GylfiAsCharged
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Posts posted by GylfiAsCharged
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On 13/06/2023 at 15:38, Vladis said:
It's been a long time since I had a long-term save in France. And Lyon looks like a very attractive variant to return back to this beautiful country. Ater the bright 2000s the club is permanently in the shadow of PSG and last season the Lyon finished in 8th place. Les Gones has never fallen so low in recent history. But with its famous youth system, decent finances (the club is still under the Aulas ownership as I start with default DB), large fan base I think I have all instruments to return the club to the deserved leading positions even in PSG era.
So my objectives for this save are very simple (or not):
- To become the most successful club in French history (currently PSG - 10 trophies, Lyon - 7);
- Win Champions League;
- Just have fun.
Youth development, entertaining football, pragmatic financial approach? Yes, of course)
The Squad
Unbalanced, not the greatest quality of bench (defense is the main concern). But on the other hand, we have Lopes in the net, Caqueret and Tolisso in the midfield, Lacazette, Dembele, Tete in attack. And of course, young talents: Gusto, Barcola, Cherki, Lukeba are already in the first team and some boys like Da Silva, Mvouama, Felix - on the way to it.
Projected First XI before the start of pre-season looks like:
--------------------------Dembele--------------------
Lacazette-------------------------------------Tete--
--------------------Tolisso------Aouar---------------
-------------------------Caqueret---------------------
Tagliafico-----Lukeba-----Boateng-----Gusto
---------------------------Lopes------------------------
Good luck and enjoy the save, they look like a great team to play as.
Cherki has been fantastic in my game, they use him as the AM in a narrow 4-1-2-1-2 ahead of the same three-man midfield you set out and he always seems to score against me.
Florent Sanchez has developed nicely after a couple of seasons too, so be sure not to overlook him!
I feel like PSG's dominance puts people off the league, but having a front row seat to whenever they slip up (big, small, or ideally at your own team's hands) is really satisfying.
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Bit of a nightmare start to the summer transfer window, with key midfielders Branco van den Boomen and Darius Olaru demanding new and frankly ridiculous contracts that the club can't afford, and the board barely giving me a proper transfer budget despite finishing second and qualifying for the Champions League.
Branco's replacement has already arrived on a free transfer, as I had agreed a pre-contract deal with Ethan Ampadu of Chelsea with the intention of playing him at centre-back, but he looks like an excellent ball winner in central midfield. Turning Sepp van den Berg's loan deal permanent means we are adequately covered in defence. Ander Guevara also comes in on a free transfer from Real Sociedad to add depth to the centre of midfield, and to replace Olaru in the Shadow Striker role we'll be demanding more from Facundo Farías who couldn't really get going after joining in January.
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2023-24 Season - Bordeaux
A brilliant first season back in the top flight. We moved into second place after the 18th game-week, and never dropped a spot from then onwards.
Just like last year in Ligue 2, Josh Maja led the league in goalscoring. He always looked likely to score a hatful for us, but I was expecting more resistance from the PSG forwards.
He somehow got pipped to the African Player of the Year Award by Andy Delort who bagged 19 goals for 13th placed Nantes, but unlike Maja he did play a few games for Algeria. Somehow the Nigeria manager hasn't called up our main man once despite him leading the scoring charts all season.
And as good as our league campaign was, I certainly wasn't expecting to win any silverware this season.
The path opened up nicely thanks to this glorious result early on in the tournament...
Our run wasn't the toughest, but we made quite hard work of it at times, only looking fully convincing in the semi-final against the Monaco team I declined to manage this season.
They ultimately opted to appoint Marcelino, which didn't go so well.
Sacked with a month to go before the end of the season with the club sat outside the European places. His replacement Ange Postecoglou didn't have time to undo the mess he made as you'll see in the table at the top. 10th place was certainly not what they hoped for.
I made a fun signing on a free transfer in January, and he was willing to join for peanuts as long as we funded a coaching course for him.
He was totally immobile and only made one substitute appearance before retiring, but completed his coaching course and will be staying at the club, as shown above. Mbark Boussoufa also retired this summer, and after his invaluable contribution to our promotion season, it seemed rude not to extend his stay working with the Under 19s.
A much more useful January acquisition was taking over the loan of Liverpool's Sepp van den Berg who swapped Burnley for Bordeaux. His £3.4m option to buy is definitely on the cards this summer, along with Timothée Pembélé who will cost £3.5m. I'm expecting our second-placed finish and Champions League qualification should give us enough budget to stump up for these two players key to both last season and our long term plans.
My favourite match of the season was the one I was dreading. I put off playing the game for two real life days fearing a thrashing would ruin our morale and form with a cup final looming.
It's definitely proving to be my favourite save of FM23 so far, and it'll take a long time to overthrow PSG as the dominant force in France, but things couldn't be going much better so far.
Alberth Elis didn't deliver what I was hoping for after returning from his excellent loan at Brest last season, so I sold him to Crystal Palace in January. Club captain Fransergio sadly suffered a career-ending injury after fifteen games this season, but the veteran Brazilian is yet another former star working with our youngsters.
