[FM20] Awakening a Sleeping Dwarf: Can Académica de Coimbra Improve Their Marks?

[KingRoyston]

Coimbra is the fourth largest city in Portugal after Lisbon, Porto and Braga, a major cultural centre mainly due to oldest academic institution in the country, the University of Coimbra.

While incubating young minds and safe guarding many cultural traditions they city has always been lacking one important Portuguese passion - a decent football team!

Académica de Coimbra have a fairly inauspicious history with the exception of a runner up finish in the Primeira Liga once back in 1967, they now reside in LigaPro the Portuguese 2nd Tier. 

They do have a couple of trophies to their name two Taca de Portugal cup wins in 1939 and more recently 2012.

This is my first career story although I am a long time FM player, my journey will be to see if I can turn this quiet town of boffin heads into sports crazy jocks as their football team returns rightfully to their place in the top tier and then attempts to wrestle power from the all too dominant Big 3: Benfica, Sporting and Porto.

Can Académica de Coimbra win back to back Primeira Liga Championships and call itself the dominant force in Portuguese football, I guess we'll see and the attempt will be documented here.

Edited November 22, 2019 by KingRoyston

[KingRoyston]

To make things more challenging I have started with no coaching license and as a Sunday league footballer, usually I just use what is recommended for the club i choose so it will be interesting to see the difference this makes.

 

As we can see, a fairly sparse trophy cabinet, hopefully we change that soon.  One of the things that attracted to me to this challenge is that they have decent sized albeit very old stadium - if we can create a decent team, hopefully we can eventually fill Estadio Cidade de Coimbra on a weekly basis.

No immediate requirement for promotion which is nice and reduces the pressure a little bit.  Signing players under the ages of 20 i can live with, I always like to develop youth so this is fine by me.

 

 

 

[KingRoyston]

THE SQUAD

Squad has potential but a bunch of holes.  Lots of loans which I'm not really a fan of, I don't like improving other people's players so they get the long term benefits, even if get the short-term gain.   So i'll probably try and cancel as many of these as possible after the 28 day amnesty period which I guess is a new FM20 feature.

STRENGTHS

Good depth at centre half, 4 solid players with not a lot of drop off in quality across the 4.  The star of this group being Ze Castro, brought up through the club ranks and went on to play for Athletico Madrid and Deportivo, now at 36 this season maybe his last - would be great to send him off with a promotion. 

2 quality player makers, despite my preferences two loans I won't be cancelling is Felipe Chaby - he looks a great AMC at this level and Joao Mendes also looks very nice, I'll need to figure out how to get both of them in a tactic controlling our attacks.

Great left back - our best player may well be Mauro Cerqueira and we actually own him!!  Will definitely want to be using a marauding left back this season.

WEAKNESSES  

We only have 2 full backs which is a big issue, I need to find some cover here. 

We only have one capable fit striker, Hugo Almeida who is 35 and probably not super durable, the other strikers being either injured for 10 mths or just not very good.

 

We have 10k per week in Wage Budget room and a 50k war chest which more than I'd hoped for so i'll see what I can do in the market before deciding on a tactical approach, although first impression is i'll be playing a system with a Deep Striker/Target Man, an out and out right winger, and a couple of play makers

 

[KingRoyston]

TACTICS

I'll start things off pretty simple and adjust as I get to know the players better.  Squad suits a 4-2-3-1 as I have two really good attacking mid / playmakers and harder to fit them into a 4-3-3 or 4-4-2 and I generally don't like playing with 3 centre backs.

Not settled on the striker role yet, might change to DLF for Almeida and could be totally different role for whichever other striker I might finally sign (tough going at the moment).

Not too many team instructions to start with and a balanced mentality, I imagine this will be a base i tweak from as I go and a little bit in-game.

[KingRoyston]

JULY 2019: 4 Wins, 1 Draw, 2 Losses

THOUGHTS

Pretty happy with how the team has looked, played some tough friendlies, great win against Koln and totally out played Boavista in the division above despite a 3-1 loss.  Only other loss was after going down to 10 men in the 10th minute.

One competitive game, the first round of the league cup - a nice 3-0 home win against Varzim who are also in our division.  You have to play 2 U20 players in this competition which was news to me, so a couple of 18yr old prospects were drafted in at the last minute.  Happily they combined for the first goal and Simao Franca on the right wing grabbed a brace - forced to give youth a chance and they came through!  

FUTURE STAR??