argento Posted April 2, 2023 Share Posted April 2, 2023 Really enjoyed reading all this, love the moneyball concept. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 3, 2023 Author Share Posted April 3, 2023 (edited) March 2024 - Season 3 Month 1 So how did we do in our first month of the wicked MLS congestion? Match 1: Home vs Cinci Spoiler Easy 2-0 win where they didn’t get a single shot on target. However, Bobby Reid got injured in the 20’… And is out for the rest of the month. Honestly I thought it was going to be worse, but still this sucks. Match 2: NACL Municpal (GUA) Away Spoiler Formation Change: J-Lowe will become our Striker as we have good AMR Depth and Antonisse will take his spot as AMR for the A-Team to keep a dual Trinidad B-Team. Rotated my wide players so we have fresh WBs and Ws as well as giving Beufort the start over Henry. J-Lowe will be the starting striker. 5’ in they disposses or DM and break hard on us and score an easy goal. Very upset and then my f’ing loane Lb gets a straight red card in the 7’. What the hell!? Marshall misses a great 14’ chance, but we are getting some good opportunities even down a man. Harper takes a slight injury, but I keep him on and then in the 42’ he leads a buildup combination that sees Antonisse blasting the ball into the back of the net. However, VAR is getting involved, was someone offside? VAR SAYS GOAL!!! At Halftime I pull the injured Harper and move my DM back from RB to bring on a proper RB and play a holding DM to be more defensively sound. We have a couple nice early FK chances and I have to say Antonisse is looking really good down his flank. And Chamberlain is dominating the midfield. We have a “Goal-Line Technology” possible goal, but the GK did enough to save it. However in the 78’ J Lowe works his magic and 1 v 4 beats their defense and scores!! Lets Go 2-1 comeback with 10 men away. Harper is out for 8-10 days with a ‘stubbed toe’, really? I thought the injuries were supposed to pile up at the end of the season not the start! Match 3: Home NY Red Bulls Spoiler With our NACL match 2 days later I’m going 100% rotation for this match and will take the loss if it comes to it in the league. Things look great with John-Jules getting a 12’ goal off a fast break championed by the game captain Bacuna. He almost makes it 2 in the 15’ but the shot is saved. Austin is having to do some work for us, but so far so good we make it to halftime still up 1-0 even though NYRB have had the stronger chances. All the second half subs are to bring on defensive players as NYRB continue the pressure and we are holding out until the 92’ when NYRB take a free kick that a player scores behind Austin. We get super lucky though with that player moving early and the goal is dissalowed. Austin did excellent with a 7.4 rating and 2.56 xGP! Match 4: NACL 2nd Leg – Home vs CSD Municpal Spoiler Mostly Team A, just Bacuna replacing Harper who is still not fully back from his stubbed toe and J Lowe as the striker with Bobby Reid still injured, Antonisse gets another shot at AMR. They can’t control J Lowe his speed and tricks get him open in the 4’ and he passes Antonisse in who scores, but the go to VAR and: GOALLL! Then in the 22’ we double it to 2-0 with our DM Stewart actually getting one. [go back and record]. We get to half-time without them making much of anything against us. I pull tired Bacuna for Marshall and we head back out. While we come out with some chances in the 49’ we let them get behind for a goal, which goes to VAR and: Goal Awarded, guess we both got a tight one. 74’ their quick winger beats us and crosses on the goal line to a striker who heads it in, which brings this to a 2-2 level score which is very disappointing. 86’ however our VC Nilsson gets his 2nd header goal of the season, this time from a Famila-Castillo corner. NACL Next Draw: Cruz Azul (Mexico) Spoiler Would have liked a MLS team, but at least this is the weakest of the Mexican options, and how is it for scheduling? Cool game cool. I guess at least they are next month’s problem? Match 5: Philadelphia Away Spoiler Going rotation for this match and full strength for San Jose 2 days later as they are in our conference so is more important to be better head-to-head against. The B-Side is getting torn up defensively by Phili to start off this match, but so far they keep hitting the post or we intercept. Great chance in the 38’ with Marshall getting wide and crossing in but their GK saves the strike from Bacuna who is having an off game. 62’ they score off a free kick and Var is called: Goal Awarded. Ugh GK didn’t react to a header by a player. Hardly any highlights the second half and it wasn’t our lucky day for the reserves and we lose 1-0. Their GK had yet another stellar game for them. Draw was the objective, but can’t fault them too much against a good side. Late March International callups: All backup/rotation players so I’m not fused. I’m really excited my CM prospect Leibman got a US Youth Callup! Match 6: Away San Jose Spoiler First team playing and should all be fresh, but 2’ in Henry gives up a penalty to San Jose. Very disappointing how many bad defensive failures we’ve been making this season. Its literally the same tactic, do I need to change how hard they are tackling? Chamberlain almost makes up for it in the 7’ but his shot is saved. 23’ their GK bobbles a corner save and Bobby Reid back from injury makes him pay making it 2 goals in 2 games for him this season. We make it to half-time still 1-1. San Jose play a very high press and it does give us trouble in buildup. 78’ they play a ball over the top that catching Henry watching who is having an awful match and they score. I pull him after this. Chamberlain has also missed a lot of chances so I pull him as well for the final 10 minutes. 93’ they make it three with Burka scoring both open play goals. Even with Henry being off the real disappointment was Chamberlain .7 xG and he couldn’t get a goal or provide an assist. It is his first off game though this season with every other match he’s played providing a goal contribution, so I guess I shouldn’t be too harsh. Match 7: Away Kansas City (Rivalry!) Spoiler Rotating people who had bad games last match but still first team primarily though I’m giving Chamberlain another go. Quiet start w/o highlights. First highlights in the 38’ and then in the 42’ Bobby Reid is taken down in the box, but was offside first so we don’t get the penalty. And that is it for the half. 55’ LB gets injured and even with fresh players and us having all the chances we can’t get a single one to go in hitting posts and having the keeper save so many attempts. My rotation choices didn’t pan out for this month with us dropping 8 of the 9 possible points during these 3 crucial matches. And that LB on loan from Getafe is out for 2 months Match 8 – Away FC Dalas Spoiler Full rotation today and my B Team hits it early with a John-Jules goal in the 2’ assisted by J Lowe. We have all the chances in this game until the 70’ when Ferreira gets their 2nd shot on target for the game and scores and I’m furious. We push and get lots of chances, but we just aren’t finishing anything. Here it’s less about my backup defense underperforming but that offense should have gotten 2 or 3 goals. Maybe try a 4-2-3-1 switch up for some of these lesser matchups? Really push men forward to hopefully counter act this awful conversion % occurring right now for the squad. Second Batch of International Callups: Okay thankfully MLS won’t totally screw me over with international duty and are letting me postpone the Start of April Match due to so many starters being gone Look at that Jamaican Representation! Match 9: Inter Miami Away Spoiler Okay, so we play Cruz Azul during the international window [not happy about it] so for this match I’m playing as many international players as possible and rotating others in so I’ll have mostly fresh defenders. This should be interesting: 14’ they score off a corner kick… 24’ they beat us with a goal over the top… Maybe 4-2-3-1 was a bad idea. We have some good chances towards the end of the half but get stuffed every time. I swap out Bobby Reid for Chamberlain at SS and in the 60’ he rewards me with a perfectly timed run behind the defence to blast the ball into the back of the net. Sadly, we didn’t have a single additional chance no mater replacing underperforming players. Experiment failed. End of March Review: A month of two halfs here, I'm not too thrilled with our start to the campaign. Granted we had probably 3 of the hardest games of the season right here, but still my rotation strategy backfired spectacular on me in the 3 key games where we dropped 8 of 9 points. With this loss of form and morale we continued to drop points in the final 2 games we should have won even though they were all away. 5 away games in 16 days is a cruel schedule and I don’t understand why we would get that many in a row but that's how it is sometimes. Luckily the boys have responded well to a 'pick yourselves up' team-talk after this and are mentally ready to take on our Mexican opponent during the international window. April at least has home games? Bad news is the Cruz Azul games are during the international window so I am down 11 first team players... that will be interesting. Club Improvements: As YAC player, I can't help myself improving Youth Recruitment even if we are only developing a player or two out of each year's intake. A third July Free Transfer: I am looking to pick up Konrad De la Fuente on a free. His salary is somewhat high, but it’s a free and as an American International he is very valuable. I’ll be looking to move on some underperforming wingers to make salary room. He struggles to do well for OM, but has rocked it for OM2 in an unplayable league. Could see this as an opportunity to try and cash in on Bobby Reid especially if he starts to pick up more injuries / degrade in speed. Hopefully this time I can get the salary cap sorted properly prior to all 3 of these guys arriving so I don't bounce another transfer. Edited April 4, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 13, 2023 Author Share Posted April 13, 2023 (edited) April 2025 - Season 3 Month 2 I took some time off from the save after that last month. However, of course I couldn't stay away for long and am back with another month of STLC vs the MLS congested schedule - our true nemesis. Cruz Azul Away – NACL Lineup: Spoiler With 11 players away on international duty there really isn’t much choice in the squad available to me, but it isn’t half bad we just have no sub depth and I’m playing both Chamberlain and Familia-castillo futher forward than normal with Hayes in a DM role he’s only partially proficient at. We can’t even fill the whole bench with real players due to injury. Match Highlights: Spoiler 19’ they score with a laser from 30 yards out of the box off a corner kick. 44’ their STC splits my two cbs on a long ball through and scores they really should have done better as these are my starting players not backups. My CBs can’t handle Juan as they leave him unmarked again just an awful showing from my veterens tonight. Shows how we are really out of form. I make 2 substitutions and pretty quickly we pull one back with my backup striker McGinty getting his first competitive goal for the club. From there we hold them off and it ends 3-1 where we have a much deserved defeat. All my internationals return for the second leg thank god, but its still going to be tough to recover a 2 goal deficit even if it’s the home leg. Meanwhile my players are facing off against eachother in WCQ And against other nations, with J Lowe having a great game against Honduras Actually glad so few played in the match as they should be mostly fit for our game with the exception of J Lowe and Bacuna. Can we win our 100th game? Cruz Azul - Home NACL QF Second Leg Match Highlights: Spoiler Lineup: I switch back to a 4-2-3-1 to put more offensive pressure on them and hopefully Chamberlain can perform as the Shadow Striker. Match: Chamberlain is missing a couple very early good chances that have me worried so I switch him and D Reid around. Chances dry up and I switch them back but still both are under-performing. Best chance is a free-kcik but Nilson is offsides. And then they find a goal in the 45’ when Burki fails to handle a long distance save. In Stoppage time Chamberalin has another perfect chance that he hits the post on. We have 1.12 xG and they have .29 yet we are even more in the hole. At half-time I pull Chamberlain & my AMR and bring John Jules & J Lowe on who were tired so I didn’t think they could make the whole game. 49’ they get us a goal. 63’ Reid gets injured so Bacuna comes on. 71’ J Lowe beats his man down the flank and crosses it in to Ainsworth to bring us to a 3-4 aggregate. One more and we can force extra time! I switch my WB to Attack duties and crazily my DM-R ends up on the left side corner flag and crosses in to J Lowe who brings us level!! Don’t even care why he’s so far out of position as we now can push for the epic comeback as they are having an awful game. Full time whistle blows and we’ve done it and made a comeback to a 4-4 level score so we head to extra time. We are dominating them this match so hopefully we can push that final bit and win it before the penalty lottery: 92’ corner play finds Ainsworth John-Jules open on the far post and they work together to score! Lets go!! M’F they equalize from a kickoff highlight in the 93’. We continue to push and a J Lowe domination on the right wing with a cross finds his main man John-Jules for a back post header giving him a hat-trick in this game as a substitute. Here we switch back to our 4-3-3 with a DLP-S role for Harper to hold more defensivesly and we start the 2nd ET. They are pushing hard on us and we are doing our best to fend them off with them having the majority of the chances. But we hold firm and the 120’ of insanity are over and STLC have broken their losing streak with an epic NACL comeback thriller. What a way for Sam Stein to celebrate his 100th game with the club! However we have some really bad news, D-Reid is out for the rest of the regular season. Means I won’t be able to sell him either as no one will buy a broken player. Question is what to do about it injury reserve-wise. I could try the disable 6, but hypothetically that has to be re-engaged every 6 games and can only be used 3 times per player per season [not sure if this is implemented correctly in game]. Or I can put him on Season Ending Injury (like I did for Burki for Year 2) with the intention of selling him over the summer. The key that I learned from that fiasco is that I haven't put the "Guaranteed Contract Clause" for D-Reid so I can actually benefit from having him on the disabled list. I opted for SEI with the intention of selling him back to England during the Summer Window as he should be recovered by the end of it. Luckily for us we didn't pay much for him (425k) so even if we end up having to let him go via domestic trade its not a big loss. Here is our Current Salary Cap with Bobby Reid before making him disabled: Here itis after putting D-Reid on SEI - remember he is a Designated Player so they take up a very large Salary Space. We get San Jose next in the NACL and fun times its in April so we have 4 additional games this month on top of the 5 regular season games. Nutso MLS Match 1: LA Galaxy Away Full rotation for this except for Chamberlain who was off early last game. Match Report: Spoiler Pretty nothing first-half without much of a chance either way. I make some changes at halftime going to a 5-2-3 formation bringing on john-jules & J Lowe. We get a penalty in the 48 min and John-Jules converts! But 54’ a ball over the top isn’t dealt with properly and they bring us back level. It takes us till the 89’ and a switch back to our 4-3-3 for John-Jules to find his brace and give us a 2-1 lead. Burki makes some big saves as and then Bacuna catches them sleeping on a counter to get a late 95’ final dagger giving us a much needed 3-1 lead because again, we lapse on the kick-off defense and in the 96’ they make it 3-2. MLS Match 2: Columbus Crew Home This will be a full 1st strength squad to hopefully get a win against a good side with our home advantage. Spoiler J Lowe shows why he’s an amazing pickup with a 9’ first goal for us. However in the 26’ we fail to deal with their 2nd corner in a row and they level it 1-1. They get a second before halftime and us missing our RB due to injury has shown a big weakness in our defense. We fail to make any highlight chances in the second half until the final few minutes where we had a couple corners, but nothing came of them. Unlucky home loss. Match 3 MLS – Nashville Home With the San Jose NACL games around the corner we are going 100% rotation for this home game Spoiler Very hopeful we can change our form. Unfortunately, our first goal is called back for Cato being just a hair offsides. And that was the only real chance of the half. 49’ we get very lucky that their winger hits the post as Austin was beat. 63’ though they take down our player in the box and John-Jules yet again converts his penalty to continue making up for that MLS Final failure. And that was the only goal I’ll take a 1-0 win even if it's questionably deserved with us requiring a penalty. NACL Semi Final: 1st Leg Home vs San Jose Here is the big game. I’ve moved Chamberlain up top as a False Nine to start with the intention to bring John-Jules on as a substitute in the second half as late speed. Spoiler Of course both Chamberlain and my DM Wan Kuzain take knocks in the first 15 min but don’t force a sub so I’ll see if they can play. Lowe is getting multiple 1 v 1s down the right so keeping him wide seems to be the right call. He presses hard on a bad pass and wins possession for us, finds Chamberlain on a check back run who then plays Bacuna through who finishes! 31’ then Chamberlain is the target and is unfortunately just off and its called back. However just minutes later in 33’ a short throw play finds J Lowe on the far post and he blasts it in to give us a 2-0 lead. Unfortunately Chamberlain’s injury has progressed and he has to come off at halftime. They score a freak free kick in the 78’ that ricotchets something nasty off one of our players. We match it up with a long distance free kick by our WB-L F-Castillo who finds Nilsson’s head to make it 3-1 which is how it ends. Great home game for us against the arguably best team in MLS. Thankfully Chamberlain has just a bruised shin so will be fully back for the return-leg in California \ MLS Match 4 – Away Real Salt Lake Full rotation for this match with John-Jules leading the line Spoiler 25’ John-Jules struts his stuff and scores his first chance of the match. We have some great counters in the first half but can’t finish them and then yet again we get sniped on a near-post corner in the 41’ to bring it back level 1-1. And then my rotation AML has a very bad give away at half field and thankfully their striker runs early and the goal is called back. Even with subs we can’t seem to get anything going today and in the 78’ they make us pay with a long range goal. 86’ though our first team CMs show what they got with Bacuna scoring a wonderful goal from the top of the box. 90’ we hit them again hard on the counter this time switching to the right flank with Harper finding J Lowe who is wide open and has an easy 1 v 1 that he converts. He’s such a great wide striker for this league. J Lowe isn’t done as he beats the players down the line after a pass back from John-Jules to find the AML wide open NACL Semi-Final 2nd Leg – Away San Jose Here we go, big game, can we keep our two goal lead? Spoiler ? 15’ and we’ve done one better with Chamberlain sitting right isndie the 6’ yard box to pick up a scrap from a Bacuna close range shot that wasn’t dealt with by the San Jose keeper. Lets Go! 59’ Our LB makes a great run finding Harper who carries the ball himself right into the box to score. I’m loving all these midfielder goals (even if I’m playing Chamberlain up top). For the last 15 I pull all 3 forward players to keep them fresh and we see out a very surprising large win against San Jose. Our players just love to dominate in the NACL! Month of March Recap So how was our 2nd month vs our first month? So much better with only 8 games to contend with we did well. Our 5-2 win at home against Cruz Azul was for sure the turning point for the team morale. Remember I ended Month 1 with a bunch of defeats and that win just catapulted the squad and the goals began flowing. What a 100th game for Mr Manager! What does it look like going forward for May? Another crazy congested month. 