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Not the most challenging team to start with but I had a really enjoyable year with Bordeaux winning Ligue 2, and breaking some records.
Can't remember the last time I had a team dominate a Team of the Season like this. All but one were club originals, with Poussin and Mwanga growing really nicely. Fabrice Olinga came in on a free as versatile depth up front and on the wings, but caused a stink wanting a contract he didn't warrant so was sold for £850k to Portimonense before the next preseason. A criminal omission from this team was 38-year-old Mbark Boussoufa who joined on a free as a player/u19 coach on a surprisingly low wage, playing almost every game scoring 11 goals and assisting a further 12, with an average rating of 7.40.
A little surprise at the beginning of preseason, duly rejected:
We've started the season well with 17 points from our first 9 games, good enough for 5th in the league but with a big gap opening up behind Marseille, Lyon and PSG as the top 3. Our board are only expecting us to finish in mid-table so I'm not too concerned about this. We haven't faced PSG yet and have only been beaten by Marseille and Nice, both away from home, I've not yet figured out how I want to set our team up as underdogs. PSG winning the Champions League granted the league an additional qualification spot, so it's good to see progress there that could hopefully benefit us at some stage.
My transfer window saw quite a few young talents come into the club, including a player I've signed several times in recent years, Álex Collado from Barcelona B for £900k. I returned to Catalonia to loan in versatile attacker Estanis Pedrola for the season.
My pursuit of PSG's unwanted young right back Timothée Pembélé was an unusual one, having agreed a season's loan with obligation to buy for £2.5m with PSG, they instead got impatient and sold him immediately to Monaco for £725k. Despite just buying him they didn't seem keen on him either, allowing me to agree a loan-to-buy deal but with an optional £3.5m price tag instead - he's started really brightly and I think he will be worth paying up for given his significant potential, assuming he stays fit.
Collado aside, our most significant acquisition was probably central midfielder Branco van den Boomen from rivals Toulouse on a free transfer, a deal agreed earlier in the year which worked out nicely for him as Toulouse finished in 19th and were relegated.
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On 01/02/2023 at 14:18, Neo_Geo said:
Czech Republic run over....
I guess losing 3 first choice centrebacks in a calendar year isn't going to do many favours for my defence. We had horrendous luck with injuries early on in the season and our the morale plummeted with the results, then players asking to leave and not being happy about it caused the rest of the squad to lose faith. Injuries then continued and the mid-season break did no favours this time round and it was just too much to continue.
Lots of promising talent but they were a couple of years away from being ready to play alongside each other at this level.
Now I'll be looking where to go next (Back to Enfield or another country?)
Anyone know if the u19s issue in Scotland is fixed yet?
Gutting to see this, great work getting them as far as you did!
Still going with them but FM has taken a back seat due to work this month, only just coming out of the winter break in season one but will keep flying the Vítkovice flag!
Will be catching up and following your progress in Northern Ireland!
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10 hours ago, Neo_Geo said:
Dvorak - great as a ball winning DM, then considered his options at end of first season. I tried to move him on, no one interested so favoured one of my year 1 youths and demoted him to u19s for the season, at the end of the season he was willing to talk again and with one of my other DMs retiring I figured I’d offer him a new deal. He’s doing relatively well in the first division.
Netolicka - first choice keeper since the start of the save and has won me a number of points in the top division. He’s not reached his potential yet despite 2.5 years as first choice keeper though.
Silhart isn’t a player that I had maybe he was sold before I took over (assuming he was there from the off)
I can’t recall if Leixner was already there or if he was signed before I took over but if you do have him then playing him as an inverted left wingback has served me well. He’s doing well still and is now considering his options and complained about moving to a bigger club (dropped it now but still not talking and into his last 6 months of his contract)
When I get back on the save tomorrow I’ll have a look at those that were there at the start of the save and let you know how they fared. Cverna I believe was there and he retired after season 1 but is now u19s assistant which was a nice touch.
Thank you, some encouraging stuff there especially about Netolička.
Leixner isn't on our books, but I've not got access to check transfers out from last season right now.
I've given Cverna a one-year deal as he looked likely to pack it in and he is the most influential player in a dressing room that isn't overly fond of me yet, so it seemed like a no brainer especially when he agreed to a wage cut. Always nice to keep them around when they retire at the club so I'll likely try doing the same!
I've finally got an assistant manager, general coach, goalkeeping coach and a (frankly terrible) fitness coach. I clearly missed one of the responsibilities when setting the game up as our owner decided to appoint a u19s assistant manager immediately despite that team having only 2 players and no manager, and the first team not having a single coach.
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1 hour ago, Neo_Geo said:
You can select to add key staff when you start the game and I think that means when a team gets promoted and playable for the first time there are staff but I usually start afresh, day 1 you put out the job adverts for the key positions.
Did Kubušek leave before Vitkovice were promoted? He was instrumental for me in the first couple of seasons.
