Everyone Very Mad After 12 Point and 2 Table Positions Improvement Year-Over-Year

When hired by HJK in Finland I knew the board set a required goal of winning the league. As such, I completely understood their disappointment in my finishing 2nd in my first year with the team, even though we were in contention to win up until the last game of the season. We finished 2nd (having finished 4th the year prior to my hiring) with 54 points (42 the year before). HJK is a storied club, but they had only won the league once in the past 5 years, having placed, in order, 8th, 6th, 1st, 4th, and now 2nd. Still, I recognized the goal was to win, and it made sense there would be disappointment.

What I was not expecting was the unanimous, borderline angry assessment of my first year in charge. Despite the 12 point, 2 position, 26 goal improvement, all possible parties saw the season as a massive failure. In the 7 in-game years since I started the save, our point total was the 4th highest point total achieved in Finland's top division. The team we lost to finished with the 2nd highest total in the past 7 years. Nonetheless, immediately following the season I was alerted that the Supporters and Board were very disappointed with our club vision progress and that my team wanted a meeting as they were unhappy with the club situation. The group of prominent players were angry about not winning the league (though no player was promised a title), with one player going as far as to say "I can't let this go, you're ruining careers here. I'm rapidly losing faith in your ability." I was listed as having an insecure job position and the board quickly invited me in while warning my job was under serious threat, asking "we would like to know why you think the team have performed so badly." Though I can think of challenges that occurred like losing our star striker midseason due to a release clause that I did not negotiate, overall it was hard to consider the season as having gone "so badly."

I was frustrated by the seemingly overboard reaction, but reminded myself that the game saw the goal as required, and there was not room for nuance beyond that. However, my frustration turned to confusion as I continued to get oddly misguided comments about decisions I made in the season review. HJK was a team that was 1 million over payroll budget when I arrived, having recently spent a record 3.2 million pounds on a player who was now playing for our reserve team before a team in Luxembourg finally purchased him as an Impact Sub for 100k after I agreed to pay half of his salary. Despite their free spending, I was given an F rating on a transfer by the board because of a high transfer fee of 84 thousand pounds. It would have been difficult to find a fee much lower that wasn't a free transfer. This 84 thousand pound player went on to be our Fan's player of the season as well as the signing of the season, having made 30 appearances with a 7.16 average rating. I signed another player for 195k pounds who had 4 goals and 3 assists in 17 appearances, and I was again given an F for paying "over the odds" for the player.

At the end of the season review, the summary talked about how we routinely performed subpar, and that it was a disappointing season that fans would want to forget. We improved to 16-6-5 with 53 goals scored after going 10-12-5 with 27 goals scored the year before I arrived. I know the goal was to win the league and we very, very nearly did it, earning enough points to have won the league 4 of the past 7 seasons. I expected the board to be disappointed, and I even accepted that given their (not-so-recent) history as a perennial champion perhaps there would be some frustrating overreaction. But in total, from the board to the supporters to the players to the press, the reaction began to feel weird and unrealistic, and clearly the kind of thing that I will be asked about in every interview for the rest of this save. It crossed a realism line for me with the severity and tone of the reactions and complete inability to recognize that growth had occurred. Even understanding the game is never going to recognize nuances like losing star players to previously set release clauses or joining a team a million pounds over payroll budget due to previous poor management, I have a difficult time reconciling that every party is upset and disappointed beyond their ability to see the significant growth shown by the team this year.

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