I may have hinted in my previous blog post that I've racked up a fair amount of hours on Football Manager 2009. Steam claims I'm on about 227 hours played.  I'd like to add that thats not one save file, I've restarted the game numerous times usually because my career has gone tits up in some manner or I've just gotten bored. My current save file says that I've put in 6 Days, 5 Hours with the addicted rating as "Remember, eating gives you the strength to keep on playing".
 
I'll explain now that I'm a Gunner, for those not informed on club nicknames, that means I'm an Arsenal fan. But I very rarely start off as the manager of my favourite team, usually I start unemployed and see where that takes me but on this occassion I started in Ligue 1 in France as Manager of Bordeaux, a semi succesful first season was followed by a disastrous start to my second season and before Christmas I was fired and then employed by Burnley in the English Championship. That first half a season was a struggle against relegation, which is the state the club were in when I signed on. I prevented them going down and have spent the summer bringing in a fair few free transfers and now have a squad I feel confident in.
 
So why blog about it? I honestly don't know other than to say this is the first time in a long time I've been playing Football Manager 2009 and enjoying it rather than feeling that I owe the game my time. I feel like I'm building something at Burnley (I've got a mix of young English, Spanish and French players plus some old heads like Louis Saha dotted throughout the squad). My statistics aren't exactly brilliant (think my win % is around the 33% mark over 2 and a bit seasons) and I tend to just rely on playing the game my way and trying to work things out whereas I know ALOT of people use pre-built tactics and guides to lead them to success.
 
I've actually been posting monthly updates (as in in-game months) on the Arsenal forum I frequent as have other people on the site for the various editions of Football Manager that they play so its quite interesting to see how everybody approaches the game differently, has different success with the same clubs, tactics or players and just how different everything is in each individual persons game save. Football Manager really is an incredibly personal experience and everyone who plays it has a story to tell, although these no doubt bore those who don't give a crap about the Beautiful Game or Football Manager.