Oh nice! Didn't realise anyone else was playing with Vítkovice, will have to catch up on your posts and will be following with interest!
Kubušek is still around but I found him transfer listed and exiled into the U19s presumably as he stated he was exploring his options at the end of his contract in a few days' time. I've made an offer and hope to keep him around, though I'd earmarked Guy Reteno Elekana the Gabonese winger as my likely starting striker.
I'm pleasantly surprised at the quality of some young players in the initial squad, particularly Jan Dvořák (20 and 16 DET) in central midfield, Filip Šilhart (21) on the right wing and Tomáš Netolička (21) in goal. I'd be interested to know how they fared for you and if you saw much development?
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7 hours ago, GylfiAsCharged said:
MFK Vítkovice
Have struggled for a long-term save this year but fired up the game last night and joined newly-promoted MFK Vítkovice in the Czech Republic. My favourite save of FM22 was with Dukla Prague so giving this a go here seemed to make perfect sense.
I'll upload my manager profile and some more season preview bits this evening, but can start with some background. In-game, the media are predicting a mid-table finish for our first season, and the club's facilities are pretty impressive.
We ground-share with neighbours and top flight side Banik Ostrava at the 15,123 seater Městský Stadion. Our much bigger neighbours played in European competition several times around a decade ago, and won the 1. Liga title in 2003-04 and the domestic cup in the following year.
That isn't to say Vítkovice have had no glory years of their own, just a little further back, winning the Czechoslovak First League in 1985/86, making their European Cup debut the following season, eliminating PSG in the first round before falling to eventual winners Porto next. They placed second in the league that year behind Sparta Prague. They would go further in Europe the following season, beating Sweden's AIK, Scotland's Dundee United, Portugal's Vitória de Guimarães before finally falling to Espanyol in the Quarter Finals. Unfortunately 1989's Velvet Revolution saw them lose a lot of their financial support from the city's iron and steel works, leading to a descent through the leagues and financial issues.
Behind the capital Prague and Brno, Ostrava is the country's third largest city, situated in the east and close to the borders with Poland and Slovakia. We are the second biggest club in the city, so surpassing the established order locally will prove a huge challenge by only relying on youth players. The club represents the Moravian side of the city of Ostrava due to its roots on the one side of the Ostravice River, with Banik being headquartered in the Silesian part of the city, so there's a rivalry ripe for reigniting if we can make it that far. I'm not super familiar with the history of the region but if this goes well I'll be doing plenty of research alongside the save.
Time to get my teeth into this.
Assessing the squad on my arrival, we're flush with wingers but don't have a single striker in the senior squad bizarrely. The squad looks best suited to a 4-5-1 or a 4-2-3-1, but I think I'll likely opt for the latter to begin with at least.
Unsure if this is always the case with this challenge, but I've arrived to no staff at the club other than some doctors, so addressing that will be my priority ahead of the first season.
These two have made badly timed career moves and have been frozen out to be sold as soon as possible.
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MFK Vítkovice
Have struggled for a long-term save this year but fired up the game last night and joined newly-promoted MFK Vítkovice in the Czech Republic. My favourite save of FM22 was with Dukla Prague so giving this a go here seemed to make perfect sense.
I'll upload my manager profile and some more season preview bits this evening, but can start with some background. In-game, the media are predicting a mid-table finish for our first season, and the club's facilities are pretty impressive.
We ground-share with neighbours and top flight side Banik Ostrava at the 15,123 seater Městský Stadion. Our much bigger neighbours played in European competition several times around a decade ago, and won the 1. Liga title in 2003-04 and the domestic cup in the following year.
That isn't to say Vítkovice have had no glory years of their own, just a little further back, winning the Czechoslovak First League in 1985/86, making their European Cup debut the following season, eliminating PSG in the first round before falling to eventual winners Porto next. They placed second in the league that year behind Sparta Prague. They would go further in Europe the following season, beating Sweden's AIK, Scotland's Dundee United, Portugal's Vitória de Guimarães before finally falling to Espanyol in the Quarter Finals. Unfortunately 1989's Velvet Revolution saw them lose a lot of their financial support from the city's iron and steel works, leading to a descent through the leagues and financial issues.
Behind the capital Prague and Brno, Ostrava is the country's third largest city, situated in the east and close to the borders with Poland and Slovakia. We are the second biggest club in the city, so surpassing the established order locally will prove a huge challenge by only relying on youth players. The club represents the Moravian side of the city of Ostrava due to its roots on the one side of the Ostravice River, with Banik being headquartered in the Silesian part of the city, so there's a rivalry ripe for reigniting if we can make it that far. I'm not super familiar with the history of the region but if this goes well I'll be doing plenty of research alongside the save.
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Curious to see if any of your staff meetings have yielded anything quite as useless as this:
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19 minutes ago, Ronaldo Beckham said:
I would do it as a joint manager with the San Marino national team as the job might not come available for a long long time due to the very low expectations.
I have lost nearly every game in the 10 seasons I have done so far and not been anywhere near getting sacked.
