[FM13] Success Not Guaranteed

[westa03]

Success Not Guaranteed

When picking a team to start with, I struggled for quite a bit on who to be as I had tried to be quite a few teams previously but just could not get attached to the players or the club. However after watching my beloved Arsenal beaten on the opening day of the Premier League, I was suddenly drawn towards managing Aston Villa. The appeal of their young team that had plenty of room for improvement, the mix of pace and power and of course because they have that Belgian beast known as Benteke. I have decided to use a custom database so that all the summer transfers are done.

Here is a little background on the Villans:

So after having a meeting with the board, I was told what my budget for the season would be:

This was an acceptable budget, when you take into account that Villa had already brought in Nicklas Helenius, Leandro Bacuna, Jores Okore, Antonio Luna and Aleksandar Tonev. The wage budget was a massive problem though, the club was littered with high earners and we were currently 99k over our budget. Sales of players that I felt weren't value for their salaries would be a possibility.

The Squad

After evaluating my team, I could see that we had quite a few young promising players in the form of A.Westwood, B.Bannan, G.Gardner, J.Okore, C.Clark and L.Bacuna. Personally I thought with a partnership of Vlaar and Clark/Okore would thrive and in attack we looked strong with having a choice between Benteke and new recruit Helenius. The midfield was the area that I thought we looked weakest, Delph in my eyes looked rather average as well as Herd and we were lacking a solid defensive midfielder, so this is where i would look to make a top priority for reinforcements.

So after looking at the transfer market, and scouring for new players to improve my team this is how my transfers activity ended up:

There wasn't that much talent out there available to us in all honesty. However I am rather pleased with the loan signing Maxime Gonalons, he was a player that could not only do the defensive work that I needed of him, but he was good on the ball as well. De Sciglio and Ruben were both brought in to add depth at full back. Casper Sloth will rotate with Bannan in the MCA role this year, and it was his PPMs that made me decide to sign him. Most of the players that we sold/loaned out was to get them off the wage budget as Given, Delph and Ireland combined were earning just under 150k p/w which in my eyes wasn't justifiable for the ability of the players. I was tempted to sell either Agbonlahor or N'Zogbia, however i decided against it as i didn't want to leave myself lacking depth on the wings, and I believed that they could play a big part for the team this season.

This is the formation I created:

In my next post, I will show you how the team did in Preseason and the first two months of the Premier League campaign.