RSL in the WSL Part 1: First Match
The Season Finally Starts
It’s time to get the season rolling.
As you may recall, we are playing in the Major League Soccer division of Super League 1 of the World Super League setup. You can read more about the league structure here.
The first real match of this save comes against Club Puebla, down in Puebla, Mexico.
Club Puebla
Club Puebla has seen its ups and downs over the years. Its greatest run came in the 1980s and the early 1990s, in which it won two league championships and two cup championships. The team has had what appears to me to be a string of lower mid-table runs over the past few decades, though Mexico’s league system is so complex that I’m honestly not quite sure I understand it.
Club Puebla is certainly much older than Real Salt Lake. RSL was founded in 2005; Club Puebla started professional play in 1944, and dates back to 1904.
Not only is the club older than ours, but their players are considerably older as well. As you can see, their average squad age of 27 seems like a lifetime older than our average age of 22, peppered with numerous wonderkid speculations thanks to my transfer policy.
And, as you can see, it isn’t exactly a short bus ride to the nearest town. The 2,000 mile bus ride would take 35 hours, assuming we never stopped. I suppose we could fly, though our club finances make me suspect that we’re not quite wealthy enough to own our own jet. Of course, the magic of Football Manager ensures we’ll make it one way or another.
It’s going to be a tricky match – a real early test of my managerial skills.
The Match
It rained heavily throughout the evening – a cool rain for a cool evening, soaking the pitch and bogging play down. The attendance was poor, though I’m not sure if that’s because of the weather or because of the local fans’ expectations for their team.
Either way, we won. It wasn’t pretty, but we pulled it off.
We looked bad at the beginning, and I wondered if my experiment would crash and burn right from the start. After a lackadaisical first half, I thought this might be an embarrassment.
The second half looked a little bit more promising. We were awarded a questionable penalty in the 56th minute – a penalty that proved to be the deciding factor in our 1-0 win.
Football Manager 2021 is the first game to include xG, which I suppose measures expected goals based on the angle of the shots you take. As you can see, our xG started off quite worrying, but then improved remarkably when we got that penalty:
There’s not really too much else you can say about a simple 1-0 win.
We were outshot, but we had more shots on target. We had quite a few fouls, which is one of the “features” of the tactic I’m using. We managed to get more of the possession, though the majority of highlights were for Puebla.
I was hoping to get a good shot of the lineups before the game, but Football Manager decided not to show me one of those special screens for some reason. Anyway, here are the individual player ratings.
6.6 is usually considered to be an average rating in the Football Manager world. 6.3 and below is a bad game, and anything above 7.0 is considered good.
Nicky Stott, our 16-year-old Scottish goalie making his first team debut, put in a great performance – an excellent sign for the future.
The worst performance went to Cardozo, another very young central defensive midfielder making his debut. He was called upon to start at the last second because the older, experienced starting player wasn’t fit. Fortunately, Cardozo’s quiet game didn’t hurt us much.
It was a pretty poor game all around, though this isn’t really that strange for the start of the season. If my prior experience is any indication, once the players learn the tactic we should start seeing good results.
Oh yeah – and we had 3 substitutes in the MLS Team of the Week. Again, not bad at all.
There’s nothing better than being at the top of the table – even if it’s after only one match!