Good luck with the challenge. I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you very much for the advice!
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Always wanted to have a go at building San Marino so I've downloaded Italy to level 5 and just started up with Victor San Marino. Not sure if I'll be able to get the National Team job down the line or if I needed to do that when setting up my game - can anyone advise please?
Alternatively I see playing within the Sammarinese League is a popular approach, and I'd happily go down that route instead.
I'm only in preseason so happy to scrap and start over if I've got it wrong.
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3 hours ago, Jimbokav1971 said:
Thanks very much.
I must admit that I haven't really had issues with the registration after the 1st season, (once I realised what the rules were & we got our 1st intake), and most of the time I always have at least 1 slot free so that if I find someone I want to sign then I can just do it straight away.
I think once you decide to play with youngsters, it doesn't really matter how good or bad they are. The decision has been made and you just use what you have. (That's how I look at it anyway).
Crespo looks good, (but is very inconsistent), and it's interesting to see what we're producing with such a low reputation and with such relatively poor facilities. The improvements we've made to our facilities have already had a significant impact by the looks of it, but when I see a 5.0 PA player I don't expect them to be that good in the grand scheme of things. Just better than what we already have.n
That's an interesting point about making the decision to play with youngsters and sticking with it, I think I'll be leaning into that from now on.
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Really enjoyed catching up on this, congratulations on your promotion! Have also been playing with Ceuta and finding the max 18 over-23 players rule absolutely brutal. Glad to see you having success with your youngsters as it looks like the way to navigate these rules!
Crespo looks an absolute star in the making too!
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Any first window business for you guys?
Had a bid accepted for Endrick at Palmeiras who is absolutely not interested in negotiating terms which is really disappointing.
Playing the rather uncreative 4-2-3-1 I'm tempted to strengthen in midfield, but don't like the asking prices for Ndidi/Tielemans/Rice and am half tempted to just give Sambi the chance to grow into one of the deeper roles alongside Partey, using Xhaka and Elneny as depth there. If anyone has picked up a starting calibre defensive CM within budget I'd be keen to hear.
Was tempted to look for a new, more attacking RB but Tomiyasu has pleasantly surprised me going forward in preseason.
I'd also never heard of George Lewis before this save, what an unusual situation he is in. 22 years old without any real potential according to our very good scouts. Neither homegrown for club or country, so think he'll be going on the scrapheap.
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Scarborough Athletic appeals a lot to me as a long term building save this year. Newly promoted to the National League North, they are the phoenix club formed after Scarborough FC's dissolution in 2010, a club that spent the whole of the '90s in the Football League after Neil Warnock led them to promotion. Plus they play at the Flamingo Land Stadium which sounds like the kind of place I want to be.
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FC Carl Zeiss Jena - 2025-26 Season
Transfers - Squad - Best Eleven
Top Scorer: Patrick Breuer (14)
Most Assists: Felix Drinkuth (9)
Highest Avg. Rating: Tom Müller (7.08)I began this season with a couple of sales off the back of our title win and promotion, as some heads were turned following top flight interest.
Andreas Gohlke, who was developing at the club since before my arrival and spent our first season in the B Team but played 46 league games for us after that, was sold to Stuttgart for a decent sum of £875k, featuring once for them off the bench in the cup as their experienced side finished 5th in the league, before Stefan Ströhl from my 2023 intake headed to Bundesliga bottom club Köln for £375k, spending the season in their second team. Neither player left a real gap in the first team, and since they wanted out I decided to let them go. The moves have benefitted two of our newer breakout players, deep lying playmaker Mark Klein and winger Marko Voss, both of whom were almost as good as their predecessors at the time of their sales and have since exceeded them.
This season was just as much of a slog as I anticipated, but thanks to a fast start followed by a disastrous autumn courtesy of some cruel fixtures and some good game management down the stretch we managed to see off the likely threat of relegation. There were only a few teams even potentially worse than us in the league. Mainstays like Felix Drinkuth and Fabian Eisele are really looking past their best I'm really straddling two generations with this team, with only a couple of the youngsters truly ready to feature weekly. Thankfully in the case of Eisele he has already been surpassed by our best youth product of the save so far, u20 international Patrick Breuer who is touted as the next Jurgen Klinsmann.
Due to this I think next season could be an even tougher battle than this one, as dangerous looking Nurnberg and HSV sides cruised the 2. Bundesliga with a 10 point margin behind them. Arminia Bielefeld faced Hoffenheim in the play-off, but were seen off 6-1 on aggregate, so the league is looking particularly strong next season. We are still punching well above our weight in terms of player quality. Union Berlin aren't great but we're no better really, and only finished above them thanks to a shock victory over league runners up Wolfsburg on the final day. Our two fellow promoted sides from last season Augsburg and St Pauli both had excellent seasons off the back of some good recruitment, though we managed key home wins against both. Freiburg weren't an awful side but seemed rather too focused on their run to the final of the Pokal, where Bayern duly beat them.