9 games means we have over 2 games a week all month. ] Because we will be playing our first NACL Final! and it is against Tigres, so a formidable Mexican opponent (though perhaps not the scariest) Edited April 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 13, 2023 Author Share Posted April 13, 2023 (edited) Scouting for Strikers With an injury that sadly signals the end of the Bobby Reid era at STLC I am on the hunt for a new development striker to bring into the club. Here I want a high potential U20 striker with the idea that I can sign them onto a U22 Development contract (off-budget) or if they are really good onto a Y-DP contract, which is a lower cap-hit than a regular DP contract. Issue is, no high-potential youngsters from Europe want to come to the MLS (go figure) and unfortunately even with scouring the Caribbean over and over again I have yet to find another Ainsworth hiding in one of the domestic leagues. Our Current Striker: Tyreece John-Jules First, we should establish our baseline striker, who has been a fantastic acquisition for us. I found him rotting in the Arsenal youth ranks, but showing that he could hit hard at those levels. As he was under 22 I could sign him on a U-22 Development contract which is an off-book contract thus he doesn't count against the salary cap. It helps you take these risks on young players. He has been a very good striker for us thus far this season and excels coming off the bench due to his speed and 'beats offsides' player trait. Where he really shines is in his development and its in the coach report. He's basically as good of a striker as you can hope for as a generic MLS player (non-DP) his one big drawback is he isn't reliable for big matches but his being either-footed makes up for it as he finishes chances form both sides. His contract is a slight issue as he only has till the end of next year on his U22 off-book contract. We will have to sign him to a salary-hitting contract soon, but I have to say he will be worth it. Striker Targets So, first the hunt is into the MLS academies for trade-targets for when the parent clubs finally decide to bring them up. With how the MLS drafts have been lately I'd much rather part with my picks for some of these academy players who actually have a chance of making it for us. The annoying part is that until the player is promoted from the academy we can't even make trade-deals on them so its a wait and watch situation. Rolland Bennet - Colorado Rapids Academy Here is my favorite option. Good personality & Fairly consistent as well as technical, which is good for a DLF. And, like we want to see he is doing damage against these youth defenses and really should have been brought up by the Rapids way sooner I have no idea why they have waited. I'll be back to update this once I re-scout all the academy players. I hate how you lose all knowledge of these guys after so many days, which is why I have a bunch of shortlists holding players indefinitely. If we expand the search to the whole range of players we have scouted there are 618 strikers we know about If I want to be a money-ball manager then what are our soon to be expired contracted players: For this I remove the '5 games' requirement as a lot of these will be reserve/youth players. Unfortunately diving through these none are really that interesting, so I'll spare the details. Looking at this another direction, I recently scouted all of the Caribbean national team players under 23 to see what new talents are being called up to represent the region. While some have been added to a shortlist, its easier just to go to my "Scouted" view and limit the search of players to an age range. This way I'll also pick up the other just general players with Caribbean nationality being scouted due to where I've sent all my scouts. Good number of these players are European and don't want to join us but let's take a look through the scouts favorites, specifically strikers: First interesting player is Jacen Russell-Rowe who is a backup at Columbus. He could be an easy domestic pickup and would be HG as he came out of the Toronto Academy. Nothing too crazy performance-wise here as he's just featured in a couple matches for Columbus He's got two of the key green traits I like to see, consistent & likes big matches. High bravery never hurts and having some speed is a good sign. A player who turned me down over the summer is Devon Edwards who opted for Shefield United over us. And then Omari Benjamin is at Arsenal and has no interest in joining us. Both are lower CA but higher potential as they are 18 & 19. Khayon Edwards is another "A rated" prospect who seems to have good ability and potential. Big issue is that red consistency, but the fact he has speed and versatility is valuable for us. And unfortunately he has done very poorly in League 1, which isn't a good sign for us even if we are looking for a development striker especially if he wants anywhere near that wage range. Jahmari Clarke provides a big-man option and he's been just okay for Reading this save in the championship. Mason Burstow hasn't done too well at Oxford, and is too highly valued with his Newcastle contract for us to make a move Edited April 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 13, 2023 Author Share Posted April 13, 2023 (edited) Scouting for Goalkeepers it has been a never-ending quest for a young developmental goalkeeper to bring into the squad. With Burki's age [34] he has 2-3 more seasons before he retires and while Austin [26] is fine, he will never be a star GK for the MLS. Luckily for us both of these GKs have American Citizenship/Green Card and count as domestic players, so I don't mind hunting for a European player to bring over as a development target. I've played into late May so we have hit the mark for a spreadsheet update! While I haven't been playing the save much the past couple weeks, I have been tweaking the tool here and there with a lot being cleaning up earlier errors. One very visible change is adding additional statistics to my export leading to a major upgrade of what I'm showing for Goalkeepers. As you can see with the errors for the "MLS" bar and the "Top 3" not fully implemented there is still work to be done, but there is enough working here to better evaluate Burki and keep an eye on how his degrading physicals due to age impacts his performance. Roman Burki Compared to the other Top 3 team GKs I have to say Burki is still doing okay. He no longer is the master at xGP that he was, but he is playing more games than these other guys and is still showing comparable performance. Watching the red/green arrows he is improving his mental/skill game while his physicals are degrading. I'm also sending him on coaching courses and fully intend to transition him into the backroom staff when he decides to retire. Brandon Austin (USA/England/US Virgin) Unfortunately, with his injury Austin doesn't make the minutes threshold to get included in the data-rip. However, I can import all STLC players into the "Scouted" secondary dataset and view him that way. This part of the spreadsheet is very rough, but it has the data. I'm hiding rows/columns to make the screenshots useful here. With this data it suggests that Austin is playing on-par with Burki even if it is only for 7 matches this season. He is still out injured, and the plan is when he is fit he will get to see if he's good enough to get us some Cup trophies in the League Cup & US Open Cup. Domestic USA Goalkeepers Its very possible that Chicago Fire are developing yet another Slonina. My scout report on him is ancient, so I've lost all the details and will update when we get more info, but his performance for their academy team & that ability range has me very interested. He has US Vigrin Islands second nationality, so maybe if I took that national team job I could get both my GKs to switch! Naturally as a domestic & Home Grown player he would be the ideal target and very well could overtake Austin in a few years. I'll be watching him like a hawk to see if Chicago promote him and then look to do a major trade to get him into the club. European Young Goalkeepers There are 3 young GKs in Europe who have me very interested. Two are still too young to be willing to come to the US [17], but one is actually interested and would be a very reasonable acquisition. I'll start with the 'maybe later' guys first: Shurwendel Merencia (Netherlands/Curacao) - Sparta Rotterdam Currently still costly to acquire, but once he turns 18 and his contract begins running down I think he will be very cheap to get into the club. He is the lowest of interest to me especially since he is Unambitious Franciano Daunay-Cotellon (France/Martinique) - Strassbourg Either footed & Very Consistent are nice touches for a GK He's not valued super highly by Strausbourg (and isn't displaying the potential) but I could see that moving up especially if he gets gametime as a young GK. Romain Jean-Baptiste (France/Martinique/Guadalupe) - FC Metz This 19 year old is very interested in joining us and will take a MLS-Minimum senior contract to do it, which is perfect for a backup GK. Love the consistency and adaptability. He's "balanced" personality, but with two Fairly Professional GKs to mentor him I can see that getting improved. As long as Metz stay under 1M and are open to me staggering the payments this could be a very reasonable pickup for now while I wait for the American talent to get promoted into the MLS. Statistcs-wise he's only playing for the U18 team and hasn't gotten promotted to the B-Team yet so only unloaded-basic info to go off of. Negotiations Could I have gotten him a little cheaper? Maybe but 500 structured +100 when he makes league appearances seems fairly reasonable for a young prospect especially considering the dearth of GK options available for us with any kind of potential. A tight release-clause and unfortunately he didn't want to be locked into a long deal/contract extensions but 2.1 is just above the minimum for a senior contract so he's almost as cheap as possible for us. If he trains well then he can earn another contract, which should line-up with the sunset of Burki's career. English Backup Then there is Coniah Boyce-Clarke who has just finished a spell down in League 2 on loan to Crawley from Reading. He is older at 22 so has less up-side, but is actually 'game-tested' with a League 2 season now under his belt. Unfortunately for him he played at a poor squad that finished 17 of 24 with a -7 GD, so he was battered in the net. My data-set is only down to League 1 and I don't think I'll do a full England additional download just for him. Unfortunately, talking to his agent its likely Reading will want way too much for what he's worth. He could be a good emergency GK loan option though if things get worse with injuries here. Edited April 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 13, 2023 Author Share Posted April 13, 2023 (edited) Striker Statistics Figured I'd update with Striker Statistics to round-out the above post. Here J Lowe gets included as he's a natural STC, but I play him almost entirely as the AMR because he just does so well from the wide position. You'll see in the comparisons. His providing statistics blows any other natural striker out the water, and he still puts up reasonable Goals/90 from out wide and actually has a lot of on-target shots. The lower conversion I take to the fact that most of his attempts are at a lower-quality angle as he's cutting in from the right. The surprise is his heading % is excelent for strikers in the MLS at 49%. AMR To really understand J Lowe's ability he needs to be compared against AMRs. Since he played so much for us and the other AMRs had injuries he is the only to get included in the full dataset so we can look at just the summary statistics table. One change I've made is to switch from the full crossing statistic to the open-play crossing statistic. This should remove Corners & Wide free-kicks from the data. Display Error: Top 3 OP Cross Attempts & Completes are backwards. Of all the statistics the only one where J Lowe is below the "Top 3" is his Conversion % that is just 21% vs the 38% for the other three top players. However if you look at any of the MLS groupings he is well above the league which is between 11-13%. Because he is so dominant as the AMR I refuse to move him up to striker and that is why I'm looking for a new player. AML Here we don't have the same situation of an out-and-out star and have done a lot more rotation especially since our young talent Ainsworth has high injury-proneness. Anoyingly, because J Lowe is also natural at AML he is included here as well, so we will have to look at the individual statistics to really get a sense of how the left wing is doing. Marshall isn't having a good season, but it's not entirely his fault. Due to the number of CM/DM injuries he has had to move into CM-A for a lot of those minutes where he can play, but is not nearly as good as he is up in the attacking third. Ainsowrth however is doing very well this year as the provider pair to J Lowe. His crossing is fantastic and he has good shooting accuracy, but just the lower-league average conversion rate of 11%. Left Wing Changes for Summer Transfers July 7th we will be getting 2 star upgrades for both positions on the left wing who I intend to play as my 1st choice pairing and it will change the formation slightly due to their strengths. Here are the 3 players, the CB will be my #3 choice, so we won't discuss him now. Jay Dasilva is fully capable of being an AML, so is skilled enough to be a Complete Wingback for us and probably will set him on Attack a lot of the time. Konrad De la Fuente is right-footed with the 'cuts inside from left' player trait so is perfect to be an Inverted Winger designed to be overlaped by the Welsh international winger coming out of defense. Here is my current main formation strategy. It is a balanced attack formation though the skill differences in my wingers leads to generally a left-service situation with the right-side being more dribble-shoot players. The "Personalized" roles denote the tweaks that I'll be making. I'll change my DM to Defend and add all the 'hold position' instructions as well as change my right back into a less aggressive FB-S with a couple more conservative player-instructions (take fewer risks, shorter passes). Then on the left I'll start with just the natural overlap of a CWB-A on top of an IW-A. I don't see the need to add the overlap instruction on that wing as that will push the IW-A starting position into the path of Bacuna running in from midfield creating a bottleneck for us. Also this way maybe we can see some short passing play between the CWB & IW. These changes will still make sure that J Lowe is getting his left-service but it will be coming from the defender instead and we should have an additional target crashing the box now. Ideally this should translate into more goals with now 3 attackers in deep of the box with 2 trailing CMs at the top of the box. Three holding DM/CBs with a less agressive FB should be enough to prevent the counter over the top. We will see when the new talent arrives. Edited April 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 14, 2023 Author Share Posted April 14, 2023 (edited) May 2025 - Season 3 Month 3 As reminder here is our packed May. Naturally the priority will be to win the NACL Final even though that will mean most likely sacrificing points against Austin who are league leaders this year. May Match 1 MLS: Home vs Chicago Fire This is almost full rotation with the exception of my CMs due to injury. Spoiler 17’ we have a goal disallowed and then in the 24’ they also have one called back so its an even exchange of offsides there. 40’ they foul our striker and we get a penalty and John-Jules does his thing converting yet another penalty with him being just on fire offensively right now. We start the second half off great with a 50’ goal with John-Jules making a good attacking run to the goal-line and passing it back to our young playmaker Leibman who gets what might be his first goal for the club. We almost fully bottled this match. Burki hands the ball to their high pressing striker gifting them a goal right after they got an easy dispossession goal. Thankfully I brought on our young star AML Ainsworth who scores an 85’ goal to give us back the lead. This was way closser than it should have been against a perennially bottom-table Chicago side. The Burki error is concerning... Match 2 – Away Minnesota Spoiler We have a rested first XI and they make their mark early with a 5’ goal, however they get us back right away. They come at us again disposesing my rb in the 17’ and countering hard on us with that 4 in attack. Stewart then gives up a soft penalty and Burki is having an absolute awful game as he should have done better on the pk. This makes it two awful games for him in a row and he will ride the bench for the next game. Halftime they get a talking to and in the 60’ Stewart makes up for his defensive error with a rare long distance goal for him. Chamberlain has been off today so I make the switch to John-Jules, however its J Lowe who then makes the difference in the 70’ finding us our equalizer to make it 3-3. Match 3 – Away Houston Dynamo Full rotation as we prep for the first Tigres games. Spoiler Pretty quiet first half till 34’ my AMR gets injured so J Lowe comes on early. 47’ stoppage time they score a nasty free kick to go up 1-0. Not much the GK could do, but not happy we are down. 54’ I’m very surprised to see our CD Thomas make a cross from the bye-line to to bring us level. However, we give it away very quickly in the 59’ with them catching our backup defenders sleeping. Disappointing 2-1 defeat. And we have yet another injury Match 4 – NACL Final 1st Leg – Home vs Tigres Lineup: Match: We are pressing great today keeping them on the back foot and that with our counter yields results in the 17’ with J Lowe driving down the right side and playing it for Harper making the attacking run out of midfield who gives us an early lead. However in the 23’ they come back with their own run from deep that catches Henry overloaded and they score. Chamberlain is having trouble getting his shots on frame but J Lowe isn’t with him sitting perfectly at the far post in the 37’ to get himself on the score sheet. We go into halftime dominating the match and I want to keep pushing to get us a better goal cushion to defend in Mexico. Our pushing finally pays of in the 73’ with our numbers in the box overwhelming their defense and J Lowe finding that final ball. We hold on at the end and they have one good chance, but hardly threatened us this game. Now to defend the 2 goal cushion. Match 5 – MLS Home vs Austin FC Full rotation for this game as next up is the NACL Final 2nd leg, so let’s see how the backups can do. I’m fully expecting to drop points as Austin are a solid team. Spoiler Match Pretty quiet first half with my young American CM Leibman getting a knock but staying on. We didn’t produce any chances so I’m thinking some halftime changes are in order. Leibman has hit the post twice this game. And while Austin makes some great saves he gets beat 1 v 1 for them to get a 70’ goal. Then of course Hayes the ever unreliable takes down their striker in the box to give them a penalty so we go down by 2. Kickoff highlight though finally sees Chamberlain & John-Jules connect to get us one back! Even with my final push there’s nothing we can do to bring it back level and we lose 1-2. Match 6 – NACL Final 2nd Leg – Away Tigres Lineup: Our going 1st Team. Why change what worked so well in the first encounter! Match They make a grievous early error giving us a penalty just 2 minutes into the match. Unfortunately Harper duffs it so we don’t’ get an even better lead. 18’ though Ainsworth makes up for it getting a wide service from our WB-L form the right side after a FK and finishing it perfectly. My WB-L Familo-Castilo is having a great game as he serves in a FK from wide to Henry’s head to give us a 2-0 first half lead in Mexico! We roar into the 2nd half with a deep service up to Bacuna making his attacking run out of CM to get us a 3rd goal. I make some subs which brings Chamberlain back to playmaker and John-Jules comes on and he gets himself a goal within minutes. 58’ we gift them a penalty and Burki comes up with the stop so its even on missed penalties for the match. 