[FM23] L'Espace FCL : Production de merlu 🐟

[Tommo_]

L'espace FCL : Production de merlu 🐟

Welcome to my FM23 save game thread, the eagle eyed amongst you will have guessed that I will taking the reins of FC Lorient, who play in Ligue Un in France. In real life football, Les Merlus (The Hakes) have been a stand out performers in the league, they currently sit 4th in Ligue Un. Having only just avoided relegation last season, many predicted them to struggle again, particularly after the sale of their best attacker, Armand Laurienté to Sassuolo, a change in manager to Regis Le Bris, who took over the club as a rookie manager. But they've wowed fans with the way they've performed. 

During FM13 or 14 I had a longer term save with Lorient, it was one of those saves where you begin to attain an affinity with the club. I started to follow them in real life and look for their results, over the next years I would come across them quite often as they had some cross over with Arsenal, the club I support. Whether that's Arsenal buying Matteo Guendouzi from them, of Arsenal legend Jeremie Aliadiere having an unspectacular spell in orange. 

So why do I want to return to Lorient in FM? I think they are the perfect club in a perfect league for what I want to achieve in this version of the game. With my family and work life taking priority these days I don't have so much time to dedicate to FM these days, so I wasn't looking for a longer term project that involved growing a lower level team. I wanted a team that I could mould and make an impact with. I suspect Lorient, within FM, can easily become a mid-table team that can fight for Europe and possibly qualify in the near future, if I manage things well. 

However, on the pitch results aren't my focus. Which my sound strange coming from a football manager but it's not something that will determine whether my save will be a success. The title of this thread is ''L'Espace FCL: Production de merlu", "L'Espace FCL" being the name of the club's training ground and academy based in Ploemeur, Brittany and "Production de merlu" directly translating into 'Hake production". This will give you a clue into what I want to prioritise in this save, production of talents through the academy, youth development and a focus on home grown talent.

 
 

In a recent interview with the club's website (if I've translated correctly) the club's Head of Youth Development, Frédéric Bodineau (above) made some comments which peaked my interest. 
 

Quote

On the training centre project: "Our raison d'être is to be able to feed the professional team. The objective is to propel, each year, 3 players into the "useful 16". Those who share most of the playing time."

On how they plan to achieve their aims: "On the one hand we have recruitment. We have to find players who correspond to the club project, and who want to move forward with us. And on the other hand, we must create the conditions for the success of these young people."

On their values: "Obviously. Humility, hardwork, respect, listening and ambition also which seem fundamental to me. For me, human values, those “around the field”, are a strong prerequisite. Then, I talked about it, you need a shared culture around performance. And from this stems many things, from the training methodology to the pedagogy through the place of the competition. We must ensure continuity, stability, a common vision but without becoming a dogma. The main objective remains to train high-performance players for our professional team."

The comments are where I will construct my approach for the save from. Fortunately, my on-field goals set in-game by the board and the supporters are quite open. The board require me to make profit on players and work within our wage budget whilst the supporters want to see entertaining football and to stay in the division, all of this should be straight forward and gives me some freedom to implement what I want to achieve off the pitch.

With all this in mind, I set some aims for the save.

Aims

1) Actively promote youth players from Lorient 2 and the Academy into the Ligue Un squad, where possible.

2) Create a recruitment process that brings the best young players from Brittany, France and other focus areas in line with the above FCL philosophy.

3) Maintain a reputation for developing high level players. Lorient have already had the likes of Guendouzi, Lemina, Claude-Maurice, Laurienté, Wissa, Meslier and many others come through their ranks. 

In future posts, I'll begin to elaborate more on each of these aims but in the mean time - thanks for reading!

Salut! 

 

[Tommo_]

L'espace FCL : Production de merlu 🐟
A promising start...

At the beginning of the save, some people like to spend hours day one hiring and firing staff, setting things up etc but my preference is to work with what I have, particularly with a save like this one where the focus is on what we have at the club with local staff etc. Initially, I wanted to focus on the playing squad and despite not being a huge fan of the tactical side of FM, I like to see attractive football being played. I like to keep things simple and given the stature of the Lorient side I had some preferences as to what I wanted to see; 

1. Finding the balance between attack and defence. I always like to have a holding midfielder at the base of the midfield, in this case we have Laurent Abergel and a quite capable replacement Bonke Innocent. It's important for me to have this protection in front of the defence. It might go without saying but they have the same mentality as the two centre halfs. 
2. The two centre midfielders are the showcase of this team, both high potential players and trained at the club. It's my aim to keep both Ponceau and Le Fée throughout the save and build the team around them. 
3. We don't want to press high so we're starting with a mid-block and standard defensive line. The doesn't have the qualities to press high and we don't want to be caught out at the back either. 
4. The Mezzala is my favourite role in FM, the left hand side with the FB, Mez and IW allows for an overload and also some rotations with the PF dropping deeper. I hope to see my Mez or IW getting in behind with that space created by Moffi.
    

Pre-season starting well with this setup, no goals conceded and plenty of nice stuff to see going forward. We continued this form into the start of Ligue Un and currently sit 2nd at the end of November. We opened our league season with a huge win over Brittany rivals Rennes, that got the fans on side! Another win over title contenders Lyon was great to watch. At this point we knew we were outperforming our xG so had expected some difficult results to follow, which they did. I've seen a bigger need to tweak things in matches during this version of the game, some things that I've switched in the last 3 or 4 matches as follows

1. Balanced > Positive mentality
2. IF-S > IF-A
3. FB-A > CWB-S
4. Raise the tempo
5. Work the ball into box
    

After the transfer window closed (I had the first window disabled) we were able to add our first player to the squad. Amadou Traoré was a free agent since leaving relegated Bordeaux and after a trial with the team I decided to pick him up. His attributes are looking good and his four goals in 3 starts for the B team is no surprise to me. Can he develop into a first team player for me? Here's my squad in full for those interested.

 

[Sport Lacost]

I’ll be following this

Your approach definitely resonates with me. In the past I’d take a small club and spend the entirety of that year taking them as far as I can, but with outside influences taking up more of my time I just don’t have the hours to pour into that sort of game now so I will be following a similar approach this game cycle. 
Similar to yourself, my plan is to take a sort of mid table side and over maybe 3/4 seasons (or however many I can fit in this year) take them as high as I can. I’m not necessarily focused on winning silverware, but just growing the club in a realistic and manageable way.

Good luck with this - I’ll be following! 

[Tommo_]

Somehow we didn't beat PSG at home...

[Maximation]

I follow, good team

[SixPointer]

On 04/11/2022 at 22:31, Tommo_ said:

Somehow we didn't beat PSG at home...

Crazy performance shame you didn’t win it