As you can see below, we got off to a strong start which put some much needed points on the board. Then came a brutal October and November period which yielded only 1 point from 8 games, plunging us into a relegation battle.
Here's our excellent windfall for staying up this season. Annoyingly next season we move into our new 15k seater stadium, 3k smaller than our average home crowd last season. I'll be trying to get that expanded as soon as I can. Another £3.5m improvement to our youth facilities, to be completed in November, has been approved off the back of this prize money. Our current president had been pretty stingy until then, and also won't offer me a new contract as I head into my final year, so hopefully I get offered one during next season otherwise a very plausible relegation could signal the end of this project for me.
After star striker Patrick Breuer won the award last season, versatile left back Nicolas Brinker came third this season after only 5 starts and 5 sub appearances. He's both footed and can play anywhere in the back line, so I see him as a valuable asset for the future.
Speaking of our youngsters, they finished second in the league stage and then reached the final of the play-offs, losing to Bayern.
As tends to happen at the end of a successful season, players and agents are getting a bit cheeky with their demands. Patrick Breuer is our best youth graduate so far, and ought to be an integral part of our future, but he's kicked up a fuss about his contract which to be honest isn't unfair, he's the lowest earner of our first eleven and has the brightest future of all of them. His agent has stuck in a pretty disappointing non-negotiable release clause to clubs in the Champions League, so the league's top four can pinch him from us for £4.3m. I'll be trying to give him a new deal to patch over that next season.
So, for this year's intake...
Not the positional spread I was hoping for in truth. I could do with a quality prospect at centre-back one of these days. In terms of the age profile of the squad, Christopher Theisen (32) looks like the next veteran who will need replacing in the centre of midfield, so I was hoping for one of the attacking midfielders to also be suited to playing as a central midfielder on attack, or as a mezzala.
8 players were signed from this year's intake. I'm hoping that Felix Fork can grow into Theisen's shoes. He's certainly an exciting prospect, and I hoped to blood him in the first team a little towards the end of the season, but the relegation battle was just a little too tight to give him an opportunity. He will get plenty of chances in the coming season.
Survival remains the aim next season, and I'm expecting an even harder challenge.
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FC Carl Zeiss Jena - 2024/25 Season
Transfers - Squad - Best Eleven
Top Scorer: Theodor Bergmann (16)
Most Assists: Christopher Theisen (19)
Highest Avg. Rating: Theodor Bergmann (16)Even the most optimistic of Jena fans wouldn't have expected that season, and I certainly didn't either! But this team seems to have a knack of going on great runs. Carried mainly by players promoted out of the unplayable leagues we had another amazing season, when we lost 5-0 to Bochum after a good start I expected we'd tail off into mid-table or the bottom half but we just won another three games on the spin to my surprise, culminating in a 6-0 away win in Kiel. The title was out of our hands on the final day having lost 1-0 at home to St Pauli in the third last game, but we won our final two as they drew theirs and we overtook them to seal our first piece of silverware!
Surprisingly our title win was managed without a super prolific striker, after scoring 50 times in two 3.Liga seasons Fabian Eisele struggled with the step up, only netting 8 times this year, and in October I gave a debut to our promising young striker Patrick Breuer. Born in Jena, the local lad made his debut off the bench against Schalke and netted in injury time to give us an unlikely victory. The press failed to mention his winning goal, but the Klinsmann comparison was interesting to see! He would increase his tally to 10 over the season and will go into our debut Bundesliga campaign as our first choice up front.
I didn't even know this award existed but it was definitely richly deserved, and I hope to see many Jena players picking it up in the coming seasons.
Here is how he is looking attributes-wise, I think he's pretty well rounded and will grow into a good asset for us and fetch a good price eventually.
I'm just glad we found our next goalscorer in the first few seasons as the age profile of our team when the save started initially suggested we would need to replace in a load of key areas at round about this time. I'll be grooming a young midfielder to soon take the place of assist king Christopher Theisen (31) who had a great season but is starting to show signs of decline. Thankfully our intakes have been excellent, and this season's was no exception.
During the season the board agreed to upgrade both youth recruitment and junior coaching from excellent to exceptional despite our finances being mostly taken up by the construction of our new 15,000 seater stadium. That doesn't look like such a wise move now, given we averaged 14,803 fans while playing in neighbouring Erfurt this season, and now have the attraction of top flight teams visiting. Nonetheless, they're still willing to fund youth upgrades and we had another great intake this year.
This is the first time I've experienced this, but it doesn't look like we'll miss him too much.
A player cut off by the screenshot here is Niklas Wettengl, a 15 year old centre-back already good enough to compete with my first team defenders. He would have gone straight into the team if he was old enough to play, so will likely make his debut and feature a fair bit in the top flight next season.
I know this team has exceeded my expectations in every season to date, but I expect the Bundesliga will be a different story entirely. I don't see many if any teams we can expect to beat, and I expect we will probably come straight back down and that relegation may lead some of our best prospects seeking a move away.