62’ they pull one back, but we still have a 5 goal lead. WE ARE THE NORTH AMERICAN CHAMPIONS! Unfortunately we get yet another injury for our small side with another player out for an extended period Match 7 MLS – Away vs NY RB Mostly a rotation squad again to recover some starters from the NACL fixtures. Spoiler We start off great with a FK from Chamberlain that finds the head of our rotation CB Kai Thomas for a great away start. Hardly any chances in the first half and we go into halftime that way. In the 57’ they get a player sent off for a 2nd yellow and we quickly make them pay with Chamberlain finding John-Jules making the run in to get himself a goal. I give McGinty some minutes and he gets himself a goal. Chamberlain almost got himself a goal but it was called back from being offsides. Match 8 – Away Toronto FC Lineup- First team even though they are all under heavy congestion right now. Spoiler Match Pretty quiet first half until a throw in play gets a ball slotted forward to Bacuna running into the box from the midfield and he confidently finishes it. We start the second half on fire with Powell slotting a short cross into Harper in the box for another CM goal. Our 3rd comes in the 54’ off a broken corner play where our DM hits Ainsworth our AML at the far post for a header. Match 9 – Away LAFC Mostly rotational squad here to save up for the big match right after this. Spoiler Match Pretty quiet first half which is fine with me. I Gave McGinty a chance up front and he missed a clear goalscoring opportunity. However he makes up for it in the 26’ playing through Ainsworth who finishes his 1 v 1 in expert style for a 1-0 lead. It looks like we almost had a second but the striker was offsides. It takes till the 82’ but we do get our second with a rare header-goal from Harper. NACL Awards & Such The NACL was the J Lowe show with 6 goals and 6 assists in just 8 matches, which is insane and a well-deserved Golden Ball. While Bacuna was the initial season first awesome acquisition, J Lowe is turning into the best free agent signing as he's the absolute perfect AMR for this level. I also got my coaching badge As well as am in the USA Head Coach Hall of Fame (seems early to me) Trophy Cabinet: June 2025 (Season 3 Month 3) Review: So another month down, how did we do? I mean lets be real we won the NACL while keeping up fairly good form in the MLS making this a fantastic month! Yes we lost against two strong teams but those were expected losses due to purposeful full rotation to be fresh to win the continental title. Really only the Minessota game stands out as a disappointment as we should have been better defensively to get the win away. How’s our league standing? Not bad at all as we are just 2 games behind the lead clubs in our division. I knew we would drop points during the continental fixtures thankfully everyone else did as well. What's our June look like? We start our US Cup run; Can STLC secure yet another trophy for the club!? Edited April 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 14, 2023 Author Share Posted April 14, 2023 June 2025 - Season 3 Month 4 I've already played through June into July so there will be a lot of matches to update here. June Match 1 – MLS Home vs Montreal Spoiler 5’ Chamberlain takes a corner and doesn’t get back onside quick enough afterwards and his goal is disallowed. We have a couple more chances but in the 14’ again a ball over the top finds my CB just not following their striker and he wins the 1 v 1 with the goalie. Ugh. Was literally their only chance of the entire half while we had 13 shots with 1.07 xG. After the half we bring on John-Jules and push more offensive and aggressive and it takes till the 66’ to pay off with my great sub striker getting himself a goal assisted by my WB-A Powell who got himself far forward to make the slotted cross. 81’ this time the cross comes from Marshall who came on late to find John-Jules in the box for him to record a brace. 84’ Lowe misses a great chance, and we have a couple more especially when Montreal gets a straight red card. Sadly we couldn’t finish a third even with 3.1 xG. International Callups: Another strong window of callups for us with 2 US Under 19 players which is great. June Match 2 – Home vs Atlanta United Mostly rotated side here. Spoiler Disaster in the 8’ where we just botch 2 clearances leaving them able to cross it in to an attacking midfielder. Then in the 10’ John-Jules has a perfect opportunity in the box straight on to goal and he hits it over the bar. Lots of halftime subs and one of them in J Lowe for the AMR slot and he does his stuff feeding in to John-Jules and getting us an equalizer. John-Jules almost gets a second this time from Bacuna but he didn’t track back with the defensive line. They then turn around and feed Almada directly from the GK and 3 of my defenders all miss tackling him and he beats us and score. Awful defending. 71’ Jules hits the frame when again he gets behind. We keep the pressure on and then we get our break in the 82’ when Harper is fouled in the box and we get a penalty. Can John-Jules convert? Yes, just barely the goalie guessed right but it was too quick. Saves us a point here. Match 3: US Open Cup Away – Memphis You can only play 5 foreign players in the US Open, so this is a chance to play a lot of our younger backups to see how they can do. Spoiler First half isn’t very good we don’t have too many chances and they actually outplay us with only the heroics of Austin keeping us in the match [including saving a penalty!] until the very end of the first half when Cato (who has been bad all season) actually scores a goal with an opportune deflection off a defender. We start the second half very poorly again with our CBs failing to hit a header and letting their 2 strikers beat 4 defenders. Subs happen in the 65’ and its John-Jules who their defense can’t handle who sets up Harper coming forward for an easy second goal to get us back the lead. We are pushing for a 3rd goal and they hit us hard on a counter where my RB held on a striker who was unmarked. Again bad backup defenders killing us. This sends us into extra time. Thankfully John-Jules gets an early 3rd goal for us. In the 99’ Ainsworth makes it 4. Took us till ET but we got the win. This sets us up with a draw against our rivals in the next round, which is exciting! June Match 4: MLS Home vs Colorado Back to mostly 1st team players. Spoiler We had the preponderance of the chances in the first half but failed to convert any of them. I gave them a stern halftime talk that inspired the team and in the 48’ Bacuna drove up the middle then quickly laid to Chamberlain who used his vision to find J Lowe’s outside run for him to slot it away. Unfortunately in the 54’ yet again our corner defense was lacking and Colorado are back into the match. 62’ Lowe flips the script serving in Bacuna in the box to get us a second goal. Even though he’s playing great Lowe picks up a knock and to be safe I pull him right away with Chamberlain to keep them fit. 81’ Bacuna makes it his first brace in a while with a great finish from the top of the box. Thankfully its just a bruise for Lowe and so he’ll be fine. June Match 5: Away Charlotte FC Rotation squad for this match with an international bent as we have a cup match right after this. Spoiler Few early chances, but really a fairly low-highlight first 30 minutes. Unfortunately for Chamberlain he was just offsides for a great play from the left flank by Marshall. Even though we fired up the boys at halftime but in the 54’ Charlotte got one on us by countering with not enough defenders holding back. This seems to be a theme that I’ll have to look into. It gets worse in the 56’ when they score a second from range. I try to push to attack but none of our shots connect. Then in the 87’ they slot the perfect pass through my defense and get a third goal. Really poor defensive showing to let in this many goals. Rotation cost us here. June Match 6: US Open 5th Round – Home vs Sporting Kansas City (Rivalry!) I’m playing a strong side for this match (at least as much as allowed with max 5 foreign players) Spoiler While we had the majority of the chances in the first half none were quality until 45+1 when John-Jules carried the ball forward drawing all the defenders leaving Leibman to run forward unmarked from CM-A. Then a perfectly weighted pass had him in 1 v 1 with the keeper and he finishes to send us roaring into halftime up 1-0! I’m playing higher pressure this game and don’t plan to let up on them. Really the second half is even more quiet than the first half and we change to maintaining our lead for the last third of the game and they didn’t put up any sort of fight, we win 1-0! June Match 7: MLS Home vs San Diego Spoiler 6 minutes in and their winger Moreno makes a run down the whole side and shoots on goal and Burki bobbles the save and lets it roll in for a true howler… Thankfully 17’ our recovered Curacoa winger Antonisse makes a good run and slots the ball to Chamberlain for an equalizer. Right after halftime Chamberlain picks up an injury and has to come off. Though we had a couple chances really it dried up for us after he went off as John-Jules wasn’t in the lineup today due to being exhausted form the last game. 2.02 xG and we couldn’t get the second and their one chance our once reliable GK fails us. Is his time up? Injury Pain This has been bad all season with the number of injuries but we really feel the pain here. Both of my 2 DP are out injured with the SAME AWFUL INJURY! That’s ~200k p/w in wages just up in smoke while they are out, which is almost half our payroll. Thankfully Chamberlain’s isn't totally destroying his ability like Bobby Reid's has. Reid's contract is up in December and I've already let him know he's leaving on a free, but will try and get a European side to take him early even if we have to pay half the wages as he can't be registered. That's 2 of my 3 star strikers/AMCs gone... What a downer to end the month of July on. We have now lost our 2nd DP to the same injury. Performance-wise it really is only the Away loss to Charlotte where we absolutely flubbed a match. Yes the San Deigo draw was disappointing, but we still got at least one point. How are we doing in the league now? We are doing well to make the playoffs but it seems Austin will be running away wit the Supporters Shield this year. Injuries are killing us this season. In the Cups, we have already won the NACL and have advanced to the QF of the Us Open. We will see how the League cup goes shortly as that will be the test of our new players. What’s in store for us in July? Honestly not the worst though we do have 3 games in 7 days to start the month. Also the Gold Cup is happening this year so I expect things to get re-arranged as well as there is the League Cup that will pickup at the end of July. No rest for the wicked! Youth Intake Preview: I've played enough YAC to know this is almost always a lie, but hey a guy can dream Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 14, 2023 Author Share Posted April 14, 2023 (edited) July 2025 - Season 3 Month 5 This month we get our European Reinforcements midway through, so there will be some growing pains as we work at least 3 new starters into the squad. With the Chamberlain season-ending injury I'll also be looking at who else has been released by clubs overseas to pick up another offensive player. July Match 1: MLS Home vs Real Salt Lake Full strength squad today that are actually feeling fine. Spoiler First half we absolutely dominated them but couldn’t seem to score. We had lots of great chances especially Baccuna who missed a break away and finally just before halftime broke the deadlock with a 45+2’ goal to head into halftime ahead. Second half we have even more chances but we can’t seem to score another goal adding up to 3 xG until in the final minute of the game 90’ we score a header goal off a corner. I’m not liking this underscoring July Match 2: MLS Home vs LA Galaxy Rotated as many players as I could but the squad is super slim right now as I wait for my summer transfers to arrive. Spoiler 23’ we score off a free kick with Harper finding Nilsson’s head at the backpost. Good start and we are dominating possession. Our second goal is a repeat just from a different side so other midfielder finding Nilsson head on the back post. Second half wasn’t super interesting and they didn’t do anything notable and we coasted to a 2-0 win. Here are the options to move matches because of the Gold Cup: I’m going to postpone the Seattle match for sure, but keep the DC Match (they are one of the worst teams in the league). I’ll also keep the US Open match as their star GK is on the Curacao team, and we can field a decent enough squad to start. Here are all our Gold Cup players: July 7th International Transfer Window Opens Can we make it work this time? Here is our Salary Cap And the transfers in face-cap are at 37k but I’ve done my best to make sure it is bought down with GAM (as we have a ton of it) but we will see if that actually triggers correctly Of course not 2 of 4 failed which is ridiculous, but thankfully the game is letting me fix the De la Fuente transfer. The issue with the MLS is even though it says in the transfer negotiations you can pre-buy down the contract with GAM for whatever reason that doesn't happen when the transfer goes through. Maybe its a bug? It's annoying either way because it limits how many free-transfers you can stack up coming in from Europe as they all hit simultaneously and will trigger this over-cap situation. Here is me Buying down the contracts as I intended to do to make room for Konrad De la Fuente who then I was easily able to complete the signing of. So all in all not nearly as bad as last year. Just will have to re-do the GK signing, who ended up costing me way more GAM/Cap space than I anticipated which is frustrating: why does he cost 7,750 p/w cap when he has a 2,100 p/w salary!? This just blew 450k of GAM for no reason which pisses me off. This means he will spend lots of time out on loan for us as I don’t want to be spending that much to register a reserve GK every season. Edit Note: When the transfer window happened I hadn't put Chamberlain on SEI yet. Had I done that there wouldn't have been any registration headaches as we would have had a huge amount of Cap-Room available and I wouldn't have needed to buy down Jean-Baptiste salary. Doh! Free Agent Backup CM With the Chamberlain injury we really need depth at CM and in Andre Fortunue I found a perfect backup player. He went to Estonia and was absolutely on fire in their league, which is lower level than us but he's coming off 2 great seasons and because of that has been getting callups to T&T. If we look at the scout report he has 4 awesome traits for us: High Consistency, High big Match, High flair and good speed. This fits perfectly for our CM-A role even if the scouts absolutely hate him Even better he will accept the Senior Minimum Salary Contract! (and has US second nationality so isn’t a foreign player). Just a 1.5 year deal is perfect for a cover midfielder is exactly what the doctor ordered. Remaining July Matches: Match 4 MLS – Away vs DC United Lineup due to international duty + Injury: Weakness here is in the CM as we will be already testing our new T&T signing as the playmaker as well as our other 3 new players. Let’s see how our acquisitions perform. Match: Spoiler Well 50 seconds into the game Wan Kuzain hits a free kick to Ainsworth’s head and we score! Not new signings, but I like the early goal. Ainsworth and Leibman are finding themselves in on the GK 1 v 1 multiple times in the early stages of the game but they can’t find the finish. Our second goal comes in the 16’ and this time its all new signings! Konrad De la Fuente dribbled down the flank and crossed it in to Fortune running into the box who blasts it home! What about that for a first match in the MLS. DC United pull one back when Nilsson’s header clearance isn’t enough to get the ball away and they work it back in finding an open striker’s head to pull one back against us. Wan Kuzain’s FKs are looking great today. He’s had 2 directs that have been upper 90 fingertip saves by the GK. He wants a new contract from us with a big pay-raise, but I don’t think he’s worth it as he’s an on-budget player. They had a great chance in the closing minutes of the game as they made a final push but Burki did his job tonight and held them off for us to pick up a nice 2-1 win away. Now we get a 2 week break for the Gold Cup to return at the end of July to take on the league leader Austin FC who lucky us we get to play twice this year! Unfortunately, we lose Powell to injury while on Jamaican duty, guess he will be back for after the summer cup series. Here we get the League Cup draw which bumps our Austin Match so we will end the month against Colorado: July Match 5 – League Cup Away Colorado Lineup: Match: Spoiler 5’ into the match Colorado gets a straight red card! Time to press them and get a goal. We are having the chances and possession naturally with the man advantage, but Colorado is putting up a good fight. 27’ John-Jules gets a perfect 1 v 1 attempt on the GK but can’t make the finish. Fortuna is doing well again already with a 7.2 rating by the end of the first half so the chances are getting created, its just bad finishing for us. They are packing the box in like crazy and we have multiple chances but nothing is sticking. With 1.65 xG but no goals we head into Extra Time. Not what I want when I know the congestion is coming. Extra time isn’t going particularly well for us but in the 114’ we do have a perfect chance to win the game when Konrad draws the keeper out and the ball falls to Ainsworth who has an open net but can’t get the shot on frame. Thus we go to a penalty shootout. We trade goals for the first 3 till Felix steps up and duffs it right to the GK and Austin fails to save the next. Gray does his job and scores his goal. Can Austin stop their 5th taker? He guess the right way and gets a finger on it, but its not enough and it goes in and Colorado advance. Very disappointed with the team here (even if it saves us congestion). July Summary & Standings: Upcoming Schedule for August: Losing in the League Cup is honestly a blessing for our players as we are already congested enough in August. We have two matches against the top team in the league 10 days apart. Those will be our first team squads as I'd like to get another piece of silverware this year in the US Open. That will mean rotation against Seattle which is a strong team. We then end the month against the City Group NYC outfit who are doing very well this year in the MLS. 4th and Final Free Agent Signing: We end the month with a 4th free agent signing from Europe now that we have lost another player to injury. With a very low 4M Fee Release Clause Buchanan was willing to come in on a Senior contract instead of a Designated one. Tajon Buchanan (Canada – Main / Jamaica) He didn’t really succeed in his move to Europe especially since I don’t have Belgium loaded, but he is currently playing for the Candian national team and did well in the Gold Cup. Again, free agent signings I can be more loose on because I should be able to sell him for 4M considering its basically half of what he got to go to Europe the first time just a couple years ago. Similarly in 2023-24 he played 5 games for Canada and had 2 Assists and 1 POM, which to me shows some good big match ability This gives me another star AMR player who then can rotate with Konrad with J Lowe moving permanently to striker and my Curacao player being the 3rd rotational sub for all 3 attacking positions I had another option in the Trinidad International Levi Garcia but he has serious injury prone-ness issues specifically with his Hamstrings and the last thing I need is another injury prone player. Edited April 14, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 14, 2023 Author Share Posted April 14, 2023 (edited) North American Gold Cup Here are some of the inbox messages for my players performances. Best looking was easily J Lowe who was a key part of Jamaica's group stage success, though Harper did his job in midfield as well. Henry got some games for Canada, but I didn't take the screenshots. He was just okay. Spoiler In the knockouts Jamaica ended Martinique's magical run and then were stopped in a close game with the USA Like usual it will be Mexico vs USA in the final. And unless Dike or Tillman score in that match Jamal Lowe might be the highest scorer of the tournament and almost certainly will have the highest average rating! Potential for International