the right road, in the ball-park, and so on. I just had to make the right bid, evidently.

I went back into negotiations, and this time offered the club Braafheid+7000 points, and Mathieu himself a two-year deal worth 1350 points. It was a wrench to contemplate getting rid of Braafheid - he’s been a great SB for me so far. But I figured that the prospect of getting a really good, rising star might tip Mathieu’s club’s hand. I thought the two-year deal on offer to Mathieu would clinch it.

Again to the next week, and again no joy. There were two weeks left. I started to think I’d better look at a few other players. It might not be the time for Mathieu after all. My Team Ranking was probably the culprit. Mathieu just didn’t want to come to me right now. His current club was ranked ‘B’. Mathieu himself was an ‘A’-ranked player.

I made bids for Mathieu, and again for Micah Richards. Just the two of them. (I checked my List again and tried to negotiate for Maldini (a 20-year-old youth at this stage of my ML), who is at Manchester United and not really playing for them. Man Utd refused to negotiate.)

Went to the next week, and the Mathieu and Richards deals had both broken down. I concluded that it was the players themselves who didn’t want to come to me right now. I got the message. I gave up for now. I didn’t want any other players. I wanted to hold onto the excess points and try for Mathieu and Richards again in the off-season. I went past the final negotiation week and into Week 19 of the season without placing any new bids.

Despite knowing that I don’t have to buy new players in every single negotiation period, I did feel that I’d wasted this one. I could and probably should have looked for another top-drawer striker. A superb CB would also have come in handy. The dead wood in my squad is still there, gathering dust. They only play when there is absolutely no one else available, which isn’t very often.

I also feel that I have a few too many players in the squad. 32 players is the maximum size allowed, and having 32 players limits my opportunities to get new players from the Youth and Unbelonging lists. At the end of the season I’ll be looking to get the squad down from 32 players to about 26 players. Make room for the next generation.

For now, it’s back to the ups and downs of my season. I took a look at the Calendar before Week 19, and was shocked to see two games per week for the next several weeks. Of course, when I won the Division 1 Cup last season, I automatically qualified for the PES equivalent of the UEFA Cup - the European Masters Cup. Caught up in a tense relegation battle at the time, I hadn’t realised.

So. Two games per week forever, eh? No problem…

After the annus horribilis that was 2010, when I survived relegation back to Division 2 by not much more than the skin of my teeth, my Team Ranking has gone up to ‘C’ - thanks for the most part to my swashbuckling Cup run and victory over Liverpool in the final. My league form certainly didn’t get me the new rank.

Yet again I found myself thinking that I had to bag myself a really top-notch set of players in the off-season. There hasn’t been a negotiation period yet when I haven’t thought that. And I’ve always been left slightly disappointed.

This time, I have 38000 points in the bag, an estimated final salary bill of 21000 points, and a squad of 30 players (Huylens retired) that could use some weeding.

PES2008 models (in a limited fashion) your team’s prestige and popularity, which determines not only what players are interested in signing for you but whether their clubs will even let you negotiate with them at all. Now that I was a ‘C’ team I should, in theory, find that more players and clubs were willing to talk to me. Right?

No, not really. I still couldn’t get past the clubs to talk to the players I was most interested in. Mathieu being top of the list, of course. Jerome as well. A left-back called Jansen. Even a legend from PES6, Zoro. None of their clubs accepted my requests to negotiate.

There were plenty of others. And this isn’t even the most frustrating thing. The game counts an unsuccessful request to negotiate as one of your allotted number of weekly transfer bids. Thus you can easily spend a negotiation week putting in requests, having them rejected, and then suddenly finding everybody’s names greyed-out, forcing you to move on to the next week to start again.

After the first negotiation week, I got the message. A ‘C’ ranking was not much better than a ‘D’ ranking. I’m moving in the right direction, but I’m not there yet. I’d have to lower my sights slightly, or hope I’d get lucky.

And so here’s the players I did bid for, and get:

LEKSTROM (GK, age 27) - traded for Ivarov+1000 points. A keeper with great all-round stats. Better than Friedel and Kim U Don’t. Three keepers in your squad is a luxury, yes, but there’s usually about five games per season when you’ll be glad of it. Stamina schmamina…

O’SHEA (CB/SB/DMF, 29) - traded for Suzuki+3000(ish) points. What? An ageing, lumbering centre-back? What was I thinking? Well: for one thing he plays in three positions (CB, SB, DMF). For another thing his stats are still impressive. For yet another thing I was influenced by the fact that I have him in my Coventry City team on FIFA08 (yes, I said the F-word) and he’s brilliant. Want to see a goal O’Shea scored for me in FIFA08? Okay, here it is:

(And yes, that is from next-gen FIFA08, not ‘next-gen’ PES2008. Spot the difference? It’s a constant source of amazement to me this year that, for the first time ever, FIFA is arguably nearly as good as/as good as/better than PES. Next-gen FIFA08 runs so smoothly, too. Curse you Seabass!)

O’Shea will do a job for me for a couple of seasons, then I’ll move him on (we’re back to PES2008 now).

BRAAFHEID (SB/CB, age 25) - traded for Weir+1500 points. Crazy name, crazy guy. High body balance, high speed, and he can tackle. He also plays in the middle. I tested him out in my two pre-season friendlies (of which more later) and he did well, a lot better than Klavan or Van Steensel.

MARCOS (CMF/SMF, age 24) - A superb find in the Unbelonging list, and a player who I would never have got but for the new ‘C’ ranking I think… He’s a left-sided midfielder with strength and stamina and a wicked long shooting ability. He’s like Shaw with muscle. Again, he did well in my pre-season games.

DELGADO (CMF/SMF) - traded for Mao Molina (goodbye, Chairman Mao!)+ 500 points. Another utility player in the mould of last season’s miracle man Djiba. Middle Shooting, strength, body balance, a bit of pace.

ANDY COLE (CF, age 20) - snatched up from the Unbelonging list. A bit of a risk, as he’s a player who I’ve never rated at all in real life. I agreed with Glenn Hoddle when he said that Andy Cole seemed to need five chances to get one goal. But this is PES, not real life. I’ve never rated Alan Smith in real life either, and what a phenomenal player he was in PES6. Here, Andy Cole is just 20 years old and already has impressive stats. Also, I really want another nippy striker up front. I seem to have too many big lumbering CFs right now - Schwarz, Folan, Boyd, Frutos - and not enough fox-in-the-box CFs. I’ve got a good feeling about Cole for some reason, despite him being unfit for both of my pre-season games. Grrr.

So that was my negotiation period. I didn’t get the triple-A players I was hankering for, but I’m happy enough with the ones I did get. My squad is now composed of 32 players, all but a few of whom can at least hold their own in their position against almost any opposition.

Among the players I nearly got was the one and only Micah Richards. I think the game was telling me that I’ll get him next time.

Next time I’ll cover my pre-season games and talk about my all-new and all-improved First XI.