Popular Post WhiteCat33 Posted March 13, 2023 Popular Post Share Posted March 13, 2023 (edited) Statistics Manager July 2023 update: After a 3 month break I've returned to this save and made the leap to Europe having conquered the MLS. My philosophy at the top here is still very much in play for my current management. I still use my excel tool combined now with a no attribute skin to have easier access to current season statistics. For those who want to jump right in to Europe: Start at Eintracht Frankfurt [Dec 2025] Moneyball In this career I'll be attempting "the Moneyball approach" to managing a club. The drive behind this is to take advantage of all the interesting new statistics SI have added into the game and see if I can build a Continental Champion Club by utilizing them. By Moneyball I mean very simply that major decisions in player acquisition, retention and play time/position are made primarily on the players measured past performance in the game. This combines both on the field (which the stats give us) and off the field (coach remarks & training performance). Eventually I intend to make cost-benefit analysis of the value the player provides us for their statistical performance on the field when weighing how "good" they are for us on a Moneyball-basis. This will provide justifications for accepting large transfer bids for well performing players later in the save. Need for a Tool The issue is statistical direct comparisons aren't all that convenient to do in the game itself especially on a large scale. Thankfully SI allow you to print any page into a spreadsheet format that is easily opened by excel! Over the past few weeks I've used a new Youth Academy Only Challenge (YAC) save in the Lower Leagues of Germany to build a tool that enables me to do a "simple" task: display the absolute and relative performance of my players. This means having the ability to export the performance of all the players in the league(s) of interest from the game and do three things: 1) Automatically display individual player statistics; 2) Compute relevant benchmark averages ; 3) Create a relative a ranking system to display where any individual player lies within the range on each statistic. Simple right?! While it took a good amount of time in excel, from a data cleaning & organizing point of view SI actually gives you a very easy to manipulate dataset. Only Player Position provided a bit of work to parse out and there I just brute forced the variables rather than properly cleaned it. For actually transforming the data I only required two function AverageIfs() & PercentageRank(), which are straightforward to implement. If you're curious in my developing the tool here are the posts from my Elazig Hamburg YAC save as I built it: Intro & 2030 (S8) | 2029 (S7) & 2028 (S6) | Master Sheet | Percentile Rankings (S9) | 2056 POR & BEL | Table Rebuild |GK Add & V.03 Link . As Introduce my save I'll talk about what I've built, how I've used it and provide the steps so that you can as well. Current Tool Link [4-14-2023] https://www.mediafire.com/folder/z6k77x3z9wj9z/WhiteCatStats So where to play? With a little more tweaking from the base system I developed in Germany, the tool was ready to actually be used to play moneyball instead of evaluate my players in a youth only situation. The question was where to go in the world!? As an American who has played FM for over 10 years I have never taken control of a MLS side. And to me there is a perfect opportunity in this year's edition of the game to really build a team from nothing: St Louis FC SFC is the most recent MLS expansion team, who have just started their inaugural 2023 season. What is great for my save idea is that they are available to be selected as a club with the MLS start date of 1/1/2022 and they will just be league-less for the first season. This way the AI won't fill it with useless players, and we just start with the handful of pre-acquired players by the club in real life and can build a team to fit our style of play. Head Coach I didn't screenshot him but like in the YAC I started with my Sunday Reputation & No coaching badge coach. First time using him at a topflight club, but luckily, I have a year to get him up to speed quality wise Challenge Restrictions: In my mind just doing moneyball-style transfers wouldn't be enough of that 'unfairness' that hooks me into small nation saves. First, I've been a watcher of The Cult of FM @Jack Sarahs youtube moneyball series and like the challenge of a "hidden ability" save. Therefore, I've hidden all the attributes via the skin settings (A=0). Second, I've followed a couple career series where there was a region or province player restriction in place and felt that would add that extra bit of difficulty. Out of Africa in the Spanish league as a current example. Similar to @Jimbokav1971 I restricted myself to what I consider a logical restriction for my save but opted for a single region rather than a continent: the Caribbean! To be slightly fair to myself (and open up scouring Europe for players) I only am requiring that a player has one of his nationalities from the Caribbean. He certainly doesn't have to be born in the Caribbean or come through a Caribbean club, however we will end up paying the premium in wages and transfers if he doesn't. Additionally, since I am not simulating a season for the first ~6 months I can only make free-agent signings to fill out the most basic positions until I can download sufficient statistics to evaluate player performance. Downloaded Databases: For this to be possible the save needs two different databases. The first is @V50's awesome and accurate Caribbean Megapack, which I used last year for St Vincent and can highly recommend if you want a totally different small-medium nation FM experience. While I'm not playing there, loading accurate leagues as playable is critical for forcing the game to generate Caribbean players. The second database is new and is @Gum's take at an accurate USA lower leagues specifically including the NCAA amateur clubs. This is important not just so my reserve teams in Next Pro or affiliates in the USL Championship can actually play real games (and get real statistics), but so I can scout and make assessments on youth player performances in the NCAA so I do more than just randomly pick players in the Super Draft. Game Setup: This combination of leagues I think gives me the best players/performance set up for my game. From my experience playing in the Caribbean this should give me access to the best producing and performing domestic leagues with Haiti, Jamaica & Trinidad and Tobago being the top 3. I have of course also checked every box for loading Caribbean players to give me some chance of players outside of these loaded nations, but I expect that to be highly unlikely. For Europe I went with just England and France with a few additional tiers loaded as the caliber of players we are looking for very well could be playing outside of the top flights. I strongly considered loading the Netherlands, but decided against it. Introduction to the MLS The MLS is a very different league to any in Europe as it is a closed-league, with a salary cap & has a very American amateur youth-setup combined with a draft system. I'll save the salary cap for an additional post as that's pretty complicated. The MLS league is actually two simultaneous competitions. The first is "Major League Soccer", where all the teams are split into two parallel geographic divisions. The second is the "Supporters Sheild", where instead of being split up everyone is together in a single table. This is like Europe where the best performing regular season team wins the title. For the MLS, the top 7 teams in each division (currently) qualify for a single elimination playoffs (like other US Sports). In addition to the league there is both the US Cup Competition as well as a "Leagues Cup" where teams from the MLS and Mexico are drawn together into a mid-summer competition. The scheduling is pretty hectic with 2 games a week being more often than not especially if you have the 'fortune' to do well in the cup competitions. Team Structure For the team structure, both your Reserve Squad and Youth Squad are actually separate teams that you only have partial control over. Importantly the academy players are all amateur and can be poached by any international club who looks at them, but domestic competitors can't take them. You have till they turn 18 to sign them on your own Reserve or Senior contract or they get entered into the super-draft. Would make a youth-only save sligthly a headache... Drafting For the Super-Draft each year in early January the ~200 youth players in the country are entered into a full league draft. Each team is given at the start of the season a pick in each of the third rounds, but these are tradable assets. Before it starts there is an inbox message outlining the "Generation Adidas" Players, which get special league-guaranteed contracts that don't go against your salary cap as well as tend to be the highest potential youngsters in the class. There are also 6 temporary teams created with the players in the draft so you can scout the players directly. Lucky for us though, we will have their NCAA careers as well to look at for stats! Trades instead of Transfers In the MLS you have an additional transfer window for each club that is a more complex version of player exchanges. Here you can trade not just players, but Salary-Cap Credits, Player Rights, Draft Picks and very importantly International player slots per year & permanently. This will be the method for us getting domestic Caribbean players from other MLS teams. Most often this is draft picks for players, but sometimes with higher quality players teams will offer GAM money for them. Contracts Part of that trading is because contracts for players are held by the league not by the club. So transfers between MLS teams are not for real money (usually), but for different tradable assets. General Allocation Money is used by a club to 'buy-down' how much salary a player contributes to the 100k p/w cap set by the league. Each team gets a varying amount of GAM at the start of the season. Since we were a new team we got extra our first year to build a squad (and we used it!). These Senior Contract players can still be on relatively high salaries like our Swis international GK Roman Burki. You are forced to buy down these contracts at the start of the season and actually was brought below the minimum cap requirement (somehow). Each team gets 2 exemption players called Designated Players and you can buy a 3rd slot for GAM money if you choose. These players have a fixed salary impact and can have unlimited salaries. This is how the MLS signs high reputation players and clubs can pay them competitive salaries to Europe without blowing out the salary cap. We start with a versatile CD/DM/CM German from Koln who is excellent as a Segundo Volante (A) who is actually on a lower salary than our GK, but is a 'higher reputation' contract. Go figure. Injuries Because of the hectic league and easy trading of players the transfer windows are huge in the MLS especially for domestic and free agent signings. There are also two levels of 'injury reserve' where a player is unregistered due to injury and you can bring in a replacement either by signing or recalling a loan. DL6 is a 6 game removal and SEI is a season ending injury that goes until January 1st. Additionally, you can always sign an emergency goalkeeper if your starter gets injured so bad he has to go onto the SEI even outside of windows. Salary Cap The financial rules have lots of conditions and I'm still fully figuring it out. What this impacts is any player that is kept at the club during a season, so what I've noticed is this will incentivize loan-farming players out to the US lower divisions till they are viable for the first team / gain citizenship rather than keep them in your reserve team. I haven't figured out how to sign players to our B Team directly, which is annoying as I'd like to sign the academy players there to play for a few years rather than onto our reserve contracts and then loaning them to USL teams. I'll go into this more with the different transfers I made thus far. You'll see both my successful manipulations as well as some not so 'artful deals' to put it politely... Hey this is my first transfer save in over a year, I've got a lot of remembering to do! To Come Intro Posts: To make sure this save stuck (as well as keep working on the spreadsheet) I've not just made it through the vacation season but played the first full MLS regular season (which you can see in the screenshots). Since everything seems to be working correctly I'll be editing and posting tonight a First 2-year recap, which will include examples of how I've evaluated players as well as my spreadsheet I mentioned at the start. I've made sure to stop before the MLS Playoffs so once I am caught up this can turn into a 'live' monthly update post to show how St Louis is doing. Edited July 28, 2023 by WhiteCat33 10 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 13, 2023 Author Share Posted March 13, 2023 (edited) Introduction on the Squad, Scouting & Salary Glitches Initial Squad We start with only a few first team players, but have a full 2nd squad and youth team that I can promote players from if I'd like to. You'll notice that of course none of my players are Caribbean. Like in a Youth Challenge save, I can keep any existing players at the club that aren't Caribbean and keep giving them new contracts. I just can't transfer-in non-caribbean players. This excemption will include players who come through my youth academy, where I highly doubt I'll be seeing Caribbean players till I find myself an island affiliate. Contracts I mentioned earlier about the contracts, when you start a save in the MLS you get this much more detailed information, which really is a lot of word salad until you have to start negotiating contracts. The jist I gather here is there are specialized incentives to finding U20 & U22 players. We can discuss this more when it's made relevant. We already have 2 Designated players our playmaker and our striker. I need to get the coaches in to get a good read on these players as I can't look at their attributes, but this means if I want to bring in a high talent European player I will have to pay the extra fee to add an additional slot. I have to say this is a pretty good starting core of players, that I found completely satisfactory to build upon rather than raze and rebuild. No-League Glitch Because I'm not in the MLS for the 2022 season, I don't have any GAM money allocated to the club, and no Salary cap that we are judged against. This makes it impossible for me to directly negotiate any larger contracts that would impact the salary cap. Here is an example of a player who I ended up missing out on because I couldn't directly negotiate and hadn't set up a GM yet to do it for me: I was however able to get around this during the friendly season for the most part when I was picking up older Caribbean free-agents all on less than 3,000 p/w contracts as well as the Academy players the coaches liked on reserve contracts. WIth these players I was able to fill out a first 11. You'll notice very easily that all of these players are inferior to the star players the club initially starts with, so I feel I didn't game the system picking up players that were free agents: Club Upgrades: I didn't sit idle but made sure to upgrade my background youth setup. I don't expect to get too many good players this way, but the club has tons of money so I don't see any reason not to max this as soon as possible. One of the better players I found was Terell Ondaan and he was already plucked by a random Japan side for a loan + future sale during our vacation season. Weirdly this sale didn't trigger at the end of the season, but they took him back on loan during 2023, so he is effectively transferred. Looking at that 2022 performance you'd think I would have brought him back, but actually we have a lot of AMs in the squad, though his specialty on the right could have been used by us this season. He has a 2 year extension on his contract (if he doesn't get bought by Higashiosaka), which is an option to exercise. Scouting Issues: Another annoying issue is that during the vacation season I couldn't specify any specific targeted scouting other than just 'full range North America' unless my chief scout happened to select it previously. It meant I was very inefficient in my first year scouting building up my knowledge base of Caribbean players around me. Even so, by the midpoint of the season I did get an alert of some interesting end-of contract options: Of these the one I liked the most was the super versatile AM Alex Marshall who plays in the Canadian Premier League. Here is what an extensive knowledge scouting report on him looks like: At this point in the Canadian season He’s only played 2 games so its hard to really say how he’ll do in the season but he’s already generated an assist. I assigned a scout to fully investigate him and keep checking in every month to see how he progressed. Will have to wait till halfway through to transition evaluating him. Mid-Season Data Export Come Mid-May its now time to do our first export of players. Because I started with such an early start-date none of the European Leagues are actually running, so I can only get domestic, Canada and some Caribbean leagues information. The way this export works is pretty straightforward, but I'll walk-through it here. I add a new Head Coach who I make unemployed. Then I import my custom view that shows as many /90, ratio and % statistics I could select. I'm sure I've missed some, but there are more than enough now to evaluate players. Eventually I'll also be utilizing salary and geographic indicators / nationality for easier scouting but I'm not there yet. WhiteCatStats.fmf To get the view to work with your playing manager you have to go to the "Players in Range" tab of your scouting, it won't work in the scouted section. Again eventually I'll add this view to the other windows, but I haven't felt the need to. Download this into the "Views" folder in your SI Documents Folder You then Import it: With the view imported I go to scouting and import filters and will choose the relevant pre-setups I've made thus far (and there are more up at the top) All of these filters do the same thing. I'll import the last one as an example: All of my filters have two components: 1) A Minimum Minutes played in the season & 2) specific leagues selected. My tool does league-level statistics so I want full control over the number of leagues I am loading into the spreadsheet in any dataset. This specific filter is the one that will be used to find Domestic (USA+Canada) players as well as those who still play in the Caribbean. I then Ctrl+A all players that pop up (2111 in the example) and then Ctrl+P to print as a web-page: This then gets saved into my season-statistics folder. As you can see I do them in 6 month increments with the ideal targets being start of May and December to catch players before the season reset occurs: From here I open my Excel sheet and then the season stats that I just exported to my computer. And drag-and-drop it into the spreadsheet with my other statistics exports. Next I copy all but the first 2 Columns And then paste into the "Data" sheet. Obviously, before I do this I delete all the contents in this sheet. I do this manually because to automate this process requires enabling macros for the sheet as the "Get.Worksheet" function is only available through vba and not as cell commands, which everything else is in this spreadsheet. I'm a stranger on the internet, and don't wan't to be saying 'trust me enable macros', so this part is manual. First Transfer Example: Alex Marshall I know this is a lot, I'll go through it with my first transfer example which is my return to Canada to evaluate if Alex Marshall in Halifax is worth signing. Once I give the sheet a few seconds to recalculate with the imported data I can now specify who I want to get summary statistics on. With Data Validation I use dynamic name-lists to make it easy to select who I want to study. First up is the League: Canadian Premier League. Once chosen a list of the teams in the league is created so I can pick the club of interest: HFX Wanderers FC. From there it is the position I want more detail on: AMC. After that the rest of the decisions are for specifying variable levels. For all my decisions I keep it at 1000 minutes played (~11 full matches) and a 7.00 Average Rating. The final step is to tell the sheet the top 3 teams in the division for the season observed. Here is the set-up to evaluate Marshal: Even without the league loaded the game displays the top 3 finishers (for most leagues), to make this possible for any league that has players in it. Okay what do you get for all this effort? First: are summary statistics for the selected position. Excluding the "Players" column, each cell uses Excel's AverageIfs() function across various restricted ranges of the data to provide us a Mean value for each statistic. This provides us a localized numerical value to directly compare the player of interest against. Showing the # of Players is critical here to give us a sense of how robust the data is. A breakdown of the different range restrictions: All: This is the unrestricted average of the dataset. This means all leagues, all average ratings and all minutes played. Players with 0 minutes will automatically get dropped because they won't have a statistic. Tier:2 - This is denoting the "level of league" I have selected. Here in North America I consider the Canadian Premier League a 2nd Tier league as the top Canadian teams play in the MLS. Thus, this average contains both the CPL and the USL Championship League together which gives us 36 AMC. As an additional judgment call I gave all the Caribbean leauges a "C" Prefix so they aren't averaged in with any other T1 & T2 leagues, but are a group of their own. Again, this is my opinion that there is a distinct difference in dificulty of competition between the Caribbean leagues and the USA+ Canada & Mexico league structures. M:1000 - this restriction is then only including T2 players who have played at least 1000 minutes. This does not distinguish between starts/subs, but ensures that whatever value they have in a variable is due to playing a large amount of minutes. Avg 7 - this restriction isoloates only players who achieved a 7.00 Avg Rating or higher in the position regardless of the minutes they played. M:1000 Avg:7 - this is the combination restriction of the above two. Most of the time this will be the same as the Avg 7 row, like in this case. However, sometimes you have injury prone players who play great when they are fit, but don't meet the minute threshold so will get dropped here. CPL - This repeats exactly the "Tier:2" data, just only for the CPL. Notice how it drops from a sample of 36 players to just 13 players. This is why I like to have the data be horizantal not just vertical so that I can include more players at the same level of league for a better 'average player'. HFX Wanderers FC - here are the combined statistics for all players at the club who the game selects as one of their positions being AMC. Halifax have two, so this is an average of both their players. Top3 - This only selects players from the teams I choose above as the Top 3 in the league. They don't have to be the Top 3, they can be any 3 that are in the league that I want to set as the benchmark teams. Here notice how none of the top teams have an AMC with higher than a 7.00 Average rating. This will be important shortly. A display issue I'll fix later is the order of the Top 3, 1000 min should come before avg of 7.00 rating. Second: all league players at the selected position displaying only the selected statistics for the position from the first table in the same order. The % here is the PercentageRank() function which ranks all players in the position and gives them a score with 100% = max score in the league and 0% = minimum score. This is using the restricted dataset of selected league at the chosen position. Thus, it will include even the sub-players because it's a good chance those are the players I'll be hunting for bargains in Europe. This is why when the data is imported the minutes restriction is important as it will effect this % Ranking. If you want more of an explanation how I did this you can go to my post in the YAC: Conditional formatting is used so 'the numbers pop' and we very clearly can see which players play for our chosen team and each of the top 3 squads. The highlighting colors correspond to the selector colors at the top of the sheet. For the % I use Red for 0 - 10% ; Orange for 11 - 25% ; Black for 26 - 74% ; Blue for 75 - 90 % ; And Green for 91 - 100%. I throw in double underlines for the top and bottom for good measure. Note: I'm not color-blind but I can understand how these color choices might not be ideal for those who are. All these colors can be changed if you select the whole area and go into conditional formatting and select "manage rules". Third: all players at selected club. For this I display all the /90, Ratio & % statistics I pull from the game. Just to emphasize I do not tamper with any of these other than cleaning Minutes and the Position variable so they are what the game creates. It's up to me as a manager to interpret them. There are a lot of variables so this table goes from E to BY to grab them all, and can be a bear to read. Long-term I'll be building a visualizer / dynamic table so the user can select what they want from the full list. You'll see before the table I have 2 Position variables, and then a Pos selector column. With the way the data is exported from the game the "Position" variable contains what the game considers 'natural'/'regular' positions for the player. I have taken the brute-force approach rather than a proper clean. It takes way less thinking and as I run more and more data through and fix the errors I've added the vast majority of likely combinations. You can read this in my initial post on the tool in the YAC: Diving into Alex Marshal: Because HFX has 2 players, the top table isn't as helpful for us as he is averaged with Joao Morelli. Therefore, lets just look at him in the top row of the All players in division 2nd table: First off: he has over a 7.00 Rating and has played the most minutes in Canada! He is a sprinter-dribbler which is what I'm focusing my tactical style on (more on this in the next post) and from these runs does a better job than most of the league in creating chances for his fellow attackers. The next section shows his weaknesses as a player: bad at crossing. Totally fine by me as he will be used as an IW role or an AMC role, neither of which require that as a strength. His passing at only 79% isn't ideal, and the low key passes isn't great either. However, looking up at the Chances Created / 90 [CH C/90] with only 1.05 Open Play Key Passes [OP-KP/90] he creates .66 chances with .26 being assist-worthy chances (xA). In rough percentages, 50% of his KP create chances, and 30-40% of his chances are assist worthy. I attribute the difference between assists and xA more to the quality of his striker team-mates to his skill as a creator. Moving on to shooting he's pretty good with the xG, but his shot% and conversion% really could use some improvement. He is young though with potential and I can absolutely focus-train him as a Shadow Striker with extra shooting focus (if that's the route I want to take). Here are my thoughts when I was making the decision to sign him or not: Quote He has played a ton this season for Halifax and is the speed dribbler of the league on the left flank. He has “tries tricks” combined with dark green flair and light green speed which poses well for cutting in and beating players. He’s a bad crosser and key-passer, but he generates lots of chances and assists for the league. Additionally, his xG and shooting is good but a low conversion percentage means he has probably poor finishing. HFX are offering him for transfer and shouldn't be too pricey, so if I can get him on a cheap contract he will be a great rotation player for AML/AMC and can fill AMR in a pinch. I did $145k spread out over a year and none upfront and pushed it back to the end of the season so he will play the full season in Canada which is good for his development as he’s only 24 As you can see I went with acquiring him: . An additional thing I was hoping for was that he would be there long enough to gain Canadian second nationality so he wouldn't be a foreign Jamaican player. He was so close! i kept him in the squad for 2023, but I plan to loan him to any club in Canada for at least half of next season to get him naturalized and thus no-longer a valuable international slot: For Money Transfers: In addition to Marshall I made 3 other transfers with Abreu not being important (he never played for us just went out on loan) but the other two are key players and were in my starting XI plans for 2023, so I'll dive into them in the following post after I describe the tactic I'm utilizing (though I'm not a tactical genius). Edited March 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 4 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 13, 2023 Author Share Posted March 13, 2023 (edited) Building the Squad: Primary Tactic, First Season Paid Transfers & Trades Primary Tactic: This is a very offensive tactic that pushes a lot of players into the box from the midfield while using a striker who will tend to draw defenders out of position with runs back or holding the ball. Each wing has a combination Inverted & Winger role to create overloads and provide a cross option. On the right I have my best crosser-assister who will get 3 targets in the box with the AML, AMC coming into the box from deep while the DLF drops off creating chaos in the box. THe Right IWB is to cover the very large hole in the CM left by a Segundo Volante on Attack who will find himself right at the top of the box in perfect position for any ball the pops-out. Then on the left you have the WB who will be outside to pick up anything that flies all the way through to provide a second service. It's nothing fancy with offset positioning, but does produce overloads which we all know play to your advantage in FM. I also utilize 'run-at-defense' so I am looking for my offensive players to be technical/flair/dribblers rather than a tiki-taka high passing style. The weakness of this tactic is we can get hit hard on a fast break over the top and have a 1 v 2 or 2 v 2 of their strikers against our CBs. A price I am willing to pay. Secondary: To see out a game I drop my AMC back into a BBM role and switch to a defensive 4-3-3. We still keep enough firepower forward to hit them on the counter, but I switch both DM-D so we don't leave a gap above the defense. Important here is how we drop the intensity, because fatigue is a real issue in this league if we have a 2 goal lead at the 70 min mark its time to smartly conserve energy for the next match. Trades: I'll start with trades before returning to the paid transfers above. Here are all the trades I made during the Vacation season: Outgoing Star DP Striker!?! Before we've even played a competitive game I'm saying goodbye to our Brazilian DP for (almost) no money! Was this a good transfer? Yes & No, specifically because I didn't understand quite how GAM worked when I made the trade. Live and learn. Because we were in a pre-league situation that GAM they sent me couldn't be used by us in the 2022 season and when it rolled over into the 2023 season I lost half of it so I only got 40K. I should have just dropped our pick and that part of the deal to end up with an additional first round draft pick. The part of the deal, which is extremely valuable to me is the permanent international player slot that we got from it. 3 1st round picks in 2 years is also valuable to me as that is when I'll be ready to start building a player-pipline after 2 years fully building the squad. Even though he was a perfectly adequate striker, for my style of play I didn't feel it was worth using a DP slot for a striker. I would much rather use it for an Attacking Midfielder and to acquire a 'budget' striker who just does the job I want from the DLF. So what did I do? You signed someone from the Swiss Challenge League to Replace Him!?! Not where you'd expect to find a Caribbean player for the MLS, but lets look at B. Labeau, the Martinique Striker from Lausanne and see if I can convince you of why he was my choice to start the season. My first choice would naturally have been to find a domestic striker to trade into the club to preserve an international slot. No surprise, there really aren't many options of "natural strikers" that are Caribbean. If I extend it to just "Accomplished" at striker it doesn't get too much better, but I already have AMs who I can push up-top, so I don't see a reason to go out and acquire another one. I don't have to use my tool to tell that none of these 5 strikers are delivering the kind of goals I'd want from the man leading the charge. Next we switch to excluding the MLS and seeing what Caribbean's I have found outside of our league. What do you know, Brighton Labeau instantly stands out as the most prolific of the bunch. He actually isn't in the lowest league either with one in the lower US and one in the English League 1. Instead, he's at the middle-tier of difficulty with Shamar Nicholson of Spartak Moscow and Michail Antonio of West Ham well above the rest at their clubs. Then there is Jozy Altidore on loan at Puebla. I could have acquired him (he was later released when the loan ended and abruptly retired) but look at the difference in contracts between the two. He's 10x the salary cost of player at the very end of his career and not scoring goals. I want goals from my striker Moneyball says no. I forgot to screenshot the tool, but I can recreate it with the same dataset. For this I have a filter that selects all T1&2 of European Nations whose top-flight league is 3.0 Reputation at the start of FM23. Since this is an early-season data pull I manually changed the minutes to just over 100 because most seasons were still getting started. You'll see the Swiss Challenge league down there near the bottom. My tool can handle up to 5000 total players, so this is cut down adequately. With the season just starting I didn't do Top3 for the league, and since only the player I want comes up for Lusane we can look at the Summary table first: As a goal scoring striker he is much better than both his league average and the tier average (without restrictions). Yes he doesn't assist, but that's okay. What I really like to see is his number of sprints is crazy high which fits what I'll be asking of the players. He is getting double the goals out of the same number of shots as most other players with .65 Goals for 1.21 Shots on Target. This translates to a 23% conversion rate, which is double what the other players are showing. His passing is also good for a striker at this caliber. The big risk here is twofold: 1) Will he step up to what I consider a slightly more difficult league in the MLS than the Swiss challenge League? 