Money like this certainly isn't a bad thing though!
At the very end of the season our training facilities were downgraded, but we could comfortably pay the £1m needed to upgrade them back to their previous level.
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FC Carl Zeiss Jena - 2023/24 Season
Transfers - Squad - Best Eleven
Top Scorer: Fabian Eisele (26)
Most Assists: Theodor Bergmann (16)
Highest Avg. Rating: Dennis Slamar (7.40)I was delighted to be proved wrong in last season's review in my assessment that we weren't good enough for promotion, especially when I began the season by selling arguably our best player, 23 year old central midfielder Leon Burger to Strasbourg for £110k. He was adamant on making the move, and though it weakened us in the short term I also figured that some sales would be inevitable during this save, and the dressing room were very much on his side when I rejected their initial bid of around £20k. Checking on how he is doing, as I expected (and did try to explain to him) he wasn't yet ready for the jump in quality and finds himself surplus to requirements, rotting in their reserves with an asking price of only £55k.
I also knew that I had under-utilised my talented number ten Christopher Theisen who looked like he could comfortably drop back into a mezzala role, so Burger wouldn't be too sorely missed. He was one of two attacking midfielders who changed their position to take up influential roles this season, with Berkan Taz moving out to play as our left inside forward after only 8 starts in the previous season.
Past Positions
The season started much like my first, with wins coming easily and a feeling of inevitability that our form would soon tail off, but soon enough ourselves, Duisburg and Bayern II (bolstered by yet another intake of brilliant regens and still playing Fiete Arp up top who earns more than my whole squad combined) had emerged as a three-horse race for the title with a ten-point gap behind us. Knowing that Bayern II could not be promoted it was just a case of not slipping away into 4th, and while we started drawing a lot more games towards the winter we were clearly one of the front runners and eventually made it across the finish line despite losing 5-0 away to Bayern II which effectively handed them the league title.
Having upgraded youth recruitment and academy coaching twice last season I wasn't expecting much further investment this season, and our finances began looking pretty ropey as the season went on, but towards the end I managed to leverage our league overachievement to further improve both to Excellent. I also without any warning and having had my requests to do so turned down in the past received my National C license, granting me badly needed improvements across my own coaching attributes.
Our coaching department grew from three to six, adding former Austrian international defenders Emanuel Pogatetz and Martin Stranzl to the ranks, and towards the end of the season they were joined by former Nurnberg head coach Robert Klauß as more of an attacking specialist.
Due to our promotion, our home at Ernst-Abbe-Sportfeld has become too small for the club exactly a century after first opening, so we are building a new one. For the next two seasons we will play at Steigerwaldstadion, home to local rivals Rot-Weiss Erfurt who have sadly dropped out of the playable leagues.
Hans Meyer Park will be named after the manager that led the club to their UEFA Cup Winner's Cup Final back in 1979.
This season we averaged 9,446 supporters at home games, so the new capacity of 15,166 gives us a reasonable bit of room to grow into. I expect there'll be some scope for expansion if and when necessary too. With my academy coaching and youth recruitment both rated excellent now I'm pleased with how our infrastructure is looking, though this new stadium project will likely delay investment in our training and youth facilities.
Turning an eye to our youth team, in their first season after promotion back to the Division 1 North/Northwest we finished runners up to Wolfsburg, who won the championship last year. This gave us a play-off against South/Southwest winners Bayern, who we overcame 5-4 on aggregate to tee up a Championship game against Wolfsburg who placed above us by two points in the league stage. They sadly lost the final 2-0, but I'm proud of an excellent season in this respect. While we are still in the early stages of climbing the leagues, it is encouraging to see our U19s mixing it with the country's best. Last season's intake mainly stuck to youth football this year, with nobody breaking into the first team squad just yet unsurprisingly, though this season's intake looks much stronger.
The Youth Intake
I'm quite excited about the three "elite" talents, and this crop is looking far better than last year's in terms of current ability.
Patrick Breuer is exactly the kind of player I wanted out of this intake. We've leant on the goalscoring of Fabian Eisele for the past two seasons, and thankfully he didn't miss a single game this year, but at 29 years old we need somebody to be ready to pick up his influential role when he can't anymore. Other than Felix Drinkuth who I play as a right inside forward and is the same age as Eisele anyway, Breuer comes in immediately as the next best advanced forward at the club, and his personality and attribute spread are encouraging. My only main concern is that he lacks consistency which is one of Eisele's key assets, but their comparison suggests he's not too far off first team level, already beating my star man on mentals and physicals.
Niklas Diemer looks to have the makings of a great sweeper-keeper, and immediately becomes first choice in my U19s with a promising future ahead of him. Similarly, Mark Klein already looks like a natural deep lying playmaker to me, so I hope he can just flourish in his natural position without any need for too much focused training. They both look like high-ceiling prospects who look they could be quite low-maintenance in their development. This year's intake is a marked improvement on last season's, and I am optimistic for what the future holds in that respect.
