While we at FM-Britain do our utmost to keep our members happy, we accept that we cannot and do not always perform to the standards we try to set for ourselves. With this in mind we decided to release the following letter from a disgruntled member. We ask for forgiveness for our failings and will work hard to correct the faults listed below. We hope that the said member will accept our apology and continue to visit the site in the future.

The FM-Britain Team

FM-Britain: An Admonishment

Dear Sirs

I am writing to you to express my general disappointment with your site since the release of Football Manager 2008 on the 18th October 2007. Having purchased the game I decided to go online to seek advice from ‘self-proclaimed experts’. I immediately discovered FM-Britain via the Football Manager Portal, which brings me to my first point.

The Portal had led me to believe that FM-Britain was highly respected and extremely popular. I believe this to be false advertising of the highest order. Via the main Portal link, which is obviously the most important one, I found a review of the scene at the wonderfully informed 30YardScreamer with not a mention of your site. If it were such a bastion of knowledge, do you really think it would be ignored in such a callous manner? I think not! My only conclusion is that you must be in cahoots with the owner of the Portal, especially after his scathing review of the previously mentioned article. Both his and your sites were ignored, which seemed to cause him much distress. Personally, I found it to be an interesting read, offering attention-grabbing jumps in logic and creative grammatical patterning. Their confidence in lasting survival seems especially well placed and I, for one, won’t be sad to see them continue at your sorry expense.

I will move swiftly on to my second point before my vitriol at your bogus self-publicity causes me to spit over my monitor in rage. Another issue well raised by this article was the absolute lack of personalities writing for your site. Well, it wasn’t actually well raised, since they ignored you, but it explained why they did. You simply don’t have any exotic writers telling us absorbing stories about their online exploits! I had expected to see colourful bitch fighting, backstabbing, name-calling and general tomfoolery from your staff and members. I was hoping to experience something similar to the humorous japes common in other forums, such as the time a regular member continued to alter his sign-in identification in order to provide merriment for the readers. Oh, how I laughed when I discovered the truth! At your site, however, there is none of this kind of hilarious monkey business. No! Everybody has a set name, you all get on well and respect each other and you allow little nonsense in your forums. As for the jokes you do try to make, don’t even start me on that! What is the point of a witty comment if it is too witty for me to understand in the first place? Boring, boring, boring. You would think that FM-Britain only existed to discuss Football Manager rather than offer exploitable opportunities for individual self-publication. If one were to believe your site representative of the scene, one would think it was all content and tactics related rather than about vibrant inter-personal argument.

Or you would if you had any content to actually offer! Three days after release and you have designed neither a tactic nor a training schedule for your members! Three days and nothing! And you call yourself the home of tactics! All we get are assumptions and frameworks. What use are they? Will they help me to fire up the game and win the Premiership in my first season without having to tweak a setting? No, they won’t! So, why bother?

The tactics and training schedules you do have on offer have all been designed by other sites. On the same day of release no less! If other sites can release fully-tested, guaranteed tactics and training schedules only hours after the game’s release, surely the ‘home of tactics’ can do it! But no, you seem content to bask in their reflected glory. You may have sanctioned their posting tactics in your forum but we know they aren’t yours. Don’t think that cleverly allowing them to advertise their site in the thread header is going to help either. It won’t. The glory is all theirs and your puny attempts to grab a share of the credit are blatant and pathetic. I seriously hope that they will block you from doing the same thing on their site when (if) you ever get round to designing some tactics. It would be a dishonour to their name if they let such sloth sully their site. The tactic in question was also written by one person! One person! One person! He needs no help from others to see if his tactic will be successful across divisions and continental leagues. He knows it will! He needs so little time to develop an official site-sponsored tactic that guarantees success. His opening tactic has already achieved that, in less than a day! Can you better that! No, you can’t! He has complete and understandable confidence in his tactic. After all, he has come second with it in his first season! What could be better? He needs none of this extolled teamwork that FM-Britain boasts. He has already achieved far, far more than your whole team in the first few hours of gaming! He hasn’t even had to wait for the patch! Get off your lazy backsides and release some tactics or my wrath will really stir.

Last, but not least, is your Lower League Management section. I intended to pursue a lower league management career and believed your site to offer some specialised services in that direction. Services! Don’t make me laugh! Firstly, there seems to be an obsession with llamas in this section. As I mentioned before, I am all for a good jape, but having such a pathetic in-joke about a spitting quadruped just isn’t funny! What’s it even got to do about football? It is hardly surprising I found it difficult to get involved with such puerile humour in evidence. However, I persisted. In my good faith I thought, let’s give them a chance. But how was I rewarded? All I wanted was some advice on some decent lower level players to purchase for my struggling non-league side. Not much to ask, especially with the dearth of tactical downloads in your so-called tactics forum. But my request was treated with contempt. No one answered, no one helped. A few even told me I wasn’t suited for lower level management. I found this to be a disgraceful attitude but one to be expected given the false promises of your main site. No tactics in the tactical forum, no player buying help in the lower league management forums. Shameful false advertising once again!

I am not sure as to the procedures as to reporting you for false advertising but be assured that I will do so if such a unashamed contempt for the truth continues. I will revisit the site two hours after the patch is released. Be warned, if you do not have a considerable number of patch-specific tested and proven tactics ready for download I will be taking appropriate measures against yourselves and the Portal, should it continue to fraudulently direct internet traffic to your site. I do not make such threats idly. You have been notified of my intent. I suggest you now take action.

I look forward to discovering if my directives have been followed.

I remain your obedient servant

Soccerates