2) How will he adapt to such a change in culture and having to learn a new language as he only spoke basic English? My anticipation was he will have a slow first third of the season as he adjusts to life here, learns English and melds into the team, so I would need to be patient with him and continually give him opportunities for at least the first half the season before I really start being critical of his performance. But if he can return to what he's showing at the start of the Swiss season here he will score goals for us, which is what I want from my striker. If I was playing at an old club rather than an expansion-side I could see a similar scene unfolding when I say I don't want to go for veteran international strikers at top-level clubs but instead this unknown from the Swiss 2nd Tier: What do the statistics say after the 2023 regular season: Slight spoiler, but I think it's worth a glimpse at how my gamble went here. Here's a look at what we all normally see in the game: Note Joao Klauss is a DP at 63k p/w contract for Phili (he was a more modest 35k p/w for us, but the salary-cap hit is the same) and B Labeau is a Senior player on a 11k p/w contract: He "Got on Base!" Do we care about the average rating? Nope! He has begun to deliver the goals promised. I had to wait for it though as he was goal-less for the good first part of the season, but with 11 in his last 17 competitive games for us he is producing back on-par with that Swiss half-season. His average ratings though, my god they swing wildly. But if he's just not feeling it a game he is subbed off. Moneyball preventing a transfer A very important transfer that I couldn't justify from a Moneyball perspective (even though I was confident would gain us a perfect winger was) Jahkeele Marshall-Rutty. A super high potential winger who shockingly Toronto released completely. And look at the teams looking to snap him up, his 4.5* scouted potential and 3* ability is probably an under-estimation and would be a typical dynamite free agent pickup fora club. However, for me those awful NextPro stats mean he's off the table till I can see a quality performance somewhere, anywhere. I purposefully offered him a trial to send him to Porto (players will automatically accept any transfer bids instead of going on trial to you). I saw this as being best for him to develop and break into the first team and become Canada's Alphonso Davies for the other wing. In a classic Porto move they immediately sent him down to the Porto B team in the Portuguese 2nd League, and I think we can all see he was absolutely dominant: Now I won't bore you with the details of how he crushed it in Portugal, but he was easily good enough for me to look into a loan deal from Porto. It took a while, but I was able to structure the deal so that most of the costs were in Monthly fees and not Salary contributions giving us a star player for 4 of our positions at not too bad of a salary cap hit. They let me have a 11.5 option future fee in the contract, but I have no intention of paying that much for him even though he would be a domestic player as he'd almost certainly require a Young-DP contract. He was great for us, but I don't have the space for that level of contract commitment and I think I can do more with 11.5M dollars. Second Important Permanent Deal: Juninho Bacuna - Birmingham (EFL - Championship) With the odd start-schedule the finances for some of the championship clubs were a disaster and Birmingham was particularly in disarray. When I initially saw him they had him listed for 1.2M and were currently sitting at 16th, which was within 3 points of both the promotion and relegation playoffs. So dead-average. My scouts were salivating at the opportunity to sign him saying he would become the best player at our club if he joined us. What did my tool say? Watford, Norwich & Burnley were the top 3 in that order. The game said he was a CM, so that is the analysis I was given. First up he's playing a lot of minutes, and you'd think with a 52% rank for Avg Rating he was well off the lead, but he's actually pretty good to the high-minute players from the top sides and is relatively high himself. His passing was very low, but there's a reason for that as Birmingham has been playing him as a WB not a CM. Even so, he manages a respectable amont of KPs, and just above poor progressive passes form the wing. The second batch is where the picture gets a lot better. He's 88% for chances created as well as 77% for shot accuracy. Also his defensive interceptions is amazing (but surely goosed from being a WB) as well as 84% pass accuracy isn't half bad either. Now remember, he's playing in the English Championship and is very competitive. I'd argue he's just about an average CM for the Championship, who has some good creative instincts as well as a fairly accurate shooter for a midfielder. Here's what I reasoned: Quote So he isn’t matched up great, but we have to weight the difficulty of the league he’s playing in as well as how average his team has been. Interesting he has created a lot of chances and made a lot of interceptions. His is a case where I have to look down at his individual row of all variables in the Birmingham table, there you see his Sprints, Distance, and other defensive stats are excellent compared to CMS which is what I want for a Segundo Volante. 500k up front, 700k over 2 years and then 200k if he plays 50 games for us for 1.4M total. I think that’s a pretty good deal for what will be the other half of our DM pair. I forgot to screenshot the direct table, but can re-create it pretty easily by reloading the data and looking at his full range of variables. Here you can see he sprints like crazy for a CM and covers a top amount of distance with 1.58 dribles per match. Even better as a DM he has acceptable tackling, but awesome interceptions, blocks and clearances which means he won't be a defensive liability. Due to the glitch with not being able to negotiate without an active salary cap I had to wait to do the deal and this is what I ended up settling on. Yes 3M is a very tight release clause, but with that I was able to convince him to not take a pay raise to come to the MLS! That's a huge deal to be able to bring in a player who can start for a mid-table championship side and not have to pay him a premium to do it. IMO this is a very good deal for a player who should excel in the MLS. If we lose him for 3M, hopefully that will be far enough in the future that I can have a youngster ready to step-up to the plate. We are now stacked at DM with two top level players leveraging only 1 DP slot and keeping it a reasonable second salary to the cap as you can half it with GAM so he's 7% of our CAP. Trade 2: Candian International CB Donnel Hennry (Toronto FC- MLS) A second ex-Toronto player, but this time I was able to acquire him before they released him. This was a no brainer deal for my second starting CB. 2 3rd round picks for a league veteren CB who had decently average stats playing on a team that finished in the top 5 of the league. Even better he's only on a 4k p/w salary so its extremely efficient against the salary cap and he's a domestic player as well. To do so I gave up to essentially worthless 3rd round picks considering I can only take Caribbean players there's no quality left at that point in the draft. Summary of pre-season transfers: I think those grades are pretty harsh considering their descriptions are positive and they are all pretty cheap signings who are all above the average skill of our current team. 1.2M for 3 players. Jamacian AML young phenom: Christopher Ainsworth (Cavalier - Jamaica) The next day this 17 year-old showed up in my scout reports: Because he's in Jamaica he's basically free to take from Cavalier, so I immediately made the deal for a paltry 10k. He has just turned 18 so will join us in 2024 to be our first true young Caribbean talent in the club! Since this deal he's been able to play at the (arguably) best club in Jamaica and has just absolutely dominated the competition. Here is an example of where the tool isn't necessary because he's just so cheap and obviously better than the league he's in. We will be keeping him at the club even if he plays mostly for the NextPro side next year as I see great things in his future. Big Money Transfer: Chris Willock - QPR (EFL Championship) Looking back on my decision-making I rate this a poor signing on value-for-stats. He's a very good player, and great for the MLS, but I probably could have done without this signing and stuck with Alex Marshall and a Reserve player as my AML rotation players. This is 'doubly bad' because with the glitch I let the board negotiate the deal and they put him on a DP Contract. The positive here is he's young and has held his value so I should be able to get the money back out when I inevitably sell him to recover the DP slot in the roster. Why did I like him? Well First here is the Summary Statistics for AML's in the Championship for the first half of the 2022-23 season: And here are the individual players again with the same Top 3 highlighted: The question isn't 'is he good enough' for an MLS side because I don't think anyone would argue stats like that certainly are. The question is did we need that good of a player in that role. Before the season started I really thought we did and I wanted to bring in a known creative talent to serve up my gamble of a striker. Especially considering I was planning to use the young Czech player at AMC that the team starts with who I had no idea how strong he'd perform against real competition. But boy did that change... Final Early Transfer: Jeadine White - GK (Cavalier, Jamaica) Another Cavalier player, and this one a more mature GK at 23 who is the #3 for the national team, and still has a lot of potential left. Again, for just 5k even if he is always out on loan long term he will be my emergency backup if for whatever reason my stellar Swiss GK gets injured and I need a ready-to-go replacement. I let Cavalier have him on a loan-back after I bought him so he played the whole 2022-23 season for them and joined us in June. I used him in the Cup competition, but really he's just playing for our NextPro Reserve side. I've left him offered out for loan so if someone wants to take him for a season they can. Unfortunately, since he ticked over to 23 the coaches 'descovered' he "Dreads Big Matches", which is awful for a GK. At least he's reasonably consistent and has good potential. Long term I don't see him as my #1, my hope is to find a better option in the 2-4 years when my current GK gets too old. This covers my pre-season transfer action (Season starts in March) and you can see I took a lot of my youth players on contracts and very quickly sent them away on loan around the US (for the most part). One major exception is Pan Yang who has defied all logic of youth player development and even with awful determination and being unambitious he has really taken-off in China becoming a starter for the Chinese national team already at just 17. Part of that has to do with me not force-loading Asian national teams, but he is also progressing his abilities very well. Downside is though, he is an international player as he doesn't have US second nationality. Once he turns 18 if I keep him at my US affiliate he may gain it, but he might develop better in Asia and who knows could join us in the midfield someday. Pre-Season Trades: We made 2 trades in January: The second was a mistake that I mention a few posts down due to a game glitch. The first though, man this was a pretty cold trade. Remember we signed Juninho Bacuna above? Yeah, this is his brother who SLC signed from Cardiff in real-life to start building the squad. I didn't utilize him to convince Juninho to join, but I'm sure it impacted his willingness to come over from England. Unfortunately for Leandro, they are very similar DM players and he is certainly the inferior of the two. If he was a domestic player i would have kept him, but he wasn't worth using a 3rd international slot for DMs. Chicago were very willing to acquire him and gave us a great deal of a 1st round & 2nd round pick as well as an international slot. He's had a very poor season there bouncing between the Main and 2nd team: Edited March 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 13, 2023 Author Share Posted March 13, 2023 (edited) First Half of the Season [Before May] The reason for this restriction is we made no additions or subtractions from the squad for the first two months of the season. It gave sufficient time for the team to come together and for us to see how the tactic was working. Tactical Note: I actually started with a less aggressive tactic for these first two months than what I showcased above, which is how I ended the season. I have a save point on Jan 12th, which showcases how I saw my starting lineup after the major signings were made for the season. This was before the Porto Loan was finalized and he would move around between both WB positions and AMR depending on what was needed. Key differences here: 1) Lowen on a very defensive DM role, 2) Ostak on support duty and not as a SS to get in the box 3) RWB instead of IWB because we have a holding DM so I was less worried about being hit on the counter. 4) Set to play through the middle instead of wings with the logic that i had 2 awesome midfielders. How did it play? Preseason: March: April: Discussion: Without question we were a defensive powerhouse and under-scoring. I wish I took a screenshot but when I looked at the xG table we had -10 for Goals Scored, but also were like -7 or -8 for Goals conceded. Overall, it said we should be a couple places higher, but it wasn't drastically off from our real performance. I can't be too upset with these results as a 5-3-2 record as a fresh club with a number of new players isn't half bad. These results put us in the top half of our division, which was actually the board target for the year. However, I didn't plan to settle for this and had identified our Czech AMC as a severely underperforming player: Tomas Ostrak at AMC. I took data at the start of July for the USA leagues, so this has an additional month of games in the data than when I made the decision to replace him. Summary Statistics Player Highlights Thoughts: Remember Chris Willock is our 'big money' DP transfer this season. He played as the AML-IW and I have to say he was pretty good. He's no Thiago Almada but he also costs a ton less than him. I rotated players a lot more than the AI so you can see my players have very low relative minutes, but still more than enough to get above the 1000 min. While Willock has 80-90% for a lot of statistics Ostrak only gets it for Dribbles and Sprints. Every other part of his game is average at best. Sorry, but I don't want a middling AMC especially in the MLS, so I was on the hunt for an improvement. Edited March 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 4 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
LUFCspeni Posted March 13, 2023 Share Posted March 13, 2023 Super interested in this! I follow all the big 4 sports because I love the systems of building teams. Will be good to see how you approach team building over the longer term (and by that measure, how the AI deals with it). 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 14, 2023 Author Share Posted March 14, 2023 (edited) Summer Transfers & Trades I stopped at May as that is when we found our solution to the Ostak problem. 3rd DP & Shadow-Striker Signing: Bobby Decordova-Reid (Fulham - EFL Premier League) I purposefully saved Salary Cap room and had tons of transfer left (even with the 7.5M deal as the original budget was 15M) to make a move for what I expected to be an expensive signing. With May data extracted from Europe I could finally evaluate players abroad. And in Decordova-Reid I found a Jamaican international in England for pennies for his value. Edit: Fulham finished Mid-Table in the Premier league. I'm guessing with the money earned they decided to fully overhaul their offense afterwards Like Bacuna they were essentially giving Decordova-Reid away if we could pay his wages. 375k for a mid-table Premier League Attacking Midfielder, I'm very interested. How does he stack up statistically in the premier league? Unfortunately for whatever reason he's not in my downloaded player-stats for either England T1-6 or Big5 T1-3. I know I looked at him, but can't seem to find the right export. If I figure it out I'll update later. Here are his game stats: So for sure underwhelming for the Premier league. But for 275k, do we think he will be better than our underperforming AMC in the MLS? Fulham bought him for 12.75M in 2019, and at 30 he's just at the end of his peak-years so not degrading yet. It would also mean buying a 3rd DP slot for extra GAM money. I decided it was worth it and signed him: Trades: Melvin Mol & Daneil Ward were 16-year-old American's I signed from our Academy. Neither of them were particularly great so when LA Galaxy and New England came offering lots of draft picks for them I said sure, why not. Josh Dolling was a reserve striker who was English. Again another international slot (even though it was a reserve one, which counts sligthly differently). As I wasn't using him I didn't see any reason not to keep hoarding draft picks. My resulting Draft Picks: We are stacked for this year's draft. 4 first round picks is serious. I'll be looking to trade away the 2 Second Round and 3rd round picks at the end of the season for domestic players clubs are looking to let go. This will be fully leveraging stats to acquire unwanted but high performing players. I'll be looking to strengthen my right wing both at AMR-W and R-IWB. Two and Two is a solid base, and better than the default. Three and 1 is a great set up. I think 3 first round picks is the ideal for me as that should get me a very good chance at getting the best Caribbean player available in the class. Remaining Transfers: Discussion: Bringing in Decordva-Reid prompted some alterations of players in the squad. In Particular D Mattocks (Jamaica), Isak Jensen (Denmark) and T Ostak (Czech) all became surplus AM players that were internationals who I didn't want to register. I loaned Jensen back to Denmark, gave Mattocks away for free to a USL Championship side, and then sold Ostak on a bargain to Bologna for 250k. This last one was the most important as he took up 9k on the salary cap. I did make sure to lock a hefty 40% profit clause if he somehow manages to get sold at a profit. Doesn't seem super likely: Swapping Selmir Pidro (Bosnia) for J Famila-Castillo (Dutch-Dominican) Bringing in Marshall-Rutty on loan from Porto meant that Selmir Pidro became our 2nd choice LB for the majority of the first half of the season. At 5.5k p/w and an international player, was he performing enough to warrant that level of pay + taking up international space? Considering he only made 6 league starts and one sub appearance I seemed to always have someone else I'd rather bring on in a pinch. For Familo-Castillo I had to use just in-game statistics + Scout commentary to evaluate him as he played the whole season in the Chelsea Reserves. The impetus for this trade was the fact that Chelsea were releasing him on a free and he would accept 2.9 p/w salary. He didn't perform the greatest in the reserves, but swapping LBs would lower our salary making room for signing Decordova-Reed. If you scroll up you'll see the trade to move on Pidro happened just days before I completed the acquisition of Decordova. Here's the trade again: You may be asking 'why trade a 1st round pick for a 1st round pick?' Because the draft order is based on inverse league position. Philadelphia are the reigning Supporters Shield holders and are on pace to retain their trophy while DC United finished 23 out of 28 last season and are in 26th place at the end of this regular season. That DC Draft pick is essentially a whole round before the Phili one assuming both teams perform similarly next year. I then also provided them the necessary international slot for the year to register him (as I had a spare after moving out so many foreign players) and they gave me an extra draft pick for 2025. I'm pretty happy with this combination of moves. Even more I liked Familio-Castillo better at LWB and he became our starting choice since he joined. Edited March 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
SI Staff Jack Sarahs Posted March 14, 2023 SI Staff Share Posted March 14, 2023 Fantastic effort You've also done something I started looking at too which is to add the potential divisions into your search filters. Although it might take a while to think of them all ( the relative leagues for your division ) and add them, It's probably worth taking the time to do it so the search list throws up relative results. Hope this goes well for you and I look forward to seeing the results! 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
BML Posted March 14, 2023 Share Posted March 14, 2023 14 hours ago, WhiteCat33 said: Am I missing something or does this image show Philly and Montreal giving you an International Slot and draft pick for nothing in return? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 14, 2023 Author Share Posted March 14, 2023 (edited) 2 hours ago, BML said: Am I missing something or does this image show Philly and Montreal giving you an International Slot and draft pick for nothing in return? Fair critique. Unfortunately, my save point at the start of the year is just too far from those trade dates in December to get the inbox messages. Even on Jan-12th it still shows up as blank. And after a quick search I struggle to see what happened there and frankly I don't remember those trades. The double up on Dec 17th I think points to this occurring just about when the MLS season resets. I don't remember the exact date but its sometime in mid-december before the re-entry drafts Dec 22 & 25th. What they could be (and I'll test it out this year) is I traded away my slots in the re-entry draft for super-draft picks and international slots. Probably because there weren't any Caribbean players made available to the draft (another bug I encountered where players got glitched out into forever free-agency) so those picks were worthless to me. For Philadelphia there is a simple explanation as they won the Supporters Sheild in 2022 meaning they had the best record of all the clubs in the league. Us, as the newcoming team, were by default the worst performing team. Therefore, the league gifted us their best draft pick to help us do better for next year. But I have no proof of that occurring. If I look at Montreal's trade history for this season it seems they continued to give away even more draft picks. Not sure why they did so or what they got in return from these clubs. This many trades though points to there is a tradable asset that isn't being displayed graphically here for whatever reason. Really the MLS teams lucked out as the game didn't implement what actually happened in real life with the "Expansion Draft": 2022 MLS Expansion Draft Rules & Procedures | MLSSoccer.com We should have gotten the option to take 5 players from existing MLS sides in November (max 1 per club), but that didn't happen. Honestly, I'm glad it didn't happen as that would make building the squad very easy as there are plenty of high-performing cheap Caribbean second nationality players in the MLS at other clubs, I just can't convince clubs to make reasonable trades for them. Here is my truly disaster trade where I essentially burned draft picks in an attempt to get a free agent player who was bugged, so don't worry I didn't end up with more draft picks because of glitchy AI here. It's really frustrating as there are 3 players I wanted that this happened to with one, Nicholas Gioacchini, being a player SFC actually took in the expansion draft in real-life, who looks like a great young forward who would have been a cheaper option than my Swiss acquisition. Edited March 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
BML Posted March 14, 2023 Share Posted March 14, 2023 Thank you for the explanation, I figured it would be something weird with the extra drafts that pop up when playing MLS that, for whatever reason, the game chooses not to display any more. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 14, 2023 Author Share Posted March 14, 2023 (edited) 6 hours ago, Jack Sarahs said: Fantastic effort You've also done something I started looking at too which is to add the potential divisions into your search filters. Although it might take a while to think of them all ( the relative leagues for your division ) and add them, It's probably worth taking the time to do it so the search list throws up relative results. Hope this goes well for you and I look forward to seeing the results! Thanks! For this save with a region-restriction grouping divisions was borne out of necessity as Caribbean players are scattered into random corners of European leagues. The strategy I went with (and have hinted at above since you commented) is I've created blocks of leagues by start of game league reputation. Each block has 2 - 3 tiers and gives me at minimum 5 horizontal leagues to combine for more robust average statistics. My groupings are: The Big 5 Leagues [England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain] Tiers 1 - 3. England Tiers 1 - 6 (Have a Beta save with Guiseley so tested this there) Germany Tiers 1 - 5 (I built the tool with a team in the Hamburg Oberliga) Second Rung Leagues 3.5* REP [Portugal, Scotland, Netherlands, Austria, Russia] T 1 - 3 3.0 REP Leagues [Switzerland, Belgium, Croatia, Ukraine, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Serbia, Iceland, Croatia, Turkey, Bulgaria] T 1 - 2 LUX, POR, BEL, FRA & GER - My long YAC built the Luxembourg league up to the 17th ranked league in Europe and it had all these leagues loaded over 30 years into the future, so I felt comparing them all was apt as both Portugal and Belgium were much stronger from all that time. 2.5 REP Leagues [Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Belarus, Finland] Caribbean Leagues Obviously, it's far from perfect and I plan to bump leagues out of the very large 3.0 REP bracket. Almost certainly Belgium up to the Second Rung, but also maybe Turkey. Then I plan to drop down Iceland to the 2.5 Rep bracket. If I move those three it should be enough to add the 3rd tiers of leagues into the 3.0 Bracket and remain under my 5000 player hard-limit. I'd be curious what different groupings you'd make having played a lot more with transfers in top-flight major leagues than I have in recent cycles. Edited March 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 14, 2023 Author Share Posted March 14, 2023 (edited) 2023 Season: May - October Results: May: The congestion was not our friend this month, even rotating for the Cup Matches (which allow only a maximum of 5 international players) meant our players were all doing 250+ minutes in two weeks. June: This was better with draws instead of defeats, I really rotated the defense more here as I think my CBs were too overplayed in May leading to our major defeats. Notice how many goals my SV(A) are scoring. At this point I started alternating them as a starter with a lesser DM supporting them and their fresh legs. We got unlucky drawing San Jose in the cup so early as they are the 2nd best team in the MLS right now. July: Very good month here, everyone has fully settled in and I've found a squad rotation rhythm that is seeing us turn out strong performances twice a week. That NYCFC game had an absurd start with our academy 17-year-old RB/DM getting a hat-trick in 10 minutes! Naturally then, the team got complacent in the second half and I struggled to hold it together against a mid-table side we should have easily dispatched. I was surprised we advanced so far in the Leagues Cup. August: Okay that 5-1 Red Bull Defeat was really frustrating. My player got injured 15 minutes into the game and I accidentally cancelled the replacement player, which glitched out the tactics overlay. I couldn't start the match because we only had 10 players but I couldn't re-engage the substitution. I have a skin with a match-resolve button so I had to press it to continue. The AI then played with 10 men and never made a substitution for the remaining 75 minutes of the game....Shocker we collapsed hard in the final part of the game. Thankfully this was the 'off' month after the League Cup so we could recover with a beating against a lower league side. September: Our offense is flying right now; what a great way to head into the post-season! October: We had a disapointing loss at home to FC Dalas and have just one final home game left in the season. Major League Soccer Standings: West Division MLS Supporters Shield Colorado have a game in hand on us so we would have to win our game and they only get 1 point in 2 matches to jump up one place in both the league and the Supporters Shield. Regardless, we have comfortably earned a playoff berth with a very good first year performance! Edited March 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 14, 2023 Author Share Posted March 14, 2023 Now that is how to show your home fans a memorable last home game of the regular season! Fair to say my Striker is hot hot hot right now. Martinique must be thrilled as this is the game right before an international window. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 15, 2023 Author Share Posted March 15, 2023 MLS 2023 Western Division Playoffs End of Season Results With that 6-goal win and Colorado drawing their last two games we actually overcame our 4-goal deficit in GD to beat them out on tiebreaker in the Supporters' Shield & Division Ranking to finish 4th Overall 2nd in the Western Division for this season. This is crucial because this will give us home field advantage for the first two playoff games as well as the second-best seed saving San Jose till the division final. Leadup After the final game of the regular season was an international break that saw a number of our players head out to play Nations League matches for their respective countries. Importantly we see braces for our two offensive threats Decordova-Reid & Labeau and a surprise goal for our AMR Cato. Can't wait to dive into his statistics at the end of the season because he is almost certainly the best value/performance player & surprisingly high performing player for his ability. The SFC machinery is running at optimum efficiency at the perfect time: Players are performing great for club and country; training ratings are all above an 8; morale is through the roof - can't ask for anything more! That is until earthquake rips open the foundation of our squad: Pretty much the worst possible injury to our Captain and most critical position of the squad. I can't overstate how damaging this is not just for this playoff run but for next year's entire campaign. Due to him having a huge salary I'm more or less forced to put him onto the SEI reserve so he won't be available for the entire season. Best case scenario is he gets fit by the end of the summer transfer window and I can loan him somewhere for the fall half-season to get back into form. Absolutely gutted by this bad luck. This will mean the first true competitive test of our young Jamaican GK who dreads big matches will be for the biggest matches of the season ... oh dear! Western Conference Playoff: First Round First game down in a dominant showing where they never threatened the goal and we were able to rotate out stars to keep them fresh for the next game. This is made even sweeter as Kansas City is our Fierce Rival bringing the I-70 Rivalry from baseball to MLS. No test for our GK...yet. Western Conference Playoff: Second Round That was scary, we almost collapsed when I made some subs midway through the second half and tried to defend our 2-0 lead. Thankfully my strikers second strike wasn’t called off and we won 4-3. Lebaeu then came in big at the end of the game to get a much-deserved hat-trick. He was robbed on that disallowed goal as it was another AM trying to get out of the way that triggered the offside, not him. The big issue becomes clear though with my Goalkeeper getting an abysmal 6.2 rating. They scored 3 of their 4 shots on target! Not good, son. You might also notice that we got a second injury, this time to our star loaned FB Marshall-Rutty. How bad? Bad enough: 2 of our 3 best defensive players are now out for the hardest matchup of the season: San Jose. We faced them 3 times this year. They defeated us in both cup competitions 2-1 & 3-2 when we went to San Jose. Then when we faced them at home in the league we won 4-0. Unfortunately, we will be playing this game in California and are particularly vulnerable defensively right now. Western Conference Playoff: Final Yeah, what do you know again Our GK let in 3 of 4 shots on target and this time our offense couldn't break through the very good San Jose defense. Pretty definitive that White won't be getting the chance at our #1 spot next season (or perhaps ever), god that was horrendous. It never looked like we would win the game, they paly a very effective high-press that my defense didn't have the passing skill to comfortably break through. Henry, while a good aerial and intercepting defender is not an effective ball handler and one of his turnovers resulted in one of the quick counterattack goals. Consolation is we get to add 'Runner Up' to the Conference Title. For an inaugural season the board are ecstatic with our performance even if I'm frustrated with the end to our playoffs. It's going to be an active transfer window especially for our defensive players. I truly don't understand the logic behind the social media following numbers. Our first season we get to a Division final and we lose 10% of our base? Meanwhile we increased our hardcore fans! That is awesome news for the club long-term. This was the screen in October at the end of the season. This is a 2% increase for Hardcore, Core & Family while dropping Fair weather by 5% and Casual by 1%. Beautiful stuff! We also seriously need to expand our stadium. 18,000 of 23,000 seats are already sold to season ticket holders and the wait list this year was another full stadium's worth of 22,500 people. St Louis is flocking to their new team! Club Vision & End of Season Review Nice simple club vision for us that I am more than happy to agree with without negotiating. We better be in the playoffs next year and I fully intend to spend money to improve the squad this Winter. 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 15, 2023 Author Share Posted March 15, 2023 Season 2023 Player Statistics This post will just have attached a raw copy of the player statistics for now. I'll refer back to this document as I go through the off-season player analysis and make transfer decisions and paste the relevant portions to each analysis. I do this as this way I can keep changing the spreadsheet into the leagues I am scouting and have a reference sheet for what the performance levels are for the past season in the MLS. The dataset here is all 1000Min players in North American T1 leagues as well as USA & Mexico T2 and USA T3-4. I've set the Minutes selector to 2000 minutes for the regular starters in each position and the rating is still at 7.00 for the star players in a role. You'll notice for some positions there were no players who achieved a 7.00 average rating. One issue that will require a revision to my tool is to address the over-inclusion of CDs generally in these databases. Specifically for that role it needs more than 100 player-slots for the league. This season it was only 107, so not terrible to miss a couple but I've seen leagues get to 120. 2023 Player Statistics MLS + LigaMX.docx 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 15, 2023 Author Share Posted March 15, 2023 (edited) The Hunt for a Goalkeeper! With that travesty of a performance in the playoffs it's crystal clear Jeadine White isn't ready for top-level MLS matches. Sure he could get some cup showings for us, but considering he's an international its absolutely not worth giving him the slot. He will be loaned somewhere in the US next year. Here were his season stats just for the curious: Our GK that we must replace, Swiss GK Roman Buerki who was in and out of the Swiss team as their 3rd choice GK and is in the running for MLS Goalkeeper of the year: Game Stats vs Spreadsheet Because there are so few viable options for a senior starting goalkeeper to even come close to replacing Buerki, it really isn't worth the effort to set up the spreadsheet for each individual GK. We don't have the reputation or financial resources to pry away a true starter for a top-tier side like Mike Maignan of AC Millan who has Hatian second nationality, so we will be picking up scraps from someone to hold us over until Buerki can return for a final hurrah before retiring. Domestic Choices: There is only one good Caribbean GK still in the MLS and that is Philadelphia’s Andre Blake {Jamaican/American}. Considering the season they had I see it almost impossible to pry him away. The other starter is Eloy Room {Curacao/Dutch/American GC} who was the Minnesota GK. They finished 25th of 29 teams this year in the Shield. Not particularly promising when GK hunting. American/Canadian + Caribbean Abroad: Here we have two options of players in top leagues that we could both get for very cheap as well as wouldn’t cost us an international slot on the roster. Brandon Austin [24] 9.25k p/w (Leicester – Premier League ENG) {American/US Virgin Islands/England} Issue is we have no statistics for Austin as he hasn’t played at all in this save. Leicester bought him for 13k and are already having him on the transfer-list. At Tottenham in 2022/23 he played some preseason games and had 3 league matches where he was a complete disaster. Sean Johnson [34] 11.25k p/w (Troyes – Ligue 1 FRA) {American/Jamaican} NYCFC start with Johnson as their GK, but decided to release him at the end of the first season and Troyes acquired him on a free. At 34 years old he’s not a long term solution, but its possible he could be a 1 year loan choice. NYCFC replaced him with Juan Espinola who is a 29 year old Paraguayan. For Johnson's statistics we only have a full 2022 season. In 2023 he played 6 games for NYCFC before leaving for Troyes where he has yet to make an appearance. To be fair to him, in those 6 games he had 2 shutouts and only allowed 7 goals with a 7.02 rating. Highlighting his 2022: As a “Statistics Manager” I have to prioritize Sean Johnson for a #1, but could consider Austin as a backup with the expectation that he will go out on loan immediately to see how he can perform in a reasonable league to down the line be in consideration. Caribbean GK’s Abroad: Nathan Trott [24] 5.75k p/w (West Ham – Premier League ENG) {English/Bermudian} As a Statistics-Manager Trott is my priority signing. In 2022/23 he went to Vejle in Denmark and was the best GK in the league. He is Transfer listed for only 145k and has a very reasonable wage. With no one else interested in his signature hopefully I can get him to come without the wage-premium. Not sure the game will recognize that with our #1 injured he would come knowing he’d get the starting job for at least next season. Amal Knight 7.25 k/pw[29] (Higashiosaka Rosa – JAP) {Jamaican} Older, on a higher salary, and not transfer-listed so most likely more expensive to acquire. While he has done fantastic, I would have to say that Denmark is a harder league than Japan just with the Europe factor, but Japan is at least a strong Asian league where that good performance for 2 years truly means something. He has been in the MLS before, but was released (by our rival no-less). If he was transfer listed I'd be considering him, but I expect a Japan club to force a big fee to pull a senior international player from the roster. Transfer Window Priorities: All defensive focuses for the moment. I want to lock in all these positions first and see what kind of salary cap room we have left. I’ll add to this as I go through the targets position by position. Goalkeeper [2 of 3] {#1 SEI & #2 Loan out for Development} Nathan Trott - Listed 145k (International) Sean Johnson (American – Loan only) Brandon Austin - Listed 33k (American – NextPro GK to determine ability/depth) Right Inverted Wingback (starter) {#1 loan-end, #2&3 32+ and declining, #3&4 young and underperforming} Left Wingback (Backup) {#1 Excellent & Improving, no depth} Central Defender (Important Player-Ballplaying Defender) Edited March 15, 2023 by WhiteCat33 3 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 15, 2023 Author Share Posted March 15, 2023 (edited) TLDR Transfer Window Priorities UPDATE 2: All defensive focuses for the moment. This will keep growing the more positions I investigate. Goalkeeper [2 of 3] {#1 SEI & #2 Loan out for Development} Nathan Trott - Listed 145k (International) Sean Johnson (American – Loan only) Brandon Austin - Listed 33k (American – Transfer then loan to determine ability) Right Inverted Wingback (starter) {#1 loan-end, #2&3 32+ and declining, #3&4 young and underperforming} Alvas Powell (American – Cinci-MLS Trade, could be costly) Luis Felipe Raul – MLS Player Rights Trade SKC Lloyd Walliams – Super Draft Target Wayne Moore – Super Draft Target Felice Fils-Aime – Super Draft Target MOVE BACUNA TO RB & SIGN DM Left Wingback (Backup) {#1 Good & Improving, no depth} Kemar Lawrence – Listed MLS Minesota (Would become #1) Yampier Mack (US VI-M/USA) – Super Draft Target Dion Collie (Bahamas-M/USA) – Super Draft Target Central Defender (Important Player-Ballplaying Defender) Transfer Logic: For those who are interested, here is my thought-process building out the FB domestic wish list. Next up will be looking internationally (but I do want to keep those slots free for attackers if possible or a star CB). Right Wing Back and/or Inverse Wing Back Current Squad: I planned already to invest here in the offseason. All 4 of our best options are either loans who won’t return or 30+ and below-average. Cordell Cato is also our AMR so while he can play WB just fine, I’d much rather keep him in our offense. Shawn Barry is declining significantly in speed right now so I plan to trade him for draft picks/international slots. Clubs wanted him in the past, hopefully that will be the case again. So how did they all perform? Thomas Hayes was not that good and Ledbetter didn’t play here enough to even get a rating. We need dribblers here and he is at 1.5 while all our other fbs are at 3.4-3.6. Sure he runs with them, but can’t carry the ball or provide any kind of attacking assistance. How was he defensively? Interestingly his tackling is the highest for our FBs. He also has just as good of Blocks/90 as Shawn Barry who was my go-to man with the loaned Rutty. He is bad at clearances though, but at least is passing in line with the rest of them. MLS Caribbean Right Backs The ideal acquisition would be a player already in the league who has good performances, but is at an under-performing club who would be open to taking a super-draft pick for him. For this domestic scouting I’ll be dropping Atlanta from the Top-3 Sides to be replaced by us (St Louis City), so then I can select the club of the player I like and head-to-head our players. We know of 7 players: Here is where a salary-cap league makes things interesting. Do I want to prioritize cap-space to a RB? Assuming I can keep the GKs on close contracts to what they are receiving in the Premier League I should have money to spare for my RB and CD signings. Kellyn Acosta (USA/Grenada) (22kp/w Senior Contract} I have no chance of prying away a US international from LAFC even though they did terrible. Additionally, he is a DM/CM so would probably mean moving Juninho Bacuna back there as he is partily able to play RB and could fully learn it for next year. Wouldn’t be the worst idea as I’m using such an attacking IWB role that moves into the DM slot…hmm… Option B: Move Juninho Bacuna to R-IWB Let’s look at how he played for us as a DM(S) & SV(A) He is much better defensively than Lowen and is making way more tackles than any other DM which is more in line with what my fullbacks do. He isn’t good at blocking or clearing and just okay at intercepting, but none of the DM at the best team were either. I take that to mean they were all more creative players. For Dribbles & Sprints, which I don’t have in the DM list he is top for DMs and is also highest in sprints for our entire squad. His dribbles are half that what my winger/inverted-wingers are doing. However, I think give him the room to run and the space to do so he could do it. The question is do I want to hurt my offensive ability by doing this as he’s a great creator. Would let me play both Bacuna and Loewen simultaneously, but a feature of them was the rotation that kept us peak performance in the high congestion season. Back to RB Options: Shaq Moore (Nashville – MLS) 15k p/w {American-Main/Trindiad} This is the first strong candidate to upgrade us at RB Alvas Powell (Cincinnati MLS) 4.5k p/w {Jamaica-Main/USA} This is the much more affordable option to upgrade our RB Let’s see how they look in my Tool. I was able to leave the Nashville players as un highlighted but still shown and put our players into the Orange selector with Cincinnati as the chosen squad. Just by luck Moor and Powell are right on top of each other to make comparisons easier. Unfortunately, the first half of the table is not very inspiring. Honestly, only positive to take away here is their sprints and xA are about where ours were, but the latter is just equally bad. The rest is across the board a downgrade from our existing players. Looking at more defensive stats + Crossing Powell shows he’s not totally a downgrade as he starts to have some good performances here. Shaq Moore can just tackle and clear the ball well compared to the MLS. And considering he’s the more expensive player, yeah he’s totally not of interest to me now. Question will be if Cinci are willing to part with Powell for something reasonable. At 29, he’s not much younger though so most likely they will want way too much for him and it won’t be worth the bother of working a new player into the squad. Zico Bailey – (Cincinnati-MLS) 2.3k p/w {Jamaica/USA} He didn’t play enough for the main team to get included for the main team, but did play the whole season in NextPro. He didn’t do particularly well though: Montreal RB’s: While Javin Brown is offensively intriguing I’m not happy with those defensive numbers. He’s not an improvement on Shawn Barry defensively, and while he crosses well and moves well that would only work for us if we invert the formation. Not out of the question, but unlikely. Americans & Canadian Caribbeans NOT in MLS: Luis Felipe Raul – Incarnate Word Cardinals AMATEUR (NCAA D1) Here is an 18 year old Academy Player who has been let go and has joined a college team. Where is he from? Our Rivals! Here in the MLS when you release a player this way you still retain their MLS Player Rights, so I will have to trade with Sporting KC for these rights to then have the ability to sign this player. The risk here is if he will get entered into the draft or not. As this is my first season I don’t know how this will work. Stats for these unloaded leagues have seemed to be really bad. My Academy players for example all get low ratings but once I sign them and they play NextPro or out on loan they almost always play better. Here is his whole season in the SKC Academy Scout Report is basic but is literally from the day before so is up to date. That is a high potential with Bravery. Not sure what “Committed” references in the attributes. Lack of Natural Fitness is a big worry though, I take it to mean he’s probably slow. Because of this discovery I have done a restricted search of players that are partially American or Canadian, Acomplished DR, Aged 15 – 22 and also have partial Caribbean nationality. A good number of NextPro players who I’m scouting as well as another NCAA player, who I’ll look at now. Lloyd Walliams (Jamaican-U20/American) {UNH Wildcats – NCAA} I’ll be fully scouting Lloyd. Since he did not come through a MLS Academy this is a player who will be entered into the Super Draft, I’ve added him to my draft-list. Wayne Moore (Radford Highlanders- NCAA) {Grenadian/American} A year younger at 17 he probably won’t be in this year’s draft Felice Fils-Aime {Dallas Texans} Another draft option, not much more to say he needs scouting. There are a few more with lower minutes but I’ll stop with these 4 for now. Left Back Understudy/Prospect/Backup While I have the search set up I think this is a good time to put feelers out for super draft targets at LB. Some are already in our RB list (Lloyd Walliams & Wayne Moore) but there are some new interesting options: Yampier Mack (Centra Conneticut – NCAAA D1) {US Virgin Islands-MAIN/USA} What is amazing here is his international performances are better than his league performances in the NCAA. But since this is an added playable league it is at least real performances. I haven’t scouted him yet but am doing so now to get a read on him but he could be a great addition. Ion Collie (Bucknel Bison – NCAA D1) {Bahama-Main/USA} I already scouted him and have him in my super-draft list. This Bahama international LB hasn’t inspired as of late in the NCAA. [In-Game Stats Screenshots For Super Draft Players] Left Back (Accomplished) MLS Players: You’ll see some familiar faces from the RB search with K Acosta & K Ferdinand. But what have we hear, a player Transfer-Listed by Request for Minesota!? Kemar Lawrence 9.25k p/w (Minnesota-MLA) {Jamaica-M/USA} My scouts love him saying he’s better than our current LB, but he hardly played for Minesota this season, and wasn’t great when he did. There’s a very obvious reason why: Injuries Broken Leg and twisted Ankle in the same season. That is really injury prone. He wants to move to a bigger club. Would a better performing MLS club fit the bill for him? He has a year left on his contract. To evaluate him I’ll have to look at his 2022 performance as he just didn’t play enough this season to give us a good read. They took him from Toronto in 2022 for a player exchange. He is an example of a player in real life that tried going to Europe, but it didn’t work out and an MLS team bought him back Here is his 2022 Performance Against the Top-3 Clubs from this year (San Jose, Phili & Atlanta) A little young to be our “Old Man Justice," but the injury-part fits and a player who had a prime [LINK]. He generates .12 assists from .16 xA, which is way better than we ever have and is closer to the Top-3 this year (.18 As. With .12 xA). His tackling, Pressing, Interceptions and Blocks are all fantastic and at or above the Top-3 Statistics for this year. If he’s healthy he’s up there for the best performing LB in the MLS both attacking and defending. And remember this is playing for a bad MLS team. The issue is his injuries and age at 31 he will only have a couple years before he degrades if he stays healthy. His salary at 9.25k is reasonable, the question will be what will Minnesota want in return. Joevin Jones (Chicago – MLS) He’s 32 turning 33 so too old for me to bother with all the effort, I’m going to focus on Lawrence above. Edited March 15, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_hdk Posted March 16, 2023 Share Posted March 16, 2023 Amazing story and def gonna follow. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 17, 2023 Author Share Posted March 17, 2023 (edited) TL;DR - Transfer Priorities Update 3: CD & AMR Goalkeeper [2 of 3] {#1 SEI & #2 Loan out for Development} Nathan Trott - Listed 145k (International) 8.75k p/w [tight release clause & sale-fee to player Sean Johnson (American – Loan only) Brandon Austin - Listed 33k (American – Trade SD 3rd Round 2024 to Orlando for Player-Rights & 50k GAM, delayed until after new financial year. Right Inverted Wingback (starter) {#1 loan-end, #2&3 32+ and declining, #3&4 young and underperforming} Alvas Powell (American – Cinci-MLS Trade, could be costly) Luis Felipe Raul – MLS Player Rights Trade SKC Lloyd Walliams – Super Draft Target Wayne Moore – Super Draft Target Felice Fils-Aime – Super Draft Target Move Bacuna to RB & Sign DM Left Wingback (Backup) {#1 Good & Improving, no depth} Kemar Lawrence – Listed MLS Minnesota (Would become #1) Yampier Mack (US VI-M/USA) – Super Draft Target Dion Collie (Bahamas-M/USA) – Super Draft Target Central Defender (Important Player-Ballplaying Defender) Derick Cornelius [Backup] (Canadian – Vancouver MLS Trade {3rd Rnd SD 2024} 2.9k p/w Andrew Gravillon (Reims – Ligue 1) 2.2M +800k Add on Transfer fee 18kp/w Senior Contract & 4.9M Release Clause Attacking Midfielder Right (Important Player) Jamal Lowe – English Free Agent (Bournemouth) 5.75k p/w salary Completed Transfers (Text in Green): St Louis FC CD Performance Review: First up, the Summary Statistics table: Here, we have the difficulty that I have a bunch of RBs that all are natural CD so our static is for 6 players when we actually really only used 3 players in CD, and 1 of them was a very rare rotational move. RBs will obviously decrease the aerial statistics and also boost the interception and movement based ones. Thus, this fact of us being just about right along the average we have to put a big asterisk on. To see how our CB's performed requires the player-to-player comparisons. Our two starting CBs were Joakim Nillson (DP - Sweeden) & Donnell Henry (Senior Contract - Canada-Main / Jamaica). Right off the bat you can see our DP Nillson was putting in the average ratings you'd expect from a star player. He also was super consistent and available playing almost 3200 minutes. He is a great BPD, which is exemplified with his very low possession loss (for the league) at 7.42 with solid progressive passes at 5.84. While he doesn't attempt a ton of headers, he wins what he goes for which leads to his 83% heading ratio, which is good for the league. Henry, wasn't nearly as good building the play for us but still wasn't a huge liabilty for most matches. We did see in the playoffs how he couldn't handle San Jose's press. He went up for more headers but had a lower success rate at only 75%. Focusing on the second half of the stats both were great winning possession primarily it looks like with interceptions and had reasonable passing at 89 and 87% for Nillson & Henry respectively. BPD Top Prospect: Andreaw Gravillon I found a very interesting CB option Andreaw Gravillon {Guadalupe - Main / France} at Reims. They just barely made it out of relegation safe by 2 points and part of the issue was their defense couldn’t handle the French topflight. Since the summer window they have had Gravillon transfer-listed and I've followed him with a scout and checked in with Reims on how he's doing. They have stuck to a pretty hard 2.5 - 2.8M fee that they require to part with a player they purchased for 4.1M at the start of the 2022 season. Probably because they are stil using him this season but don't consider him their ideal choice. His league stats are not great at all, but they played him for over 3000 minutes in 38 games last season, so fatigue did not help his performances. His international performance for Guadeloupe is nothing short of magnificent. 8.0 rating in their Gold cup match against Martinique, and 7.77 rating in the 6 games last year where he got a goal as well as a CB. Interesting dichotomy due to the vast difference in difficulty of his club league and Nation League. Statistics-Manager time: How does he stack up against the CB's of the top 3 teams in France’? First table shows his CB partner was the aerial defender, might mean our guy Andreaw isn’t as good at heading or was set to covering so Yunis was the stopper who took more of the aerial attempts. It’s not like he was miserable though as he had 9.25 A and 6.85 won, but was average for CDs in the league. One statistic I really like is his "Poss Lost/90" was only 3.7! Remember he played on a bad team comparatively for the league, yet he still didn't give up bad passes. No one in the MLS is even close to that low of a number. Sure, his progressive passes were low, but do we think he actually had good options to make those passes that wouldn't give away possession? Could this be an indication of him being "smart", or (more likely) this is the effect of him having the player trait: "plays no through balls". Again, being on a relegation-candidate side that will naturally translate in low ratings so that part doesn't worry me. Starting with the good he has great interceptions/90. Also, even though its low for the league 84% pass% is nothing to sneeze at, this is a little lower than the Top MLS defenders at 87%, and our two CBs at 88%, but I can see easily reaching our level with the lower league difficulty. Next, while his heading was only 74% remember that is what Henry had for us so that's not an issue. His current form: Looks like an injury forced them to play him as a L-IWB because he has no ability to play that and he did amazing. Wonder if he could replicate it on the right? I do like those matches 7 & 8 against OL and AJ Auxerre. Great passing, winning his heading and tackling. It's not a contentious statement to say both those teams have better offense than MLS teams. Here is the scout report: I'm curious what they see as bad with his passing, because his performance (Pass% & Possession/loss) don't indicate waywardness. Maybe low vision/technique? He just should be in a role where I want short passing not big switches. Love Dark Green Consistency and stamina, both will help for the high congestion. Athleticism and big matches are good as well hitting all the checkmarks for a CB. How did Negotiations go? Not bad, I also was able to use a special pot of money (Targeted Allocation Money) to get him because he's a "young international" with high enough reputation. It is use or lose (I believe) so getting this in at the end of the financial year is great because that money wasn't going anywhere. 