RSL in the WSL Part 14

Transfer Special

If you like what you see, please consider subscribing. Subscribing will ensure that you receive every new post in your email, and is completely free.

RSL in the WSL Part 14

I’ll be frank with you.  I thought I was going to go into this transfer special with no pressure at all.  I was under the assumption that our squad would be good enough to go forward without any sort of major changes at all – that we’d be safely in the middle of the pack somewhere and that we’d be able to wait for the youngsters to grow.

Five losses in a row have proven to me that there are some problems that we need to address.  And so I went into the final week of transfers looking to sell.

It’s kind of sad, since I haven’t had a chance yet to properly introduce you to the squad.  But we need to get back to winning, and there’s really only one way to do that.

Big sales

If you want to make something happen, you’ve got to get money.  And the best way to get money in Football Manager is to sell players who are in demand.

We have four players who survived my squad destruction at the beginning of the save.  One will retire in December.  The other three – Donny Toia, Everton Luiz, and Damir Kreilach, have been playing particularly poor.

I let them go one by one.

Toia went for £450,000 to Cremonese, another side in Super League 1.  He’s been particularly frustrating in his four appearance this season.  I was relying on him to be a strength at right back, but he really hasn’t played competently at all.

Everton Luiz went next – £2.1 million to Cardiff – also Super League 1.  Luiz is 31 years old and is clearly declining.  We’ve had some problems in that central defensive midfielder position, of course, but Luiz hasn’t exactly been the sort of veteran presence that we could use there.  I’d much rather have the money and the salary space than the declining player putting up a 6.3 or 6.4 every game.

This one hurt a little bit more.  Damir Kreilach isn’t a bad player at all, though he is also aging.  £3.7 million to Panathinaikos – another Super League 1 side.  The original idea was to hold on to him through the end of the season before selling him off.  However, after a bit of thought, I decided that it was better to go for broke and get the money now than to keep starting him and watch nobody score.

I suppose I should feel happy that we didn’t have a Premier League side come in and spend tons of money for an established player, though it would have been nice to have a little bit more cash than this.

Who we got

Well, we didn’t get anybody you’ve likely heard of.  I’ll introduce the side in the coming days, position by position.

I did want to mention a certain player we brought in on loan, however.  I normally stay away from any loan deals – I prefer to own my players outright, thank you very much.  However, I knew we had a problem at attacking midfield with the absence of Kreliach.  Yusuf Demir, the normal FM21 solution to all attacking midfield problems, is already out on loan.  That left me with no choice but to go with my old standby: Odin Thiago Holm.

I had Holm back when I was playing this game two years ago as a mainstay of my old Ingolstadt 04 side.  In that save, our owners sold him off for cheap right before we reached the Bundesliga, which made me upset.  He doesn’t have the personality that I went on for ages about in prior posts. However, I do know that he’s quality, and I know that he will help us finally score goals again.

Vålerenga wanted something like £14 million for him.  I could have talked them down to £9 million or so, but I didn’t have the cash, and I really don’t want to put the club into long-term transfer debt just to achieve a midlevel finish.  The plan is to try him out now, make it permanent if he plays well enough, or see if some of our younger players are ready for the starting role by the time he’s done.

RSL Transfer Roundup

As you can see, we did pretty good business this year, selling £25 million worth of players and buying £19.25 million worth.  If we keep buying youngsters, we should see similar profitable years in the future.  We just need to win now.

At the end of the month, this is how our finances looked.  It’s normal to experience large losses in Football Manager at the start of the season, only to see the money come back over the course of the year.  We’re doing quite well financially, though it seems that the chairman is still set on selling the club.  I’ve got nothing to complain about.

Transfer Roundup

I’m not going to be able to go over all £2.46 billion worth of transfers, of course.  That number itself is just astounding – and this is for the very first transfer window in the game.

As you can see, we were the most active club among all 1,000+ clubs in the World Super League system, bringing in 67 new players.

A few highlights:

Barcelona are already primed to win the Premier League this year.  Naturally, they went out and signed José Sanfilippo, a legendary Argentinian striker that can only make them better.

Take a look at what Barcelona’s first team looks like:

Of course, the most frightening thing is that Messi and Xavi have been reset to their 18-year-old selves, which means we have well over a decade more of them to deal with.

Liverpool managed to sign Germano on a free transfer, which makes me sick.  Maybe we should have gone for him right off the bat.

Club Atlético River Plate went in for Josef Smistik from Rapid Wien, also cementing their status as a monster side for the time being.

For those curious, the highest transfer fee paid for a non-legendary player was for Owen Wijndal – £53 million in all.

Anyway, I could go on for hours, but you get the idea.  Lots of money thrown around, mostly by clubs other than ours.

Our FA Cup journey starts tomorrow!