Victory in Koln

I was having a great time with Goteborg and building the team back up until….the save got corrupted and I couldn’t get past a certain date in time. So, I’m back to square one and I’m off to a country that I’m a little more familiar with but with a team that I’m not familiar with at all….Viktoria Koln. Viktoria Koln has been a club for over 100 years but never have never played in the Bundesliga and had only one short stint in the 2.Bundesliga. They have been marginally successful, recently, in the lower tiers of German football and are now trying to establish themselves as a side in the 3.Liga. That said, what are my plans for this save? I have five “tiers” of plans.

Short Term Goals

Earn Promotion to the 2.Bundesliga

This is only short term goal. Once this goal is achieved, it will open up so much for the club as whole.

Medium Term Goals

Start to build a regional recruiting network in Belgium and The Netherlands

Earn Promotion to the Bundesliga

Upgrade the stadium

Koln sits just a two hour drive from Brussels, 2.5 hour drive from Antwerp and three hour drive from Amsterdam. Add these three population centers to the population in Koln and Viktoria will have a substantial population to draw from to create a talent pool. The club plays in a tiny 10,000 seat stadium which is fine for the Regionalliga and 3.Liga but we will need something bigger once we established ourselves in the 2.Bundesliga. Earn promotion to the Bundesliga.

Long Term Goals

Establish the regional recruiting network in Belgium and The Netherlands

Build recruiting relationships in Turkey and USA

Posh FC Koln for status as the top club in Koln

Challenge for Europa Conference and Europa League place

By the time we reach the Bundesliga, we should have firmly established our recruiting network in Belgium and The Netherlands. The next recruiting step is to establish relationships in Turkey, Koln has a good number of Turkish nationals in the city, and USA, where my manager based of my self was born. This will give us four strong nations to build upon the German nationals coming through the youth academy. FC Koln is the top dog in the city and has no one pushing them. Once we reach the Bundesliga that is going to change, we are going to push them for top city club status. If we flip that, then we should have our pick of talent from the city. To push them, we need to get into and make noise in UEFA’s Europa Conference and Europa League.

Extreme Long Term Goals

Build a new stadium

Maintain recruiting network in Belgium and The Netherlands

Establish recruiting network in Turkey and USA

Establish Viktoria Koln as top club in Koln

Push for a Champions League place

Most of these goals are building upon our long term goals. The easiest way to establish ourselves as the top club in Koln is to get into and maintain our place in the Champions League but I don’t want to do this at the expense of our established recruiting relationships.

Ultimate Goals

Win Bundesliga

Win DFB-Pokal

Win European Silverware

Earn a place at the Club World Cup

These should be the goals for every top German club and if we achieve all of our other goals, these are goals which we should be aiming for.

Meeting the Team

Before the ink was even dry on my contract, the club had done a lot of work in the transfer market. A lot of players leaving the team and a mix of players coming into the club either on free transfers or on loan.

The goalkeeping situation is a tough one. We’ve got one experienced player who is out injured and one player in on a season-long loan for low wages but no third goalkeeper in the senior team. Seeing this, I made a promotion from the Viktoria Koln II squad.

Jakob Brambach comes up from the Viktoria Koln II squad and he has some potential. He looks like a good shot stopper but needs to work on a couple of things. The two glaring weaknesses are anticipating game action and communication with his backline. These things will come with game time and training with the senior team. But for now, he’s the back-up that I’ll be rolling with to start the season.

A solid pair of players on the left and a good core in the middle with other solid pair on the right. The back line will be key in keeping the pressure off of our potentially shaky goalkeeper situation.

The center of the midfield is another potential problem with only two midfielders whose best position is in the middle of the field and one of those is more comfortable playing as a defensive midfielder. The wings are in great shape so no need to look for improvement in those positions but we need to shore up the middle. Two more players from the II team will be called up to help fill that need.

A deep group of center forwards are in the squad. A great mix of youth and experience for us this season.

Marcel Risse is a player that I wish the board had not signed. He was signed on 8 July 2021 so there is no hope of getting him to agree to be transfer listed. But more importantly, he is on INSANE wages for the club as he is getting paid 24.5k per week. That eats up almost 30% of our wage. I’d much rather not have in on the team and go with a younger player. But he’s here and hopefully I can get him to agree to lower wage for next season if he wants to stay. If he won’t agree to lower wages, then let him go and spend that money in other places.

The board’s goal seem to be in line with my thoughts for the team. A nice slow build as we put in the building blocks in place for the club both in the short and long term.

Glory to Goteborg

Yesterday, I put it to my Twitter followers to decide what I should do while I wait for a England L10 database that is not full of bugs. Scaling the Cliffs of Dover won the vote and I started with them last night but I felt it was too close my England L10 database saves. I just wasn’t into it. So, I moved on to the runner-up in the voting….Glory to Goteborg.