4.9 is a tight release fee that he was firm on, so we will only make 2M if he gets bought away from us. Hopefully we get a couple years out of him before that happens. CD Cover: Domestic Search Even with Gravillion I want to bring in a depth domestic CB just so we aren't caught with our pants down in the palyoffs (again). Here are my options for MLS CD: You’ll notice that there is already a transfer agreed for D. Cornelius, that is by us. Additionally, I have placed inquiry-bids in for the two Montreal players who we saw in the FB searches. I made the Cornelius trade during the playoffs when I saw us lose 2 defensive players and saw we had no backup senior CBs and would have had to rely on one of our draft picks to play had either gotten injured. What follows is my logic when I made the trade: How is he in my tool? I had to download a new rip of player-data as in May he hadn’t played enough for Vancouver (Truly mid-table at 17th of 29 in the Supporters Shield). So instead of comparing with the top-3 I think its better to compare with teams right around them (as he isn’t supposed to be a starter) So Houston and Charlotte were selected who are both just above them in the table and then us to see how he compares to our CBs. Loewen is one of my DMs so his statistics are ignored. By luck he lines up perfectly to head-to-head with my Canadian CB Henry who is a similar cost cb at 4k p/w and also a Canadian international just older at 30. Starting with Av Rat, he’s at the lower end of the group at 6.75, but many “2nd CBs” are at 6.77 or 6.78 so not too far off . Charlotte have probably BPDs with a high posesion tiki-taka style while houston seem to have similar low possession and progressive passes. Worryingly the Vancouver defenders have very high possession loss (this is a lower=better stat) and this CB is not particularly good aerially especially compared to their main cb Romana who is top of the league for heading stats/90. Compared to Henry this progressive passing isn’t an issue as he’s actually better, and even though he makes less headers his key-heading is in-line. He’s winning 7.7 – 10.3 headers while Henry is 9.5 – 12.7, which if we jump to the end of the next screenshot is right on the money at 74 to 75% heading. Moving to tackles/defensive actions here Cornelius is all over the place. His number of tackles is low, but key tackles is very high. And then he isn’t used for pressing? My CBs are low, but his are even further down. His interceptions per 90 is very high at 4.47 but then is very low in blocks even when compared to mid-tier CB or our CBs. The possession loss becomes very clear when you look at pass % with Romana having a staggering 53% passing percent as a CB!? Cornelius is bad, but better at 77% but still below our CBs. Question is, what does Vancouver Want: To us that is basically free. We have 7 draft picks this year and this is the lowest one. Worst case I can loan him out, but probably he will be our bench/depth CB in case we have injuries & if we can't get our Guadelupe star. Also I'll be looking to trade away our 33 year old and declining current #3. Striker & AMR Interlude: Just at the top of my scouted players I saw Jamal Lowe was released by Bournemouth over the summer and has failed to find a club since. I’ll have to go back to my May download to see how he did, but he did at least play sufficiently (albeit as a substitute) I should be able to get some idea of his performance. I didn’t know his story what a late rise in stature for him. Watched his QPR Loan Interview (where he went in January), and didn’t know he was in the QPR youths with Raheem Sterling before he was dropped and began his non-league career. Hope FM has his injury resistance considering he hasn’t missed a game to injury in his 6 years since Portsmouth found him. "I've Got That FIRE In Me" 🔥🎥 | Jamal Lowe's First QPR Interview - YouTube The reason I’m interested is I asked his agent what kind of contract he would want, and because he’s been clubless so long and we did so well in the MLS he said this: That low of a wage warrant busting out the Statistics Tool! But unfortunately, I duffed up the export and it skipped tons of players which includes him. So sadly I have to rely on what the game has to say. Kicking myself for not leaving a save point on May 1st. Will have to in the future. That all looks good to me. I tried my hand at (what I thought) was a lowball at his agent and he instant accepted: first save in forever where Fee release clauses are my friend because the #1 objective is to lower the salary-impact of these players. If he plays well for us and an English club comes we net a 4M profit (after his sell-on). A respectable profit and low risk here imo. If I can get a bid for Chris Willock anywhere near his 10 – 11 M value this would be a swap to free up a DP slot which is worth 120k in GAM to us as well as 8k p/w in salary cap savings (DPs = 13.75k p/w salary cap impact). The optimal strategy for the 3rd DP is to get a U22 DP because the league gives you the slot for free to sign that player. Statistics Block a DP upgrade on Willock: Because I require that there are sufficient statistics this is a move I can't allow myself to make. Thomas Lemar is transfer listed by Athletic Madrid for 13.5M because they aren't playing him. . I don't have Spain loaded, so that might be half the issue but he only played 10 games last season instead of his regular 20's and didn't perform for them at all. Now how could I do this transfer without blowing up my transfer budget? Get the MLS to financially back the purchase! Unfortunately, they agree with my statistics, and he isn't worth the money. However, if I do find a high reputation player this will be how I'll get them. Why spend our own money when there's free money to spend! Oh America.... Edited March 17, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 17, 2023 Author Share Posted March 17, 2023 (edited) Baccuna Salary Bump With his amazing performance for us as a DM and his tight fee release clause at 3M I really didn’t think we could replace his ability for that little of money, so he got a bump in salary up to 18k p/w to double his fee release to 6.25M. With that much money I could potentially replace him. Here the issue is our Caribbean restriction. Until I can develop a youth pipeline for domestic players, not sure I can get this quality at Senior level contracts. Here is my evaluation on the DMs: First off I used the CM Statistics instead of the DM statistics. Why CM vs DM: Philadelphia use a 4-4-2 and their CMs don’t also have natural DM ability, so the CM Summary Stats need to be used to include their midfielders. This is fine though as 1) All the stats are the same; 2) For the other 2 teams & us all our DMs are also CMs. Juninho Bacuna: Our bargin acquisition from cash-strapped Birmingham. Creative Genuis! 0.33 Assists (vs 0.09 Top 3) on just 0.2 xA; 1.64 OP-KP vs 1.22 Top-3-Avg ; 0.98 ChC vs 0.87 Top-3-Avg . Additionally, he’s no slouch defensively with aggressive tackling (3.11 p90 vs 1.96 Avg), higher pressing with similar effectiveness and great interceptions (2.01 vs 1.54). Overall I am very happy here. Spreadsheet Error: Top 3 Shot% is displaying the Shot/90 stat instead of the correct one. This has been added to the Spreadsheet to-do. Eduard Loewen: The starting DP, how’d he do? Attacking Threat! Unlike Bacuna who is more of a facilitator, Loewn shines when you look at his NP-xG (0.18-100%), Shot (2.22 – 96%), & Shot% (45% - 88%) statistics that all blow the CM averages out of the water. His providing statistics are in-line with the Top-3 average, most importantly his Assists (.24 vs .22), Pass % (85% vs 88%) and Progressive Passes (6.12 vs 5.86). He does have low OP-KP ( 0.87 vs 1.22) and high Possession loss (14.1 v 11.1) but does counter this with his Possession won (13.3 vs 9.15). Thoughts: Bacuna is less of the scorer that I perceived him to be and more of the provider, with Loewen being the attacking threat. This isn’t a critique of him at all, as I think we have a contender here for our best value-for-stats especially in the usually expensive CM position. That 3 Million release clause was a great negotiating tactic. While we cap our profit on him more importantly we have reigned in his salary demands. [ADD SALARY COMPARISON LATER] Spreadsheet Future Function: Right here is a reason I’ve held sharing the sheet yet, because I wanted a full season to figure out what I want from a Moneyball financial analysis and adjust accordingly. Here I really want to see the financial impact my two playmaking CMs are having on the club. This is both full financial cost, but more importantly salary cap requirement + GAM usage. Loewen is a DP vs Bacuna’s Senior Salary, so is it worth cashing in on Loewen if we can find a Senior Contract Player to replicate him? It’s easy to compare face value worth of players with wage p/w difference & transfer paid vs received, but there are a lot of additional add-on fees as well as MLS has that tricky salary cap. For that fee, I think its just a matter of time till Europe comes asking for him back. If they do, that’s over 2 Million profit on top of a league-leader in his position. Sounds like a Moneyball player to me. Edited March 17, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_hdk Posted March 17, 2023 Share Posted March 17, 2023 Bacuna seems a top transfer! I still remember him play for Groningen...or was that his brother? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 17, 2023 Author Share Posted March 17, 2023 (edited) @the_hdk They both did! If you're thinking 2010-2013 it would be Leandro Bacuna, who I don't know if you caught, Leandro starts at SFC and had to be traded because I brought in his brother. Pretty cold dealing I know, but at 32 and with how he performed for bottom-table Chicago, sadly he wasn't worth the international slot. If you have Groningen from 2014-1018 in mind you are thinking of Juninho. Seems he didn't have as many large-impact seasons there before moving to England. His full career: Considering they are tactically the same kind of player it's no surprise that those first two young years of Juninho's career he didn't get brought up to the senior level when his older brother was an important player in the side. Very interesting how they have very similar career paths (especially now with my intervention). Wonder how much Huddersfield paid for him. Willock Brothers: There is a very outside chance that I could make a move to go for the youngest of the three brothers (and by far highest reputation) Joe Willock at Newcastle. They must not consider his wage worth-it for their CM Sub and want to move him on even though they have utilized him significantly both last year and already in this campaign. Currently he is transfer listed for 16.5M, which is too rich for our taste. This would be an upgrade to Loewen, and in my mind would lock in Bacuna's roster slot for good. Since Joe Willock would be a DP the wage hike is irrelevant as the salary cap hit is fixed. Just have to get the board to agree to such a large contract. I have hope though as Newcastle might get more desperate to offload their player, like Athletico Madrid has with Thomas Lemar whose price has already gotten slashed from 13.5 to 6M in just one month! I have till March to finalize my roster so there is plenty of time to get them to go to the most desperate option of paying a chunk of that insanely high salary I am trying to convince Chris Willock to downgrade to a Senior contract, but stupidly the game (for no apparent reason) dropped his estimated value from 10M down to 3M, and he now doesn't like I want my fee release clause to equal the same **** price I bought him for last season. His agent won't even negotiate when I lock that and Senior contract in. I am even guaranteeing myself a loss here because of his Sell-On. I still owe QPR 4.5M for him so it would be ludicrous to allow him to leave for just 5. Hopefully I can keep working him to get him to switch to a senior contract. I really want that DP slot back as it would open up lots of opportunities. Edited March 17, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 17, 2023 Author Share Posted March 17, 2023 (edited) Evaluating St Louis City's Offensive Performance in 2023 (Season 1) With the acquisition of Jamal Lowe and my continued targeting of what would be a huge coup for MLS of obtaining Thomas Lemar (whose form this season has been very good for Athletico Madrid) it's important to stop and reflect on how my offense did this year. The analysis that follows is looking back at the entire regular season. There are a few very important points to mention because of this: My analysis does not include the 3 playoff matches (two of which were fantastic for these players), which I would say most likely would have slightly raised their seasonal performances. My initial tactic for the season was simply not offensive enough, so the first 10 or so games we severely underperformed our xG (-10 at one point) and naturally all the offensive statistics suffered. Decodova-Reid was a mid-season signing who, when combined with our more aggressive tactic, revolutionized our offense. We were a completely different team from end of May onward due to him. This is the team that played in the playoffs, and it performed better than the whole season statistics will suggest. TL;DR: Great, but possibly not as efficient as I should have been If I was assigning myself a Moneyball grade on this offense I'd say its probably a B. The good moves: Finding Lebeau in Switzerland, the bargain for Decordova-Reid, & the surprise performance of the free T&T old (32) international Cato. The bad moves: Giving our biggest nemesis (Phili) Joao Claus who turns out is probably the best Target Man in MLS; overpaying for Wallock & Signing him to a DP contract. I should have waited for someone at half that cost and signed him to a senior contract. I still consider it an overall successful offensive transfer-season because all my signings did deliver a performance competitive with the Top 3 teams. Wallock is the only I had any negative thoughts about, but its because I hold him to a higher standard due to his DP slot & high transfer cost. Onto the Stats! 1) Striker While transferring out Joao Klauss in and of itself wasn’t necessarily bad because our acquisitions have done performed well in the tactic I utilized, I should have transferred him out of the MLS instead of handing the best team in the league a new best striker. This was tactically naïve and I should have known better. It is important to note I do my statistics after the last regular season game, so this does not include post-season performance. I like the fact that even with /90 statistics every player then has an equal opportunity to achieve their performances. With playoffs the better teams’ players will play extra games that will change their statistics. Brighton Labeau: First, we can’t ignore his very long adjustment period that took a good half-season. During this period he was extremely poor. However, the second half of the season is a completely different story and his ending statistics demonstrate this. He is now doing exactly the job he was hired for: score goals. He has the highest Shot % (63%) and Conversion % (33%) in the League! Additionally, his Goals/90 at 0.71 is within .04 of the best Top-3 Striker and 92% in the league. This is a Moneyball signing. Specifically: he is not an amazing all around player. Rather, he is amazing at his specific task. This is obvious when you look at his Dribbling, Sprints, Assists, Key passes and Passing. ALL of these are in the bottom 21% of the league. Bobby Decordova-Reid: While he is a Shadow-Striker and will be primarily evaluated against his AMC peers, it is worth first looking here at the other-half of our Striker average. Joao Klauss: He seems to be a complete package Target-Man. He is a great provider with only his passing % being low for the league at 79%. In the air he’s a monster (10.6 Hw/90 ; 58% Heading). And is a the most (100%) prolific shooter (4.6 Shot/90 ; 2.0 ShotTar/90) translating in a top 5% goal result (0.73 G/90 ; .54 nP-xG/90). His big weakness seems to be minutes played. With the exception of my mid-season signing of Decordova-Reid he is the lowest minutes player in the Top-3 Strikers, and by a significant margin. With 1841 minutes that’s 1000 minutes below the most played striker (Josef Martinez {Atlanta} 2897 Min) and 500 below the Top-3 Average (2349 Min) which he is obviously lowering down. This could be because he is withdrawn early in matches that Phili has already established a 2-3 goal lead, in that case he’s even beter. [LOOK INTO FULL GAME STATS] If I had the choice again, would I have let him go? Probably not. Keeping him I would have designed a different tactic that would take advantage of a Target Man. While this could have been a 4-2-3-1, I most likely would go for a 4-4-2 variant. Part of the reason I moved him on was even in a season with beat-em-up friendlies I was having trouble managing his morale and getting him to train better than average. He always seemed to get upset at the littlest of critique of not just him but the whole squad after bad games. I’ll be tracking his career closely to see if he can continue this form. 2) Our Amazing Crosser at Attacking Midfield Right - Winger I knew our Trinidad international Cordell Cato did amazingly well, but my god he is the Cross-Assist King AMR in the MLS. If you look at the Assist-chance Creation statistics he 91% or higher on all the statistics that matter: Chance Created, Assists, xAssists, Crosses Attempt & Complete. Then his Open-Play Key passes at 1.65 beats the Top 3 average of 1.41 substantially falling just shy at 87% of the league. He is the same kind of player as Christan Espinoza. It’ll be worth looking into how expensive of a player he is to see how good of value-for-stats we are getting here because Cato is hella cheap at 1.9k p/w this year. He got a pay boost for another contract even though he’s 32 and starting to slow down, but at 3.2k p/w and him having USA 2nd Nationality it was a well deserved raise. Statistically, Jahkeele Marshall-Rutty was not that great for us. To be fair to him, he was forced to play in 3 different positions across the season (AMR, RB, LB), but I don’t even think I want him back on loan with those levels of performances attacking-wise. 3) Our expensive & DP Attacking Midfield Left - Inverted Winger Chris Willock: TBH I’m underwhelmed here. Our large-cash signing seems to statistically be just good when compared to the Top-3 team’s AMLs. He is slightly-below that benchmark in a some key attributes (Dribbles, ChC, Pass%, OP-KP, Goals, Shots) just above average on others (Assists, ShotT). His underperformance [to me] comes down to his dreadful conversion rate of 15% vs the 36% we see for the Top-3. If he was a crossing AM like Cato that would be fine, but his job is to cut inside dribble and score. Improve this conversion-rating and he will justify his signing as that will lift his Goals, which at the end of the day is what I’m looking for. Alex Marshall & Tim Klein: These are the young prospects I had as rotation options this season. Marshall usually came on as the AMC sub, while Klein was the AML 2nd choice. While Klein was absolute garbage in scoring, he did do well as a provider with excellent ChC, Assists, OP-KP & Cross-C. Here it’s worth noting he is actually Left Footed, while Willock is a Righty. Klein should get the instruction to do more crosses. Marshall underwhelmed across the board and (as I already anticipated) will be sent out on loan next season to make room for our new recruits. 4) Our Marquee acquisition in Attacking Midfield - Shadow Striker Bobby Decordova-Reid: He is obviously a second striker rather than a playmaker AMC. Important to remember he only has a half-season of performance, but man it didn’t take anytime for him to internalize our playstyle and become our top threat. 0.6 Goals/90 on 0.41 xG with a 22% Conversion Ratio he was easily 2x higher than the Top3 average. Additionally, his providing results didn’t suffer with him matching the Top3 Assists (0.22) with less xA (0.16). Even though he is lower in Pass%, OP-KP & ChC he's delivering the end result (Assists), so I’m not worried. With both Goals and Assists he had the highest Avg Rating than all the Top-3 AMC. Edited March 17, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_hdk Posted March 17, 2023 Share Posted March 17, 2023 Ahh than I remember both brothers...:D I was sad the young one left to england so fast. he could have made it into dutch national team if he went to big3. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 17, 2023 Author Share Posted March 17, 2023 (edited) I believe it! Curacao is glad (in my universe at least) to have them though. Leandro is the team captain and Juninho is their Key Player & thus Top 5 as well: Edit: Also, he was just named into the North America Bext XI, which I think is pretty ridiculous. That 6 M release clause might not be enough now, but that's a good problem to have and I already have a solution ready for that outcome. Edit 2: And the MLS took notice as well considering him the 3rd best signing of the season for the league. Fair to say this was an epic success of a find Edited March 17, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 18, 2023 Author Share Posted March 18, 2023 SFC Caribbean Internationals of 2023 As a save interested in my player's statistical performances, I feel it apt to highlight how they performed for their respective nations in international matches. Also this is a way to track how well different nations are represented in the squad. Cuba: World Rank – 169th Team Performance: A year to forget for Cuba where they only won 1 competitive game against Haiti 2-0 in last season’s Nations League Div A. Lucky for them it was enough to not get relegated so they remained in Div A for 2023. One draw with T&T 1-1 was their only point in the competition with a tough draw of T&T & USA in their group. Spoiler SFC Players of Nation: 1) Gonzalo Pena – A 2022 Super Draft pick, he has spent his entire career out on loan first in the USL-Championship team Detroit City and now USL-L1 Chattenooga. He hasn’t done particularly well at either and I plan on letting him go when his contract expires. For Cuba he has had 6 starts in 9 games and was replaced in 5 of them where he did not perform well. Only against Aruba did he have a good game, which is a pretty low-ranked team even for the Caribbean. Spoiler Curacao: World Rank – 83rd Team Performance: Had a surprise Quarter Final Appearance in the Gold Cup this year losing 1-0 to Costa Rica. Granted for whatever reason they had “Qatar B” in the group stage, which is all kinds of strange so got an easy advancement. In 2023 they won their group in the NA Nations League Div B, so will play with the top nations in 2024. Spoiler SFC Players of Nation: 1) Juninho Bacuna – I mentioned him above and is considered the Key player for Curacao & the 5th highest reputation player of the nation. He played in 11 of 13 competitive fixtures doing well for them as the DM BWM or Segundo Volante – so very similar to where we play him in our lineup. Spoiler Jamaica: World Rank – 57th Team Performance: In 2022 Jamaica dominated Nations League B and got promoted to Nations League A, where they swept Costa Rica & Suriname winning all 4 matchups. Gold Cup was a disappointment where they went out in the group stage to Canada. Spoiler SFC Players of Nation: Bobby Decordova- Reid. Played 8 of 9 games available, almost always as an Advanced Forward and produced 5 goals and 2 assists which is fantastic. Even better, in every game he started he produced either a goal or an assist with his late entrance in the 77’ against Nicaragua as the only non-productive fixture. His brace against Suriname in October was the highlight of what can be considered a fantastic year for the national team. Jamal Lowe [Signed at end of season] 7 of 14 games when selected into the squad from 3/22 – 12/23. He had a much better 2022 performance, and then seems to be the odd man out in 2023 more often than not. Makes sense considering Jamaica is playing him and Decordova-Reid in the same slot, so when one plays the other rides the pine. When Lowe got the nod he did well, scoring 6 goals and provided 1 assist with consistently good ratings. His worst game was a 7.1 and he had a 8.8 rating when he scored a brace against Cuba. Excited to see if he can bring that consistency to St Louis! Spoiler Martinique: World Ranking – N/A [French Overseas Department thus not FIFA member] Team Performance: Martinique was relegated from Nations League Div A in 2022 and spent 2023 dominating their Div B group. Unfortunately, they failed to qualify for the Gold Cup proper losing to Guatemala 2-0 after a penalty win against Guadeloupe Spoiler SFC Players of Nation: 1) Brighton Labeau – 8 goals in 7 games Labeau played their Poacher and did just that against the soft defenses of St Lucia, St Vincent & Guyana. He was hot for us and for Martinique at the end of the year, which was great. Hope to see him continue this form for club and country into 2024. Spoiler Trinidad & Tabago: World Ranking – 106th Team Performance: A lackluster year for T&T just barely avoiding relegation in 2022 NL-Div A only thanks to Martinique doing even worse. Then in the Gold Cup they couldn’t advance out of the group stage only winning against St Kits. 2023 NL-Div A was a tough group with USA & Cuba, where again they survived with only 4 points just because Cuba did miserable with just a single point. Spoiler SFC Players of Nation: 1) Codell Cato – Considered the 4th highest reputation T&T player Cato is a regular fixture in the T&T squad Cato making 12 of 15 possible appearances primarily playing as their DR-WB though sometimes moving forward to MR-IW. As he plays further back for the national team you don’t see him producing the chances that he does for SFC, though he did manage 3 goals and 1 assist all coming in the 2023 fixtures he played. Spoiler Turks & Caicos: World Ranking – 206th Team Performance: Even playing down in NL-Div C wasn’t enough for the tiny English territory to have a good season. They finished dead-last in a group with Barbados, St Martin & Dominica with only 4 points in 6 matches. They weren’t good enough to even get a shot at the Gold Cup through playoffs. Spoiler SFC Players of Nation: Thomas Hayes: Considered the highest reputation T&C player, and only playing at the MLS level, he is their go to defensive player playing in all 3 of the positions and accumulating a number of yellow cards. He is both footed and natural at all 3 so is most likely their best choice in every slot. With their poor performance he only had one good game against the US Virgin Islands, but got sub-ed off before the end. Spoiler 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 18, 2023 Author Share Posted March 18, 2023 St Louis City 2024 Super Draft Super Draft Preview: Two weeks before the super-draft, each team gets an inbox message that includes all the players entered into the draft with the leagues Draft Rating of them (basically a Scout Letter Rating). This is where I cross my fingers and hope we get some Caribbean players entering from the NCAA Schools I've been scouting. Sadly, this year there were only 5, and none were highly rated. With that low of ratings really any pick would do to acquire who I wanted, and here is a reminder of the picks I had hoarded leading up to the draft: 4 First Round Picks, 2 Second Round, and 1 Third Round. I did not need this many picks, so it was time to use them to pick up players to fill out the squad. A point to recognize on the draft is this is taking college age players into the MLS so these are mostly 20 – 22-year-old players. The “Generation Adidas” players, which are the ‘cream of the crop’ do tend to be younger around 18 and have higher potential. Still, if you set up your academy correctly youth intakes will produce better players and all these players get salary cap exemptions being “Home Grown”. Trade Overview: Here are all the trades I made, which were all to gain international slots for at least this year and in some cases further on. The big trade I made was the final one with Cincinnati just 2 days before the draft on 1/12. Cincinnati Trade: Their demand for top SD picks was high enough that I was able to convince Cincinnati to give me their starting RB I’ve wanted all save, an international slot for 3 years and a trash pick at the end of the draft for 2 very good 1st Round Picks (5 & 9 overall). Powell is a 31 year old Veteran Jamaican International, so will only be good for a couple years, but there’s no one I can draft that has the potential to start in the team. If you scroll up, Powell was my target for RB earlier and I went into his statistical performance for Cinci there, but here are a couple screenshots to show what my scouts think. Key is he's still very fast, and has great mental attributes. Downside is he's injury prone. Even with his light injury prone he has played the vast majority of matches for Cinci the past two seasons. This does overload us at RB with 3 now who are 31, 33 (Barry) and 29 (Yaro). It's 4 if you count Cato. Cool part of this style of ‘statistics manager’ is you end up with a lot older players which is (imo) more realistic to how a real squad would look. I will be looking to offload Barry hopefully for some cheap draft picks or something. STC 2024 Super Draft Picks: We ended up with just 2 picks in the 2nd round of the draft to pick up who i considered the 'best of the bad' Caribbean options available. we got lucky and the best player of the bunch was still undrafted by our turn Paul Banton - Even being Unambitious with awful determination, Banton was the best of the bad Caribbean options available in this years draft class. An AML he really isn't necessary for us as we have multiple other Jamaicans all better than him with even 1 being younger. He will be headed out on loan to see how he fares. You never know, he could be like my Chinese DM who has done well even with those two big red X's on his player info. Solon Namphy - Haiti / USA. Natural DM, AMC & AML he is the utility player who doesn't really provide use in any of them. He was picked because of his technical skill and dark green consistency and big match performance. Have real doubts if he will ever feature for us, but that's what the loans to the USL are for to see if he surprises. 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 20, 2023 Author Share Posted March 20, 2023 (edited) 2024 January Transfers: Learning how Targeted Acquisition Money Works (the hard way) There are two pools of money you can use to buy-down players salaries to get your team under the cap. General Acquisition Money is like it sounds, a pool that is always there that you can use on any player in your roster. There is a special pool called Targeted Acquisition Money that can only be used when signing a contract with a foreign player that is over the Senior-Contract "threshold" (~14k p/w) you want to bring into the MLS. Unlike GAM that is a forever-pool, TAM resets yearly. Additionally, it isn't just a singular "TAM" pool, the game has it set in yearly-pools. This means we had 2023-TAM until 12-31-2023 and then on 1-1-2024 our 2023-TAM went to $0, and we were gifted our yearly allotment into 2024-TAM which was $2.8M. The bug, which broke my transfer, is that when you make a transfer deal with TAM in the Fall but the transfer finalizes/occurs on Januray 1st instead of December – 17th (league reset) it doesn’t switch to utilizing the next season’s TAM to make the deal. Instead, it keeps with the past year’s TAM which has been zeroed meaning the transfer will fail even if you still have budget in your TAM. Here are some screenshots for what happened: Of course, when I went back in to re-negotiate to acquire Gravillon both Reims and the player wanted 2x what we had agreed to, which just doesn't make sense from a Moneyball perspective. I waited till the end of the window, but when they finally would negotiate other French clubs entered the fray and he chose to stay in France rather than move to us in the MLS. Thus, the hunt will continue for a quality BPD CB. English DM End of Contract Pickups Rekeem Harper [23] (Ispwich: Jamaica-Main/English) Another cheap acquisition of an England Championship Jamaican International. The goal here would be to make Lowen redundant thus able to be transferred out to free up the DP slot. Dude was great, but I have another SV(A) who is better creatively even if he’s not as offensive and Harper could be the backup for Baccuca. [Note this for later] Scout Perspective: Spoiler Statistics: Spoiler Form: Spoiler I hadn’t considered him strongly before because he was playing at League 1 level. But he’s doing just as well at a championship level as Ispwitch’s rotation CM which is exactly what we want him to be for us. For a contract he requires a 3M release clause, but we are getting him for free so that’s fine. This is how you get young talent into the US so its part of the story. Because of the sell-on I’m able to negotiate him down to a 5.75k p/w contract which is excellent! I did guarantee it though so no option to waive him to reduce the salary. Don’t see that as being a problem though. As this is an end of contract it will happen July 1st so midway through the season. Also Guaranteeing the contract does provide some risk as he will have to be transferred to get off the salary cap, but it lowers his salary which again is what we want. Only bad part of this is its such a short contract, however I do intend to find a top level DM playmaker so eventually he will be redundant. Kevin Stewart [30] (Blackpool – England Championship {Jamaica/English} A second cheap Jamaican from the English Championship is going out of contract at the end of the season. I knew going into this Caribbean focus that this would be a major trend of the save. I am less interested in him due to 1) His age & 2) He’s heavily injury prone. Together that’s not rhe best mix. He asks for a similar contract: Both on frees with Kevin not having high demands of playing time means I can take both in and evaluate them in the pre-season and decide who I want to keep in the squad and who I want to loan out to start. Also notice Stewart doesn't have a 'guarantee' in his contract, so i can waive him if he doesn't perform for no real risk to the team. Stats: Spoiler Buggy Trading Interface It took me a while to figure this out, but if I start a trade with an Enquiry it won't display in the active trade window. Even worse, when you accept the trade in a negotiation you don't get any indication that that has actually happened. You have to just wait a few days and an inbox message will display to let you know you actually got your trade accepted and its ready to confirm. This was the frustrating part of getting Powell through that trade with Cincinati. I discussed the trade above. Spoiler Youth Academy DM Promotions: David Leibman – Professional DM. Very excited to try this guy out in the rotation and see how he fairs Pan Yang – Unambitious Chinese International. Older Youth player I signed in S0, so will be finishing his reserve contract this year and has already agreed to a senior contract afterwards. I really want to keep this guy in the