Football Manager 2015 - Late season one (Chelsea)

We are not late in the season (end of April), and there are only a few games to go. Our Chelsea side is doing well in the premier league. Unfortunately the race has been extremely tight. The top 3 positions are separated by 3 points only. Tottenham has been doing very well and ManU dominated the league for most of the season. Unlike real life, Mata and Falcao have been unstoppable. Chelsea has had some good stretches, particularly around mid season but once the fixtures got congested for us we ended up losing a few games that we shouldn't have. We managed to win the Capital One cup against Everton which was a nice win for us, even if the board isn't as impressed. On the other hand we were knocked out by Wigan in the FA Cup after a pretty embarrassing two games.

In the Champion's League Chelsea had an extremely exciting first KO round. We faced Borussia Dortmund and lost our away game by 2x0. We came back to London to put up a great show. After a 2x0 lead, Oscar faulted inside the area giving the German side a penalty. They scored making the match 2x1. At that point I thought we weren't going to manage. I was very wrong, the team played like champs and we managed to end up the game with a 6x1 win. It was a wonderful game for our team.

We have also made a few tactical changes since my last post. For one we made a few purchases. Most of them are a reflection of the fact that I'm trying to plan for a team that will be unbeatable in a few seasons. For that I purchased Gimber, Coric and Taufer. I had mentioned before that I was eyeing the CB Gimber and the Winger Ante Coric. They are both fairly good prospects that may become first team players in a few years. For now they are mostly just playing in the under 21 squad. These players are also young enough that they will become homegrown if I keep them for the long term, something I desperately need with my current Chelsea squad. Aside from that I brought in the Brazillian center back Dante. He came in for 7.25 Million, which in hindsigh might be a tad much for a 31 year old. I just felt that Chelsea was a bit too thin at the back and to be quite honest he has been very useful so far. I played him as CB quite a few games but I also ended up using him as a defensive midfielder during an injury spell. I basically had all my defensive midfielders injured for a long time. That fact combined with our clogged calendar made it so I had to bring him in. I can't complain about his performance despite his lack of natural skill in that position.

Lastly, I brought in the Italian DM/MC Melkamu Taufer. This 17 year old is already a fairly decent player and he is supposed to be developing into a superstar if things go well. I would very much like to develop him into becoming a strong deep playmaker, but we'll see. Right now he is looking very good in terms of teamwork, work rate as well as good passing skills. I may need to increase his off the ball skills and wouldn't mind better vision as well. He came in for 2.3M pounds, which isn't cheap, but I know I can at least make my money back in a few seasons. I believe I will also manage to bring in Odegaard at the end of the season. This player will likely cost me a good chunk of money but will certainly be worth it in the long run.

FM15 - Chelsea save

Just recently I've added football manager 2015 to my steam library. I was debating on whether to purchase it since I'm still playing FM13 so much and I'm still enjoying my Heidelberg save quite a bit. Since SI decided to make new FM games for Linux I sort of feel obligated to support them so I actually bought the new game.

For this game I'm probably not going to do a terribly detailed AAR but I thought maybe I'd post a few of my tactical choices and interesting things I do with my team. I basically started with the Chelsea squad that started the season and set my save to start with no transfer money, so basically all EPL squads look like what they did back in September. After playing a few friendlies and a few league games I realized that playing Mourinho's 4-2-3-1 wasn't working very well for me I decided to switch it up. Even though we were winning games the team was just not looking as menacing as Chelsea does in real life. I suffered a terrible defeat from Man United, 7x0, which was definitely a wake up call that I couldn't just rely on that tactic when I wasn't playing very well in general. Below are my fixtures up to this point. Since the ManU game, I had to change things up a bit and since then we've only lost to Newcastle, which was a game I was still using that same formation and to Swansea. The Swansea defeat was a bit of a fluke, we really were the better team, but just couldn't put it in.

