Here's where the money went

I blew the lot. Just like I promised. Got my director of football to help a bit - which was perhaps a little lazy of me as I generally like to do my own negotiations. I get a bit paranoid that the DOF won't drive as hard of a bargain as I might - but hey, let the man do his job, right?

So, here's the current ins and outs as of 29 July, 2014:

Incase that turns out as hard to read (click it to enlarge it), I spent about £88mil on Ould-Chikh from FC Twente (£1.7mil), Zivkovic from Ajax (£19.75mil), Tielemans from Anderlecht (£9.75mil), Fierro from Chivas (£1.9mil), Astina from Lanus (£7mil), Grealish from Aston Villa (£20mil), Ward-Prowse from Southampton (£20mil) and Clough from Bolton (£7.5mil).

You may note that the last three players in that list are all British. Typically speaking the British players aren't the best or most promising in the game - or when they are they cost you the fucking world - but I have one eye on meeting player registration regulations in Europe, so it's important to have some decent British talent in your squad. Grealish, Ward-Prowse and Clough might not be pulling on Real Madrid shirts any time soon, but I think they'll be decent additions to our squad.

Looking on the right hand side of the image you'll see a lot of outbound traffic. Most of these guys ended up being released by my DOF after he couldn't find clubs for them. Not sure who comes out of that looking worse, him or the players. Anyway, as I mentioned in previous posts, these guys were deemed as having no future at the club, so off they went. The downside to this; the under 18s side is looking pretty slim for this season! Sooner the regens turn up, the better.

Anyway, I better get back to pre-season...

First things first

I already knew exactly what I needed to do on day one at the club, so I didn't have to waste time doing the usual 'niceties'. Straight down to business.

Time to analyse the current playing (and non playing) staff.

As much as I admire Giggsy in a footballing respect (certainly not so much away from the sport!), I wanted a proven, top quality assistant manager. Was only one man for the job; Mauro Tassotti. He didn't know me from Adam, but obviously he was very aware of who Man Utd were. I was frank with him - I needed the best man to assist me and I felt that was him. I explained what my plan at the club was. He seemed enthused. We thrashed out the details and he came in for Giggs. Giggs was a bit upset, but what you gonna do? Decided the rest of my key backroom staff seemed up to the job. No need to replace the youth setup. Brian McClair knows what he's doing.

Next job was deciding who to get rid of. Sounds so callous, but I don't have the time or space for players I don't think are gonna be worth keeping round. I'd also started to build a list in my head of who I wanted to bring in, and that list was getting bigger by the second.

Mauro and I took a look through the coaches reports on the squad. We knew we had to be aggressive about this task and decided that to our best knowledge we'd be looking to offload any player we didn't genuinely believe would (or perhaps could) get on the first team bench at some point. This was a list that eventually included the likes of Paddy McNair, Nick Powell, Jesse Lingard, Tyler Blackett and a whole slew of youngsters you've probably never heard of (with all due respect, of course).

Now, given I needed to also focus on young players to bring into the club, I didn't really have the time to deal with selling around 30 unwanted players during preseason, so I decided to bring a director of football to look after the task. In the end the currently unemployed - and very fucking old - Italian, Fermo Favini, was the man we went for. He's being doing this stuff to a high standard for a very, very long time.

And on to the potential incoming players; I had built a list of about 52 players to bring in to the club. Our board had given me about £80mil to spend and I intended to spend every last penny securing as many of these players as possible! I quickly signed up Tielemans from Anderlecht and Zivkovic from Ajax - two young players most people will surely be familiar with. Also managed to snap up Ould-Chikh, a young Dutch winger from Twente. Beyond that, there were lots of knock backs from enquiries, which is to be expected when you go round asking teams if you can have their wonderkids. But, we did manage to organise some deals for a handful of Argentine kids who wont be able to join till 2016 and even then will likely need to be farmed out to Belgium to pick up work permits - but at least we will have secured their services.

The negotiations are continuing and we're about to play the MLS Superstars in some sort of preseason trophy lark that I'm finding it hard to get excited about. Anyway, next time I'll firm up who we've managed to capture and how our preseason has gone!

One last save before FM16

I've been playing the Football Manager series since 'Championship Manager 97/98'. I've owned every version since then, and I even moderated a game world on the short lived (and much missed) Football Manager Live between 2008 and 2009.

As much as I feel that Football Manager 15 is the best in the series to date, for the first time since I can remember, I just haven't managed to get into a 'save' this time round. Some of that will be down to personal circumstances; newly wed, first child arrived etc., but trust me, I've still managed to play a LOT of FM15. I've tried legitimate challenges; hard fucking challenges - like starting club-less with no reputation or coaching badges/skills. A challenge that lead me to 1.5 seasons in South Korea's second division and getting nowhere.

Anyway... I've always enjoyed bringing through youth players in my saves. As such, when things are going well, I tend to like my saves to be a minimum of five seasons long - something I've failed to achieve even once so far on FM15.

And so this leads us to today. First off, a disclaimer; I'm very aware that this isn't a 'challenge', it's more something that I think will be fun and will tide me over until FM16 (circa November time). I'm going to be managing Manchester United. My caveat for this 'fun' save is that I will only be signing players who are 19 or under. My aim is to end up with fantastic youngsters with bags of potential who will come through the ranks and into the first XI after a few years or more. Beyond signing players, it will also be my aim to ensure that the club has the best youth facilities and coaching, so that the regens that come through include plenty with good potential.

I'll be updating this blog periodically with my progress in a semi-FM story telling way. It'll be more of a digest to chronicle my progress. It will end when the FM16 demo comes out sometime in the next two months (I assume). I'll be happy if I can get this save into at least a fifth season - but we shall see!