squad, he played in China last year and did fantastic there and for the national team. Just need an international slot for him. Would seriously help him to get mentored by our DMs, but its hard to prioritize this 17 year old over bringing in my hot prospect 18 year old Jamaican AML. I have some thoughts for how the Summer transfer window might play out… Issues with Willock: Yeah, I have not had a good time with Willock this Pre-Season & First Month of Regular Season. I was underwhelmed by his contributions last year, so already was considering how he would be replaced. This dumpster fire has solidified my thinking that his "Ambitious" personality is going to be a problem for us. First, he wants more Money: He's already on a DP contract, but at only 20k p/w he wants a large bump in his wages (~35k p/w) which he claims is due to his performance. if he scored goals for us last year I'd agree, but honestly I'm not seeing it. Also, with J. Lowe acquisition they can play a similar role for our offense (cutting in from the left with dribbling and flair) so his 'extra value' to us for his ability just isn't there as it was when he was hired. Of course, he is kicking up a fuss and is doing his best to turn the locker-room against me. He gets maybe 8 or so players on his side, and while I can keep the morale up with wins in pre-season I can tell its getting dragged down somewhat because of him. Second, he won't agree to Transfers: I’ve had him listed for 10M since he became unhappy about his wage and Midlesbrough have been mildly interested the whole time. While they weren’t willing to go to 10M they were open to a structured 9.5M without any conditions. While there is a 2M net (Purchase price was 7.5M) there are a lot of fees owed on his transfer. On the total fee 10% will go to Chris and 5% in solidarity payments. That is 1.425M. Take that and the purchase cost off and our net-fees is barely 500k. Now 20% of that goes to QPR which leaves us a measly 400k. Proof I bought him for way too much money. We have tons of depth at AML, so I'm happy to just break even on him and move on. Now hopefully they can agree on a contract.... Well, can’t say I’m shocked. Tells me I’m right to not be wanting to offer him a higher salary. If he can't agree to terms with a Championship club he thinks way too highly of himself and has unnecessarily high wage demands. Third he injures himself: Only positive here is he is no longer unhappy about his contract and throwing the locker-room against me. Bad news is he's out for at least a month now, so he will have played maybe 3 of the first 10-12 games. Add this onto missing my star GK for the whole season and it hasn't been good for SFC injury-wise. Departure of Designated Player DM: What I prepared for at the start of the transfer window happened without my intervention just days after Willock rejected his Middlesbrough contract. Non-negotiable but a structured 12M for him from Hertha Berlin is just too good to ignore. While he is good offensively, and played great for us I have prepared for this situation with 2 bridge plans: 1) 2 Youth Prospects into the Pre-July team rotation ; 2) 2 Good-Quality English players arriving on free transfers in July. Yes it is taking 4 players (now) to replace a current star player. However, the key is if they manage it I have freed up a Designated Player slot. BMG refused to pony up to match Hertha, so to Berlin he goes! He played great for us, but a 9.75M up front with a 2.1M additional if he becomes a regular for them (that might never happen). But I am happy to make this deal. And guess where we got him from in the first place? Yup, Hertha. They paid 7.75M for him in 2019 and now paid up to 12M to get him back Now something to always keep in mind is MLS takes 25% of any profit made by the club which makes it harder to make money with transfer fees in the US. Trading Away our Disappointing Backup GK & Replacing him: NY Red Bulls came in for an offer for Jeadine White, and I actually upped the GAM and added draft picks and an extra year of an international slot for us. With the sale of Loewn we have 4.17M of GAM available right now, so this is a good way to start building back up our draft allocations not to mention hoarding international slots. Then I’ve made the trade with Orlando City for the player rights for the Leicester GK who has American citizenship, so I’ll bring him in as a 3rd GK who won’t take an international slot/ He’s on a 9.25k p/w contract in the premier league and with fee release and the sell-on I got him to come down to 6.5k Final transfer screen Edited March 20, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 20, 2023 Author Share Posted March 20, 2023 (edited) SFC 2024 Pre-Season & Month 1 [March] Results: Pre-Season: Everything was going well here. We played a mix of beat-em-up's and real matches against mid-tier MLS teams and did well. Month 1: Then Willock got upset, and we started stacking up injuries just in time for a 6 game March where we had a very underwhelming start. The first 4 games i went with the same exactly tactic I ended the season with and it obviously wasn't working. For Houston I changed my Right-wing player roles so that it mirrored my left wing and added 'hold position' to the DM-L. This opens us up a lot more on the counter, but it paid off offensively for us in Houston, and against Philadelphia (who are the reigning champions) we were able to hold them off and record a 0-0 draw. It will take some more games to see how this works long-term. Goalkeepers: It's still early days, but due to Nathan Trott joining the team earlier he played all of pre-season and was the GK the last two games where we actually had good performances. He did awful against LAFC, which had me rotate to the other GK, but you'll see why I switched back after only 3 games. I plan to give him the #1 for April and then will re-evaluate how he's doing. The positive news is both are training well and are getting improvements to their abilities as they learn our SK-S style play. Both are 25 and have potential left according to the coaches so hopefully they can bridge the large gap till our star GK is back. Brandon Austin has had 3 senior matches. He played well in the first against Red Bulls, he wasn't tested against Toronto, and then did miserable against Austin. He has played a couple reserve matches since then and is inconsistent. We will see how his April goes in the NextPro Injuries & International Duty The MLS doesn't really break for international duty. Luckily for us this March was Olympic Qualification in Noth America, so we only had 1 first team player missing for the Jamaica U23: Christopher Ainsworth. With his injury at the start of january he has only played 1 match for us all year, and only that was a substitute so we were already playing without him. Big news for our recent waiver pickup of Anthony Beaufort, is Canada used their Main squad so he got his first CAP. Other than that it was Pan Yang heading out to China, where they failed to beat North Korea and a few of our loan & reserve players. Looking forward to Month 2: April April is even more congested with 7 games with only one 7 day break the entire month. We get a rematch against Toronto Away this time to see if we can improve on our home performance. Of the teams DC & San Diego are pretty poor teams, but with them at the end of the month hopefully our Morale is in good shape to take advantage of these matchups. Here are our current injuries: Probably won't be able to work Wilock in until the final 3 games of the month as a substitute. Hopefully, he can return to the starting lineup by May to put some good performances together to make him attractive for the transfer window. After April I'll look at the first 2 month performances in a little more detail as well as talk about any transfer targets / scouting priorities. Edited March 20, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 21, 2023 Author Share Posted March 21, 2023 SFC Season 2 Month 2: April 2024 April Match Play-by-Play:April – 3rd Home vs Inter-Miami [Full rotation except Nilsson as BPD-Captain & Trott in Goal]. Spoiler Pretty dull for 63 min, and then I brought J. Lowe on as an AML-IF and in the 65 he has a breakaway 1 v 1 with the keeper and he slots it far post to give us the lead! 73’ corner kick our DM-L has come on and takes the corner hitting J Henry on the far post who replaced Nillson to keep both fresh to give us a 2-0 lead. Switch to a more conservative strategy and see out the match. 87’ we have goal disallowed, but they had no threats on us. Perfect match to rotate on. April 6th – Away vs NYCFC [Full strength (minus Wilock) and rested], can we overcome a very strong side that is tired but at home? Spoiler 12’ they give up the ball to Labeau in build up inside the box and he gets it on target but is blocked. He isn’t done with them though as in the 14’ he wins the ball pressing their CB hard and he distributes to Decodava-Reid who makes the run past him and he easily places it far corner to give us an early lead. They are a possession team and are hogging the ball with 74% to our 26% until the 35’ when their CM is dispossessed and then turns and two-foots my midfielder getting a straight red! However, they execute a nasty set piece from midfield and bring us level with an uncontested header 1-1. Then 45+2’ They slot their striker in and D Henry misses his tackle leaving Tales Magno 1 v 1 with our goalie and they score to be up 2-1 at the break… It takes us till the 68’ but our young Jamaican Ainsworth comes on and scores an equalizer and then we have our own set piece in the 72’ that finds D Henry’s head and he makes up for the defensive lapse to give us back the lead. 90+4’ their forwards combine and T Magno break away again to another 1 v 1 with the goalie and scores… I feel robbed. An example of poor GK, Trott got a 6.3 allowing 3 goals with 6 shots on target…And he’s a baby and won’t let me fine him without throwing up a fuss even though he totally deserves it. That is 1 strike of bad performance, can he make it through the month without getting out? April 10th – Away vs Dallas FC [Partial Rotation] Spoiler 10’ D-Reid was just offside so his goal gets called back. We have the chances, but then they get us on a NP Corner to take an early lead in the 20’. IT takes 4 of my 5 subs, but then we get a break on our own corner with my fresh AMR Cato finding another sub AML Marshall on the back-post and he scores. Of course they get a kick-off highlight goal with their own batch of fresh AML & R. They twist the knife for a 3rd off a corner-esque FK. Strike two for the GK. 3 shots on target and 3 goals and a 6.0 rating… this **** isn’t even funny. I don't plan on giving him a chance for a 3rd strike after his reaction to criticism: Are you kidding me?! You’re playing for the B team for the rest of April. You had a 2.1 Expected Goals against and you conceded 6 with only 5 saves. Yes NYCFC & Dalas are better teams (normally), but this season only NYCFC are doing well and are chasing us up the table. Dallas are having an awful season sitting 16th in the Supporters' Shield. Austin on the other hand has done well for SFC 2 with two shut-outs. Yes, its farm-league, but my hope is his mental form will carry over and at the very least he might be more responsive to constructive criticism. April 13th – Away Columbus Crew [Partial Rotation, Bringing D-Reid on in the second half]. Spoiler Very limited first half highlights, is the first test for Wilock and he played just the first half and I subbed my left flank at halftime. 49’ Bacuna, Cato & Powel do some very nice combination play to get Bacuna into the box to score! 60’ they refresh their whole offense with all their subs at once. 73’ We switch to a more defensive posture and sub some players including Bacuna to keep him fresh. Never brought D-Reid on as we were up. They pushed late but we held. Defensive victory as they had 0 shots on target so the GK wasn’t tested. Good for his morale and rating though. April 20th – Away Toronto FC [First Team] Spoiler Trash 3’ FK where we couldn’t head it away and 5 headers later they get it in the goal with a VAR confirmation. At 7’ D-Reid brings us level but its recalled as he went too early and was offside. 12’ though they push Labeau in the box and D-Reid gets the chance to equalize from the spot and our DP does his job and converts. 1-1. Jimenez beats my RB on the run in behind and gets them the lead again 27’. 34’ its Labeau’s turn to get that final header in a chain in the box to bring us back level. Halftime Wilock is off for our young Jamaican and his run in the 56’ sets up D-Reid for a 1 v 1 which he converts. He’s on fire today. 66’ corner-kick and Nilsson gets his header goal. Their GK is having a horrific match on a 5.9 rating and it’s the first game in April where my GK did okay. They had 1.69 xG on 7 ShoT and we let in 2 Goals. Sad when being just over the xG is a “good” match… April 24th – Away San Diego [Rotation Squad with D-Reid & Nilsson still starting]. Spoiler We have more chances in the first half but nothing particularly memorable until the 42’ when Marshall breaks down the left and San Diego pulls him down in an obvious goalscoring opportunity earning a straight red. We don’t convert, but we have the man up now and Marshall keeps beating his man. 59’ we have a deep FK and Marshall finds Lowe totally unmarked on the far post and he scores. VAR Check says… GOAL! Today is the Marshall show even though rating-wise he didn't get rewarded with just a 7.2 Not many chances after that as we moved into our cautious tactic to protect the counter even with 10 men. They pushed too hard at the end and in 90+3’ we countered well on them and our English striker John-Jules got himself a goal. Nice stable 2-0 win, with a well-timed squad rotation. On GK watch, again this was a defense performance as they didn’t get a single shot on target so he wasn’t even tested. April 27th – Home D.C. United [Mostly 1st Team]. Spoiler Finally, a home game! I’ve managed minutes so that my whole offense is fresh and fit for this game and is very obvious as we instantly are breaking into the box and 11’ Bacuna finds Cato on the far post totally open and he blasts one home for a quick goal. In the dying seconds of the half Cato yet again is roasting his man down the flank and gets a cross in that is cleared out to the trailing RB Powell who then smashes it one time perfectly to the back post to the unmarked Wilock who hits it first time goalie had no chance. 61’ Wilock strikes again this time served up by Bacuna at the top of the box. This is the first game he’s looked like a DP all season. Up 3-0 time to manage fitness and then the game. GK again wasn’t even tested as our field players totally dominated. We have a counter strategy and we had 60% of the ball. They had 0.19 xG on 5 shots, none of which were on goal. April Match Results & Standings: Backroom Developments: Uped JR Coaching & Got a Coaching Badge: Injuries: No new injuries this month, its a miracle! As you can see from the Match-Highlights Wilock is back to fitness and actually had great contributions to end the month. Europe Scouting Season: With May 1st comes my full season data-rip for the main Europe Leagues to start hunting for squad upgrades from the big leagues. I've played half of May already and have done some major transfer market moves so look forward to an upcoming statistical analysis post of potential new players. May Schedule: Month starts with a top of the Eastern Conference face-off in Orlando. We then have at the high-congestion mid-month two really tough matches against San Jose & Colorado who were both teams we faced in last seasons Playoffs with the former being the team that knocked us out. Very difficult month ahead, at least Wilock is back fit and in form. Hopefully my strikers can pick up the pace a little. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 21, 2023 Author Share Posted March 21, 2023 (edited) Big Money Designated Player Acquisition With the departure of Loewen at the start of the season, we have had a free Designated Player slot and a large transfer budget [for an MLS side] to make a move for a top-quality talent to make our offense a step above the rest of the MLS. With May I pulled data from all the European leagues and updated my Spreadsheet to evaluate what options we have available. As a 2nd-rate league we are looking to pick up unwanted players from the top sides in Europe where they are willing to part with them for a reduced transfer fee and ideally will pay a portion of the wages. I've focused my initial 2 years scouting on England for three very obvious reasons 1) The most Caribbean second-nationality players in Europe generate in England ; 2) With English as the shared language, it is easier to work a new player into the squad ; 3) England (especially in FM) has some of the top talent in the world. If players can cut it there they can easily compete in the MLS. The result of this is the vast majority of our squad have come from the English Championship or Premier League. Only a couple talents have come from scouting the Caribbean directly or domestically from Canada/USA. Premier League Transfer-Listed: I’m trying the media campaign to get Marital interested because that would be unbelievable and hilarious at the same time. Antonio is retiring this year, which leaves the youngest Wilock brother and Oxlade-Chamberlin who are both playmaker/attacking Midfielders I could get for somewhere between 12-16M. Sean Baptiste of Brentford is a cheaper option in all ways at 6.75M, but with 2 free decent DMs coming through there’s very little chance he’s worth going for. Here its ‘go for big name transfer-listed or wait till free’. Oxlade-Chamberlin vs Joe Wilock Neither has played enough minutes this year to make the 1000 cut off. O-C is at ~200 Min & Wilock at 770, so I’ll use the Summary Statistics for CMs and then look at their in-game printout of the statistics. Career Sheets: Spoiler Spreadsheet Note: Here is where it would be perfect to have an ‘import scouted players’ function so I could compare these two against the EPL benchmarks and see how they do. Part I: Dribbles/90 Wilock is on target for what we are looking for (though its not in the CM stats – again need to add). Similar passing and sprints but O-C has failed to produce any assists for Liverpool and has a much lower pass% than the average at 79% vs Wilock 83% and average of 86%. O-C does produce slightly more OP-K Passes at .93 vs .7 Wilock, but bother are way below the average of 1.31 for EPL. Same with ChC for Wilock Part II: Attack - O-C (top) ; Wilock (middle). Here we see that O-C is slightly more scoring focused vs Wilocks providing with 1.39 ShT/90 & .29 xG/90 vs Wilock’s .47 & .15, but Wilock did end up scoring so he actually has a goal/90 stat. Wilock beat the odds with his goal with a 1.75 xG Overperformance, while O-C slightly under-performed with -.63 which was his xG in 200 mins. Wilock scored 3 goals with a 1.25 xG in 770 mins. O-C’s Shot% is very high at 60%, with 2.32 Shots/90 and .29 nPxG. Wilock’s, while lower is fine at 33%, 1.40 S/90 and .15 nPxG. The standard is .34% and 1.0 S/90 with .1 NP-xG/90, so both (even with limited minutes) are overperforming in offensive potential. Defense - Both are bad aerially, but that’s to be expected. O-C actually tackled a lot when he played though he didn’t win possession anymore and also was very bad at intercepting the ball. Wilock on the other hand got a good number of interceptions while also doing some tackling, blocking and clearing per 90. Looks more well rounded. They both have strengths and weaknesses defensively, but I feel level out to about average overall. Seemed reasonable rotation/sub options for good Premier League teams. Statistical Evaluation: If I could get them at the same cost & same wage Wilock would win not just based on Stats, but also because he’s 6 years younger at 24 while O-C is 30. I would consider both to have performed well enough to be acquired by us and to be a star playmaker its just how would it fit into my formation and is it worth the cost. Financing a Deal: First Up - Liverpool: First pass at O-C was a contractual failure, but 2 weeks later I got his agent to come back to the table and I did a better job with the transfer deal with Liverpool. Liverpool were open to payin 48k of his salary, which amounts to just shy of $2.5M per year in wage they would pay. I think these deals last 3 years so that is worth (in my head) 7.5M. To get this we increased our overall transfer bid to 13M over their listed price of 11M, which is even less than the 1st year payments so I see this as a great deal. The Transfer is also very well structured with the bulk of the fee happening in year 2 when he hits 50 games, but it’s still only about half the total fee. Second Part: Oxlade Chamberlin I was able to get Oxlade-Chamberlain’s agent to agree to an absolutely ridiculous contract. Now to decide if I want to confirm this monster. I’ll be sleeping on it that’s for sure. The question: is he worth paying 1/3 of our payroll budget for. The acquisition costs I’m very happy with as its essentially an even financial deal to what we got paid for Loewen by Hertha. A player of this caliber in our offense though... What about Wilock? Newcastle won’t do a deal like this for Willock without us forking out over 23 M in fees. And then even if I agree with that because Wilock is a lower reputation player (without the English CAPs) my board won't even let me put up anywhere near the size of contract that i can for O-C and to come over to the MLS in the prime of his career he wants a stupidly high wage that there's no way I can get down so I don't even bother. Sadly no brother-combo for us at SFC. Where to Play Oxlade – Chamberlin: False-Nine: Liverpool fans react to Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain as a false nine (hitc.com) [2021] I think my fast counter and break strategy with our main striking coming out of our AMC role D-Reid, my tactic is apt for a False-Nine conversion with a player of the skill of O-C. Additionally, I’ve already confirmed acquisitions of two new DMs in Rekeem Harper & Kevin Stewart so we are set for the direct replacement to Loewen. Budget for O-C: Looking at the squad it really is the Striker position where the team has been purposefully quiet in the transfer market. We easily could have the lowest wage-bill spent at striker with our 3 natural strikers being: John-Jules (8k p/w U-22 Development contract = 0 Salary Cap) ; Labeau (11.5k p/w, 5.75k p/w Salary Cap) ; J Lowe (5.75k p/w, 2.9k p/w Salary Cap). Thus, we are spending 8.65k p/w out of 105k p/w or 8.24% of our Cap on strikers right now. Adding Ox because he’s a Designated player doesn’t even double the Cap Space we are giving to strikers. DP Contracts are a fixed 13.5k p/w cap space. You can then buy that down with GAM to 6.5k p/w CAP. That only takes 350k GAM and we a ton in the bank from the transfer deal with Loewen, so it isn’t any kind of cost to us. So 6.5 + 8.65 = 15.15 / 105 = 14.42% of CAP for Strikers. Now that seems high, however keep in mind that J Lowe is a utility attacking player who is a natural for both AML/R as well as Striker so is a perfect bench player for all three. Also, if I can finally move Wilock out this transfer window [which is my objective] we will again return to 2 DP players that hopefully I can turn into something special. What about Club Finances? So far we are doing very well keeping the team financially safe with a very healthy 24.7M bank balance. We even managed an almost neutral year our first year, which included some heavy transfer spending Note the Payroll has red because I have moved the transfer Budged around to make sure the deal will clear, I can slide it easily to bring us within payroll. And our Current Salary Cap Expenditure? Again, no problem as we are well under the CAP. Here a rookie mistake by me was putting our GK Burki on SEI because I can’t actually waive his salary commitment against the CAP. I should have just eaten the international slot & Roster spot for 2/3 of the season to have him for playoffs. The only upside of having done this is my younger GK prospects are improving significantly with valuable 1st team playing experience. One key caveat is I'll be adding the two DMs into the squad at the same time this summer, so will have to move on at least one or two backups but I have plenty of players who aren't featuring who I can waive no problem. Getting under the CAP will be the easy part of this whole thing. Status: I have just gotten O-C to agree to the deal and am the only one who has gone in for him this early in the transfer-cycle. Part of why I'm moving so early is if I let it wait till we are properly in the window I can see mid-table Premier sides vying for his signature and him losing the willingness to take such a wild contract to come down to the MLS. Will I Follow Through? This is a pretty big deal we will be making and if he agrees I am feeling pretty excited about it. Yes there are downsides to him especially having mild injury-proneness and not playing regularly at all for Liverpool this save (or in real life). But to get a Premier League caliber player into the MLS there will always be negatives to the deal. The question is, can we get him to perform like he did for the Gunners? Edited March 21, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 21, 2023 Author Share Posted March 21, 2023 (edited) Its done! Also, looked closer at the "Selling Team Salary Contribution" clause and its even better than i budgeted for. It lasts the duration of the current contract. We signed him onto a 4.5 Year deal (7/9/2024 - 12/31/2028) which is 233 weeks. Therefore Liverpool will pay us 11.2M in wages over the duration of his contract. Basically, we get the transfer-fee back over 5 years in wage-reduction for what easily will be one of the highest skilled players currently playing in the MLS. Of his base salary that will bump to 135k basically immediately so Liverpool's payment is 35.6% of his base. Granted, he will still be a massively expensive part of our wage bill and I'll have to make sure to manage his fitness properly. In this game he hasn't had trouble with injuries but his past is downright terrifying in how brutal his injuries have been. Edited March 21, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 21, 2023 Author Share Posted March 21, 2023 (edited) SFC Season 2 Month 3: 2024 May How did we do? May 1st Away Orlando City: Spoiler Disastrous start we let in a goal in the 3’ right up the gut with our defenders just following the ball. It’s almost 2 when Bacuna gives an awful giveaway. We get our act together and we make a few decent moves and then in the 19’ clutch-man Cato picks up a ball from Powell and dribbles down the wing and whips a cross in to Labeau who finishes finally getting him a goal! In the 27’ we switch to the other flank where Jamaican Ainsworth got the start and he crosses in finding D-Ried who first time finishes to give us the lead. Halftime has the team in high spirits and we come out well. In the 57’ a quick counter orchestrated by Nilsson in the back finds Ainsworth again beating his man by cutting inside (IW) and his slotted pass finds the late run of Bacuna at the top of the box. He takes a good first touch to set up and then places an upper 90 shot from the top of the 18 making it 3-1! Immediately we win the ball back and in the 59’ Nilsson again finds Ainsworth who is absolutely shredding their RB who does a shallower cut in passing into the feat of Labeau who just has to tap it in for a go-ahead fourth goal. Can it get worse for Orlando? Oh yes it can as Cato smoked his defender who in frustration two-foots him form behind getting a straight red card in the 62’. Here we sub off our stars and switch to a cautious formation to see out our 3 goal lead. Not much happens after that. May 5th Away Vancouver Whitecaps: [Defensive Rotation] Spoiler Really lack-luster highlights here. First half ended a deserved 0-0 with only a shot on target each. 62’ we made a number of offensive changes and it paid off with a ball over the top by our Academy WB-L Ream to our rotation AMC Marshall running into the box for an easy tap home at the far post. In the 68’ Marshall does it again, this time being served from the right side by Cato after a layoff from our DLF Rotation Jules. From there we sit back and protect and rotate out our playmaker Bacuna who did fine, just no assists today. GK watch: they had 2 shots on target with a .25 xG so he wasn’t troubled at all today. Was a good call to rotate the backline, Ream was the real surprise standout he’s been playing NextPro most this season, but I might bring him up as a sub. This match beat our consecutive win record! May 11th Home San Jose Earthquake: [Unfortunately this will have offensive rotation especially with my playmaker getting a knock in training right before the match]. Spoiler Powell our RB is playing SV(A) today and they are having trouble dealing with him in the midfield. So much so at 10’ he’s fouled right outside the box and our DM-L Wan Kuzain steps up for a DFK and curls it beautifully top corner. We aren’t holding the ball, but our counters are looking dangerous. Second half J. Lowe picks up an injury, so we swap a couple AM. Then a few minutes later Ainsworth also gets injured, so we swap out more. 76’ one of those subs, Cato, gets served the ball when Barry wins a ball at midfield and the team counters hard. Cato beats the keeper on the finish for a 2-0 lead. Now we defend as they bring on a whole fresh AM-3. Apparently, Cato wasn’t finished with San Jose as he sprints down the flank and finds Willock on the back-post with his MLS-leading crossing on full display. This is payback for that Western Conference final last year. GK Watch: while they only had .64 xG Austin was involved in saving multiple of their highlight shots, so I’d say the most active game he’s had in a while. Still he’s training great and performing well so he’s won the starting position now. Helps he’s American so he doesn’t take an international spot. Unfortunately, J Lowe joins the army of injured: May 14th Home Montreal Impact: [Offensive Rotation]. Spoiler 4 min in they score off an easy cross into the box. They had 2 players to my 5 defenders and we couldn’t break up the play, very poor. We make up for it quickly at 6’ when Bacuna keeps a blown corner alive and finds our 2nd striker playing AMR John-Jules in the box for a tap-in. They beat Reim again down the right side easily and I sub him out for my starter. He had a great game a few weeks ago, but was a huge liability today. 45+1 John-Jules is out to prove a point today as he beats 2 men to feed Marshall in the box who himself dribbles to find the perfect shot to bring us level 2-2. 63’ and Marshall makes it a brace! No F’in way their striker Quioto makes it a hat-trick in the 79’ just beating the defenders. GK Watch: 4 shots on target with 1.32 xG and 3 goals conceded resulting in a 6.2 Rating. Not a good showing at the back. May 18th Away Coloardo Rapids: [Bacuna and Wilock need rest prompting a cascade of rotations] Spoiler Some wonderful combination passes with Labeau coming all the way back to the center circle to start the play ends with youngster Ainsworth breaking into the box to score yet again to give us an early lead in the 11’. However, that could all be undone when Yaro takes down Zardes at the top of the box. Luckily it was just outside so no pk. He isn’t looking good at this first showing in a while. I pulled him to FB-D and moved our direction of attack to take away his liability. I make an early change for him and my DM. Ainsworth picked up a light injury and we rotated him out. 80’ they score a FK set piece, and in the 83’ we Henry almost got a corner goal but it hits off the crossbar and back post before going out. One ShotT one Goal for Colarodo. Their xG was at 1.14 so I guess a goal was warranted, but still lackluster offensive performance today. We are also feeling the rotation of DMs with my two 18 year olds just not up to the level required when I subbed Powell out. May 26th Away Chicago Fire: [1st team with a test of the other GK] Spoiler We give an awful giveaway by Bacuna in build up 30 seconds into the game to give them a goal. 12’ they make it 2 in the second phase of a corner play. 2 shots on target with .27 xG and they have 2 goals… 22’ Cato brings us one back after a great give-in-go with Powell gets him in alone in the box. Just a few minutes later D-Reid beats his man and is served the ball on a great counter to level it at 2-2. 41’ Wilock picks up an injury and has to come off. 2nd half Trott almost gifts them a goal but is saved with a header off the line by the DB. They have the better chances in the second half, but still only managed 2 goals on target and scored both. Trott has failed against one of the worst teams in the league. Safe to say I won't be giving him many more chances unless its absolutely necessary. How bad is Wilock's Injury? Bad for getting him into good form for the shop window. May Results: We remain on an undefeated streak, but the 3 draws to end the month aren’t good going into the busiest month of the year June with at least 7 games and possibly an 8th if we win our US Open Cup Match We still are on top of the Eastern Conference, which is significantly weaker than the west this year. Next month we face Charlotte and Atlanta who are two of the better teams in our division back-to-back. Minesota is tied with us on points in the Western conference, with Cinci then in 4th in ours. Lots of hard matchups to come. And because it wasn’t hard enough we drew Minnesota in the cup, so we play them back-to-back within 3 days. Great. They say we are the “Rich” club, but their bank balance wasn’t much off ours at the start of the season, and our income/expenditure isn’t far of. I’ve just made transfer money Spoiler And June gets even worse for us with the International Call-Ups Announcement: We have 4 starters called up for international duty on the 5th: CB, RB, AMC-SS (DP), AML/R. At least its just a single match instead of the whole window? They will miss at least 1 game, maybe 2 and of course they are the 2 biggest games of the month. Edited March 21, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