So the current tactic we're using is a 4-1-2-2-1 where I dropped Matic to the DM position, even though he is still part of the creative team, and Mikel has been playing some games as a ball winning midfielder. I do rotate Ramires in that position as well, and sometimes even change it to a box to box midfielder role. Fabregas is still playing in the midfield as an advanced playmaker (A), although he just picked up an injury. As you can see I also dropped Oscar's position from my tactic which is a bummer since he's one of my favorite Chelsea players in real life. He was just unable to create much the way the team was playing. Instead I have been using him on occasion in the middle as the other AP(A). He isn't best suited for that position but until I figure out an alternative, he may have to play there. I have also tried playing without a formal striker some games and putting Oscar as a shadow striker and that has worked fairly well against weaker sides. I haven't been brave enough to try it in a big game though. Hazard is playing as an inside forward on the left, and as expected he's my top player so far. Very dangerous carrying the ball up front. On the right side I've been rotating Willian and Schurrle as Wingers, and that has been working well. Willian is probably my favorite one in that position at this point but I'm trying to make Schurrle happy, so I play him pretty often. Up front I have Diego Costa, who was really struggling to score initially with my first formation. Since the switch he's been finding a lot more scoring chances and doing much better, even if he is inconsistent. Remy comes in on occasion as well, and he's had some very strong performances as well. I may even have to rotate the two throughout the season if the performances continue this way.

In terms of trades, I've just loaned out a few players but haven't really done much else. I'm thinking about purchasing some young players and maybe unloading some less promising younglings from our current team. I currently have my eyes on the popular wonderkid Martin Odegaard (15 year old MC), Youri Tielemans (17 yo MC), Bilal Ould-Chikh (17 yo DMC), Ante Coric (17 yo AMC), Benedikt Gimber (17 yo DC) and Niklas Sule (19 yo DC).

Beyond that I may wait for the January window to perhaps unload Cahill for a better DC and perhaps look for another WB as well. I'm finding Ivanovic in FM15 is not nearly as good as the real player.

UNL: Season 7 new purchases

It's the start of a new season and there is a bit of activity going on with Heidelberg's roster.

Last season we had to sell One of our top players, Juan Graciano Arrua, which went to CSKA Moscow for 12M. Not a bad transfer in termos of money considering we bought him for 1M back in 2014 from St. Davids City. I didn't really want to let Arrua go since he was still growing as a player, and very young. We also sold Takayasu to FC Berliner for 110K.

So far during this pre-season we have spent quite a bit of the money we received from the EURO cup last season and transfer cash. We purchased Tihomir Maric from Stuttgart for $6M. This is a very promising young striker that I believe in time could be much better than Arrua even.

I believed that our squad was a bit lacking in the left wing so I went out looking for a good winger, ideally with some experience since right now we only have young wingers in the squad. Unfortunately I found a 20 year old winger that was just too tempting to pass. The extremely speedy Brazillian winger, Nilson was our other purchase for a sum of $8.75M. While he is only 20, his numbers are very impressive and last year he played for Anatolis SK achieving an average rating of 7.13. He has had 7+ ratings for over 3 years now and I think this guy has a great future in our squad. I see this guy as a long term investment.

UNL - S02 review and stats

Things are slowly becoming more interesting with this save and in my DB. I just finished my 13/14 season, which is season 2, and despite our slight struggles in the second half of the season, we still ended up with a much sought after promotion to the main league. This time around the promotions went to us (Heidelberg), Taipei 101 (which did have a fairly promising season in 12/13), Celtic Tigers (extremely powerful team this season) and St. Davids City.

In terms of league positions this is what ended up happening:

 Here are our fixtures for the season. We had a really strong start, winning our first 6 games, at which point the team did hit a bit of a slump which I feel we didn't really recover from until mid frebruary. During this point we lost quite a few important games including our loss to Inter Zagreb and Celtic Tigers, which are likely the reason we didn't end the season a bit higher up. I shouldn't complain too much since we did manage a promotion, and during the playoffs we needed to perform and it happened for us.

Our last game was against Kalevipoeg, one of the stronger teams this season, winning group B despite being one of the weakest group winners. Here are the stats for our last game and the fixtures for the playoff games in League 2.

Lastly, here are some stats from our players and the League 1 standings.