Another exciting consequence of promotion is that we will finally be participating in the DFB Pokal after two seasons of just league football!
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FC Carl Zeiss Jena - 2022/23 Season
Transfers - Squad - Best Eleven
Top Scorer: Fabian Eisele (24)
Most Assists: Felix Drinkuth (12)
Highest Avg. Rating: René Lange (7.25)A bit of a rollercoaster campaign to get us off and running, but after my downfall at Truro I'm quite pleased to just make it to the end of the season and sign an extended contract. It has been clear from the start that while our board doesn't rate the team, that there is some quality on board. Aside from a mid-season slump we spent most of the campaign in the top half, and have settled into the division quite nicely. We weren't involved in any cups, allowing us to focus solely on our league objective of battling bravely against relegation.
My bigger challenges this season were in keeping personnel happy, with the squad having a lot of doubt in my ability to begin with, and many fringe players getting upset over a lack of playing time. They didn't sign contracts to stay on next season, and I won't miss the majority of them. I thought I'd done enough to appease Romarjo Hajrulla with more playing time but he didn't see it that way, and I'd have liked to keep the Albanian attacker at the club especially following some good late season form but he already seems to have made up his mind unfortunately and handed in a transfer request which I may well ignore unless a decent bid comes in.
Past Positions
As you can see, a fast start, then a bit of a slump that saw us go winless for the whole of September, but our good start helped keep us out of a relegation scrap when things were turning sour and we ended the season on a bit of a charge, finishing only four points behind the play-off place ultimately. I had a few moments of dread against the league's B teams, conceding to Zirkzee and Vidovic twice each, and once to Fiete Arp who earns more than my whole club's wage budget in our two defeats to the Bayern B team and I wasn't best pleased to see Youssoufa Moukoko leading the scoring charts early in the season, but he was promoted to their first team after only 9 games thankfully, and without him up front we beat his Dortmund B side home and away who didn't really threaten in lower mid-table. I don't think we're nearly well enough equipped for a sustained promotion battle yet but who knows. The only thing I'm confident of is that Bayern B will win the title again next year, pushing the promotion places a spot further down the table.
This year we were only expected to fight bravely against relegation and next season the board just wants survival, I'm signed up for another two years with the only expectations being that we stay in the league and stick to the wage budget which I only spend a little over half of anyway. I don't expect to get promoted in these two seasons and wouldn't be surprised to see a slight regression next year due to how streaky we were. Also once I feel we are definitely safe I will likely start blooding some youngsters from our first intake.
For context, our u19s ran away with the league title this season in the extremely weak Regional League (only Hansa Rostock's u19s ran us remotely close, finishing 10 points behind our 113), which grants us promotion to what I believe to be the National Youth Championship. Our u19 squad only had five players in it, who were joined by greyed out players but still managed to dominate the league consisting mostly of teams from below the playable leagues. As a result, I signed a larger crop of this year's intake than I usually would just to bulk out the squad and help them compete at the higher level.
The Youth Intake
I quite liked the positional spread of this preview, and was hoping for a player who could possibly contribute to the first team next season.
I didn't get the instant first-teamer that I'd hoped for, but plenty of worthwhile prospects with to bulk out the u19s with and a few who I will be looking to give minutes to relatively early on. Our current first team right back is really more of a winger, and put in some terrible performances at times this season, so if Pascal Siepel can hit the ground running and develop an attacking side to his game there may well be first team minutes available for him quite soon.
Felix Treitel will struggle to displace my current two CMs who might just be the best players at the club, but he comes in with some good stats for a 15 year old and could be useful depth in future seasons, though I'll need to wait for his 16th birthday before giving him any minutes. In total I signed up 12 players from this intake, mainly to help the team battle relegation and become established in their new league, which contains a much more worthwhile level of opposition. We could well see a load of these guys in the first team in future though, all things going well. It's the first time I've survived a season of this challenge so I'm not really sure what to expect.
Between a top half finish, promotion for the u19s and two upgrades for each of academy coaching and youth recruitment, I feel like the 2022/23 season goes down as a success for the project.
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From Cornish minnows to former European finalists and national champions, I feel like my next starting point gives me a much better chance of success.
FC Carl Zeiss Jena are three-time East German league champions and won four national cups prior to German unification, one of which led them to a UEFA Cup Winners' Cup final appearance, losing to Dinamo Tbilisi.
Club Info - Facilities - Squad
These guys are giants compared to Truro, and I feel quite confident I can establish them in the playable leagues with their current squad, and the "good" youth facilities give me hope for some promising intakes early on.
Among the existing players, I like the look of Felix Drinkuth up front, while Theodor Bergmann and Berkan Taz look like strong senior players too with some further potential to realise.
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On 30/12/2021 at 16:53, GylfiAsCharged said:
Okay, time to give this a go.
Three key players immediately want to let their contracts expire in a couple weeks' time, including our only senior goalkeeper. Not an ideal start, especially given how weak our new number one is...