BML Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 20 hours ago, WhiteCat33 said: Also, looked closer at the "Selling Team Salary Contribution" clause and its even better than i budgeted for. It lasts the duration of the current contract. We signed him onto a 4.5 Year deal (7/9/2024 - 12/31/2028) which is 233 weeks. Therefore Liverpool will pay us 11.2M in wages over the duration of his contract. Basically, we get the transfer-fee back over 5 years in wage-reduction for what easily will be one of the highest skilled players currently playing in the MLS. Of his base salary that will bump to 135k basically immediately so Liverpool's payment is 35.6% of his base. I'd always assumed that 'current contract' meant the contact he was on at Liverpool (in your example of O-C). So they will pay him 48k p/w until whatever date his contract with them was due to expire - June 25/26/etc. From memory (I'm not near the game right now) the Transfer Clauses section should outline exactly when these payments stop (I'm sure they do when selling players). Really enjoying reading your rationale behind your transfer dealings (not enough to go back to do an MLS save, but still). Statistical analysis on incoming players is definitely something lacking in my own saves, so I love reading threads such as yours, Ben's (and others) who play in such an in-depth way. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 22, 2023 Author Share Posted March 22, 2023 (edited) You're right @BML it even says it in the deal itself that I took a screenshot of, I just didn't notice going through. He has a deal for 2 years left for Liverpool so its a 'more modest' amount I'll get form them. There have been some registration issues that have changed the terms of the deal in our favor. I'm pretty sure the whole 'pre-buy down contract with GAM' part of the negotiation is bugged because once my two DMs were at the club I had to re-buy down their contracts to free up salary cap space. Because of this the initial Ox deal failed so I had to go back to Liverpool: They dropped the fee by 2 Million and upped the wage contribution to a staggering 72k p/w! Even if that is only for 24 months that is 72*52*2 = 7.5M off the balance sheet. Re-negotiating with Ox yielded similar results, still pretty nuts on the bonuses: My expected yearly cost is = Wage + Goal/Assist bonus + Appearance Fee = (135*52) +(2*1200+575) + (58*30) = 7020 + 2975 + 1740 = 11.74M. So For the first two years I'll save 32% of his total costs from Liverpool. Is he worth it? The multi-million dollar question isn't it? From a transfer fee perspective I think it's pretty easily a yes, especially with this renegotiated deal. I am paying the same transfer fee I received for my outgoing Designated Player. Thus, the net-cost to the club is pretty minimal. The hangup is of course his steep wage demands that are to keep him earning in the ballpark of what he got at Liverpool. Edited March 22, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 22, 2023 Author Share Posted March 22, 2023 1 hour ago, BML said: Really enjoying reading your rationale behind your transfer dealings (not enough to go back to do an MLS save, but still). Statistical analysis on incoming players is definitely something lacking in my own saves, so I love reading threads such as yours, Ben's (and others) who play in such an in-depth way Thank you! For me only putting this strict of limitations on my transfers had made the MLS engaging. If I didn't limit it to Caribbeans it would be way too easy to get good options into the club. While the Salary Cap places some interesting challenge of not bloating your wage bill, the interface is real frustrating (as evidenced above with my Ox transfer as well as the failed CB acquisition) In my mind SI still have room to improve on the data display to make this convenient to do in the game. I'd love for them to let you compare the /90 stats of any player you're scouting against the average of the league their in. In the scouting they tell you the rank of total stats, but really you need standardized metrics for proper comparative analysis. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 22, 2023 Author Share Posted March 22, 2023 (edited) SFC Season 2 Month 4: June 2024 Well, this was not a fun month for St Louis. Here the downside of having your team with a large number of International players hit us hard. MLS doesn't break for international windows. Instead they make this the busiest month! Fun times. While we had our whole team for the first match, they were all absent for matches 2 - 4. I had the whole team again for 5 - 7. Insane schedule. How did we do? June 1st – Away LA Galaxy [Light Rotation prepping for international departures] Spoiler Couple good early chances for Klein who has gotten the start due to injuries, but it isn’t until they foul our AM in the box and we get a penalty that the real chance comes. Jules-Jones got the start today and he takes the kick and places it perfectly in the 30’. Then right after that LA makes another foul right at the top of the box giving Bacuna a perfect DFK opportunity, which he curls expertly into the top corner to make it 2-0 in a 4 minute span. He almost made it a brace with a second kick 2 mintues later but it went up and over. They get us back one in the 37’ when Henry misses a header leaving their striker Jovelijc alone in the box. VAR determines he was just onside sadly so it stands. Second half we have a lot of opportunities, but they have two they should have scored. A FK that went just up and over and an open goal that their substituted striker totally wiffed when set up perfectly by Chicharito. Lots of end-to-end in this match and we finally catch them off with D-Reid winning the ball himself in the midfield and hitting it long to Marshall whose playing AML. He scores, but VAR comes up if he was offsides: GOAL! 88’ they are pushing forward and we have dropped into our 4-3-3 and catch them fully exposed on the counter so Marshall gets his brace. Then 90+1 D-Reid just goes beast mode and beats 3 defenders on the dribble to blast it past the GK. We don’t stop even with it in my cautious tactic, there are 5 more shot highlights in the 4 added minutes. We had 28 shots with 15 on target and an xG of 4.28 to win a well deserve 5-1. D-Reid got a 10.0 Rating & Marshal a 9.0. June 5th – Away Charlotte FC [Missing 4 starters on international duty] Spoiler Lots of unavailable players for this match, but we still have a strong XI. It’s the subs where we are very empty. We have some nice counters, and then in 30’ Bacuna picks up a light injury. I keep him on to see if he can work it out. He does, but his performance isn’t great today. First half doesn’t have any good chances and we move quickly into the second half. Marshal picks up an injury and we go through all the players available, but the ones still playing are totally exhausted. They then score on a Corner in the 86’ after the GK saves the first attempt and they win the second. Brutal way to end it. They take the lead on GD because of it. Marshall is out for a month to add to our depth issues. June 9th – Away Atlanta United Spoiler We have a lot of rotation here and it required playing a young DM and he botched a build up that saw Atlanta counter and score in the 10’. Then Labeau who has been out of form got the start and missed a wide-open goal hitting the crossbar from within the 6 just a minute later. 31’ they find an open player on the far post, we are realy missing having 2 of our starting back 4 away on international duty. Klein got a chance on the left due to Wilock still recovering from an injury, but he’s been awful missing some great chances and came off early in the second half. Labeau does the best thing in the whole game drawing a penalty but John-Jules fails to convert it. Absolute disaster of a game. June 12th – US OPEN CUP: Away Minnesota Spoiler Goodie. Also Minesota have an odd 4-2-4 formation I don’t recall seeing before A few low quality chances for both sides in the first half but it ends scoreless. Stays the same for the first part of the second half with again o real dangerous changes. 70’ they switch to a mirror 4-2-3-1 and bring on new attackers. We both go through all our subs and again no chance really stands out as dangerous. Both teams have high xG from lots of bad shots. SO of course it goes into Extra Time In the first half nothing much happens, but at 110’ we score a goal off a cross that is called back for offsides and our RB goes down injured and we’ve used all our subs so we go down to 10 men for the final 10 minutes. Here we see the most chances for us all game, but we keep not being able to finish them so it goes to penalties. Penalties: I thought it would never end. It was actually our #1 taker who takes the 12th kick for us and misses that lost the shootout for us. Brutal. Board was pissed too because we didn't advance. Our Cup runs will be bad until we develop our talent pipeline. That will start this winter. June 15th – Home Minnesota [Final game without my international players] Spoiler Rematch in St Louis, can we get the ball in the goal this time? I changed strikers and have more of my internationals playing who aren’t totally exhausted, so we will see. Klein yet again misses a couple golden opportunities, dude is really just not performing. Like usual its Cato who comes up big in the 43’ and wins the ball, beats the defender and crosses to find Labeau’s head to get us a goal. 67’ Cato does it again, this time getting the service as he runs into the box to score for us. Guy still is way overperforming his ability. That’s it we see it out to win 2-0. June 22nd – Away Seattle Spoiler 4 min in Labeau picks up an injury and 7’ D-Reid announces his return from international duty forcing an own-goal on a service from his Jamaican teammate J. Lowe. We have a few chances, but its in the 45’ where I’m glad I left Labeau on as he poaches an easy tap-in off a set piece header. Both Labeau & D-Ried come off injured as we conserve the end of game. Both are minor though of 1-4 days. June 29th – Home Cincinnati Spoiler Feels good having the squad back together and at home to a sell-out crowd. 23’ Henry finds Cato in the box after a broken long rang free-kick and he fires it home for another goal for him this season.37’ we give it back not able to clear it properly out of the back it was a poor giveaway in the 18 that they easily convert. In the second half we get a second life with the subs to the whole offense, but we struggle to break through. June Results: Competition Standings: While we are still leading our Division it is only because we've played an extra game. That pairing of our 2 hardest games for when our Jamaican & Candian players would be away from the club was really unfortunate. We are still on track though to win the division for the season if we can regain form going into the summer break. July Schedule: The 'break' where we are forced to play another tournament. If we win games will get added, if we lose games it will be some easy friendlies to build back morale. International stuff Here were all the Callups: I canceled the players doing friendlies (Bacuna, Hayes & Labeau) In the first match, all my players played eachother as I have 3 for Jamaica and 1 Canada Next they face the hard teams of USA & Mexico in the Nations League final & 3rd place. Canada Took USA to ET, but lost. Mexico demolished Jamaica. The last are friendlies that annoyingly I couldn’t pull them back from because its in the same window. League Cup Draw: I don't care about thsi competition at all. Youth Intake Preview: Apparently a Golden generation of Midfielders, STC & CBs I upgraded my HOYD from the one SFC starts with. He has at least 15 WwY & 10 Det, JPA & JPP. I then chose the best personality/rep/formation that fit what I liked. Since it's staff I consider this a necessary attribute filter as there's no way to pick a quality HOYD otherwise. He's Light Hearted + Evasive & Reserved Media Handling. Edited March 23, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 23, 2023 Author Share Posted March 23, 2023 (edited) SFC Season 2 Month 5 & 6: July-August 2024 So Did we have a good short month and summer tournament? Key point to note: International Transfer Window opens on July 9th, which is when our first two Midfielder's arrived. Due to Registration headaches Ox-Chamberlain wasn't added until later in the month. Match 1 July 3rd – Home LA Galaxy [Significant Rotation] Spoiler In the 10’ Lowe did awesome to win the ball off their CD, did a one-two to get 1v1 with the GK and then skyed the shot. Disappointing. 14’ though we break through with Willock doing well as the SS today he gets the goal. 29’ it Lowe makes up for his earlier miss with a perfect run to the back-post totally unmarked to tap in off an Ainsworth cross. 33’ sees some great combination play between Wilock and Lowe to get Willock his second goal of the night. 59’ they shove one of our players in the box to give us a penalty. Willock steps up to get his first Hat-trick as a SFC player. 69’ he then lays up John-Jules to add an assist to his tally. They get a scrap goal in the 74’ when it takes a couple deflections on the way in. 90’ we have a 6th goal disallowed as John-Jules moved to early, but the beating was already completed. Match 2 July 7th – Home Orlando City Spoiler We see them score in the 18th when a blasted shot is deflected off a defender. In the 21st we have a great chance but the final ball is no good. I’m tired like the players so don’t have much more to say. We couldn’t connect and the game ends 1-0. Match 3 July 12th – Home vs NYCFC (League Cup) Spoiler This is our first match showing off our splashy signing as well as I’m going with a full Jamaican offense today against a very good NYCFC. 14’ in they tackle J Lowe too hard and VAR gives us a penalty! D-Reid to the spot: SAVED ☹. They are tackling us crazy hard and in the 42’ it comes to bite them as their player Morales two-foots our DM Wan Kuzain and gets a straight red. 58’ sees our best attempt with Bacuna taking a cross in the box and hitting it off the post. Our offense has all the chances but their defense was fantastic. This competition has no ET just straight penalties so here we go! Absolute shambles. Their GK (who saved a RT Penalty), saves our first 2 penalties. Our GK of course didn’t save a single one so they easily win. Match 4: Away Montreal (Leagues Cup) [rotated all the wingers and both DMs as well as a CB. Will be a first test to our U22 Dev RB Signing] Spoiler Well we did not defend a throw at all they score in the 2’. 23’ we do an awful build up and for once the GK makes a big save to keep us in the game. They get the 2nd though pretty early in the 31’. Yeah we can’t do anything to stop them and they are shreading our backup defense getting a third easily. I sub off our new star for John-Jules and he gets us one back. Their 4th was called back for offside, but they make it up on a corner play in the 94’ where we don’t defend the second service. Worst loss of the year… Gray our new signing has a 5.9 rating YIKES Summer Transfers: Players Waived to Make Room I could have waived more and probably should have. There will be some major winter cleaning happening at the end of season. Tim Klein: He had a Great Season-0 with the NextPro team, which got lots of teams excited about him. When I assesed his debut season he was certainly the 3rd best AML at only moderaltly okay performance as a crosser but terrible finishing ability. This year both sides of his game degraded and I literally couldn't get him to produce anything. On 4.5k p/w he was not worth the salary space. Isak Jensen no one would buy him and he's international so he was let go. Players Out Trott was let go on a free to Manchester United as i could not get him to perform well at all in the squad. Additionally he is foreign so takes an international slot while Austin has USA 3rd nationality and plays better for us. An easy decision. With the exception of Wilock the rest are all development loans for young players. Sending Wilock Out on Loan: With Ox-Cham coming in, I want him out and no one is bidding anything worth his value right now. Middlesbrough will take him on loan till the end of the year and hopefully that will improve him? I dunno but it will give us tons of wage room for strengthening our defense. Players In I've covered the first 3 in detail. The 4th was a new find in Europe of a Home Grown American who was on the outs with his club. This means we can bring him back on a U22 deal that is off-budget and he gives us defender depth. Tavyon Gray - Transfer Logic: Spoiler With Aillock out, I’m scouting for Defensive options and I really want to bring in an American. There aren’t very many high rep players. There is one of interest for us: Tayvon Gray at AJ Auxerre in France who have moved between National & League 2. Hardly any stats for him, but he will be coming in as a Home Grown (off budget) player because he came through the NYCFC Academy, so I can take more of a risk here. Mediocre Scout report, so it will all come down to if it’s a bargain purchase as well hopefully an off budget contract, so I’m less worried about his wage demands. He only costs 500k to get Off Budget U-22 Contract for only 2 years. I see this as a tester blind pickup as he will be a bridge player for the end of this season and next season while I clear out all my old backups. I have a couple young defenders in the pipeline, and hopefully will get more in this intake so I see getting rid of him when they develop. This is the start of a pivot towards more domestic players so I can lower the number of international slots I need every year. Formation Change for New Acquisitions & Initial Tactic: I know the Stars are meaningless, but with Oxlade-Chamberlin joining it has shifted all the star levels down with him above everyone else. Second rung is my GK, SF(A) and CB showing how good 2 of the starting players for SFC are. New 3rd Tactic: 4-3-3 (1 DM) Instead of shoe-horning Oxlade-Chamberlain into my 4-2-3-1 I figured I’d try playing him properly as a playmaker. Hopefully him and Bacuna can form an awesome partnership! I’m trying to use Overlaps on both flanks with Winger roles in the hope this will push both Lowe and Ainsworth further inside but keep them looking to deliver crosses to our attacking midfielders. Bacuna has ‘get forward’ instruction on support so should trail with O-C who should be the focal playmaker. Summer Friendlies to test & tweak New 4-3-3 Formation Match 1: minimal rep team Spoiler I think the overlap is too aggressive as it gets us way forward with both FBs immediately. I’ll turn it off for now. I see some of our best plays coming from FBs hitting the wingers long and then they cut in to hit the forward/midfielder attacking. Match 2: El Paso (Championship) [Remove overlap and change Bacuna to CM(A)] Spoiler First goal is what I want to see one of our CMs (Bacuna) slotting a ball through to our AML cutting towards goal. Second goal is the same but flipped to Chamberlain who hits a ball over the top for D-Reid who scores. Third goal is Bacuna laying off for the WB-L who runs the line and crosses far post for J Lowe cutting in from AMR. 4th goal is the same great combination in midfield leading to goal. I sub in the the rotation and that ends, and they let in 2 goals on counters but this is promising. I just need better backup/hot prospects. Match 3: Charleston Battery (Championship) Spoiler Playing the well developing John-Jules up top and he gets an early 4’ goal for us. Harper (our new DM) makes an insane dribble through the middle and gets taken down in the box giving us a penalty that John-Jules converts. He makes it a hat-trick in the 34’ being found over the top by Chamberlin with his amazing vision. Bacuna gets the 4th with a back-post tap in. John-Jules gets another at the far post Chamberlain corner. A 5th being played over the top by Chamberlain again. I hope this becomes ‘their thing’. One August Competitive Match: Top of the Table Rivalry Showdown against Kansas City Making that I-70 Rivalry actually meaningful! A win here would put us within a game of SKC. Spoiler Huge home game here that is not only a rivalry but having the West leader facing the East leader. We have less possession but more highlights in the first half until 27’. We have a right-sided corner that’s taken by our WB-L Famila-Catillo, who then goes in for the follow up and scores. D-Reid almost gets his own, but then their LB comes forward unmarked and finds their AMR on the far post for a header goal to bring it level. 33’ though Chamberlain shows his skills turning and beating two players to slot Lowe making the far post run and he finishes it superbly. 43’ Bacuna gets taken down on the edge of the box, but its no penalty. 84’ they hit a ball over the top and my backup CB and LB who are in due to injuries give up a goal. 93’ we each have very good chances, with them having 2 corners but we deal with it and save a draw. Final Version of the 3rd Formation After July & August: MLS Standings & Fixture Summary: Edited March 23, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 24, 2023 Author Share Posted March 24, 2023 (edited) Statistics Manager: Excel Upgrades! TL;DR: There is no gameplay in this post, just me nerding out about Excel Upgrades & my future plans for the spreadsheet. Intro Part of what makes this career a "Statistics Manager" is that I'm playing St Louis City not just in FM23, but also in my excel spreadsheet. As this career progresses, you'll notice that I have a tendency to go through periods where I'll primarily focus on one or the other. Since I've moved through 2.5 seasons in FM without spending time in the spreadsheet this will mark a turn towards looking at how I can build a tool that better addresses my needs as St Louis City's Manager. And this is a perfect nightly activity while I watch CONCACAF Nations League matches on Paramount + this week [They have the US TV Rights]. You see some wild things like Dominican Republic getting an Indirect Free-Kick inside the box due to an improper pass-back and handle by the GK, which they convert to score in the 94' to level the score. It's worth recalling that I built this tool while playing a Youth-Only save, so its initial design parameters were focused on how to maximize the output of my existing players rather than be a comparative tool against the league to make decisions if a player should be replaced or not. Thus, while I've been playing these seasons I've kept word doc of what I could use and have turned that into an 'upgrade plan' Three Planned Major Upgrades: The save is at a perfect position to benefit from having better statistical analysis. We have established ourselves as a title-contender and with the recent transfer of Ox-Chamberlain I really need a way to evaluate his "worth" to the team and assess if such a huge expenditure (both in transfer cost as well as yearly wage-spend) can be justified through data. Now of course, his individual performance isn't the whole story. My hope with a playmaker acquisition he will bring up the level of output for all of our attacking players by improving the chances they get. So, we need to be able to have a short-hand way to see, longitudinally, if the whole teams' performances are improving not just absolutely but relatively to the competition. One final part I want to improve is to integrate my scouting process into the tool itself. This presents three distinct upgrades I'd like to add: Player Letter Grade Relative Performance Moneyball Financial Efficiency for Performance Scouted Player Import & Comparison against Benchmarks 1: Player Letter Grade Relative Performance In my spreadsheet I have a whole sheet dedicated to isolating players in the league by position. It is here that I calculate the PercentageRank() function. The output of this function functions very-much like a school letter grade. Thus, when I see my player has a 88% for Crosses Completed I could assign that a B+. But that isn't the whole "crossing" picture. To get that I could combine Cross Attempts, Cross Completes, xA & OP-KP together to see how these crosses translate into chances for our striker. If I average all these Percentages together and assign a letter grade maybe for this hypothetical player its higher at an A- because he produces more Assists and Key Passes with it. This kind of idea would get repeated for each aspect of the game per position. Wingers would have their "Crossing", "Movement" & "Scoring" grades as examples. A big part of getting this right will be taking the time to build up proper groupings for each position so that the combined grades actually mean something. Once these groups are established and I can create useful 'Parts of Game' Ratings for each position, then I could assign an "Overall Grade" based upon my weighting of which part of the game is most important for that position/role/duty. It is here where the application can start. Here are some of the ideas I've jotted down in list format: Spoiler 2: Moneyball Financial Efficiency for Performance The Second piece is to actually begin to do financial Moneyball. This will require a v2 of my Scouting View as there will be lots of financial data that needs to be brought into the dataset. Right now I just have base-salary and that isn't being used at all. I haven't started this at all and am still in the planning stages, because I want to fully sketch out all the variables I need so I'm not constantly tinkering with the import view and having to re-download data. Here I could rewrite what's in my list but I think it's a good first idea of what I'm thinking on setting up the Absolute Evaluation: Spoiler You'll notice I haven't drafted out how the actual evaluation will be set up. Probably will begin with basic ratios and go from there. Most likely this will loop back into using the groupings that I build in (1) to evaluate specific parts of players games and just utilize the absolute values here instead of the relative ranking values. These could be the basis for a relative evaluation as well but I'm not as clear on that yet. 3: Scouted Player Import & Comparison against Benchmarks The big upgrade here is in setting up the sheet to import a secondary dataset that has players I've been scouting / are in range. Then add onto this a key attribute benchmark filter with a nationality filter and I can easily see what targets to focus my scouting and efforts on. Where this will help me is in actually bringing young players out of the Caribbean to see if they can develop at our club utilizing our maxed out facilities and great coaching staff. Spoiler First Preparatory Upgrade: Statistics - What does "good" look like in FM23? - FM Stag Of course, today I don't have any of those things for you to see Instead, I have what I consider to be a preparatory upgrade that I've intended to do since I even thought about building this excel file. One of the major inspirations for this whole project was FM Stag's blog post I just linked. I highly recommend taking a look if you're finding my statistical journey interesting. It concludes with this awesome Low/Medium/High Graphic for players in the English Premier League. Seeing that I have all those statistics already in my dataset, its just a matter of setting up the Vlookup() formulas and choosing which of my 15 tables I want to use for the three tiers of benchmarking. I agree with FM Stag that the dataset should be limited to players playing sufficient minutes. For a full season data 2000 is a nice easy number to utilize. The way I have parsed the data is rather by how constricted the sample size is. My Top3 is the players at the Top 3 finishing teams in the league. I like this as you can get this information no matter if the league is loaded or not, just as long as it exists fully in the game. This is my "High". For the "Medium" I am looking at all the players that are in the League that is being focused on. For the "Low" it is for all the players at the same tier as the league in focus. Example 1: End of 2023/2024 Eredivisie This first example is just the league I had up last in the spreadsheet. This is an unloaded league in my game, so you can see how it still works fine in producing a benchmark to look at. Here the "Tier 1" League group is this: I plan to move Belgium up into this group from the 3.0 Reputation where I initially placed them. Still, this provides a number of reasonably similar competitive leagues to provide the widest datapoint. Example 2: Mid-Season MLS 2024 (Aug 23) Notice that since this is partway through the season I have lowered the Minutes to 1500 to make sure there are sufficient players in the analysis. You'll also notice that I realized I had the stoplight color wrong once I copied the screenshot up here so I changed it to go from the 'low specificity' to the 'high specificity' (even though i have them in backwards order to FM Stag). You'll also notice that Tier 1 & MLS are the same. That's because this data just has MLS in it due to how its a Jan 1st starting season. How it works: I am doing this the easy way first to get this data and start utilizing it. This is utilizing my By-Position Summary tables and doing an "Average of Averages" here to get a single value for each Player Archetype, which can sit in a number of positions. I know this is a gross excel formula but it is just 3 things. I am taking the average of the number for that statistic calculated for each position. Because I have cleaned the data, if there are 0 players in the dataset for that position I have used the classic If(Y=0,"",X) to put empty string values into the cells. Unfortunately, Average() will error if it sees strings, so I need to do another If(y=0) conditional to produce empty values that Average() will automatically drop to compute the average. You can see in this current example that there are no 0 values for a position but just 1 for a few. Double-Count Bias The big downside to this admittedly sloppy application is that there is significant player double-count in averaging together each of my summary statistics. The proper