Some of my favorite players this season were:

Axel Cedric Konan, my favorite striker up until this point. He ended up with the best average this season and a great 13 goals in 26 appearances. Our top scorer was actually Defederico, our new Argentinian striker however.

In the midfield Dennis Gerster made sure to deliver again this season. He had a 90% pass completion rate, which surprisingly wasn't our best, but this guy is just such a well rounded midfielder. This wasn't unnoticed by other teams either. There were many large offers in the mid season trade window for him, including a few offers of 2.7M dollars for him. These were hard to turn down, but he is simply too valuable for our team right now. Selling him at that point could have easily cost us the promotion.

Resit Kucukkaya was the one surprise for me this season. He ended up with 10 assists, 5 goals and an average rating of 7.31 in 28 games. I was hesitant to keep him our capitain, but I did not regret the decision in the end. He delivered a mature performance for us.


In terms of transfers here is a summary:

A few remarks on those. Defederico was our striker purchase this year, for 20k I bought my top scorer for last season. Not a bad deal. Leo Lacroix was another purchase which I see as an investment. He is only 22 years old, and cost me almost 600k, but I do believe I can develop him into a 1M+ full back.

UNL - Heidelberg save - Testing the DB

Heidelberg was my pick for my first game using my new (still beta) custom database for Football Manager 2013. I`m using exactly what I posted on my last post, and Heidelberg is one of my German clubs, with the increased budget perk as well as the training facility perk. This means that instead of starting with 20M, Heidelberg starts off with 30M in their balance. The training facility perk I believe moves a team from having a training facility rated 12 to a facility rated 20 instead.

I chose Heidelberg mostly because it is a lower league team, which is where I wanted to start and it has some of the perks that I thought would be ideal for a slow growth campaign. I also thought that a German team was also more likely to produce some interesting regens, which goes along with the slow growth idea.

Heidelberg fell into group D in the lower division, which is the same as I posted in my previous post. The team started off with a fairly decent squad (in relation to other teams which are all, generally speaking, crappy). I decided to start off with a 4-4-2 setup but also keep them training on another formation I like, a 4-1-2-2-1 which uses a DMC, two MCs, two attacking wingers and a single striker. I`m just going to toy with this formation for a while, alongside my 4-4-2 which should work relatively well as a reliable strategy.


I also had a couple of players I needed to pick up to make up for the lack of some players in a few positions (such as DMC), as well as to just have a handful of mildly competent players.

Here is a look at my squad at this point. I`m actually almost done this season, I`ll post more about the progress on my next post which will be after the end of the 2012-2013 season. The season went well for us, but considering the situation I`m not going to be bragging about it anytime soon.

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.
 

MKD - Transfer history and season summary

A couple more pieces of stats from the 2012/2013 season:

Daniel Powell was voted the player of the year again for us, despite having a lot less goals this season.

Our best eleven this time around were:

GK - David Martin (6.94 in 42 appearances)
CB - Gary MacKenzie, Kevin Feely (6.82 in 18 apps)
FB - Calum Angus, Adam Chicksen
DMC - Michael Mutzel
MC - Jay Spearing, Antonio Tomas
FC - Rafa Jorda (7.04 in 38 apps), Dean Bowditch, Daniel Powell (7.02 in 47 games)
Others - I. McLoughlin, W. Brown, M. Gecov, G. N'Daw (6.98 in 15 games), D. Larsson (7.35 in 14 apps), D. Lewington, C. MacDonald

We didn't tecnically achieve much last season on paper, however I do feel that MKD did use the last year to build upon what was started during our promotion from League 1. This last season we finally got down our core team and strategy, and I really feel that we can actually get far this season comming up. I honestly think we can get promoted to the EPL this time around as long as we maintain our form and add a few new strong players to our team.

I never posted my transfers from the first two seasons but I think a lot of interesting moves did happen. Most remarkable was the fact that we were able to snatch the Right Full Back Kyle Naughton from Tottenham for 1.6M when they offered him out. We played Kyle for a good number of games and he ended up with a 6.9 average for us. He drew attention to himself and due to a contract clause he was snatched by the Wolves later last season for our largest transaction of all time, 3.3M for Kyle, which did help us maintain our finances in check a bit more.