George is on his own again this week, because Ed is having trouble with the commute of his new job. But fear not, because he’s joined by Hogan Ephraim, who we think is the first guest we’ve had on who’s actually been in Football Manager. And we’ve got a competition. Yup, a competition.

The question of the week is about people’s festive traditions in FM. George’s Christmas tradition revolves around A Muppet’s Christmas Carol and ignoring family time in order to get in a full season with Wolves.

A lot of the community make sure that they line up Christmas Day in the real world with Christmas Day in the game to get a special Easter Egg. We guess that’s actually a Christmas Egg, really.

And then there’s all of this stuff too –

• Hogan walks us through learning the logistics of the game with Manchester United. He’s more than ten years in the future, but he’s looking to start a new save in the next week or so.
• He also talks about the realism of the transfer market, and how he’s thinking about QPR for his next save and possibly starting a save in the conference and working his way up.
• George’s Oldham save features another player revolt, and even though he’s only got a £5000 transfer budget everything’s going pretty darn well.
• Hogan talks about how many people you’ll see playing Football Manager on the coach to games on a Saturday. And George wonders whether FM is likely to get more people into actual football management.
• We then chat about how Hogan doesn’t sign himself when he plays, how he sometimes need to substitute himself, and how he dealt with his own digital son.
• And then we launch our first competition. Full of fabulous prizes!

If you want to check all of that out, and a bunch more excellent content, then check out the podcast on SoundCloud by clicking right here. Or alternatively head to iTunes and search for Deep Lying Podcast.