way to do this is to go back and create new Indvidual summary statistic tables based upon a multi-position conditional I have binary variables for each position so it is just a matter of setting up the additional conditions to AverageIfs() and then do this a bunch of times for all but the CD & GK tables. Compare our Players Against this: If I want to take the route of Absolute Evaluation of our players, this would be the base of starting that process. It would be very easy to point out the exact amount we are either above or below this value. What becomes harder is to then quantify how meaningful this difference is. Here is where SDEV() would come into play where I could standardize the magnitude of our deviation from the mean in terms of standard deviations. Again, all this is using the (erroneous) assumption that we have a normal distribution at work here, but again this just for purposes of a game not for real world use so I'm not too fussed about it. Using FM Stags "Good Table" as a Scouting Filter The direction I plan to take this first is to use these as the values for building the scouting filter to begin to create the Scouting element to the tool. Getting the scouting to work is technically the easiest of the 3 tasks I've set for myself as it just requires building secondary versions of a lot of existing formulas in the sheet. I also think I'll get the most use out of this in scouting for high performing young players in the USA as well as the Caribbean to begin building the best Caribbean Talent Pipeline ever! Edited March 24, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 24, 2023 Author Share Posted March 24, 2023 (edited) Building the Secondary Scouting Element to the spreadsheet: TL;DR: I go through building a scouting part into the tool. At the end I "use" it to isolate some options for a backup GK. Philosophy on Scouting I know form a technical point of view it is unnecessary to import a secondary data-set of scouted players because all these players are already in my primary dataset with full stats. However, remember to get the full datasets I use a “holiday manager” who has the ‘Gods-Eye’ view of all the players in the game universe. To use that unrestricted view to discover players to sign is IMO cheating. If you’ve noticed, anytime I’ve used the tool thus far it has been after my scouting network found a player and then I’m comparing him against the summary statistics & the Top 3 teams. In my head-cannon my manager has purchased a subscription to “WhiteCatStats” part of which is getting full statistical information on the Top 3 finishing teams in every league. Thus, when I compare player-to-player it is only with the Top 3 finishing teams. Granted I’m at a MLS club that has an unrestricted scouting range with about 1M USD a year in scouting budget so really I can do whatever I want. Considering I chose the closest region outside of our own, its not unrealistic at all for an MLS team to have excellent Caribbean scouting knowledge. Onto importing Scouting! To do this First I went back to my May1st save-point to be able to pull player statistics. Then I did this search to look for all partially Caribbean & American players that are 23 or Younger. The objective is to find some youth prospects to bring into the team that won’t use an international slot. There are 159 players known to us, but that includes MLS contracted players as well as the young amateurs around the country we can’t sign. If I drop off the American filter & exclude MLS players it jumps up to 785, so shows how constricted getting dual-national Caribbeans is for us. Again with the scouted players I’m getting weird glitches where the UID is coming in as text and not number. It only happens to players with scouting ratings, but not all of them? Must have something to do with that If I just select the cell and press enter it turns back into a number. Just an annoying manual clean I have to do each time: With it imported in, I’ve added in some important additional information about the players that will impact our decision making. We need at the very least American players so nationality has been added as well as the nation they are based in as well as birth region. For us it is even better is if they are ‘Home Grown’ thus out of another MLS Academy, but then we also need to know which team still has the ‘player rights’ to them because that will require a trade to sign them. With this, then it goes into its own simple position clean: To then create Position Binary variables: Now it’s ready to set up “UID Screeners” where I set a specific statistical and / or general condition and I build a dynamic list of UIDs who match that criteria. First up are the easy Single Critieria Screens: These are Array formula of Index-Match using IFERROR & COUNTIF to find the next UID in the list that the criteria column (Based In) have “USA” as their value. This set up is how I isolate the selected teams players in the main spreadsheet. Same works for position by using my binary variables. Notice now instead of a Var value it is hardcoded to 1 and set to the correct Position Binary, in this case “DL”. This is filled down the line for each position. A simple change of condition from “=” to “<=” allows us to isolate all players with a 7.00 or higher Average Rating. I can use this exact same thing to use the “Minutes” selector on the Main. Here are all the positions. Like always there are very few wingbacks, and unfortunately there aren’t that many GKs which is where I want to focus on for this example as with our Main GK erroneously put on SEI Reserve by yours truly and me shipping off the high-wage bad-performance Brit back to Manchester we have no backup Goalkeeper if Austin goes and gets himself Injured. I really think I need to go back and expand this with all ages because if its just for this year I can pick up an old man playing well in the lower leagues or Caribbean somewhere and go for youth later. Take Two Export: opening the age up gives me almost double the players. Import into sheet and how many GKs do we get? 20 Potential USA + Caribbean Nationality GKs. Does this match what you get in the game Search Filter? It does, Hooray! Of the GKs I found 17 of the 20 have some playtime statistics to be judged on. Now the question is how can I make a dynamic comparative analysis of Goalkeeper attributes so I can select an American + Caribbean nationality GK that I can afford as a backup? First, I need to select out the Statistics of Interest to us. As I’m going to use this against my already existing Summary statistic tables I set up a table that is linked to each position table to record the 15-18 variables currently being utilized. I added 4 additional slots to future-proof this for expanding statistics [which will be another part of this Statistics Upgrade] Now, there are two ways to use this. Either all in one cell with Index-Match-Match, or I can establish a Column variable for each position (with match) to then be used by Vlookup() to know how far into the Scouting table to look to draw out the data. I went with Index-Match-Match and while we have gotten data into the table. I know its small, Here is an example of the formula: This is the classic usage of Index-Match-Match. Importantly we need an error check to make sure it is drawing data from the right players. Since the logic is the same across all the columns the easiest is to check if the UID-Name matches what’s in the raw data. Looks good to me! Onto Part 3: Combining with Summary Statistics Easy first part of copying over the selected summary table from the main page For my lower-tier league pickups the first major filter I want to see is that these players are getting a higher average rating than Top-3 Sides in my League. If I am pulling a player up divisions, they need to be crushing it at their level, i.e. a star at a ‘Top-3’ side. The simplest way to do this is by Average Rating, which should be selective enough to cut out useless players, but still leave us a few options. How to implement this? I do a second-stage of the initial “Average rating Screen” now on the selected position. The reason I don’t do these all in advance is these array-functions add up in processing for the sheet when you change things, so I want to minimize the number of them. It’s why I have data-limits across the tool. For this part I have set the following data-limits: 2500 Total Scouted Players ; 600 players for: HG 0-21, HG 15-21, BasedinNation, AvRat & Minutes ; 250 players-per-position. Result: We filter our 20 down to 6, who were star GKs for their team. Data-Max of 50 Players with 7.00 or higher rating in Selected Position. Now just fill in the rest of the table with VLookup() What becomes obvious is the way the Av Rat filter works it also brings in the no-data players. Here while I could fix this in the spreadsheet, its much easier to restrict future data-imports to players who have played at least 1 Game. Our Three Emergency Non-Foreign Goalkeeper Options: Again, worth noting, I’ve done nothing more here than reproduce what the Scouting filter-window does for us just inside of the tool. Point is that I got the data here to be ready for larger statistical comparisons later when I want to. When making the decision for an emergency GK its not necessary. You can see my scouts hate these goalkeepers, but what do they know! GK 1: Brian Sylvestre [31] - Haiti-MAIN / USA The Haiti National Team GK as well as the starter for Arachaie, who just won the Haiti Premier Division by a wide point margin and a sizeable GD (which is a very good sign when GK Hunting!). I’d have to check in with @V50 on exactly how the Haiti league is structured, but to me this looks like a two-stage regular season with a mini-tournament for the top 4 teams in the post season after both halves are completed, considering the GK played 34 games and there are only 15 in the "Compinant". Looks like he actually had a partial season playing for Philadelphia back in 2015. Turns out there was some serious drama going on with their very high salaried Goalkeeper at the time. When their 2 alternative goalkeepers were both out injured instead of playing Mboli they opted for an emergency loan of Brian Sylvestre to fill their slot. End Of An Era: Union Goalkeeper Rais Mbolhi Agrees To Contract Termination - CBS Philadelphia (cbsnews.com) For me I actually have seen him play as he was the GK for my local League 1 side for their first year! Forward Madison FC signs Brian Sylvestre as first goalkeeper - Forward Madison FC. TBH I had no idea they made money selling him to Miami, I figured that was just a 1-year deal (like most L-1 contracts). Looks like he should have stayed here in Madison, I remember him being perfectly fine for us that season. In my universe he has left Miami to go to Haiti. He declared for Haiti late in his career in 2021, so only has 14 CAPs. Very promising as an MLS backup considering he's done it twice before. Spoiler For the next two GKs who are in Lower League USA leagues I switched to my current Aug 23rd Save-point to pull up In-Game Screenshots with more data. GK 2: Angel Molinar [24] - Puerto Rico - MAIN / USA A Puerto Rican international who is currently playing for the national team and has become a regular fixture of the Westchester United squad. At only 24 he is by far the youngest of the 3 GKs. Perk here is he's on an Amateur contract so is totally free to acquire and should be open to a reserve contract or at the very least a Senior Minimum Salary contract to be the absolute lowest possible CAP expenditure. Spoiler GK 3: Valin Bodie [29] - Bahamas-MAIN / USA With only 3 CAPs for Bahamas and coming out of the Bahamas the fact he wasn't good enough to get more than a couple chances really means he has no business in the MLS even if he's doing well down in the UPSL Spoiler STATS: While I'll throw this up, really its pretty easy to tell that Sylvestre is the best choice here, it will just be if I can get him in from Haiti from a team who have no interest in selling him. It will be expensive compared to a normal Haiti pickup, but not sure how much that actually will be. What is great about the transfer window in the US especially with GKs is if my guy does get injured I can go acquire any of these three and bring them in then. Here I'm looking at the players before I've finished the tool so I've just hidden the unused rows/columns to put the direct comparison between these scouted GKs, Our GK & what the Top-3 in the MLS look like. First important note is Molinar & Bodie are in super low US leagues that are unplayable even with my extended database so they have minimal statistics. But when we look at Sylvestre he has done very well even when compared to our backup whose been playing the majroity of the year for us. He is better on both Clean Sheets / 90 and Allowed / 90. He doesn't press veyr well with only a 1/3 success rate, but did get 24 shutouts, which is impressive that he only let in goals in 10 of 34 games. Edited March 24, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 26, 2023 Author Share Posted March 26, 2023 SFC September Matches! (Season 2, 2024) Yes, I decided to actually play some games. This final month starts off with a tough matchup with the strong Portland Timbers, but really isn't too scary of a month with only 5 games! Match 1: Portland Home – [Actually used Harper as O-C was a little tired and Harper will be heading on international duty. Mistake?] Spoiler They score early in the 11’ after just some bad defending. We aren’t generating any chances in the early part of the game. But then a play down the right wing sees Harper run forward and slot the ball across for D-Reid who has an easy tap in finish at the far post to bring us back level in the 20’. 35’ Harper almost gets himself a goal with a wicked shot from range that clatters off the crossbar. Also we had a WTF moment here. They had a throw-in and apparently my CB shoved someone in the box because they got a penalty and he got sent off! My GK does well to stop the PK but their striker is fast and gets to the second ball and scores it anyways. Brutal luck. We come back after a great half-time talk that fired up the boys and even with 10 men we kept our press on them. In the 52’ it paid off with D-Reid winning the ball off their CB and getting in behind to slot a goal home to level it! Getting away with a 2-2 draw is the best we can hope for here after such an early red card. In the week leading up to the second match we get: Oxlade-Chamberlain Injury #1 And we are in the thick of it for a title race. The result with Portland was crucial to not let them keep pulling away from us, but without the win we have some ground to make up to truly challenge our rivals Sporting Kansas City With our lighter schedule I decided to actually let my players go out on international duty as they would only miss 1 match by doing so. J Bacuna was the standout player for both match-days with 3 goal contributions and a 7.8 & 7.5 rating showing he's in excellent form. Harper & J Lowe both played well for Jamaica. I of course made this decision before Ox-C got himself injured, but I'm glad I let my CMs show their ability for their nations. Spoiler Match 2: Away Montreal – [Lots of starters away on International Duty + Ox-Cham injured] Spoiler I was real worried here having our big money playmaker out plus at least 8 other starters but in the 6’ our #6 CM on the depth chart Wan Kuzain got forward as the CM(A) and blasted one in off a classic Cato cross. Our GK Austin is the one making all the highlights with some good saves here to keep us ahead but in the 31’ they find their equalizer. Then 44’ D-Reid plays as a DLF perfectly bringing down the ball and holding it for Marshall making the run through on the left to lay him off for 1v1 which he converts. With our subs available I actually refreshed both AML&R and in the 87’ John-Jules playing at AML extended our lead to 3-1 Match 3: Home vs Nashville [All but Ox-C ready to go] Spoiler Harper shows again how he was an awesome free-agent pickup as he drops a ball back to Lowe who gets a goal in the 5’. But then off a Bacuna free kick in the 7thLowe makes it a first 10 min brace! It doesn’t stop there, off a counter by Harper he finds Lowe who slots it to D-Reid for a 3rd goal in 17 mintues. Demolition job here. Game goes end-to-end for the rest of the half but they can only manage .21 xG so we weren’t threatened. We slowed the game down in the 2nd half and played a much more conservative game with hardly any highlights or goal chances for either side to coast to a 3-0 win Mach 4: Away vs Real Salt Lake Spoiler We struggle to connect our long last passes and get some very lucky off-side calls against them that save 2 go-ahead goals. 41’ it looks like they finally kept it onside, but they broke too early and yet again a goal is called back. We turn it around and in the 44’ just a few plays later Marshall drives iwh the ball into the box and lays it back to our DM Stewart who beats the keeper at the far post. Come back from the second half and of course the 52’ our RB gives away a penalty and they convert to level it back up. Right after this I make a massive 4 player change including our striker bringing young John-Jules on. He rewards me right away with a 62’ goal assisted by Lowe another reinforcement. Impact subs! Scarily they almost score on the kickoff play but we survive somehow. Then another sub Wan Kuzain takes a great FK finding John-Jules head on the back post to give us back a lead. 89’ a great quick free kick has Harper find John-Jules breaking into the box for the 55’ sub to make it a hat-trick off the bench! Fantastic stuff. Match 5: Home Vs New England [Reasonable rotation as they are in dead-last in the league so figured I could rest a few players] Spoiler 4’ in John-Jules perfectly beats the offsides and gets us a goal. After his sub work last game he deserved the start to continue his hot streak. A few chances, and then again we beat the offsides VAR call in the 36 this time with Bacuna running wide and crossing it to Lowe on the far post. Second half is a snooze fest as we lock it up and make sure to hold our 2-0 victory because… WE ARE IN FIRST FOR THE SUPPORTERS SHEILD! WIN OUR FINAL GAME AND THE TITLE IS OURS It is a tough game too as it’s against Charlote FC but at least its at our home ground. Charlote, while they won’t catch us for the Division top-seed, they could spoil our Supporters Shield if they beat us and Sporting KC wins. Well deserved after our almost flawless September. Our new 4-3-3 is working perfect and the AI did not see it coming and hasn’t been able to adjust to it. (Formation is showing AI formation). 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 26, 2023 Author Share Posted March 26, 2023 (edited) Final Game of the Regular Season: Can we Claim the Supporters Shield?!? Final Gameday of the season: we have the privilege of having the late-game slot so we see how every game went ahead of time. Importantly for us Sporting KC couldn’t beat Philadelphia! In MLS first tiebreaker is head-to-head, so now that all 3 of us are level on points because San Jose beat us they are ahead in the Supporters Shield. We just need 1 point in this match to claim the title! Final Game of the season: Home vs Charlote FC Lineup: Ox-C is partially fit, but with how well Harper has played I give him the start as the playmaker. I like bringing in John-Jules as an impact sub with late-game speed so D-Reid starts at striker. Play-by-Play: [First try at Gifs is pretty poor I know. I'll probably switch to Imgur Links for these for the Playoff Games] 5’ D-Reid Misses an open goal, and then 8’ he sets up J. Lowe for his own attempt. I’m liking these early chances. 14’ Harper plays D-Reid in but it’s saved wide for a corner. Immediate second highlight: D-Reid takes the corner and while the first service is cleared out its back to D-Reid who serves in a second ball finding our VC BPD Nilsson on the far post to give us an early lead 17’ in! While we have 3 more corner kick highlights all are dealt with by Charlote. However, in open play J Lowe serves a ball up the gut to Bacuna running forward from midfield and he gets himself a goal!!! 36’ we do not deal with their corner well and they are able to scrap in a goal to bring it back to a 1 goal lead. Time to focus! We make it to halftime without any other excitement. We start strong in the 52’ Harper makes it clear I made the right decision starting him as he slots a ball to J Lowe who gets 1 v 1 with the GK and scores! We continue to put up good chances, but even letting in 3 goals their GK is having a great game with a 7.3 rating however in the 66’ it goes form bad to worse for Charlotte when Jones gets a second yellow and is ejected! Then in the 83’ their sub BWM just clobbers my winger and gets a straight red so they are down to 9 men. I played the rest of the game safe to ensure we get the victory and there were very little additional highlights. We win the Shield! Now can we make it a Domestic Double by winning the Post Season Playoffs!? Edited March 26, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
dtown1414 Posted March 26, 2023 Share Posted March 26, 2023 Interesting concept. When I play OOTP baseball, I use "stats only", and disable current and future potential for a player. It definitely makes you pay more attention to stats across the board. Don't quite jump into it as deeply as you do here, but I've always liked the challenge it brings. Good luck! 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 26, 2023 Author Share Posted March 26, 2023 (edited) @dtown1414 Thank you! We've hit the first milestone of the Supporters Shield. Now to acquire all the additional MLS & North American trophies. I did consider fully disabling the Star Ratings for the players to take that final step to a pure-statistical journey. In a way though, I like the 'rough' idea of Ability we get with the combination of Stars + Coach/Scout Attribute Highlights. It is enough that I can make big purchases for players like Ox-Chamberlain like (I'd argue) a real MLS team considering how much we love our 'marquee signings' here. I'm excited to see if I've made a huge mistake here from an efficiency perspective. This is compounded with Harper becoming like Bacuna in being a shockingly killer CM signing especially considering I found him on a free. If I was a baseball fan I would certainly be playing OOTP. I've followed that game for a long time and am a huge fan of the simulation depth it's always had. I see they just released a new version, which seems to be bringing the graphics engine to a similar level of FM. I can only hope SI are inspired to keep increasing the statistical side of the game to bring the analysis up to OOTPs level. Edited March 26, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 28, 2023 Author Share Posted March 28, 2023 Saint Louis City Regular Season Player Statistics Like last season I have put all the screenshots of my positional Summary statistics with my players into a word document where I discuss my thoughts on the player performances. Rather than Copy-pasting the whole thing here I'll give a bullet point tl;dr and attach the pdf so those who are interested can view the statistics. Overall: Even if we got the Supports Shield due to other teams not performing properly, across the board our players were in-line with the other Top 3 teams in the vast majority of statistics. Central Defenders: We need to improve our Aerial Defending. Part of it is we need to replace our backup CBs, but also Henry under-performed in his heading even with all his attempts. I still want to keep Henry as he is HG at a nice salary/performance price point. But ideally, he will become CD #3 and we find a new partner for Nilsson who excels in the air rather than a BPD, which has been my previous focus. Full backs: While both starters were fine, especially offensively, our new RB U-22 Development player is too new to be evaluated properly. For LB I just have a youngster so a second LB is a priority (again) in this winter transfer window. Hayes, while I like his nationality (Turks and Caicos), really underperformed. Then Barry is too old and needs to be released. Defensive & Central Mids: I put these together because I sign players who can play both. Issue on evaluating here is we signed 3 new starter/star level players here 2/3 of the way through the season. What I can say though is Bacuna is an absolute beast! I will be really sad to lose him to his release clause and he is probably one of the only players on the team who I wouldn't' agree to any transfer willingly for. Leibman is my 17 Year old high-potential Academy graduate, so his low performances are acceptable as he continues to develop being mentored by some of the best CMs in the MLS right now. I think he has 2 seasons at least more of development till he is challenging for a spot in the lineup. Wan Kuzain was a reserve player at the start and he continues to put in way better performances than I expect out of him. He plays our 2nd string DM and is a great anchor for the midfield three. Again, with 3 new signings I'll have to spend time lookign at them in-game to evaluate their starting performances. however, I can say Harper really has impressed and makes me even more concrned of what to do with Chamberlain now that he's fit. AML & AMR: We play our wide attackers in a 'provider-converter' pairing so it makes more sense to talk about the two together. Both got fairly equal playing time, though the first pair was Ainsworth & J Lowe with then Marshall & Cato being the rotated option (generally playing against the easier teams in the league). What I really like strategy-wise here is we switch the direction of the service when we do a substitution here. We have an age problem on AMR with Cato turning 32 and slowing down, but I've already signed a new free-agent Curaçao international who will trial till he joins in December. (will discus in a follow up post). Ainsworth & J Lowe - This is Left to Right service with Ainsworth being our only young first XI player and his movement is amazing for a winger which he converts basically best in the league into assists. J Lowe then pairs being a great converting/scoring wide attacker even though I play him in a Winger role. Marshall & Cato - We flip the script with the ever over-performing Cato who even with constant downgrades to his speed is still putting up very good providing statistics for his fellow attackers. Marshall is a more accurate & younger version of J Lowe who is left footed. At 26 he is into his prime and his succesful performances is why our DP Willock went out on loan back to England & I'll be looking to sell him in the winter. AMC & STC: With the formation change 2/3 through the season we collapsed these into one category. When we used a 4-2-3-1 Marshall, Willock & D-Reid played in the AMC role and John Jules, & Labeau played as the STC. With the switch to a 4-3-3 Willock & Labeau were dropped out of the playing team and Marshall moved to AML to make room for the 3 new CMs. Labeau has played his part for STLC and will be released in the winter. He did his S1 job, but now we have the scouting & player depth to find better options. John-Jules I'm very happy with the development of this young player. He is on a U22 Development contract so isn't currently in our salary cap. However, when Labeau leaves he will most likely get a senior contract and I'll look again for a new youngster to develop for the role. D-Reid his movement and assisting/providing statistics are fantastic. It's hard to judge his converting ability because he played primarily in a deeper role. At 32 and playing excellent for Jamaica this might be a prime opportunity to cash in on him. His value is between 3 - 5 M and we acquired him for under 500k. If sold, this would move Chamberlain up to a false-nine role like I contemplated when signing him. Willock - he isn't in the statistics because he was loaned to Middlesbrough. I'll discuss him in a follow up because I plan to cash in on him. Goalkeeper: I need to revamp the GK statistics substantially, but at least our backup this year has played reasonably well. He won't be challenging for the starting spot next year, but as an American he will keep in the team for an emergency and to continue developing. 2024 STLC Player Evaluations.pdf Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 28, 2023 Author Share Posted March 28, 2023 (edited) MLS Playoffs Eastern Conference Semi-Final: Orlando City (Home) Spoiler Lineup: Same as the last regular season game Match Highlights: [Imgur for Goal Vid(s)] Spoiler There actually were very few highlights in the first half. It was a half where they hogged possession (67%) but produced 0 chances on goal. We had a couple dangerous free kicks and corner kicks, btu it wasn’t until the 36’ that we were able to break through and score! It was a throw-in play from close to the half-line on the right side that found J Lowe who beat his man on the right flank to cross in to D-Reid who powered through a defender to slot it home! We have a couple more good corners, but we go into halftime 1-0. 54’ we are inches away from a second when we execute a perfect counter and Bacuna gets in on goal and their GK makes yet another great save. They continue to hold the ball and because of that I sub out the whole CM to get fresh legs and try and gain better control of the possession. Still no real chances for them and we have 2 xG, but no second goal to show. Then in the 75’ J Lowe who is having a great game beats his man again and he two-foots him from behind nice easy straight red. Then in the 88’ we finally get our second goal. Chamberlain showcases his playmaking vision to find D-Reid making the run through the defense who then squares it to Ainsworth at the far post for a nice easy tap-in goal. Chamberlain really wants to get back the starting position as 3’ in to stoppage time he repeats D-Reid’s move to find Ainsworth to give our young AML a POM performance with his dual late goals. MLS Eastern Conference Playoff Final – Toronto FC (Home) Lineup: Only change is Chamberlain into the starting lineup. Even for only 6 days and playing the full 90 min I’m playing the same 4 wide players as they are all still fully fresh. Match Highlights: [Imgur Goal(s)] Spoiler Absolute disaster to start the game with our LB over-pressing into the CM position leaving his runner open down the flank to give them a 7’ goal to one of their dual DP strikers. 19’ we almost get a goal off a corner but their defender saves it off the line. While we had a few chances I’m really not happy with that half. That one early chance is almost the entirety of their xG. Halftime I have a very stern team-talk with the guys and I switch back to our 4-2-3-1 pulling Bacuna who has had a miserable 6.3 rating half for John-Jules at striker with D-Reid slotting back to his SS role. And Guess what WE SCORE FROM THE KICKOFF AND IT IS JOHN-JULES WHO DOES IT! Our 4-2-3-1 puts a lot more pressure on their 3-1-3-2 very defensive formation. 