Management? Now that I've won the NACL I believe its fair to allow Mr. Manager the opportunity to manage national teams. Before the Gold Cup started Martinique were without a manager, but because we hadn't won the NACL (yet) I didn't go for the job. Shame they filled it when they did as that could have been a really exciting adventure. However, there soon may be two very appealing Caribbean National Team Jobs due to poor Gold Cup Performances. Both Haiti and Trinidad & Tobago have reasonable talent playing overseas. Haiti especially have lots of dual-national players that could be fun to try and convince to play for their lower-ranked nationality. I'll keep watching these and will update if we pickup one of the jobs. Haiti have already been knocked out of World Cup Qualifiers (By Cuba of all teams), so just have friendlies to rebuild the squad for nations league. Trinidad on the other hand still have a chance in WCQ as they are in the group-phase, but have a big hill to climb after that 4-0 loss at home to Suriname Chances are they won't get fired until after the Qualifiers, but I can still declare interest! Apparently I'd be a "Leading Candidate" so we will see, its been so long since I've played a national team it will be yet another learning experience. Also will be a great time to test choosing players based on current form over ability. Update: I had to play our first game in August before the Gold Cup Final occurred and it seems none of the American strikers played well because Jamal Lowe is MVP & Golden Boot Winner! He also had the 2nd best goal of the tournament And made the Tourney Best XI. What a performance for our man! Edited April 15, 2023 by WhiteCat33 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 15, 2023 Author Share Posted April 15, 2023 (edited) Link to the Spreadsheet! Yes, I know I mentioned at the start of all this I'd make the spreadsheet available, and while I sort of did with a link back in the YAC I have procrastinated fully sharing it. Mainly it is because I am regularly making changes to it and trying to do better at making it less laggy. Because of all the recursive array formulas do expect there to be some delays when you change any of your selections like League, Club & Top 3 Clubs. Check the bottom of your excel spreadsheet and you'll see the % progress, if this keeps going up its not frozen just working. I've done most the building of the spreadsheet on a whatever laptop that's about 2 years old. Really, this should work fine as long as you're not playing on a toaster. For Excell compatibility this was built in Excel Home-Student 2019. In every instance possible I've used the legacy version of formulas so this should work for earlier editions and of course will be fine if you have a newer version / using Microsoft 365. Mediafire Link: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/z6k77x3z9wj9z/WhiteCatStats WhiteCatStats The spreadsheet I am using currently in this save is "WhiteCatStats". I've explained the parts of the spreadsheet at the start of this career story. I'll do my best to link them here to put this all in a convenient place. I've uploaded 2 versions of the spreadsheet. "STLC 2025" includes all of the exports and is set up how I use it to evaluate St Louis & MLS. "Big 5 2025" has only the export for the Big 5 Leagues Tiers 1 - 3 for the 2025 season. I have both loaded this into "data" and left the tab with the raw-export. First off here is one of the first paragraphs in the introductory post linking all the initial construction posts I made in Youth Academy Challenge Thread: On 13/03/2023 at 17:28, WhiteCat33 said: 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. Second, here are links back to the posts in this thread where I discussed how to use the tool. Setting up View, Import Data & Basic Overview of Summary Tables: Example of using Stats to Evaluate Year-End Performance (2023 Season 1) FM Stag Table Tab Secondary Scouting Data CA Calculations This is a secondary spreadsheet I made and use during my Youth Academy Challenges. This will calculate a reasonably accurate Current Ability rating for your players both including their Week Foot ability as well as if that was set to the minimum value. It also will create a flat ratings out of 100 for the highlighted abilities by position. It currently is just set up for a 4-2-3-1 but I'll go back and update it for all positions...eventually This will use my modified version of the "FMStats" view and has an identical manner of exporting and importing the data that I use in my Statistics Spreadsheet. Here is what it looks like. Note this squad is in the German Oberliga (T5) so we aren't dealing with world-beaters here. Edited April 15, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted April 15, 2023 Author Share Posted April 15, 2023 Registration Bug Loses all my August Progress Well it's a good thing I haven't posted August yet because it's all getting erased. I'm furious. On deadline day I saw that Wolfsburg were willing to send Kevin Paredus out on loan for a reasonable amount that we had space for in the salary cap and I made the deal. However when he came in and it happened on deadline day for some reason it unregistered MY ENTIRE SQUAD and there is an issue with the end of the transfer deadline day in the MLS where you don't get the notification to finalize your roster. It just is what it is you can't adjust anything. It may be because the day after deadline day we played the Campeones Cup match so the game only thought to register players for that match (which anyone can play in so there is no registration) so automatically unregistered my whole squad? I really don't get it. And of course I hadn't saved the game since August 2nd. Like you shouldn't ever be able to have 0 players registered because there is a minimum roster size of 15 so this is a major glitch. And here is the solid month we just had. Yes, we got knocked out of the US Open but our league play was great and more importantly Austin absolutely crashed in the league this month. Austin's record was absolutely abysmal: Which set us up great for retaining the Supporters Shield: Maybe its the USA lower leagues mod that touches the cup competition and is glitching out the MLS transfer windows? Like should the MLS have the deadline day system, because I haven't had that all save. I'm almost positive @V50 your Continental additional file only touches the NACL cup and not any of the other continental competitions so shouldn't be causing something like this to happen. My last save point is on August 2nd; thank god I do monthly(ish) saves. Just pissed I didn't save before the September international break like I usually do. Instead I waited till the end of the transfer window which of course doesn't help me here. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 26, 2023 Author Share Posted July 26, 2023 Finishing the 2025 Season: It's been a few months since I've played in St Louis, but with the summer transfer window heating up I found the interest in picking up the save for a run at another MLS Title. Basically I had to re-do the month of August and make sure not to make any major transfers this time / save often to keep from having a repeat disaster. August: Start with a drab 1-0 win against Seattle where they just held the ball all game and never attacked Then it was the Semi-Final US Cup: We Won this time! John-Jules came out to play in the second half but it really was my Jamaican AML Marshal who I moved to the Right at the 60’ who created both the goals. Followed it up with a league win 4 days later against bottom table Orlando Then we visit Austin for a top of the league showdown as we are tied on 53 points right now. Start in dream land with a 2 min goal off a corner goal by Marshal our AML who I last minute rotated in for the start. Disaster in the 19’ as we have a defensive meltdown and they get an easy equalizer. Opportunities at both ends but it remains a draw. I’ll take the point away from home keeping us still level at the top of the league Then we host Portland just 4 days before the US Open final, so it’s an almost full rotated squad. And my persistence with Konrad at AMR is rewarded with him getting his first goal in the 3’. John-Jules sets up Leibman perfectly to make it 2 inside 15 min. I rest players and coast the whole second half to a 3-0 win. What follows is our US Open Cup Final away at Atlanta United. Gave up an early goal which is not good. It was a crazy first half that saw us go down 0-2 and then pull it back to go into half time 2-2. We each had a goal dissalowed and it was their 3rd goal that went unanswered even though we put all the pressure on them the second half. My strikers didn’t show up tonight I gambled on them both and not one of my AMLs and I think that backfired. I really need to get more of my players USA nationality. We just didn’t have it in us after that game and just absolutely fell apart in NYC losing 3-0. So many defensive errors coupled with our strikers both failing to finish again. But at least now we have a 3 week break before the Campeones Cup. Month Summary: September: After the busy August we get a much needed 2 week break to start September. This is the transfer window that killed me last time. But this time I made sure to save before I did transfers and I was able to get Parades without unregistering the squad. Also brought Ricardo Wagner in on loan a striker from Wolfsburg as we only have 2 forwards and could use the cover. He only costs what a SMS is and we have a free international slot so its no risk. If he does well he has a 625k release clause so that’s actually a price we could consider paying. Campanoes cup we lose to Monterey 2-0 with both goals being headers off long free kick plays with both Burki and Nilsson really letting down the team. We came back for a mid-week game against bad New England and we held onto a our lead to win 3-2 with some significant rotation Next was Minnesota at home. We had a couple minor injuries to our Welsh LB and Jamaican international DM, but both of their backups played great in the last game so I wasn’t worried. Both made their presence felt each setting up a goal in the first 2 minutes! Our defensive pressure on their buildup was unrelenting as we made it 4-0 in 18 minutes. In the second-half I tested some lesser used players and we held our margin to end up winning 5-1. October-November: October starts with a nice easy win against Vancouver before all my players head back to the Caribbean for World Cup Qualifiers End of Regular Season Standings: We played before the final day of the season so we had to wait and see what Austin FC would do. If they won their game against San Diego they would win the league. We repeat the Supporters Shield as well as get top-seed in our conference for the playoffs! MLS Playoffs: Semi-Final Since we won the division we enter in the Semi-Final round as the home side. We end up with San Jose, which used to be a big rival of ours, but we started the season knocking them out of the NACL and they didn’t have the dominance they had in the past. We get off to a great start as they register a straight red card in the 14th Minute! A great tackle by Stewart started a counter attack where he found J Lowe on the wing to get us a first half goal. A mistake by a defender got us an own goal in the second half for a very easy 2-0 win against 10 men. Onto the Division final! Funny the day after this game San Jose fired their head coach. Brutal. MLS Playoffs: Division Final We get Colorado in the Final, who were the lowest ranked of the playoff teams. Looking at the matches it seems Austin had a surprise 4-5 defeat in the first round to Portland losing in extra time. Happy days! We start the game with a major defensive error that gives them the first goal, but my main-man Bacuna comes up big with an equalizer just minutes later. Then in the 24’ James-Jules, who broke his hand the day before the match and is playing with a cast, shows why he’s the clubs leading goal scorer to give us the lead. He makes it a brace in the 40’ with the same wing combination from Aimsworth who is developing like crazy easily becoming one of our best players. Again a defensive lapse lets them pull one back. Their midfielder just dribbled through the whole team… They have 2 shots and 2 goals. But John-Jules don’t care dude pulls off his second first half hat-trick in the past month. But he doesn’t stop there as he finds a fourth in first half stoppage time! Monster. Even with his 4 goals I am pulling him at half time as I want him okay for the Final and he’s carrying an injury. I moved J Lowe up to striker and he showed he could work with Ainsworth making it 6 in the 51’. Again our defense is leaky as they pull one back right from kickoff. They are scoring about every shot they take. Our St Lucian CB Felix makes it 7 with a near post corner header. Geeze they get a 4th. 6 shots on target and 4 goals with 1.43 xG… It got even worse with them scoring every shot in the second half with 2 of their players getting Hat-Tricks. I kept trying to adjust but they just scored everything. We won 7-6 in what was a shambles second half. Highest scoring MLS Playoff Game on record. MLS Cup Final First half we were having all the chances and then their GK dribbled out and booted it long and apparently my 2 CBs and DM all couldn’t handle their solo striker who beat them all to score their only shot of the half. The stern halftime talk gets them fired up and in the 49’ J Lowe brings us level! Lots of chances for us in the second half with 2 headers going off the bar and out which was unfortunate. It ends 1-1 at full time so we go onto added time. 25 shots with 3.25 xG and we can’t get any to go in so we have to go to penalties, which is not our strong suit. Harper misses his 2nd kick so we are behind, but thankfully their 3rd taker just duffs it right to Burki so we are back in it! Our 4th and 5th takers both make it so it comes down to their final man who is carrying an injury. And Burki comes up huge with the stop and we win!! Clearly we should have put this away during the match, but our injured striker just wasn’t making it happen and I had to pull him in the second half and my chosen RW option didn’t deliver Summary: 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 26, 2023 Author Share Posted July 26, 2023 (edited) Season Review: 4 Trophies – 3 Domestic & The Continental Trophy And here’s my total Haul Post Season: Marshall Gets a Green Card! And Bacuna gets a green card! We’ve added the Haitian club AS Capoise as a Youth Affiliate to bring in the Caribbean Talent as Home Grown! I had the choice of Jamaican and Haitian clubs and looking back I should have picked Jamaica considering that's the ethnicity of the squad and would really fit the story better here. Hopefully this will help build up a really struggling Caribbean nation who didn't even make World Cup Qualifying. Transfer Targets Honestly the only spot I’d look for a true improvement would be at Striker as we are light there. Other than that, if a good deal on a CD appeared I’d go for it but unless people buy up my players I don’t see that active of a winter market. I’ll keep my eye out for expiring contracts to get people to join in June. 2026 MLS Draft FINALLY one of the Caribbean players in the amateur divisions is coming through and is actually rated well in the draft. He’s a player I’ve been watching literally since year one a LM from San Francisco and look at that we traded perfectly to have the 1st pick this season so we will get him! We also have the 17th pick so there’s a high probability we can pick up the Jamaican Striker as well. Attempt to Move to Europe: Applied to job adverts for top flight gigs in England, Spain Germany & The Netherlands. Most decided not to shortlist me, but Eintracht Frankfurt offered an Interview! Interview went well, and thankfully SLC didn’t sack me for it though they “hope I stay”. Honestly, if I don’t get Eintracht I probably will for another season as this team is set up really well for the MLS. 2 weeks later I get the message that I get to pick my staff! Looks like I can move to Germany. Almost wish I could draft, but honestly this will be better for the club. They will get to pick the best player as well as the 17th which should give them some young talent. \ They let me take a lot of my Caribbean specialty scouts with me and some random coaches, so here we go: And I accepted onto a fresh journey to really be the restart of this save and a real test of my statistical skills in picking players without seeing full ability values. Funny I beat out Wayne Rooney for the job who moved to Barnsley pretty early in my save where he's continued coaching: Edited July 26, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 26, 2023 Author Share Posted July 26, 2023 (edited) St Louis City Final Squad Summary Before I move on to Eintracht Frankfurt and really dig into the statistics of a truly underperforming team I want to take a minute and highlight my almost entirely Caribbean squad that has become back-to-back MLS Champions & North American Champions. For attribute screenshots I'll switch back to the vanilla skin to show the attributes as moving on to Frankfurt I'll be looking for fresh players. As an overarching comment it seems that if you can get players with 12-14 avg ability in the key attributes for their position they will be a leading player in the MLS. This fits with my assessment that if I could find average players in the English Championship they would easily be good enough to be starters in the MLS and put in better performances than they did in England. Once you begin signing ex-Premier League players their wage demands out-strip their ability and in Salary-Cap league its hard to make a good pickup. Full Squad: Original Players: 2 Roman Burki (GK) & Joakim Nilsson (CB). These two players are leading MLS players and out and out stars for this league. Roman Burki: He really has become inconsistent this final year at the ripe old age of 35. He still was good enough to stop the caliber of attacks faced in the MLS, but the decline is real and he probably would have been out had I decided to play on in the MLS. Part of that inconsistency are the two major injuries that have really slid-down his physical ability from his prime at the start of the save Joakim Nilsson: At 31 he is at his peak as a BPD and really was as good of a CB as one could hope for. The abilities are very balanced for a BPD without any real weaknesses. Players by Caribbean Nationality: Jamaican: By far our most common nationality with 12 of our 1st team players having either 1st or 2nd Jamaican Nationality. I’ll split them between those who play for Jamaica and then the rest who are secondary Jamaican. One general comment is I got a lot of these players from England with 4 English and 1 Welsh player. Alvas Powell was my best trade acquisition as he was already in the MLS, and then Alex Marshall I actually found in the Canadian Premier league and he just gained his Green Card when I left SLC. All of these guys have been actively playing for the Jamaican national team. Kevin Stewart is a good holding DM who has the physicality to win the ball and the mentals and skills to then act as a DLP to start our lethal counter attacks. Spoiler Jamal Lowe: he is having a true late career peek both for us and the national team. 6 goals in 5 games this year for Jamaica has gotten them up to 47th rank in the world. He is the perfect wide attacker for the MLS. Christopher Ainsworth: He is the only player I found in Jamaica and he is my starting Left Attacking Midfielder. Found him at 17, waited till 18 for him to join us and he’s had 2 great seasons in the MLS and has the potential to develop into a quick dribbling winger. He is the only player I would have considered bringing to Germany specifically because they have a major gap at his position but I'm glad to leave him in the US to see what kind of career he can have and if he can break into the national team. Rekeem Harper: This was a surprise cheap young pickup form the English Championship. He has developed and trained fantastically and was crucial when Ox-Cham got injured and didn’t play the back half of the season. As you can see he's still improving and I would not be surprised if English clubs come back in for him when I leave. Second Nationality: 3 Canadians all of whom weren’t first choices this final season. To be fair to Donneil Henry for my first 3 seasons he was a great efficient CB, he just declined too much physically this year to keep up. Buchannan came in just