MKD - Fixtures and transfers

 Just for completeness sake I decided to post my fixtures from last season, which I had forgotten. As I mentioned on the previous post, I had a horrible slump mid season as you can see below.

This season we had a pretty difficult start. After our pre-season we had to deal with a few really tricky games. Tottenham, Man Utd, Man City, Liverpool, Chelsea and Everton within my first 7 games. There really isn't any way you could make this transition into the EPL any harder. Out of the first 7 games we ended up actually beating Chelsea on a very lucky yet well played game. We also managed to tie a scoreless game against Man United. However, ManU isn't necessarily doing very well this season though. Man United has been sitting in the bottom half of the table for a while now and currently they are one position above us (MKD 14th, ManU 13th).

 Lastly, lets look at our transfers. Last season we didn't really spend a whole lot of money on transfers, with only 2 purchases, Dirk Riedel and Paul Caddis, both for 35K. Caddis has been a great purchase of our right back, while Riedel has been developping quite nicely into a very good prospect for the future. He's been drawing quite a bit of attention to himself from some of the larger clubs, and we have had several offers for him already. I am however really trying to keep him in the club if I can, and if not I'd want at least a couple of millions for him, even though he's not worth very much right now (250K maybe?).

Once we got promoted however, I have been making sure we beef up our squad with some big signings. Kevin Mirallas being our biggest purchase yet (8.75M). He's been having a slow start at the club but I do think he has the pace and talent we need to maintain our EPL spot. Our other 2 large buys were Thorgan Hazard (2.2M) and Ruben Perez (600K). Hazard hasn't really shown very much of his talent despit the large price tag, Perez has been doing a bit better, and at less than a million, I think he was a bit of a bargain IMO.

On the other end, we have been selling some players as well to cover some of our costst. Gareth Taylor was sold for 1.2M, this U21 player has been developping for a while and he had many offers just before the end of the transfer period, and we ended up giving him up to Liverpool for a hefty 1.2M. Sampdoria purchased Marc Torrejon, which was a new addition last season. He came in as a free transfer and a large salary. In the end he wasn't a very fruitful addition to our squad, but still managed to give us a profit on his 1.8M transaction.

Lastly Andrea De Falco was sold to Reggina for 675K, which was fair. He wasn't getting very much game time with us and honestly I just don't feel that De Falco was producing as much as his potential allowed him to. He was a good player, just wasn't working for us.