64’ I switch out playmaker and AML as they are both looking tired. Yet it’s not them that gets us the second goal. Instead its our RB Powell cutting inside and slotting a ball through their entire defense looking for D-Reid who is challenged and lets the ball through to find super-sub John-Jules who first time shot beats their GK! They wait till the 84’ to switch to an all out attack 4-2-4 and I use my saved subs to bring on fresh FBs and move to a defensive posture and we see them out to win 2-1! ONTO THE CUP FINAL! CAN STLC DO THE DOUBLE!?! Well I guess technically a Triple because we won the Eastern Conference Training Catastrophe: Even with light training going into the big game we lose both our Central Defenders Going into the Cup Final as well as our GK (even though he's not playing this year). I was absolutely livid at this many players getting injured. And this was my training I set up: Like does Free Kick training give higher injury chance to CD or something? because i though it would be just light training for everyone. We have awful CD depth so this is a major problem. We have Cornelius who has ridden the bench all season and isn’t even game-fit right now because the B team finished their season weeks ago. I am torn to go with Hayes or him, neither has been good for us MLS Cup Final: San Jose Lineup: With both CD out I changed my WBs into FBs with ‘Dribble less’ & ‘take fewer risks’ as well as switched my DM to defend. I just can’t trust these two CD to win against a star striker on a fast break. Additionally Harper is back in the starting lineup as he is training amazingly well and I’ve pushed Chamberlain over to replace Bacuna who had an off game last week. I’m saving John-Jules as a sub again even though he got a brace last game. Also Marshall gets the start this time. Match Highlights [Imgur for Goal(s)] Spoiler 10’ Chamberlain almost gets one in from a long free kick but the goalie tips it wide. But in the 22’ off a throw-in play they find their AMC open and he just dribbles past 2 of my players who cant make a tackle on him. We have a couple chances each but my CMs can’t get the ball on frame with their multiple shot attempts. However that changes in the 39’ when a paly down the right flank where Powell & Lowe are tearing up the defence gets Lowe right to the goal line to cross it back to Harper in the 6 box. And at that range, his lack of accuracy isn’t a problem as he puts it in. LEVEL! We have a couple more highlights for us before halftime, but overall things are looking good even though we are level at the break. 3 very good early chances for us that don’t materialize, but the 4th in the 59’ we convert! This time play is up the left side to find Lowe making the back-post run for the tap-in goal. We are in control possession for once and are countering their attacks well with a very high xG but can’t seem to find another goal. I am doing my best to see out the game and we are almost there when in the 93’ WE GIVE THEM A PENALTY! Of course it’s an up the Gut shot and my GK just dives to a random corner and we let them back into the game forcing extra time. Just a couple low-quality highlights in the first ET. Onto the second. Again very few highlights and for once John-Jules was a bad sub for us as he has missed a lot of great chances today. So many I’m worried about him as a penalty taker, but he’s still our best on the field. My GK lets the same guy score the same shot up the middle as their first taker, but when the 2nd taker tries the same thing he finally wises up and makes a save! We go 3 for 3 and our GK makes a second stop on their 4th kick so it is down to John-Jules to win it for us who has had an awful game can he make up for it? HE F’IN SKIES IT OVER THE TOP AND POSSIBLY OUT OF THE STADIUM!?! They score and its down to my 5th taker and my main-man Bacuna. Can he do it!?! HE DOES! WE WIN THE MLS CUP!! What's Next: With the season completed now we will move into a lot more transfer market action and player scouting to prepare for the Draft in January. Also there will be a lot of players leaving on Waivers and Frees in the next two months as we free up dead-weight on the wage bill. Again the priority will be defensive acquisitions as we are very thin there compared to our Midfielders. The secondary priority will be to see if we can get good money for our DPs and if so look for a potential young strike-prospect to bring in, ideally American second nationality. Next season we will have the NACL games in addition to the MLS so squad depth will be essential so we don't fall apart. Also hopefully some of the exciting youngsters I've been watching in the NCAA finally declare for the draft so we can begin the domestic-caribbean pipeline. Future is bright for St Louis City! Edited March 28, 2023 by WhiteCat33 3 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 29, 2023 Author Share Posted March 29, 2023 (edited) New Arrivals is bugged. If I let them play for the B team at all it shows that's where they came from not the club I actually signed them from. But here are all the Letter grades and how much they played for us. Spoiler Kevin Stewart was signed on a free from Blackpool (Championship) Brandon Austin was signed for 100k from Leicester (Premier League) Tyreece John-Jules was signed on a Free from Arsenal (Premier League) Tayvon Gray was signed for 500k from AJ Auxerre (Ligue 1) Shame I have Germany unloaded because Lowen didn't even play for Hertha yet this year. I can get 1.56 to buy now his 2M 50 Apperance clause, and might do that if we need funds next year. Again we lose supporters? SI really need to explain what is the deal with the Social Media Following numbers. One would think winning 3 titles would increase this but instead it goes down like 10%? In Game Data Hub: Analytics: Spoiler xG Table: Big story here is how badly Nashville did this year and then how San Jose overscored like nobodies business. I hope Nashville plan to replace their striker in the off-season. We on the other hand were deservedly first, which is what I like to see! It is hard to see with it being a Blue Dot, but we are essentially off the chart in a good way on all of these statistics. I expected the low defensive rating in this, but the high Goalkeepeing is plesasnt surprise. Crossing seems we are just more accurate while being on the line for number. Attacking Efficiency is Shots / Conversion Rate so its excellent to see us with the double-high here. Interesting how Possession actually fits a trendline. We did better here than I expected. Passing is no surprise because I use "run with the ball" so we do a lot lower passing than many teams. Defensive Efficiency is the inverse of Attacking so Shots Faced / Opposition Conversion Rate. The fact we are good here helps to counteract the bad defensive statistics we are showing. Still want to upgrade defense Pitch Tilt is Final Third passes against & For, so very good this is in our favor. Aerial I knew would be bad, but isn't in the full red I expected. And of course Passing dynamics won't look good for us as we aren't a possession team. The field graphics are interesting. Not sure how to fully interpret them as its hard to see how it compares to the league, just shows where we did our best/worst. Formations: It's important to recognize that we switched to the 4-3-3 with only a few regular season games left and then played all 4 Post-Season Games with that tactic against the best teams in the MLS. Because of that, it is to be expected that it will have more chances against. What is impressive to me is that we actually had a slightly increased rate of chances for us at 42 min instead of 48 min. Player Visuals: Goalkeepers Spoiler Chart 1: Indicates a large part of the good defensive result for the team is because of the players in front of the GK keeping the shot count down Chart 2: Indicates Austin was a good shot stopper with his high xG Prevent (for the league) and having above average save percentage Chart 3: Indicates we aren't a high back-pass team because he didn't get a lot of pass attempts so his GK type passes (which are way less accurate) dominate his pass count resulting in low pass completion. Defenders: Spoiler Chart 1: We are in the big cluster more to the left side for all our players so doesn't show too much insight into individuals. Chart 2: Here I rate us more as average than particularly good being almost entirely in the clump. Chart 3: This is actually interesting because it shows Cody Ream very high compared to Familia-Castillo. Also why are they not using Open Play key passes here, but open play expected assists? If you are looking to remove FK/Corner assists why wouldn't you also remove those key passes when creating a comparison? Chart 4: Didn't realize our FBs were so bad at crossing. I think its because a lot of their final passes aren't crosses when they pass it up to either the wide forwards or to the attackign midfielders Spoiler Chart 1: I actually hadn't considered looking at how often players are fouled. Didn't realize player really go after Castillo Chart 2: we are just in the thick of the middle part here, which is to be expect as we aren't a possession-passing team. Chart 3: Similar Story as 2. This is Winning vs Losing possession. What is good to see is Nilsson & Henry are actually really good in this graph and then you see a lot of my backups / wide fullbacks as bad. The backups will be dropped this winter and the FBs don't worry me as much. This does shine a positive light on D Cornelius, but I'm still getting rid of him as a non-domestic Chart 4: Ugh Aerial is not good. Again, priority for this transfer window Midfielders: Spoiler Chart 1: Useless due to outliers. Chart 2: Not too insightful either we are all in the big clump with only Pan Yang down far in the bad section with Rekeem Harper also a poor tackler. Whatever? Chart 3: Now this is weird that Pan Yang is such an outlier. He didn't play a lot so maybe its the game he did? Bacuna though he did play a ton this season and his movement was very obvious and beneficial for the team Chart 4: this showcases our diverse offense that utilizes all our midfielders to score and assist. We have 3 major outliers here with Willock actually having good expected Goals and Assist. Issue was his conversion rate wasn't there. Spoiler Chart 1: Positive look for Chamberlain even with his very few matches. Will be interesting to see if this can be maintained over longer games. But you see why I was leaning towards Harper in some matches, he is doing amazingly well already for us Chart 2 & 3 Wilock the innacurate corsser and poor converting shooter. really no one on our team has a good conversion rate, which is frustrating. Chart 4: They are doing okay getting shots on target at least Spoiler This whole block isn't that useful as we are pretty much within the central scatter of the plot. Forwards: Spoiler To be Added Spoiler To be Added Edited March 29, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 30, 2023 Author Share Posted March 30, 2023 (edited) Season 3: Pre-Season Transfers & Super Draft End of Season House-Cleaning Releasing/Waiving Players I let go most of my draft-picks and the players from my academy I had signed who either had no potential or wanted stupidly high salaries for their ability. with the way the MLS works I can always sign these players back because I have indefinate Player-Rights on them. Burki Green Card A mechanic in the USA is that after ~1000 Days players can apply and get a Green Card, which gives them a temporary USA 2nd Nationality so that they don't count as international for you. If they leave the country though they will lose that Green Card [Which is what I messed up with my Chinese Youth Player]. I doubt any more of our players will get one this year, but starting next year some of our early signings might start acquiring them and become domestic players. (This is taken in early March so ~90 Days since he got the Green Card) Chris Willock Sale Willock has played really well for Middlesbrough, but he doesn't fit into my plans at STLC. He is at that awkward ability where he is too good (and too ambitious) to accept a Senior Contract, but he's not so much better that I can use cheaper players to produce his statistical performance on the field. I'll also own up on the fact I paid too much for him, so the objective is just to get our money back-out. Thankfully Middlesbrough are so happy with his loan deal they are willing to try and buy him again. Last year they were willing to pay 10 M, but not pay the contract he wanted. Because I just wanted him gone I took a pay-cut and a very modest sell-on just to get close to even on his transfer. The small sell-on might net us a fee in the future. Willock wasn't a jerk this time and took the contract, so his loan move has become permanent. Cheap LB Loan Found that Getafe generated an 18-year-old American LB in their intakes who is as good or better than our HG youngster and they will give him to us on loan for just his wages so that’s a no-brainer #2 LB. The loan is so cheap his salary will get boosted to meet the senior-minimum contract amount for the salary cap and it lets us delay signing a permanent additional LB. Super Draft Caribbean Players: We have 7 Caribbean Players this year that aren’t all that exciting. We have a ton of picks that we won’t be using again this year so I’ll be looking to trade them ideally for 18-20 year-old Caribbean Academy Graduate player rights. Trades of Surplus Super-Draft Picks First Trade: 3 Picks for the Player rights of 2 19-Year-old HG players from Montreal. One LB One AMC/STC Second Trade: Return San Jose their first-round pick + 50k GAM for 2 years of an International Player slot Third Trade: A 2nd Round pick and 73k GAM for Player rights of a HG player & 1 year of an international slot The HG Players whose Rights I Acquired: Jacques Bennett (Canadian/Haitian) Spoiler Sainvil Pitton (Canadian/Haitian) Spoiler Courtney O'Keefe (Jamaica-U20/USA) Spoiler Free Transfers To Arrive in July: International CB Mid-Season Acquisition: Joel Felix – St Lucia-MAIN / Denmark Initial Scouting: Found a St Lucian good Aerial CB in the Danish top-flight who has a contract expiring in July. Because of this I was able to pick him up on a free transfer and with a tight release-clause and large sell-on to send him back to Europe if he does well he agreed to a reasonable salary of 9k. I wanted 7.5, but this isn’t bad and is a short 1.5 year deal. Idea is he will provide rotation for the playoff half of the season and I’ll be testing new HG CBs in the rotation in the first part of the season to see if any can stick around to pair with him as the development CBs. As I need to start really looking to the future as my current CBs are 30 & 31. It was hard to find a CB that provided a good rotation option for Henry that wasn’t at a salary closer to Nilsson, as that is what all the European CBs want. Here was our only real option, and he is scouted as being particularly good in the Air, which is where we are weakest as defenders. His performances are just okay in the Danish Top Flight, but he did really well in their 2nd tier last year so plays on a yo-yo team (in this universe). Second End of Contract Defender: LB Jay Dasilva (Swansea) Wales-MAIN / Jamaica Initial Scouting: Here we have to pay the English Wage Premium, but he is a really good Left Winger who is natural at FB, WB & AML and who could become better than any of our current players who play on the left wing. Also the fact I was able to scoop him up on a free is a huge coup considering it would realistically cost 5+M to buy him from Swansea. Worst case scenario (if he doesn't perform) is we should easily be able to sell him at a profit. For Performance I just used the in-game as he seemed to be consistently good in the championship for Swansea. As a free-transfer I am more lenient because we are acquiring player-value here. Looking at his movement I really like the 55 Sprints / 90 with a high number of dribbles/90 at 3.4. He has good pass completion (83%) with a good number of progressive passes to regular passes ratio (18/35). Again, here is an example of a player that is cheaper on the cap than Willock and provides more utility along that left wing. For Wales he plays as a DL, but for Swansea he has been playing as a WB primarily, but also has done well as an AML. He will be our first current European International. Hopefully Wales will still consider him in the MLS. At 26 he has plenty of years left to run and to get him on a senior contract is a big deal as we can pay that down to just a 7k Salary Cap hit (out of 115k now). I take it as a successful negotiation when the scouts thought he would be 15-20k wage and with Sell-on & release clause we got him down to 14k. If he plays well for us there is a high probability that fee triggers. Mutual Termination of Labeau I couldn't find any club to buy him, and he would reject any loan offer so I was forced to terminate Labeau's contract to free up his large salary-cap room. It was expensive at 350k, but we have the money to spend it. 2024 Transfers Transfers In: Transfers Out: 2024 Trades 2025 Super Draft & Pre-Season transfers: We ended up with still 3 picks in the Super Draft and we added Courney O'Keefe from the trade as well as the only high potential prospect from the 2024 Youth Intake Lucas Munro to bring in 5 new youngsters into the team. We then finally let Ondaan move permanently to Higashiosaka Rosa (where he's been on loan all save), sent some development players out on loan and finalized the Willock sale. Super Draft Players: You may have thought the players I traded-for were pretty poor, but here are the 3 best of the 7 Caribbean players (performance-wise in NCAA + scout reports). These guys are not good. Maybe mentoring will give Rob Smith the boost he needs to actually become decent cover on the wing, but I have little hope of them ever becoming relevant. Spoiler Lucas Munro (American - Casual CD) Awful personality here, so I'm rolling the mentoring dice to see if my Professional CBs can fix this guy. He has 4-5* Potential and is either footed so if he can be fixed he could be our long-term CD solution. In the first month after signing him up mentoring already fixed Casual to Low Determination, which is excellent. Hopefully that continues: Spoiler Edited March 30, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 30, 2023 Author Share Posted March 30, 2023 (edited) Saint Louis City FC: 2025 Pre-Season, First NACL Matchup & A/B Lineups 2025 Pre-Season We played a good mix of friendlies against USL Championship & MLS teams (going away as well to challenge the players) and put up great performances with the exception of a late collapse against Tampa Bay that had me questioning my rotation defenders. NACL First Round: Necaxa (Mexico) While we did get a Mexican team, we certainly got one of the easier ones with Nexaxa so I wasn't too upset at the draw. They got the Home slot, so we had to go to Mexico first for the first competitive game of the season. Thankfully I didn't make any major 1st Team personnel additions, so the squad is already jelled and ready to go! First Leg - Away [Goals] Spoiler Lineup: Forgot to screenshot, but I’ve switched to Harper as AP-A & Chamberlain as CM-A so that means my favorite Bacuna is on the bench to start. Rest of the lineup is how we played in the post-season. We are holding our own in Mexico in a first half that sees us have more possession and a decent number of chances then in the 31’ Chamberlain gets his first competitive goal for the club! He almost gets a second right away in the 32’ when his header hits the bar. But our counter-attack won’t be stopped and Bobby Reid opens up his account with a close finish that took a VAR check to confirm. We don’t stop and continue the pressure for the rest of the first half. Halftime is an easy talk and we go out unchanged. 55’ Stewart our DM takes a knock so Bacuna comes on and I swap out LBs to bring on our loane. Just a few minutes later Ainsworth makes one of his trademark speed dribbles down the left and his shot is just too wide that it hits the post bouncing out right to J Lowe who easily taps it in for 3! 82’ I see something very rare in the at our loane makes a hard tackle in the box and it goes to VAR for a penalty check and we actually get a No Penalty decision as an away side! We utterly dominated them and keep the clean sheet. Second Leg - Home [Goals] Spoiler Lineup: with our 3-0 win and the home advantage I’ve rotated almost the whole squad except GK and CDs because I don’t trust the backups. Match Play-by-Play Well f-me our young RB Gray gets a straight red not 10 minutes into the match…I pull off our DM to bring Powell our starting RB back into the squad and I drop my two cms to DMs. Somehow we hold 50% possession with 10 men but we aren’t generating any chances because I dropped to balanced and pulled our mids deep. They have some chances, but still we are managing okay. Halftime it’s a ‘don’t get complacent talk’ We come out after halftime and Bacuna runs forward at goal and when he’s tackled the ball pops forward to Marshall who is wide open at the post and he scores! There aren’t any more highlights till very late in the game but even that it ends with us easily advancing. March Preview: After beating Nexaca we were entered into the lottery draw for the Second Round and really lucked out with a Central American team instead of a MLS or L-MX team. However, whoever designed the MLS+NACL schedule is a sadist. We currently have 9 games scheduled for the month of march and if we beat Municipal (Guatamala) - which we better - then we should get 2 more games to make it 11 in 4 weeks. And you may notice we play San Jose (the team we beat in the Final last season) right in the heart of that with Philadelphia (who should be a good squad just had a disastrous campaign last year) and our rival Sporting Kansas City sandwiching that game. This is about the hardest 3-match window we could have and they are all away to boot! With this insane congestion its basically required to have two full team lineups to keep the players performing well in all these matches. So here are my two full 11 rotational lineups: A Team: B Team: Depth Commentary: After last year's performance in goal I have total faith in Austin to anchor our rotational defense. He did so well last year he, and my full starting back line, were in the MLS Best XI: Spoiler With that said, we are still very shallow when discussing defenders and I'm taking a risk waiting for my two first-team ready players to arrive from Europe on free transfers. It would have cost me 5-7M to buy them now, so in my moneyball estimation it is worth the point drops now (in the league) to wait for increasing the player value by that much in July. The key is I am less fussed about getting the Supporters Sheild again, so we just have to qualify for the playoffs at the end of the year. When our two new signings arrive we should have a very good 2-squad rotation system with a second team that should be able to beat all but the top-teams in North America. My current B-Team should be good enough to hold onto Aggregate leads against lesser Continental Opponents as well as secure us the points against bottom-table MLS teams. It comes down to choosing opponents who aren't particularly dangerous in attack as the defense is where we are exposed here. The Midfield and Offensive trios are all seasoned players whose stats back-up they are above average players for the MLS. After our summer arrivals we just have a question mark at RB if Gray underperforms. Worst case, I can drop Cato back to RB and bring Antonisse up to Starting AMR as he's the new Curacao player I picked up on a free this winter who can play all three attacking positions like J Lowe. He is just untested at how well he can do outside of the national team. Ledbetter is technically a DM/RB out of our S0 Youth Intake, but he is questionably skilled and I will be looking to find a new player to fill his role. In offense we have a surplus of AML players with that being the most plentiful Super Draft position (go figure). We also have a spare 3rd striker in McGinty, but I would love to find a new prospect there. I have tried to pick up some young English academy graduates but they all decide to stay in England rather than come to the US. We have the transfer-budget to actually spend to bring in a Young Designated Player who actually costs less against the salary cap, but we will expect to pay it in transfer fees. The only remaining transfer objectives are 3rd string (development) RB, DM/CM & Striker Finances: With the Willock sale we are flush with just shy of $30M in the bank. You can see with the steep recline though that our wage-bill will eat lots of that. We have a high for the league payroll at 410k p/w with over a quarter of that going to Chamberlain and half of it for our 6 star players. If you look at the season preview it will tell you the Salary Per/Year of every team and we are at: 21.32 Million Per Year Player Salary. While not the highest in the MLS (Toronto is paying 32M) this is in the top-group of salaries with a handful of teams at or above 20M. The average/poor teams in the league seem to settle in around 15M Per Year Salary. Importantly with the Willock Sale we have enough money in the bank to comfortably survive the seasons salary obligations Edited March 30, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted March 31, 2023 Author Share Posted March 31, 2023 (edited) 2024 North American National Team Performance 2024 is an off-year for the Caribbean international calendar with the only competitive matches happening in early June for the NA Nations League, but I still want to highlight how our internationals are doing for their country before we really get into the 2025 Season. Luckily ESPN+ is actually airing the HSV match today, so this is perfect for an 'extended' lunch break. A general comment: Due to the MLS Playoffs occurring during the October International Window my best players were withdrawn from their National Teams resulting in fewer CAPs than usual. To get the performance statistics I'm loading a December 24th save-point. Jamaica - World Ranking 58 This is the most important nation for our club as it is the majority nationality of our players. So much that our "Core Social Group" is defined as primarily Jamaican players. Spoiler Sadly, I can't say they had a particularly good season with losses to all 3 of the major North American teams. Yes, they won against all the small islands but a draw to Curacao has to be considered a poor performance in a goal-less June Window. Lucky for them it didn't impact their World Ranking too poorly ending the year at 58, right in the middle of their 55 - 61 recent range. Spoiler STC Jamaican Players: 9 Primary Nationality + 4 Secondary nationality Bobby D-Reid: Just 1 start and 2 sub appearances in 2024 he had probably his worst International performance to date without a single goal contribution. this all occurred during the only truly difficult window so he didn't get an opportunity to beat up on small nations. Spoiler Kevin Stewart: No Callup in 2024 Rekeem Harper: His form with Blackpool was good enough to have him included in the early squad, and then his success in MLS kept him a regular feature in 7 of 7 matches he was in the squad starting in 5 of them. Even playing primarily as a Mezzala while he did get good ratings he really only created a few chances and didn't show the goal-scoring threat he does for us as an AP-A. Spoiler Jamal Lowe: With B Reid Lowe features as one of the primary striker choices for Jamaica playing almost exclusively as an AF. Unfortunately, it wasn't a good year for him as he only managed 1 goal against Guyana in September. At least that 2nd window he got better Av Rat than the disastrous June window. Spoiler Alvas Powell: Unfortunately even though he was called up in June & September he was only used in a single match and he didn't do particularly well there against Canada. Spoiler Alex Marshall: No Appearances in 2024 Chris Ainsworth: At only 19, Ainsworth was active in the U23's this year where he had two positive matches though Jamaica failed in their Olympic Qualifying. Spoiler Kai Thomas: Called up to the U23 as well, but was an Unused Substitute. Paul Banton: Never Called Up. Curaçao - World Ranking 79th [Game High] As they didn't feature in the NA Nations League Finals, this was a year of friendlies for Curacao until Novemeber when they faced St Lucia in World Cup Qualifiers. They almost let a 2 Goal Agg lead slip away, but the 3-3 draw on the road gave them the victory to advance to the 3rd Round. They have a tough year ahead of them facing Jamaica, El Salvador and Honduras with only the best team advancing. They held Jamaica to a draw in June, can they pull off the upset to advance for the first time?? Spoiler STLC Curacao Players: Juninho Bacuna: Easily my favorite player of the save, he has been great for his nation as a DM-BWM with 2 goals and 2 assists this year with 3 of 4 games recording a 7.5+ Av Rat. The reason he only played 4 games is because he was withdrawn by us in most of the windows due to it all being friendlies. Spoiler Jeremy Antonisse: It is due to his good games in the June window that I noticed this free agent when checking up on Bacuna's national squad and decided to take a chance on this winger. Because I only discovered him then not all his games show-up in the form with only the 2 when he was a trialist at the club being record. 3 goals and 1 assists in 5 games is fantastic - even if it's against poor oppositions. Spoiler Canada - World Ranking 42nd The extra-time defeat to the USA in the Nations League final had to hurt. However, you can't fault it being a pretty good season though the loss to Guadeloupe has to be seen as a dissapointment. Spoiler Doneil Henry: He played in 3 games, being injured for the fourth he was available in November. He did okay against USA & Jamaica but really showed his defensive leadership against the DR wining 11 of 15 headers. Spoiler Anthrony Beaufort: In a shock to me, due to Beufort's stellar play for our reserve side (and Canada U20 last year) he got the call-up to the main team in March and he was totally solid against some easy opponents. Then when Henry got injured, he replaced him against St Vincent and again was excellent. These performances have elevated him in my depth chart and at just 19 he could be something special for us. Spoiler Trinidad and Tobago - World Ranking 103rd Like Curacao T&T's only competitive fixtures came in November where they also beat their WC Qualifier opponent Guayana. This sets them up for a Qualification group next year with Suriname, Grenada & Costa Rica. I'd say this is a much better draw, but only time will tell. Even though it was a draw, I'd say their 1-1 result against the DR was a notable performance. Spoiler STC Trinidad & Tobago Players Cordell Cato: His role in the squad has been reduced this year with him riding the bench in their competitive fixture after being their go to RB/MR choice for the 2 years previously. Spoiler Ryan Peltier: Like Cato he was called up to the national team for the Guyana fixtures, but wasn't selected. Still has yet to make his international debut. Turks and Caicos Islands - World Ranking 207th With only a win against Monserrat it was the typical poor season for the tiny British Territory. Spoiler Thomas Hayes: Our S0 Super Draft Pick actually played less than Smith due to being recalled to be available for us last season. His performances aren't too great considering he's on a loosing national side, but getting a 7.0 against the DR when they lost 3-0 must mean he did some good work. They play him in every one of his natural positions, which I find interesting. Spoiler Rob Smith: Our recent Super Draft Pick played in every game this season for T&CI and actually managed to provide 2 assists of the nation's 5 goals all year. Guess he's their creative force? Spoiler British Virgin Islands - World Ranking 206th A very ugly list of friendlies for this nation. Their best performances of the year came in their pair of competitive fixtures where they actually got a win at home against Antigua & Barbuda (Rnk 145th), which is their first competitive win all save & only second total. The other was a friendly against Saint Barthelemy in 2023. So certainly an upset, but sadly not a double-one to get them into WC Qualifying. Next year will be random friendlies. Spoiler STC VGB Players Timothy Cawley: Our recent S3 Super Draft Pick I included his full VGB form for 23&24 shows he's been reasonably good for what is another low ranked British territory. He provided an assist against Antigua & Barbuda in a two-legged excellent performance. Spoiler Puerto Rico - A brutal penalty loss to the Bahamas in their WC Qualifier by blowing a 3-0 Agg advantage is unfortunate for Puerto Rico. The wins are against micro nations, so we will see how they do in friendlies next year. Spoiler STC PUR Players Wilson Saldana: Another recent S3 Super Draft Pick. Unfortunately, I didn't have him scouted in December so I just see his overall form with 2 starts and 3 sub CAPs for Puerto Rico and a 7.05 average rating. Not too shabby, but he's still not a very good player. Spoiler Edited March 31, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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