mid-season on a free so he never fully took over the first choice at AMR. Beaufort was a trade player that I picked up to begin building up cheap CB depth. Spoiler Oxlade-Chamberlain: The Ex-English international who is our lone remaining Designated Player. Considering he spent 30% of the season injured he never really fully delivered on what was promised. Easily the worst transfer I made all save as he is a huge wage cost and not delivering. Hopefully the next manager can get more out of him. Jay Dasilva: Another of the Summer Free-Transfers he is a great Complete Wingback that is probably too good for the MLS. He will be a great asset for the next manager. Haiti: Just 2 with one being on loan. I picked Fuente up for free this summer and he never really became a first choice as none of my wingers got injured this season and I have a ton of them. Dominican Republic: Again just 2 with one being a loane. Famila-Castillo really over-performed for his ability for us having constantly great seasons the whole save. I really think that speed saved him in our league. Curacao: Only one played with us for the whole season, but he’s my favorite player of the save Juninho Bacuna and he gained US 3rd nationality now so he counts as a domestic player. His skills are the MLS average across the board plus he's crazy adaptable so coudl fill lots of roles, but was a great CM(A) for us. The other Curacao player was Jeremy Antonisse but he is in the glut of wingers we have so mid-season I sent him to the Netherlands on loan: US Virgin Islands: Our Backup GK Austin, who was crucial for us last season when Burki was injured. This year he only played 10 games when Burki hurt his wrist at the start of the season. It has been really hard to find Caribbean GKs and he was the only one I could get into the club from the Tottenham youth program. He was fine, but nothing special. Dominica: Our critical striker T John-Jules. He led the line expertly and has signed a great new deal for himself graduating from his development contract for a full deal. 24 goals in 32 games is all you can ask for from your striker. He came out of the Arsenal youth system and really found his league in the MLS. St Lucia: Joel Felix was a great mid-season pickup and I credit at getting us over the line in winning this season. He picked up for a failing D. Henry. Great find player in the Danish top-flight who has a much cheaper salary than the French CBs. He's got the same balanced ability that is the theme of these players I brought in. Edited July 26, 2023 by WhiteCat33 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 28, 2023 Author Share Posted July 28, 2023 Eintracht Frankfurt Hire Stein! This year has been rough on the 2022 Europa League Champions who languish down in 12th place in the Bundesliga. However, there is only a 4 point gap to Wolfsburg in 6th place, so making it into Europe for next year, though ambitious, is totally possible. Thankfully the board put forward a super easy requirement for me to 'avoid relegation' with the target of mid-table. And actually 2 of those 5 wins came from their interim manager who changed to a more offensive 4-2-3-1 from the previous managers 5-3-2 and it seemed to pay off. Bodes well for me coming in the morale isn't totally shot at the club. Surprisingly it's really just this season that they are struggling as last year Eintracht reached the Conference League final League losing to Marseille. They still have a good core of the squad together and are objectively better than St Louis (who I will try to make an affiliate btw). The AI really hasn’t done much transfer damage to the club and most of the 2022 Europa League winning squad is still together. Looking at their transfer activity its been pretty mild with their acquisitions with the only surprise to me is the two Americans Timothy Weah & George Bello. (This Year) (Last Year) So how big are the Squads? Like always the AI has a very large team of an almost unbelievable 87 players across all 3 squads! First team has 29 players lots of whom are older players. Spoiler Second Team is full of Useless players bloating out to 29, of which at most 1/3 are worth keeping. Spoiler And then the U19 squad has 30 players with 3/4 being totally pointless! Let the Purge begin. Spoiler Transfer Activity by January 23rd: It will take a few transfer windows to clear out the bloat but I made a dent with the easy releases and cheap sales that can be made. Notable Transfers Out: In addition I was able to sell or loan-out with optional sales a number of first team depth to build up wage and transfer budget: Also out of nowhere OM came in with a 7.5M up-front fee for the underperforming George Bello. Considering I wanted to upgrade wingbacks anyways that was an easy decision as he has a 10M release clause so there’s not much more upside on keeping him. And then everyone wanted Rafael Santos Borre on loan, but man Sporting KC in the MLS took the cake with offering to pay his whole wage + 133k p/m. Yes please. Transfer offers were only for like 3M so getting about half of that in a loan is pretty good. Nice little factoid there with his winning penalty. Another loan out this time with an optional future fee is a young winger Faride Alidou. Again another lesser right footed winger which we have a ton of. We will get almost 3M if he sells which is not bad And got a nice random 1.3M for an old signing Transfers In: Tottenham have a WB-R Djed Spence who Chicago had on loan as a designated player last year, and even with them barely making playoffs he played well in the league with a team that had a pretty lackluster offense for him to combine with. My hope is he can play well for us as an attacking threat this year. We have an optional 6.5M buy option on him, which is reasonable enough that if he performs I’ll be doing it. He qualifies as he has Jamaican 3rd nationality At LB my first choice is a Man United player who I can get as a free agent in the summer instead of paying 12M for him. He had a couple options and chose us! He will have a 19M release clause and a high salary (for us) of 70k but he should be a fantastic wingback only issue is he will be for next season and we just sold one of our 2 LBs. So I need to find a loan for the other wing. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 28, 2023 Author Share Posted July 28, 2023 (edited) 2024-2025 Performance Analysis With all these players, it was important to see how they performed last year when they actually did okay making to a European Final. and to do this I used my excel analysis tool. Since it helps me to write it out I'll just attach the pdf of the word doc I wrote up for myself. Because of this I had to add another post here due to it exceeding the attachment size. 2024-2025 Bundesliga Statistics.pdf Squad Strengths: Center Defenders: Even though some have under-performed transitioning from a 5 at the back formation gives us lots of depth of CBs. This is where 2 of their big money signings contribute to the team. Only issue is a lot are over 30 so we will need to begin building a development pipeline. Defensive Midfield: Another big transfer the club brought in Promel and again he's old at 31, but looks like a great DM. We also have Jakic who will be a good alternative as well as a second BWM. Playmaker: Djibril Sow is the only player who is rated high by the league and is the key assist provider for the team. Slots in perfectly for my AP role. Wingers: Kamada and Hauge are the true star players of the team and both are top quality and totally flexible attacking midfielders who are naturals for the winger positions I want to use them in. Squad Weaknesses: Wing Backs: Both Left & Right wingbacks are totally underperforming with the only good WB having already been transfered out by the club before I joined. First priority in the transfer window is to replace these players. Goalkeeper: Our starter is 35 years old and while he is fine for this year, this is a ticking timebomb especially due to the restriction of only Caribbean players. Natural Goal Scorer: The difficult task is to find that #9 who just lives to score goals. We have great midfielders, especially for our playmaking and midfielders, and a few older Strikers who have failed to score for multiple seasons. The starter is Randal Kolo Muani, who really hasn't had a good career for Eintracht after the initial season. I will give him a chance because its really hard to find Bundesliga leading caliber Caribbean strikers that we can afford. Edited July 28, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 28, 2023 Author Share Posted July 28, 2023 (edited) January Matches There are 4 matches this month to ease us into our new role. We start with an easy friendly, unfortunately it’s the only one before the league starts back up so the team is still learning my formation First match in charge of Eintracht is away at Hoffenheim, which is actually a pretty reasonable first match. They play a defensive 5-3-2, so should match up well with my wingplay 4-3-3. LB is still injured (with Bello gone) and my DM is suspended otherwise its my first choice team. Still trying Kolo Muani as the striker, but he was bad in the friendly. He proved me wrong scoring inside 5 minutes assisted by Kamada playing as the AML. A defensive issue between my GK and FB results in their equalizer. Another defensive issue gets them the 2nd goal. Gave Pfieffer a chance as he’s worth a ton and supposably good, but I think I’ll move back to the two I like better next match. We had an easy matchup against Ausburg, but I couldn’t get my offense going. Kamada is a beast but his services are to strikers who can’t finish. Good to see my new FB had a great combination with the BPD. Third match away at Freiburg Kamada shows why he’s the star of the squad getting a goal 10’ in when he beats his man. We dominated the first half, but they scored a long range FK to bring it level. In the second half we were creating chances generating 3 clear cut opportunities but we don’t have a natural finisher up top to put them away, so it’s a second draw. Edited July 28, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 28, 2023 Author Share Posted July 28, 2023 End of January & February Transfers after Jan 23: I brought in the Jamaican National team striker Shamar Nicholson who I have been following for a while in St Louis as he played in Russia. He pairs up top with J Lowe from my previous team for the Jamaican national team. Together the both of them have been fire in North America succeeding in getting Jamaica into the 2026 World Cup! Hopefully he can be a cheap backup striker option for now while I look for the real big striker. Jerry St. Juste is just crushing it in the Portuguese league and we can pick him up on an end of contract free. With one of our CBs 33 he will be a direct replacement there and being able to play DM he can move between the two as well as cover RB. He is fast, which I really like. I tried to go for Marital from Man United, and though I could get a transfer financed his salary demands were just too insane for us to set up. Unfortunate as he would have been the answer to our striking problem, but hopefully I can limp through this season with my cheap Jamaican pickup. February matches: Match 1: Wolfsburg at Home Wolfsburg is first up. Same team from the last match just switch Kolo Muani into an AF instead of DLF and turned my playmaker into AP-A so hopefully that pushes more offensive. First half didn’t have very many chances or possession. Changed some of the position instructions and dropped us back to balance. Second half we played better with a few chances but most of my attacking players got tired and needed replacing. By the 75’ I had brought on Lindstrom and my Jamaican striker Nicholson from Russia and what do you know in the 79’ he breaks the deadlock and scores just minutes into his debut! We hold out for the last bit of the match and record our first win as Eintracht manager against the team who were in the final conference league position when we took over. We travel to Berlin to play 14th play Union. Before this match I've tweaked the formation to be more offensive with a Mezzala-Attack and AP-Support as well as a Pressing Forward to push harder on their back-line. Here is the current formation set up: And it shows pretty good coverage across the pitch in what is a very balanced system. Match 2 Union Berlin Away: Our LB gets injured early, so has to get substituted. Then in the 39’ Kolo Muani finds himself wide open on a counter attack by Hauge’s cross and he puts it away to give us a 1-0 lead going into halftime. Was literally the only attacking highlight for either team. With the lead I gave Kamada and Sow our two key players who are tired and brought on the more defensive Jakic and will give Paulo a chance at AML. Then in the 65’ their defender makes a clumsy challenge in the box gifting us a penalty! Hauge steps up, and buries it in the corner. 2-0! 75’ they pull one back when we leave a midfielder unmarked at the top of the box and he scores a long shot. We tighten up for the final 15 with some fresh defenders. And they almost find an equalizer in the 84’ but luckily he was a hair offsides and its disallowed. We hold out and win a second game! Bad news is we lose our LB again who seems to be real injury prone. Will have to use a RB on that side for now, luckily my sub played well actually. And it gets worse when in training I lose my veteran GK for the rest of the month. And then my playmaker is out with a virus. Will give a lot of depth players a chance in a relatively easy game against Koln Match 3 - Home vs FC Koln To handle the missing players I move Kamada into the Mezzala role and give Weah a chance at AML. In the 15’ Kamada breaks free from midfield and beats the GK 1v1 to give us an early lead. However, Koln equalize in the 22’ due to a poor clearance by Pomell combined with him letting his mark run past him gave them a clear chance. Sadly our young backup GK failing to make the stop. 54’ again they got a 1 v 1 chance from an inadequate clearance and my young backup did not do well in stopping it. He has made some saves today but not enough. I need to work on my corner set plays because we had 14 corners and couldn’t get a goal out of any of them. Another minor knock adds to our short term injury list. While it's not an issue long term it will make our game against Shalke difficult. Match 4: Shalke Away Head to Shalke with Kamada again as Mezzala and trying my other backup GK. Both these guys will be getting replaced probably over the summer. They score in 30 seconds… thankfully its disallowed. They have more chances and finally in the 34’ they get one in. My RB just didn’t’ mark his man sitting on the far post. Then another play dribbles 5 players who never tackle him and he scores… Second half isn’t much better with another FB mistake this time on the right letting them in uncontested to goal. Very poor defending today combined with a lethargic attack. Match Summary: We've played our first 2 months in Frankfurt and have a very average 2-2-3 in competitive fixtures. We won't get fired for this performance, but its not good enough to challenge for European positions. At least I can say only the Shalke game was a true disaster, we were in it for the other games even if we didn't have the lethal final third required to get wins. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 29, 2023 Author Share Posted July 29, 2023 (edited) March Matches Match 1: VFB Stuttgart Away We head to 5th place Stutgart to start the month before any intake. Spoiler Starts dreadful with Heintz giving them a penalty which Kastanaras converts. He makes it a brace as he gets perfectly behind my back line and makes us look silly at the back. We lose 2-0 in a deserved loss. We underscored again and should have pulled 1 back with the chances we had in the second half. Match 2: Bayern Munich Home Net we have our home game vs Bayern. I didn't expect to get much out of this match. Boy was I surprised! Spoiler We do okay for the majority of the first half but in the 35’ Sane finds Gnabry on the far post to give Bayern the lead. I make a couple changes including giving Weah a chance for the underperforming and angry Haugue and he does the unbelievable and sets up Lindstrom for a goal in the 66’! Was the second phase of a broken corner play where he found himself unmarked, totally against the run of play. After this they switch to a nasty 4-2-4 Narrow so its time to tighten up and weather this. They are giving us more opportunities on the counter and we are actually getting good chances unfortunately Kolo Muani is nervous and struggling and my Jamaican is out sick this week. I am tempted to sub him, but I stick it out and in the 85’ I am rewarded with Weah again having an amazing impact wins the ball off Grotzeka slotting the ball to Kolo Muani who got behind the lines and he places it top left corner!!!! We hold them off and pull off an unbelievable upset at home. We are Bayern’s second loss of the season. Weah has his best game ever for us. Match 3 RB Leipzig Home: Spoiler We’ve got another tough match against Leipzig but luckily its at home again. First half we are looking dangerous, which is great the players seem to be handling the pressure from Leipzig well. We go into halftime level and neither team having a true advantage. I push the team with a stern talk and it seems to work as in the 52’ again one of our short throw plays finds an unmarked Kolo Muani who heads it over the GK who didn’t come out quick enough. We had the lead in the 92 min but a bad backpass got their poacher in behind and they equalized. I’m pissed, we were robbed of our upset. Youth Intake As a YAC player I always get excited for the Intake, and actually this one was very good for us arriving mid-season. We have a potential star player in Simon Geisler accompanied by 5 good talents who are primarily all offensive players to form a good domestic base for our next generation development. Due to how bad the Caribbean is for generating players our youth academy will be critical for generating our future talent. Thus, I will be doing everything to maximize the facilities. This year I was able to do both Youth Recruitment and Junior Coaching one level. Both will need many more upgrades. Geisler: He’s a CAM who is right footed, but he seems to start with high Bravery and okay finishing, flair and speed. Could play like Kamada as the IW-A especially if I can make him a lethal finisher. Tom Balsfrenser: Sadly he’s slower but seems very technically skilled and has great consistency. David Geisler: A small high flair and teamwork Wingback. Will need serious work developing his defensive abilities as well as his dribble/passing, but has the speed I like on the wings. Ben Hagner: Not the greatest mix without finishing speed or consistency. Albert Adams: Can’t finish but otherwise has an appealing mix of attributes and mentality for a Pressing Forward. Hopefully he gets a little taller as well. And finally Mertin Arslan: A reflexive Goalkeeper. Transfers Looking around the best GK I can find who is reasonably young is a Cuban GK in the Spanish 2nd Division Christian Joel Sanchez. He has a 2.1M Release clause, which I will just be paying as after the GK debacle when Tropp got injured I need a good quality backup who should be able to take over in the near-term till I can develop a young GK. He has performed well in the Spanish 2nd division especially considering his club was never top 3. Last Year Performance in Tool: Unfortunately for whatever reason when I took the data snapshot even though it has the seasonal data the league change has occurred so the top 3 teams aren’t in the 2nd division but in LaLiga so the Top-3 part of my analysis wont work. Instead, the better comparison here will be against all Tier 2 leagues in the Big 5, a few of which are loaded. Since each team generally has just 1 GK in the database this gives a large pool of 92 GKs. Part 1: Even with lower minutes than the average he does pretty well in the ratio of Handle to Parry showing decent hands. Most importantly he has a very good xGP of .25 /90 showing good 1v1 and shot stopping ability. 