IFK Goteborg were once the kings of Swedish Football and have won 18 Allsvenskan titles. They are also the only Scandinavian club to win a European trophy as winners of the 1982 and 1987 UEFA Cup. They have also reached the semi-finals of the Champions League twice in 1986 and 1993 back when the Champions League wasn’t the big money tournament that it is today. On the managerial side, they also gave Europe Sven-Goran Ericksson, who led them to that 1982 UEFA Cup title. However, their last Allsvenskan title was in 2007 and the one before the 2007 was back in 1996. This once proud club has won two league trophies in the last 25 years. The goal of this save is to return IFK Goteborg back to its glory days of the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Here is Goteborg’s history this century as compared to Malmo. They have gone up while Goteborg has gone down.

The Roster

We have two goalkeepers of equal ability on the first team roster and both will see their contract expire at the end of the season. The plan is to only keep one of them and go with a younger option as the back-up for the 2022 season.

Not a deep backline with only three center backs, two right backs, and one left back on the senior roster. The young player, on the right side, isn’t the greatest but we will see how he develops this season to see if another short-term deal is in order or if I need to cut bait and move on with another younger option next season. The problem is compounded by 35-year old Mattias Bjarsmyr in the mix at the starting center-back position. I’d really like a younger option in the mix here.

A lot of options on the left side and they are all injured. Decent amount of choices on the right. Not a lot in the middle.

On the forward line, I have some options led by 34-year legend Marcus Berg, who is here for the next two seasons as well. By 2023, Oscar Vilhemsson, the 17-year old, will be ready to take over the lead center forward role. I plan to bounce between a 4-4-2, 4-3-3 and 4-2-3-1 with the squad so Vilhemsson should get plenty of seasoning over the next two seasons.

Once Vilhelmsson develops a right foot, he’ll be a good one.

Where things Stand

We sit in 10th place and really struggling after 11 matches on a 3-4-4 record and -3 goal difference. Halmstads is trying to run away with the league but Malmo and AIK are in the title hunt, as usual, as well.

We are in a good place financially. The transfer budget is zero because I turned off the transfer activity for the first window.

The board isn’t asking for much giving me plenty of time to rebuild the squad as I try to return the club to it’s past glory.

[FM22] Zero to Hero – Introduction

A few versions of Football Manager ago, I had a very fun save with a tiny club in National League structure….North Ferriby United AFC. They were in the National North when I took them over and got them as high as the Championship. In real life, North Ferriby United AFC was not as lucky. Their time in the National League structure was brief. They made into the National League for one season and were relegated. An ownership change and another relegation quickly followed the season after that. Not long after that, the club was dissolved and sitting on over seven million pounds of debt. The club had a very full lower-level trophy cabinet.

19x winner of the East Riding Senior Cup

3x winner of the North Counties East Football League President’s Cup (that’s a tough one for the engraver)

2x winner of the Northern Premier League Challenge Cup

2015 winner of the FA Trophy

1997 runner-up of the FA Vase

A lot of silverware for a tiny club.

From the ashes left behind in the seven million pounds of debt, a phoenix club arose….North Ferriby FC. They started competing in the Northern Counties East League starting in the 2019-20 season. The finished in 4th place in that inaugural season. Their second season was cut short by COVID and they were sitting in 4th place.

Here’s where I come in….Tim Brooks a middle-aged American manager with only Sunday league football experience (I was a high school goalkeeper who could have played Division 3 (lowest division) soccer) and no coaching badges because I have no coaching badges. Though, I do have a U19 certification to officiate field hockey and used to hold the same certification for soccer/football.

North Ferriby play, in Football Manager, at Grange Lane which has a capacity of 3,000 with seating for 250.

Looks about as good as the fields I played on in my career. My kind of field.

We are picked to win the league, though I think this may be due to the fact that I’m the only club with a full squad in the league. The board wants to win the ninth tier next season before stabilizing the eighth tier which is the Regional First Division. Back-to-back titles may be a tough ask but I think I’m up for the job.

We don’t have a lot of money in the account but we do have a money-making friendly against Hull on the schedule so that will help.

I’ll have a nice footballing universe to play in as we move up the divisions and can start branching out with a scouting network that doesn’t involve finding cast-offs from clubs in higher divisions and our youth academy products.

Only one way to go when you start at the bottom!

Not Going Hungary in Quarantine – Part 4 (Lots of Nations League Coverage)

It was a long 2020-21 season both domestically and internationally.  This post is going to be very heavy on the international side since I had a full slate of Nations League qualifiers to get through in the fall and the start of the 2022 World Cup Qualifiers in the spring.  Sandwiched in there was the MTK domestic slate with 33 league games and a lot of Magyar Kupa games.  A very busy season and a very successful season filled with ups and downs.

Not Going Hungary In Quarantine – Part 3 (Mostly MTK)

After getting sent out of the 2020 European Championship Qualifiers, 2-0, by Poland.  The second half of the season was focused mainly on getting MTK promoted into the top tier of Hungarian football.  It was a pretty easy task since we had spent the entire season in first place and there really wasn’t much to change that fact.  In short, it was a mainly getting through the remainder of the season and into the offseason where the heavy lifting was going to take place.