The squad is pretty threadbare except up front, where we have three strong options. I'll be keeping things very simple with a 4-4-2 in order to get two of our strikers on the pitch at all times, and Tyler Harvey is a decent midfield option too so I could include all three in my lineup.
As a newcomer to the challenge I guess I can't expect a better starting squad than this, and I'm grateful for the strength up front. I guess I just need to scrap for survival for a few years as we try and build some squad depth from future youth intakes.
A factor which may prove an obstacle to investment in youth infrastructure is the board's insistence on building a new stadium in their five year plan, I'm hoping I can get a few improvements in alongside the new ground.
As expected, my first attempt has been an absolute car crash. I've not been sacked yet but we have been relegated with half a dozen games left to play, rooted to the bottom of the table. Funnily enough I couldn't work out a tactical system that made the most of my threadbare defence and utterly hopeless goalkeeper who at one point left me speechless in an interaction...
No, your 6.2 rating hasn't been bad at all, and yes we deserve to be rock bottom. At the time I looked into his stats and worked out his save percentage in the League to be 51.23%. He was conceding every other shot on target!
Unable to get any kind of consistency out of a team simply not cut out for the level, I decided to have some fun and go a bit more gung-ho with my approach. Greenhalgh was an absolute sieve in goal after all, so we'd need to score loads to pick up points. This culminated in a record-breaking goals conceded tally of 125, while we outscored all but three teams in the league, including the runaway leaders Eastleigh. I had strikers score 22 and 19 goals respectively as we were effectively the class clowns of the division.
I'd hoped this decent youth intake would be able to patch my squad up but realistically I always knew I'd never last long enough to meet them.
I'm not giving up on the challenge and am wondering if I made an obvious mistake in my game setup to start with such a ridiculously weak squad. I did make sure to load players from the seventh tier, so that won't have been the problem, but it seemed impossible from the start really. Going to try another European country, so heading to Germany's lower leagues where I've not managed before for a change of scenery.
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Okay, time to give this a go.
Three key players immediately want to let their contracts expire in a couple weeks' time, including our only senior goalkeeper. Not an ideal start, especially given how weak our new number one is...
The squad is pretty threadbare except up front, where we have three strong options. I'll be keeping things very simple with a 4-4-2 in order to get two of our strikers on the pitch at all times, and Tyler Harvey is a decent midfield option too so I could include all three in my lineup.
As a newcomer to the challenge I guess I can't expect a better starting squad than this, and I'm grateful for the strength up front. I guess I just need to scrap for survival for a few years as we try and build some squad depth from future youth intakes.
A factor which may prove an obstacle to investment in youth infrastructure is the board's insistence on building a new stadium in their five year plan, I'm hoping I can get a few improvements in alongside the new ground.
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This challenge always feels like the one I can't even come close to achieving every year, so going to get started in England I think, then try some other countries if I get sacked. Hopefully it doesn't come to that!
3
Reading FC
in Good Player & Team Guide
Posted
2023/24
Not sure how it took me so long to do a Reading save this year, but the first season was dominant as you'd like to expect. The takeover was sorted by January, with former Crawley Town owner Ziya Eren bought the club with no plans to provide any additional investment, but the Turk took over with us sat top of the pile and was therefore reasonable about some board requests on wage budget and percentage of transfer revenue available.
Competitions
I always aimed to win the league but to break the 106 record with a 4 point deduction was ridiculous! Especially sealing it in a 6-1 win against second-placed Blackpool on the final day.
I rotated the team a bit in the Bristol Street Motors Trophy, but we still managed to win the competition despite being second-best to Derby in the semi-final which we turned around to win 4-2 and almost letting a three-goal lead slip in the final against Shrewsbury which we won 3-2.
In the proper cups, we made the fourth round of the FA before losing 3-0 at Old Trafford, and Bournemouth put us out of the League Cup in the second round.
Transfers
Disregard Mukairu and Ballard from the below, obviously there was very little space to work with financially. Snodgrass was an absolute flop and I quickly established I didn't want to trigger a second year on his contract by giving him five appearances, and he kindly decided to retire mid-season. Mochrie was our Player of the Season, while Bloxham and Amo-Ameyaw also contributed importantly in the attacking positions.
Scott Hogan must have left Birmingham mid-season and only appeared on my radar on January deadline day, and while Dom Ballard topped our scoring charts with 19 he was suffering frequent injuries, so given the Irishman's pedigree and reasonable demands I couldn't say no. He returned 13 goals in 12 appearances including 4 on a memorable final day of the season.
The Squad
Below are the squad stats for everyone who made nine or more appearances. The goals really were spread around the team, and my tactic with very attacking wing backs brought the best out of Nesta Guinness-Walker (17 assists) and Kelvin Abrefa (11) who enjoyed a break-out season himself.
Naturally my biggest concern is how reliant we were on loanees in attack. Mochrie's value increased so much I doubt Dundee United will let us take him back, while Russell Martin has been frustrated at me for the roles I've used Sam Amo-Ameyaw in, and since that bridge has been burned then I also can't take Ballard for another season.