8 Shutouts is very good for 1112/90 = 12.4 matches. Part 2: As you can see there are some data-issues here as we are missing Blocks & Saves/90. However his low Allowed with good Clean sheets is great to me. Only downside is he played in a lower division, but at least he seems to be a totally dominant GK in said division. This year Performance: Looking at his seasonal statistics for this year we see he’s continued to dominate with an astounding 50% shutout record domestically. And then even with Cuba he managed a shutout and their team isn’t very good in my save. No surprise he is their highest rated player. He chose us! International Window Even though it is against weak opposition I love to see Hauge & Nicholson having a good game or two for their countries. The real surprise is Sow has gotten some good time for Switzerland setting up an assist against Korea. Jamaica: I forgot to highlight how well Jamaica has done this year as they are the lone Caribbean Nation to qualify for the World Cup! They lost to the USA 1-0 in the Gold Cup Semi Final last summer, which was their only loss of the year. I the fall they came out big to finish top of the WCQ group with El Salvador, Honduras and Curacao which is no small feat especially going undefeated. You'll notice in how many games S. Nicholson scores this past year in the international matches, this was the key reason I chose him as my short-term 2nd choice striker. Even though he didn't do so well in Russia this level of consistent scoring internationally (even against North American teams) is impressive. Edited July 29, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 29, 2023 Author Share Posted July 29, 2023 (edited) April Matches During the international break we lose our striker who has finally started performing. With Kolo Muani injured my Jamaican striker Nicholson gets the start, otherwise it's our regular first team for this big night Derby match. Spoiler Nicholson got a chance very early that he duffed to the GK, but at the 5’ mark he got a second where he broke through the defensive line and Kamada hit the perfect pass to him which he put it in the corner to shock with an early lead! Then there were literally no highlights (I have it on extended as well) for the rest of the first half until a 45+1 corner for Mainz, but we easily delth with it to go into halftime up 1-0. We are doing fine in the 2nd half until the 65 when our loane Spence shoves their striker in the box gifting them a penalty. Burkhardt steps up and Trapp guesses correctly and stops the 1st and 2nd shot!! Then my defense clears it away. They switch to an offensive 3-4-3 and we switch to more defensive CMs to counter and we hold them to win 1-0! ' Match 2: BMG at Home Unfortunate injury to our playmaker. I’ll use Jakic to replace him and dropping him into a DLP roll due to his more defensive abilities. Other change is for my right back Buta instead of the loanee, who struggled recently. Spoiler 3’ we get them on an end-to-end play. Trapp stopped their attempt over the top and instantly began the counter attack finding Nicholson’s head who heads it over the backline to Kamada who slotted Lindstrom running forward on attack out of the midfield to get us an early lead. Kamada picks up an injury early but wants to continue so I’ll let him for now, but BMG finds a back-post header to draw level with us so we need to keep pushing. We let in a 2nd as they keep pushing everyone forward on us. They injure another player this time my CB so I’ll have to sub him at halftime. Second half we had the shots and chances but couldn’t seem to find the back of the net. Until the 91’ when Lindstrom (who I’d moved to Striker) just one man beat their defense to get us an equalizer. He then almost got us the win with a free kick finding Pommel who just hit it over the bar. Match 3: Hertha Berlin Away Sow is back from injury so he is back in the starting lineup with Nicholson still up top. Spoiler 17’ they get up on us with a cross where my 3 defenders couldn’t out head their solo striker. They make it 2 on a near post corner. Really disappointing half where they just totally dominated us. Halftime has 3 switches and a very stern team talk, hopefully it changes something. While we had a couple chances it really wasn’t much better in the second half until the 73’ when Jakic just blasted it at the goal and the deflections went our way. And then in the 88’ it was Spence who was a halftime sub who does the same blasting the ball and the ricochet going our way. We put lots of late pressure on Hertha, but couldn’t find a winner. Totally okay as we stole this point away from Hertha. Match 4: Home vs Bayer Leverkusen No changes to the lineup. Spoiler 3’ Hauge hits a wicked cross to Kamada but he’s a step early and its disallowed. Very few highlights in the half and in stoppage time Kamada gets injured and has to come off. In the second half Lindstrom has multiple chances 1v1 with the GK but he can’t put any away. This time its an unlucky draw, we had lots of shots that actually generated decent xG, but just couldn’t break through Leverkusen. Even worse than the draw we lose Kamada for the final two games of the season May Matches Penultimate Match: Brousia Dortmund – Away We have Kamada out injured and Kolo Muani only partially fit, so we are using our Brazilian M. Paulo as the AML with the rest of the regular starters. Only formation tweaks is to make my midfield less aggressive and defense take less risks. Spoiler 5 min in and we have done the impossible with Lindstrom and Sow combining from the midfield to slot a bar far post past Kobel! Unfortunately the jubilation is short lived with Moukoko beating my injured winger to set up a nasty long distance strike. Then a 22’ corner finds Schlotterbeck on the far post and he beats Trapp. We start having some momentum and then Hague makes an awful slide tackle from behind getting a straight red – our first as manager. Dude has been angry for a month now wanting to triple his contract, and has been really inconsistent since. I move to a 4-2-2-1 Narrow with center attack focus bringing on a prospect Wenig who has been a regular midfielder sub to replace Paulo who already was injured. Then in the 45+1 Sow yet again works his magic this time finding Nicholson running through the lines and he finishes to bring us level at halftime! Well 2nd half we get burned by Moukoko again whose speed gets him behind my defense no problem. While they have significantly more chances than us we did pretty decently actually holding possession and getting the ball forward. In added time Nicholson actually almost got a brace, but was a step offside this time. Still he had a great game for us. Final Match: Home vs SV Werder Both my CBs have to serve a suspension for yellow card accumulation as well as Hauge for his red card last match so a good amount of rotation to end the season. Let's me give the retiring Mustafi a final game, ended up being a mistake. Spoiler Very dull game, with only 2 highlights in the first half neither of which were real chances at goals. Unfortunately its Mustafi that causes them to score a goal as he doesn’t track back on a ball over the top. I sub out my attacking 3 and we start seeing more highlights and chances but sadly none connect and we really didn’t play that well today missing so many key starters. Bummer end to the season. Edited July 29, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 29, 2023 Author Share Posted July 29, 2023 (edited) End of Season Summary What do you know, my Jamaican Striker gets signing of the season, 4 goal contributions in 11 matches is okay. Only player who competed with him is Promel, who is a better player and admitidly we were much more vulnerable when he wasn't available than if Nicholson wasnt. Board didn't really like our transfers out, but we needed the funds. If FC Twente don't activate the option to buy Ragnar Ache he might get the bump up to our bench to sell off Weah and Paulo who really weren't that great for us. Borre is doing well in the MLS and will be on loan through December, but will provide good cover when he returns in the winter. The end of season losses and draws mean we finish just midtable at 11th getting 50M in prize money. We really struggled at the end of the season to close out games. For our games in charge we had a 5-6-6 record, which is disappointing. Really thought I could do better than 50%. Shocked that our home win against Bayern Munich isn't the highlighted game, though the win in Berlin was a good one I guess. Squad sorted by Minutes Played. No player had better than a 7 avg rating, which makes sense when you look at our record for the year. Still not happy about it. Supporters Budgets Luckily, we get almost 20M to play with for the summer window all of which I will be using towards signing a striker as I've managed to get my depth players already for mostly free. Might try again at Marital, maybe even on just a loan deal if Man U will accept a partial salary. Club Vision Edited July 29, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted July 30, 2023 Author Share Posted July 30, 2023 2025 - 2026 Season Statistics for Eintracht Frankfurt Weird Variable Changes by SI since the April Update: I'm not sure why but in the most recent update some statistics have been dropped by SI as well as names changed for some of the variables. This is why I have been getting #REF! errors in my spreadsheet as the variables I set for each position summary table is hardcoded. I have to go back through and change these if I want this missing data / replace it with similar data. Lost Statistics: This year SI added Open Play Cross Attempts & Completions / 90 Min, which like open play key passes is key to evaluate open play performance of players who also take dead balls. For whatever reason this statistic has been removed as far as I can tell. Not the end of the world, as I will just revert to using Cross Attempts & Completitions / 90, but it will skew the crossing data for players like Kamada and Hauge who also take some wide free kicks and corners. Hdrs L/90 seems to be gone. It was the 3rd variable in the set: AER A/90 ; HDRS W/90 ; HDRS L/90. It also is the denominator in the Hdrs% variable, which is the ratio of Headers Won / Headers Lost. I can easily recreate this variable: Aerial Attempts - Headers Won = Headers Lost. I will be doing this as I like having this number to see the aerial liability of a player. Shts Blckd/90 was a more specific sub-statistic of BLK/90 to show which of the blocks would have registered as shots vs just pass/crosses. I liked it for CBs. Renamed Statistics: Crs C/90 --> Cr C/90: Weirdly they removed the "s" from just the created but left "Crs A/90" as is. Pres C/90 --> Pres C: Another weird inconsistency as this is for all I can tell still the per 90 statistic, but it has lost the /90 part of the name. Even more bad (from a data perspective) is that Pres A/90 was left unchanged, so now they aren't matching variables. Conv % --> Conversion Rate (%) : Okay, didn't see an issue with the abbreviation but whatever. Data Setup As a reminder my filter for players is just: 1) Club playing for (will include loan players) is in Tier 1 - 3 Leagues in Germany, France, Spain, Italy Or England ; 2) Played 1000 Minutes. This table shows the breakout of players. Important to note here I only get 14 Eintracht players who hit 1000 minutes across the season. I have a way to get the statistics for the full squad with a secondary database, and might showcase that in a follow up post. Pretty simple I select the League and Club as well as what I am setting for the minimum values to take for selective sample averages. The two are "Minutes Played" and "Average Rating". With this setup "Minutes Played" isn't any different than the whole sample of players as 1000 minutes was my selection criteria. *Note that the "Position" is what gets cycled for each summary table & players in position to be pulled to the master page. These are what I screenshot. I break out average statistics for the Top 3 teams in the league as well as I like to head-to-head compare players from the top 3 teams to my teams and this will color code them for me for easy visual comparisons. Part 1: Defense I've already done a lot of free-transfer activity in January when the 6-month player steal window opened. Most importantly I found 2 new starters in Jery St. Juste and Tyrell Malacia. Watching his performance & development Rico Browne was a mistake, but the others all represent young talent that my scouts rated with high potential & did decent playing in their respective leagues in North America. Right Back: Determine if Djed Spence is worth the $6.5M USD optional fee to purchase from Tottenham. If he isn't worth the money then I need to decide if I want to give Cedric Brunner [32] a contract extension for FB Depth. St. Juste is fast and could play RB if I need him to. Center Back: I have a big deal free-transfer CB coming in from Portugual so I need to decide who is the best CB to try as the starter to pair with him. I'll have 5 CBs after this with 3 over 30. Might look to sell one or two of these to begin featuring younger talent in the rotation. Left Back: No real choices here, my other big free-transfer will be my starting LB, we sold Bello already for a nice 7.5M and my current LB Lenz [31] has 1 year left on his deal, and will be fine as my backup. Spence wasn't very good. His only positive statistics are in winning Possession and Interceptions and dribbles. However I do remember him losing the ball quite often when he was dribbling so that makes me think I should have the Possesion/Loss variable up here, which is missing. Brunner wasn't much better, only additional statistic he had was Blocks/90. My Decision: Toss Both RBs Back into the Sea! What to do: ??? [I'll table this and come back] The statistics for our 3 must used CDs look pretty good. Below the Top 3 teams for the most part, but above the Bundesliga average. Freidrich was our 3rd choice and least used CB so most of his statistics come from his time with the previous manager. He still did okay aerially with good progressive passes, key tackles and interceptions. Pfeiffer is our most expensive CB, who has speed on the others. Unfortunately, he is very poor at tackling, pressing and blocking. For playing as a BPD he did surprisingly poor in Progressive passes, which I thought that would be encouraged in that role. Heintz is getting old at 31 and it shows with a pretty lackluster performance this season. Even with the large depth at CB we have a staggering underperformance here from what are fairly expensive senior players. I want to make changes here. Of the 1500 natural Carribean natural CDs 27 or younger there are a few that are liked by my scouts: I only have 20M total transfer budget, so I need to be careful on how much I spend on CDs especially considering my much-needed Striker upgrade. Two of these players were in the Bundesliga: Reece Oxford (Ausberg) and Killian Sildillia (Freiburg), so are easy to look at in direct comparison to my CBs as they both played over 1000 minutes for their clubs. Important to note that Ausburg was relegated, and Freiburg is in the relegation playoff, so it's questionable if I want to "strengthen" my defense with players from teams that failed in our league. But its also possible I can get them for cheap if the clubs need to make sales to balance budgets in Bundes 2. Kiliann Sidillia lost a crazy amount of possession, which makes me think he was played as a RB or maybe he just really sucks with the ball. Reece Oxford seems just okay with his standout statistic being winning possession a lot, much better than our CBs. Otherwise he doesn't seem to be an upgrade. Neither qualify as upgrades Jorrel Hato played in the French Ligue 2 and is under contract with Ajax. The most expensive player, he also has the highest potential. He played almost 3000 minutes this season so his statistics will be robust. Even better Troyes were the champions this year, so he was on a successful defense even if he ended up with a low average rating. French Ligue 2 CD Statistics: An important comment here is to remind that here we have comparisons at the Tier 2 level of the Big 5 European leagues, so its somehwat of an 'apples and oranges' to compare with how my players did in the Bundesliga. Better to see how he ranks among the French T2 and overall T2 CDs. Jorrel Hato: Honestly, he didn't preform that well on a relative basis to the other Ligue 2 CDs. Not enough to justify such a high transfer fee hoping he will reach that potential. We strike out again at Center Defender upgrades. Time to head back to Bundesliga to finish our Defensive Statistics. If someone comes in with a decent offer for Lenz I'll take it. I'd rather play an 18 year old who will get similarly bad statistics but at least improve his abilities and value than a sub-par 31 year-old. I'm thinking about the youth intake players I have a high potential RB who could learn to play on the left who comes with good mobility attributes. 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WhiteCat33 Posted July 30, 2023 Author Share Posted July 30, 2023 Part 2: Midfield 3 (DM & CM) To be completely transparent I have no intention of changing around my midfield 3 right now. The 3 I ended the season with had a good working triangle going and I have lots of depth in the squad here even with Kamada playing as a wide Attacking Midfielder. I have 3 higher potential U20 Midfielders already in my squad, who are ready for more gametime. Wenig was the rotation/backup this year, Pieper is Driven and improving fantastically in the 2nd team, and Geisler is from the most recent intake class and will be a great future attacking midfielder. I've selected them in the screenshot: Pongracic I under-utilized last season, but he could do well to replace the depth of aging underperforming CDs and right backs. He got the preliminary callup for the Chech World Cup squad, but was dropped from the final roster. In my spring between-window transfer activity I just found two prospective midfielders to add to the development pipeline. Joseph comes directly out of Jamaica, so a good chance he won't have the potential required but he played well and its a cheap risk to take. Defensive Midfielder Grischa Promel was the main starter at DM for us with Kristijan Jakic filling in if he was suspended / had a knock. Djibril Sow is a natural at DM, but he played exclusively as a CM as our playmaker so I'll ignore him here. this is skewed by Sow who was our main Assist generator. I'm not surprised both Promel and Jakic have low statistics here as both played DM-D and were really all about being that holding anchor between the defense and midfield. They did create some chances here and there, but not much really stands out. Center Midfielders Unfortunately Jesper Lindstrom doesn't count as a CM so we can't see his statistics here. Sow was a great playmaker for us doing his job creating chances for the strikers many of which are progressive passes showing he's looking for those balls forward. His defensive statistics aren't the greatest as well as his finishing, which is why he's the playmaker and not the Center mid Attack. Kamada isn't really fair to evaluate here as he played maybe 1 or 2 games in the midfield and spent the rest as the AML-IW. Center Attacking Midfielders Kamada and Lindstrom don't have natural ability in the position where I play them, so they don't show up in the statistics. It's a major limitation of my tool, but there's no other way get reliable statistics. Since both are really CAMs it makes sense to compare them here. The way I play both of them should give reasonable comparison to the CAM role. You just will expect Kamada to have higher crosses and movement being out on the wing. Lindstrom is really just playing as a deeper starting CAM with his CM-A role. Overall these are great numbers especially considering we ended up finishing 11th and my CAM players are in-line with the top 3 clubs. Interestingly both my players are low on their "Chances Created / 90", but from a scoring perspective they are right on target with the top 3 team midfielders. In my opinion the difference between xA and Assists here is not reflective of the skill of these two CAMs but the lack of conversion of our strikers. The fact that Kamada is creating 0.3 xA / 90 he is producing just a stupid amount of chances for our team. If we can get a striker to convert both of these players chances man we will be golden. Something to note the KP vs Open Play KP showcases how corners and free-kicks skew data. This is why i'm bummed OP-Crosses is gone. Lindstrom is putting up some great shooting numbers, which is what you want to see for a CM-A. Kamada is just okay, but that doesn't surprise me, he creates chances that I need Hauge to start finishing more like we were getting in St Louis. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted August 1, 2023 Author Share Posted August 1, 2023 (edited) June 2026 Activity This is the first true summer transfer to begin rebuilding the squad with the "power" of Caribbean players, so there's a lot that happened. Also its the 2026 World Cup with the Group - Round of 16 happening this month. Lots to do! Scouting & Transfer Activity: Janis Antiste: Versatile attacker at Suassalo who hasn’t renewed his contract so I could get on a free and he’s 22. He’s basically average at everything, with only light gametime but my scouts really like what they see in him. I put on a tight 10 M release clause and he agreed to a cheaper 25k p/w contract compared to the 35-40 most of the Bundesliga quality Attackers want. It's okay if he gets sniped at 10M as it will go into the transfer fund to buy the real future star we’ll need. He might even improve with gametime being so young, so I'm happy to pick him up. With this, I’ve decided to send Weah out on loan as French and English clubs will pay his whole wage + a small fee to take him for the year. I accepted the 4 most lucrative one’s. He will get more gametime in England in the Championship, but we get paid less so I decided to let him decide He went with Montpellier: Additionally testing the waters with Paulo (my other underperforming winger) got us a nice 5M structured bid from FC Koln, which I was going to accept but then I saw we have to pay him 1.8M loyalty plus another 745k to him and A Madrid so we literally won’t get anything this year, just 2.5M over 3 years… While he was almost always a sub, he still didn’t make a single goal contribution in 24 appearances and he had an expectation of .2 assists p/G. Even though we don’t end up with much money its probably good to get him out of the club as his contract is till 2030 and takes a lot of wage. We bought him for 2.4M, so its at least not a loss financially. Hopefully our atacking transfers are better than what the AI did here. Defenders Still?? I’m still looking at RBs as I’m not sure who the best investment is for 4-6M. Livano Comenencia at PSV is another viable option in our price range: Sadly he isn’t that much better than what we have even playing on the 2nd best team in The Netherlands even though my scouts love him. There’s interest in him so the agent feels PSV will want between 11-14M, which is too rich for the performance he displayed in the league last year. The next is Yvann Macon who is the RB for AJ Auxerre who finished 12th in France Ligue 1, so very midtable. Interestingly though he has some very appealing attacking statistics as well as great Interceptions and Blocks. At 27 he’s right in his prime and I think is the man for next season. I fought AJ Auxere down on the transfer price from 8 all up front to 6.5 structured. I did a split 50% now 50% over 2 years and they accepted. Pay the same as what it costs for the loanee, but structured it so there is more room in the current transfer budget. And I think he’ll perform better especially offensively. Continuing at RB there is a player who fits just on a ‘cheap depth’ option even though he hasn’t played much is Shurandy Sambo who has been as PSV in Eredevesie but has his contract expiring this month, so is available on a free. You'll notice he is the 2nd choice to Livano Comenencia above, but instead of paying 11M I can get him for 0. He had a good loan season at Sparta Rotterdam and then in the B team the first two seasons of the save, but hasn’t seen any action in the PSV first team since. At 24 he’s young and even better will accept a very low salary and playtime request (Emergency Backup), so should provide cheap cover who will be happy enough as a rotation option for Macon until my 16-year-old intake players are ready to challenge for 1st team time. His 3 negatives are in the hidden attributes of: High competitive (cards), Injury prone & dislikes big matches. At least he’s consistent? 13.5k is higher than I expected, but still not that expensive in comparison to Macon and finishes our RB recruitment. At Left Back: I got some offers of 2.4M for Lenz (which I goosed to 2.8M) who would be our 31 year old #2 LB next year, so I went to the market to see what I could get for free to provide depth to make that little profit on him. Jean-Kevin Duverne is a CB who can play on the Left in a defensive role. Only a few matches last year, but has been a regular in Ligue 1 for years. And best of all with a low 5M release clause (his highest transfer ever was 2.8M so seems fair) he will agree to a low 19.5k p/w wage, which is half that of Lenz. So financially it makes sense even if his wrong-footed and lack of crossing will require adjustment tactically if I play him. I’ll watch for loans in the summer and probably bring someone in for depth as I don’t have a good LB prospect at the club yet. I’m being a little risky here, but we have lots of defenders to cover the gap. Potentially another Attacker? Georgino Rutter at Hoffenheim is a possibility for us and the scouts like him. Unfortunately, he didn’t play well for Hoffenheim last season and would be at least 10M to pickup, so I’ll keep looking. Just thought its worth putting him in here as he’s an example of one of the better options I’ve found from a scouting perspective, but he doesn't have the statistical performance to justify putting out that high a percent of our transfer budget. A better value is the Swiss international Ruben Vargas from Ausburg as they got relegated and he would only cost 6M to pick up as he’s pissed to be dropped down a division. Even playing for a bad team, he had a really high xG and Shots 90, but very low assist ratings and crosses. My guess is he played as an IF for Ausburg, which is what I plan to do next season, but best part is he's natural at both wide AM positions, so can be cover for both Kamada and Hauge. Only issue is the Game-Time. He will want to be an Important player and Hauge will get first choice in the hope he performs like he did when he was happy last year. This time I’ll give him a new contract if he wants the pay bump. 4.9M up front with a small conditional amount seems a good bargin for a Bundesliga caliber winger for either side. He surprisingly accepted “Squad Player”, which makes me much more willing to pick him up. He then accepted a 10k p/w wage cut to join us with a reasonable release clause and then the relegation clause, cause I’d be sacked anyways. Very happy with these demands. For those curious he has Dominican Republic 2nd Nationality: 2026 World Cup Part 1: Eintracht Frankfurt Player Performance Pre-Cup Friendlies: Some good performances out of my players with most of the nations they represent getting some wins in preperation. Group Stage: Yes, you saw that right Palestine made the World Cup! How did they do it? Spoiler Here is their schedule: Which got them into this final group where they beat both Iraq and Kyrgyzstan to make a world cup. Well done! Team has a good number of players in Germany, so maybe having the league active has helped them? Next World Cup Match Day featured 3 of our players who all contributed to goals with great ratings! Shame Jamaica’s defense couldn’t hold out. And Switzerland upsets Brazil! Again Sow is getting poor ratings, but the team is doing well so he can't be doing that bad right? Final Group stage Games: Lindstrom is having an amazing World Cup and I’m very happy I just got him onto a new contract with a 40M release clause instead of the 19.5M he starts with. Nicholson couldn’t break down Poland’s defense, but man Norway smacked Argentina and Hauge got in on the action. Hauge and Lindstrom continue to do amazing work for their national teams in the 1st Knockout round helping both advance. 1 goal and 2 assists in just 66 minutes is amazing for Hauge. Wow in a shock, Albania defeats Switzerland 2-3. Bummer considering they did so well to beat out Brazil earlier in the tournament. Hauge has an absolute triumph as Norway + Haaland advance over Poland with an aging Lewandowski. Lindstrom picks up a small knock (bruised ankle 1-3 days) so comes off early but Denmark get the win and advance! Here’s the Quarter Finals Matchup, exciting I still have 2 players advancing at this stage and there is a chance both could advance yet. (Update with full QF after rest of games) Edited August 1, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted August 2, 2023 Author Share Posted August 2, 2023 July Update: World Cup Part 2, Transfers, Pre-Season & a Real Madrid Friendly Like June we did a ton of transfer activity this month scouring the globe for Caribbean talent. But first we left off with both Denmark and Norway making it to the World Cup Quarter Finals. Did they advance?! World Cup Part 2: Can Denmark & Norway Make the Upsets? 120 Min’s for both Denmark and Norway as they take their big country oppositions all the way to penalties. Even better both of my players scored! How did the shoot out go? Sadly, Norway lost theirs 4-3 but Denmark advance!! The Norway coach subbed off Haaland in the 80th minute with Hauge and other well performing players who all had decent condition left. Then Spain got their equalizer in the 89’ to take the game to a goalless extra time. In my opinion he should be fired. They were so close! Sadly in the Semi-Finals the dream run ends for Denmark, however Lindstrom scores again! Don’t know how he managed to get a 6.6 rating with a goal. Regardless, he has performed fantastic in the World Cup and I can’t wait to see how he does for us this season. Club Affiliate: I asked for a youth affiliate and the list returned some blah Belgian and Portuguese teams, but Zilina in Slovakia is a really good affiliate. They have been 3rd place two years running so get Conference League matches with full 3* Reputation. They have great facilities with excellent youth recruitment. Slovakia is also a good place to get nationality for my Caribbean players as non-eu can’t play in the II team, so I’ll certainly be adding the loan-option on here so those and my English players can have a quality loan destination. Free/Cheap Youngsters out of the Caribbean/USA All of these players are total gambles that most likely won’t play out, but they cost nothing and have very low salaries (less than 1k) so I pick up Young National Team players who the scouts say might have some potential + current ability good enough to play on loan. Most have 1-2 year contracts with 3 year extensions, so they can be tossed back quickly without too much money risk. On exception was I found a Dominican Republic U20 player at Regeia who he helped get promoted from Serie C to Serie B. For 150k I could get him and I loaned him back to the club in the hope they use him again in their next campaign. Patric Pfeiffer Transfer: Trading a CB for 3 youth Prospects Some interest materialized from Aston Villa & Al-Ittihad for Patric Pfeiffer who is a high value, high wage underperforming CD. His specialty is speed and with the pickup of St Jude I have another fast CB, who I can easily swap in for him. He’s valued around ~25M and I was able to get two interesting offers agreed to. Aston has more up front, less overall but both have the 40% sell on which I should be able to sell for a good amount as his value should jump in either league. Sheffield United came in for a loan offer, but honestly its sell or play in my mind as I have plans for that transfer money if it comes in… he decided to go to the money in the Middle East instead of England. They are paying him $175k p/w so its true to life with all the transfers happening right now. 3 Youth Transfers: Selling him I want to convert this directly into future talent specifically because the only really high-potential Caribbeans come out of European nations, thus cost a pretty penny to acquire. I've earned us a very healthy transfer budget to work with here. Also remember I have 10M coming over 2 years as well through this deal. Here are the high potential youngsters with Caribbean nationality my scouts have found so I plan to buy up a few. Obviously, S Stevens at Arsenal is way too expensive, but the rest are options. A Bresil is super cheap at 1.5M due to Havare getting relegated down to French National. Pretty easy decision to gamble on even with us having a RB prospect and him having bad injury proneness and consistency. Worst case I should be able to sell him at a small profit if he never makes it into the first team. And as French he can play in the reserve squad for us. Also, this brings us in a CB even though we do have a couple great prospects in the 2nd team. Devon Edwards is an ex-Arsenal youngster Sheffield United bought for cheap and has now developed very well, is a Resolute striker with high finishing, which is something our team is missing. As its England there’s a high premium to get him for 11M total. 4.5 up front, 4.5 over 2 years, then 2 in possible add-ons isn’t too bad. Dalton Sargeant is another English striker this time at crystal Palace and they accepted an identical deal to the one I just gave above. Sargeant just has slightly higher contract demands, but they aren’t unreasonable so Its no problem to me. He’s got Resolute personality and is more a pace merchant player vs a skilled finisher so each provides a different potential player down the line. He is also either-footed so I intend to train him as an AML as well. Loan In Instead of buying him I’ve loaned Shandon Baptiste from Brentford. We have lots of wage budget and are light on defensively skilled midfielders, so he is to give us first team ready depth in case of an injury crisis. Transfer Records: We are doing big transfers setting records with an interesting one of the highest fee for a Barbadian player with our Crystal Palace Striker The number of moves in/out is pretty substantial, and we are still positive with a large transfer budget remaining if there are any deadline day deals to be had. Pre-Season Match Performance: We’ve had a pretty easy pre-season, though I moved up to Belgian sides to end it and our 2nd players actually beat Standard 3-2, which is welcome. Now Real Madrid Here is my new formation. It should function as a 3-4-3 in offense with the two CWBs pushing high up and Promel holding back with the CBs functioning as a higher starting stopper. The other big change is switching Kolo Muani and Hauge who is now playing as a CF-S instead of PF-A. I also decided to add 'Overlap Right' which should encourage Kolo Muani to hold the ball more and dribble looking for the slotted pass either to the WB coming forward or one of center options. Real Madrid Friendly Lineup: Posting to prove this is the true 1st team squad, with a lot of familiar faces still starting for Ancelotti in this match. Match Play-by-Play: 22’ we win the ball in midfield and Hauge tries taking on the defenders, realize he doesn’t have the odds and he slots a perfect ball through the box to Kolo Muani who is making a run in from the wing and he taps it in! Unfortunately, they notch us back on a short throw play that St Jude fails to clear properly and Mendy is wide open on the back post and he scores. 29’ Hauge proves to me he’s the CF I’ve been looking for when he makes the perfect timed run through the defensive line and Kamada slots the ball right into his run so he can place it in the far corner which Courtois had no chance of stopping. We make it to half-time without conceding. They dominate the possession (no surprise), but we are making our few chances count. They change a midfielder at half time and very quickly find the equalizer in the 51’ by Asprilla who beat our WB badly on the inside run. Kamada gets an open-play injury, which is worrying so Vargas comes on. 63’ our GK takes a fk short to Macon who sees Lindstrom making the run forward out of the midfield and he hits it over the top and he perfectly places his shot when 1v1 to give us back the lead! They bring on Rodrigo and I decide to change CB and DM as both are tired and haven’t done that well today. We are looking good, but in the 81’ we have a defensive lapse and Vini Jr gets wide open in the box and no surprise he finishes his chance. 3-3. 85’ Rodryigo gets a goal, but was offside so it stays 3-3. Have to say I’m very happy with this draw against a giant club like Real Madrid. The bad news: Was worried about this happening. Could have been a lot worse. Vargas will get into the starting lineup now and will play AMR and I'll switch Kolo Muani over to the left IW role to utilize his dribbling and scoring ability. August & September Schedule: We have a very tough start to the season, hence why I accepted a friendly with Real Madrid to give us a real challenge before the season starts. In the first 4 games we play the top 3 finishing teams from last season. With Kamada out, hopefully our offense can still hit hard like they did against Real Madrid. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted August 2, 2023 Author Share Posted August 2, 2023 Start of 2026-27 Season Squads Before I move into the intense first two months of the season, it's worth showing all of my squads and the players out on loan as there are plenty of new faces to watch this season. I have all the squads at about the right number of players to have full depth even if there is a good amount of junk floating around in the youth teams. I'm happy with the quality of my first team, and slowly I'm beginning to build the talent pipeline that will be necessary to develop European Competition quality players. Eintracht Frankfurt Squad New Starters: I've already shown above in the formation screen who my Starters & Subs are, but its worth highlighting the new starters, which is my entire defensive line. RB Yvann Macon: [France/Guadalope] Instead of the Tottenham loane, this budget acquisition at $6.5M from AJ Auxerre is definitely a stop-gap RB until I can develop/buy a high-quality youngster. He's a player that has nothing stand-out about him, and in general is stronger going forward than devending. Spoiler LB Tyrell Malacia: [Netherlands / Curacao] My big free-transfer steal from Man United has the physicality to really compete at a high level in Germany. He's not the most skilled, and has English wage-bloat, but to actually be a left footed wingback that's only 27 I see him having 5 seasons with us at the very least. Spoiler CB Jerry St. Juste [Netherlands / St. Kitts & Nevis] A quick CD, who we will see if he can step-up his game in Germany from years dominating in Portugual. He has a somewhat low bar considering Pfiefer's underperformance. And really for more defensive games I can see him moving into the RB position due to his much better marking/tackling than Macon. If he doesn't perform having $30M of value in a free player will do wonders for funding a potential wonderkid acquisition in the future. Spoiler CB Marvin Friedrich: [Germany] The only player of the 4 who was in the squad last year. However with the sale of Pfiefer and the slow-down of Dominique Heintz [33] due to age, this 30 year old has taken up the 'big man' CD spot. He's 6'4" with excellent Strength, Jumping, Bravery & Heading so he fits the role perfectly and has done well with St. Juste in pre-season. Spoiler Eintracht Frankfurt II Squad There are a couple repeat players here from the 1st team that are made available for fitness (notably Goalkeeper Christian Joel Sanchez, CD Martin Halabrin and Wide striker Ragnar Ache). There is a good amount of potential here, that are mostly below the quality to get loans to top-flight clubs. Hopefully the squad is strong enough to get promotion out of the Regional League into Liga 3, which will be a great level to develop young talent. Eintracht Frankfurt U-19 Squad Both my new young English Strikers are repeats here as they can't play for the 2nd team, and only for U19 Friendlies. You can see I have a number of random Caribbean players who are too old for the league, but don't have EU nationality to play for the second team. Once I get the Slovakian affiliate loan agreement I plan to send them there. Season Preview & Odds 9th is actually pretty low, but I guess we didn't really add any world-class players to take us up into the top group. World Cup Winners: I forgot to post the final tree of the world cup. I guess Norway can take some solace that they lost to the champions? still has to sting. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted August 3, 2023 Author Share Posted August 3, 2023 August Matches DFB-Pokal Away 1st up is the DFB-Pokal match against a lower league side. I’m using a fully rotated side to be ready for the next match against BVB. Embarrassing defense saw them score on us with their first shot on target , while we absolutely struggled up top. Nicholson had a rare really poor first half missing all his chances, so I decided to give my other English pickup a halftime sub. Finally in the 56’ we got the equalizer assisted by Sargeant, and in the 63’ we get ahead. 