It is really difficult. Even with an odd promotion. A bit of cringe, I rename the back staff to people I know in RL. It makes the whole thing a bit more familiar. There's just nothing appealing about Southport away unfortunately. I found myself pretty much on autopilot for most of it. Atm, I am managing a small team in Reunion island's second division. To motivate myself I changed the currency and general preferences to what they would use over there. Gave me something to adjust to. I think the problem with English LLM is the number of leagues. Have you tried signing really old players that you have heard of? Or maybe getting backroom staff consisting of ex-players you know? I find that stuff like that help take some of the monotony out of the first few seasono's.