3rd goal was a breakaway by Edwards so both my new strikers already doing great things (against easy opposition). 70’ they get a player sent off, so it is basically over. 4th goal was a nice combination between the two of them Sargent assisting Edwards. Look at them having the top 2 ratings on the side. Fantastic debuts! Spoiler Match 2: BVB Dortmund at Home We had the dullest first half ever with literally just 1 highlight for us and the rest it just ticked over. Surprised we have held BVB to literally no attacking opportunities, granted we’ve just had 2 ourselves. 2nd half: Still very few highlights and both of us change out all our attackers to try and get something going. Nothing came of it for either side, which I guess says a lot about our defenses? A 0-0 draw is a good way to start against Dortmund. Youth Facility Upgrade And a training injury means we will get a first test of my Cuban Keeper League Match: Bayer Leverkusen Away Kamada and Trapp are out injured for this match against the 3rd strength team. A bad matchup by our winger saw them counter us for an early goal. We struggle to have possession and even with some halftime switch-ups they get a second goal off a Free Kick play. Not our finest match. There will be a number of fines for players. Season has just started and Hauge is complaining again even when he’s not doing well. I don't want his performance to drop again like it did at the end of last season when this happened so I caved to his demands. Salary bloat has already begun… League Match: SV Werder Bremen at Home: Kamada and Trapp are back, and I’m trying my Jamaican Nicholson up top with Hauge back as a winger. Also changed the defense a little. A totally botched FK defense sees them get an early goal due to Heintz trying to dribble in the 6 yard box. Thankfully we equalize with Hague finding Nicholson wide open in the box. St. Juste playing as a FB-A is wide open at the top of the box and blasts in a second after halftime. 73’ Hauge and Nicholson repeat their first goal exactly. Guess the experiment with Hauge up top is over. Right After the goal I sub him off for Kolo Mauni who picks up a loose ball and scores to give us a 4th. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted August 3, 2023 Author Share Posted August 3, 2023 (edited) Deadline Day! I'm usually not that active on deadline day, but this one is an exception. Kolo Muani Cash-Out? Even with him scoring a goal off the bench last match, the fact I see the best performing formation has him on the bench, that's a lot of player-value not being adequately utilized. Kolo Muani's value is between 30-35M and he has a 33M release clause, which then begs the question: is he performing as a 30M striker for us? 2025-2026 Striker Performance: You have to recall that half of this performance is from before I arrived. He also didn't play enough in 2024-2025 for him to exist in my 1000m+ statistics, which is really poor for your top-rated striker. This year he just played 1338 minutes just shy of 15 full matches equal to less than 50% of the available minutes in the season. I think he got more of those minutes under me and was starting to hit some form near the end of the season, but then had a 1-month injury. Rest of these statistics up here are very poor, but then again he's not a chance-creator, rather a finisher so this isn't surprising. With that said when he did play, he did have very good Gls/90 off a reasonable NP-xG and good conversion rate. So, he has performed adequately well when on the field. However, at 27 he is in his prime and if I have him as my sub-striker/winger he will get the game-time from my two new 18-year olds who I want to get valuable rotation minutes to develop them. If he was just worth 10M I wouldn't be bothered to replace him, but at 30M that's too high of a value to not be considered our first-choice. Moneyball play dictates I should cash in on his high market value and use the funds to build players to replicate his performance. Part 1: Adding Mid-Field Depth Ever since season 1 in St Louis a player I’ve been watching is Joe Willock of Newcastle. He has speed and a broad array of skills with adaptability for lots of midfield roles. When he was younger he was a 15M+ signing, but he’s become more and more out of favor there and is being sold at a bargain 3M now. His contract is pricy at 79k p/w but we have plenty of wage room right now. He gives us a direct 2nd string for either Lindstrom or Sow as well as can be a depth option for either Attacking Midfielder role if we have an injury crisis. He hasn't played enough recently for Newcastle to be in this year's data, and we will see how he does coming off the bench for us while we work to build up young Midfield talent. Part 2: Receiving a lucrative bid for Kolo Muani Roma are willing to pay me 30M straight up for Randal Kolo Muani. From a Moneyball perspective, this offer is too good to refuse I outlined why above. He also has a 33M Fee-Release clause, so getting 30 with a sell-on is basically maxing-out my profit. With 6 hours to go in the transfer deadline the deal is closed. I get 28.5M into the transfer budget, which was already flush to begin with due to us selling to equal all our big purchases. Spoiler Part 3: Jamie Bynoe-Gittens! For some reason Dortmund are totally fine letting go of Jamie Bynoe-Gittens for just 17.5M, which I see as pretty much getting a younger version of Kolo Muani that is less of a striker and more of a fast winger. Even this far into the save he's still just 22 years old, so has a ton of career left in him. He has Barbados 2nd nationality for those that didn’t know: Spoiler 2025-2026 Statistics I don’t have a natural AML in the squad right now, but he played pretty well especially with amazing amount of dribbles he did. He then combines that with top in the league shot conversion and very high open play key-passes, which is like a perfect 3 combo for an AML. He over-scored his goals by 2x (.34 on .16 xG). He has a surprising high conversion rate, which helps compensate for his low shooting numbers. His one big negative is his crossing is pretty poor, but he’d be the IW so I wouldn’t expect that of him. Will make it so I don’t depend 100% on Kamada in the AML slot. I need release clauses to get reasonable salaries because we are a smaller club, but at 40M we will make a tidy profit on him if a bigger club comes in before we can re-negotiate the contract. 5 hours to go in deadline day and he’s agreed and joins the squad: Spoiler Part 4: Attempt at a big money Deep Playmaker Purchase! Even though they finished 4th Feyenoord have a very interesting DM in Quinten Timber, and I’ll have to pay to get him. I unfortunately don’t have him fully scouted, so all these bright highlights I’m sure will go down somewhat when I get him. He’s only 25, so will be the young replacement I need for the 32 year old Promel who is my current HB as well for Sow if he is underperforming. They want a DM on loan when I take him and really Marcel Wenig is the perfect one to go as he is the depth for the position Timber will play. Its within the “value” range that the market thinks and I do have the funds to get him with the Muani sale + the transfer balance. 2025-2026 Statistics He was an absolutely fantastic DM for them in the league both defensively and offensively. The question is, do I want to spend 35M for him. I think the answer is yes especially if I look at this as a swap for Kolo Muani, whose transfer is for a similar value. The other two I had the money in the transfer budget for already and this strengthens our defensive and playmaking side of the ball. He will be pushing the top earner with that 100k p/w I have a fight on my hands for his signature as RB Leipzig have thrown their hat in the ring as well. Unfortunately, that player exchange thing might have been a mistake as they couldn’t sign a replacement (though I thought my loan player would fill it?!) and the transfer is a bust. Live and learn I guess. Now we have 35M in the transfer budget for winter to play with. Additional Deadline Day Deals I need more CD Depth and something very interesting came up: Tyrone Mings [33] is available on a very cheap loan of just 19.5k p/w wage. He’s old, but if I just need depth for one season that price can’t be beat as they just want him to be a squad player. This way I don’t take on the risk of his contract in the long term with just an optional purchase which I just won’t do. Performance-wise just on a quick look he’s done fine for Aston villa and has played a good amount the past few seasons. Romario Smith (Bristol City): my scouts found a possibly high potential defender For just 900k I picked him up. With all these new attackers I decide to send one of my new strikers out on loan for free to Hansa Rostok in Bundesliga 2. He had a loan stint in League 2 last year that wasn't too spectacular, so hope he can do better in Germany. Transfer Window Summary With the break-down on our Playmaker purchase we ended netting-out more than we paid in fees due to the lucrative sales of stars Pfeiffer and Kolo Muani. We still have tons of money in the bank account as I look for that next star signing to make. January should be just as exciting of a window. We moved the most players in and out, but didn’t spend as much as Bayern who apparently really wanted Konrad Laimer and decided that Sane wasn't worth it to keep. Here are all our transfers we made after July 1st: lots of loans out for our players to get playtime. Current Lineups: Notice I've changed my mind on the FBs to go with the deeper-starting and simpler FB-A First Team: In addition to the FB role change, I've moved St. Juste to the wide spot especially since we now have Tyrone Mings as our backup CD. He doesn't have crossing skill, but has good ball-carying ability and speed but most importantly good defensive skills, which the loss to Bayer Leverkusin shows we need desperately at FB. With the sale of Kolo Muani I am all in on my bargain Jamaican Nicholson, so we will see if he can do it for us. Again, I have the transfer budget if a Winter move has to be made. Second Team: Here you see the vast majority of my transfer efforts. Literally only Kristijan Jakic is an original player when I took over the squad, so we have an almost 100% Caribbean lineup already! Edited August 3, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted August 4, 2023 Author Share Posted August 4, 2023 (edited) September: International Matches, Bundesliga & More Youngsters Right after deadline day we go into the international window. Lots of our players were called up for their teams for matches that are a mix of friendlies and Nations League. Lindstrom got injured on international duty the week before we face Bayern Munich. I think I’ll drop Kamada back and give Byno-Gittens the start Friendly during International window: With all our new signings I wanted a game against a lower-opposition to give our bench players some fitness. We got a good first performance from Bynoe-Gittens even if its against a scrub club. Brought on Sargeant for the second half and he did well too as we build fitness for our backups. Unfortunately, we got a couple injuries here trying to build fitness and morale for the bench. Glad Baptiste is just a loan. And another training injury has thinned out our bench substantially Bundesliga Matches Bundesliga: Bayern Munic – Away My Jamaican striker is tired from a bunch of games so I am starting him on the bench, as I have little hope in this fixture. While of course we don’t have much possession, we actually start the match relatively okay until in the 34’ when Muisiala scores a crazy shot from 25 yards out at least into the top corner. Then a missed header in the 40’ lets Tel get an easy goal. It gets worse and is a night to forget for us as they pay us back for the upset last season in spades. Vargas gets a consolation goal at the end by chipping Nubel, and because of the assist Wilock actually gets a decent rating coming off the bench. Bundesliga Match: Away Borussia Munchen Gladbach Lindstrom is still injured so Willock gets the start. He gets a first chance very early and makes it count in the 12’ with Kamada and Nicholson combining to set him up. Then in the 32’ it is St. Juste dribbling forward who slots Nicholson making the run through who finishes it perfectly. Ngonge who has looked good all game pulls one back for BMG. Then out of nowhere after halftime there is a laser shot from range and its level 2-2. Then they score a 3rd to take the lead with an injured Willock leaving a gap. I make a sub to bring on Bynoe-Gittens and from the kickoff he dribbles and slots Hauge who gets us level again. We hold it there to end the thriller. Bundesliga Match: Mainz 05 at home [Derby] Lindstrom is back from injury and it only takes him 4’ to let Mainz know it! A true team goal where every midfielder & my striker were involved in the buildup. Nicholson is just offsides in the 13’ so we don’t make it 2. 31’ Kerim Aydogan two-foots Kamada from behind and gets a straight red! Quiet rest of the half. I sub off Kamada for Byno-Gittens as he’s hurting and playing poorly. Second half we have a few chances, but we are just off multiple times and they pack the box switching to a defensive formation. It takes until the 96’ in the final seconds of stoppage time for Nicholson to find our young Barbadian Sargeant making a run on the wing and his back-post header goes in! First goal for the youngster, in a big game. Bundesliga Match October 4th Before International Break: Wolfsburg Away Kamada isn’t training well so Byno-Gittens gets the start, otherwise it’s the normal 11. We do okay in the first half with some half chances while limiting them to just long distance shots that stay off frame. We get lucky when they miss a really good chance and go into the break 0-0. Then some end-to-end play sees them get a goal. Sargeant gets a chance up top to bring us level by Vargas and sadly he can’t pull the trigger and we end up losing to a well performing Wolfsburg. Bundesliga Table: It looks pretty poor from us, but with the last game we have already played the top 5 placed teams with only 7 games played, which is a brutal start to the season. We now will have a run of 12 games playing all of the weaker clubs before returning to the hard-hitters after the winter break. Hunting for Caribbean U-20 Talent This save will be a lot of hoovering up of low probability youngsters that may or may not develop. Having scoured Europe and North America I’ve been able to discover 7400 U-21 Caribbeans. That means the game is generating about 1250 Caribbean nationality players a year. I have scouted all the National teams both Main and Youth as well as hunted through English and USA clubs for the youngsters who are Caribbean. While there probably are a few players I've missed, this has to be over 90% of them and includes the high potential ones. I could check with an added head coach, maybe at the end of the season. Anyways, after scouting all those players only 5 have 5* Potential and most are already well onto developing into quality but very expensive players. My interest is for the next-wrung down players who are 3.5-4.5 PA and thus much cheaper. We aren’t at the financial stage to take a big swing on a single youth player with our whole transfer budget, like Gio Schwangie or S Stewart. However the last player Jamie Morgan is of interest to us if I can get him for a similar price to my other two strikers. Would give us one for each of the 3 roles. Looking at the next players down the list you can see we already own 4 of these players (D Edwards is our player on loan at Hansa Rostock) and I'll be looking to buy whatever bargins there are here especially those players with good personalities/attribue mixes. The next player I'll be adding is T. Afougou from Bordeaux. He gives me a natural LB, which is a position we don't have a high potential youth player in yet, and he comes already with speed and the all important left footedness! Could become a nice attacking Fullback. Additionally, there is a Trinidad & Tobago DM who has a Driven personality, who is essentially free that I’ll take a chance on. He will probably go on loan to an affiliate (hopefully). He has a lot of development to do, but with a good personality and already having experience playing in the T&T top flight he might have a chance as that’s the best league in the Caribbean. A few days later my scouts found an interesting Cuban in Cuba who developed in a MLS Academy, who I remember seeing when I was at St Louis but forgot about when I moved. Again, for free he’s worth adding into the growing hoard of Caribbeans getting trained in Frankfurt. I kind of like letting these clubs get a 30% sell on for these players as this is a way to funnel money into the Caribbean leagues without gaming the system. Edited August 4, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhiteCat33 Posted August 4, 2023 Author Share Posted August 4, 2023 (edited) October: International Window, Bundesliga & DFB Pokal Next International Window: October I decided to put everything in spoilers this time as there are a lot of screenshots. Here are all 17 of our international callups: Spoiler And these are the Match Reports: Spoiler October Matches Bundesliga: Dynamo Dresden – Home 9’ in we see another player two foot Kamada and get a strait red card, we better make them pay! It’s a scrappy first goal after a long free kick, but it still went over the line. Hauge finally converts one of his many chances in the 34’ to get us 2, and salvage his rating from the 6.4 he was on. Promel makes it 3 with a header on a long free kick by Nicholson. With the lead I pull my international players at half-time to give them rest after playing matches during the window and we coast to victory. After this game both my FBs get injuries, which is annoying and then we lose Kamada as well! What the hell is going on in training this week? Bundesliga: Hannover 96 – Away With the injuries and some tired players I decided to do some rotation for this match for those players who have had a lot of games recently. They score a wicked goal from range in the 14’. We answer in the 23’ with Macon coming forward out of defense to score a long shot. Vargas makes it 2 with another shot from range in the 31. Taking off ‘work the ball into box’ has done wonders this game. We now play Schalke twice in 5 days first in the Cup and then in the league. DFB-Pokal: Schalke Away I’m rotating the squad a lot for this, but have the bench full of good players to come in during the second half. They get a breakaway over the top in the 37’ and find a first goal. Then a deflection gets them a 2 goal lead before the break. Pushing in the second half sees them get us on the counter. I bring Nicholson on in the 60’ and in the 66’ he already gets us a goal back. Sadly that’s all we can do, and they get a stoppage time penalty to seal it. Board is pissed as they wanted us to advance in the cup, I don’t really care as we don’t have the depth for it yet. Bundesliga: Schalke – Home All the best players starting right now that are fit. 3’ in is all it takes for Nicholson to intercept a poor buildup pass and blast the ball in the back of the goal. Hauge makes it two in the 33’ heading in a cross from a short corner play. Lindstrom gets a knock right before halftime so he’s replaced. 63’ Promel gets a second yellow and is our first ejection of the season. It doesn’t stop us though, a long ball forward by Willock to Bynoe-Gittens then gets slotted to Hauge who I have playing DLF-A and he makes it 3. Another longball to Bynoe-Gittens sees him take it himself and score to make it 4. November 1st Standings & Match Review Standings: Much better now with us in 5th in contention for the final Europa League spot. October Matches: Upcoming November & December Matches: RB Leipzig is the only top-6 team we will be facing in the next 2 months, rest are mid-table clubs. Little Loan Update: Devon Edwards is doing really well at Hansa Rostock, even if the club isn’t. 4 goals in 7 games is fantastic and is hopefully improving him with good ratings and lots of minutes. My current plan is to bring him back in the Winter and he will be my #2 Striker behind Nicholson allowing me to sell off/loan out my free agent backups. Edited August 4, 2023 by WhiteCat33 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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