Part 2: Chapter the Second: Wherein I realize that we have to play a game far sooner than I expected.
Chapter the Second, Wherein I realize that we have to play a game far sooner than I expected.July 16, 2013
The first course of business is to cancel the friendly matches that had been arranged by the previous manager. I'd have been doing this anyways, it's almost always better to set up your own friendlies and as a lower league club without any cash acting as a top flight team's punching bag is a good way to rapidly improve your finances, but there's absolutely no point in playing friendlies when only 2 of the current players will be on the team in a few weeks.
Unfortunately, my first day on the job coincides with a match against Fleetwood, a League Two team. You'd have thought that someone would have canceled that game given the shape of the team, but it's the managers job to schedule friendlies and no one got around to doing it before I was hired. Worse, it looks like the team was forced to play an away game at Wrexham the previous week, which they promptly lost 5-0.
It's too late to cancel the friendly, we're going to have to play a match with our current players. If we only lose by 5 it'll be a minor miracle. On the other hand, if one of the replacements plays well I might sign him to a contract, we need at least 16 players before the season begins in about a month's time.
Before we get to the game, it's time to clean house. When you first take over as manager of a team you have the option of asking the current staff to accept a mutual termination. It'll cost you less than firing them outright, but you still have to pay them a portion of their remaining contract as severance. If you're a poor club, you might have to wait a while before you can upgrade your staff. We are not a poor club, so everyone is getting the sack.
Letting lots of people go in a short period of time is generally bad for team morale, as people begin to wonder who's next to be called into your office to discuss their lack of a future with the team. Since I'm firing all but 2 people at the club, and one of them already has a morale of “Abysmal,” I don't really care.
Now that that's over, it's time to bring in new staff. The most important of those positions is your Assistant Manager, or Ass Man. Besides having an unfortunate abbreviated title, he's the guy who keeps us informed of what's going on in your clubhouse and gives you his recommendation on your players current abilities and potential for improvement. Also, when (not if) we get ourselves banned from the sideline by the Football Association for telling the referee that we're going to burn down his house after he misses a clear penalty our Ass Man will take over match tactics and team pep-talks.
The Assistant Manager and other staffers such as the Chief Scout, Head of Youth Development, and Director of Football, can be delegated quite a bit of responsibility in the game. They can handle your in-game tactics and team pep talks, attend the press conferences, even negotiate and ink contracts with players and handle transfers. I generally like to micromanage, which is why I only play one Football Manager save a year, and why I only care about my Ass Man's ability to judge talent. And I made it all the way to the end of this section without making a joke about being an ass man. I'm getting old.
This is the staff search page. Get to know it, you'll be spending a lot of time here and on the very similar player search page. You can modify what you're searching for almost any way you wish, right down to looking for an unemployed 50 year old Irishman who has great management skills with older players but just doesn't understand kids these days. You can also change which attributes and information is shown in the results. The above are the attributes and information I generally use when looking for scouts and assistant managers. As I said. I primarily want my Ass Man to be a good judge of current and potential ability. Well, and I want him for one other thing that I'll mention later. I also like all of my coaches to have good determination, discipline, and motivation scores, as those attributes impact their training rating.
As you can see here, there's 15 people the club is aware of who meet our specifications of being fine connoisseurs of talent. None of them will even consider working for us- they all either have jobs at other, much better clubs or can get hired by other, much better clubs. Which is the second thing I need my Ass Man for, without one you can't filter out everyone who's unwilling to join your organization from your searches. Always remember to complete contract negotiations with your new Ass Man before you kick the old one out the door, or you won't be able to figure out which assistant managers would be interested in the job.
Ah, much better. None of these guys are anything special, but they're all significantly better than the incumbent. Marc McLaughlin has decent scouting stats, and isn't shabby when it comes to determination, discipline, and motivation. He's even pretty good working with young players, something that will be important given how I fetishize youth in unseemly ways. I mean, why sign a 26 year old who's really good but probably won't get better when I can sign a not quite as good 19 year old who could be great in 5 years? I tend to lust for young players like Hollywood lusts for budding actresses. Heck, when I'm playing this game I'm often on my couch! Ahem.
Anyways, who cares if McLaughlin's knowledge of tactics begins and ends with which goal you're supposed to try and kick the ball into? Let's see if he'll sign on with us.
I seem to have offended him by low-balling on the first offer. Negotiations consist of offers going back and forth between a player/staffer or their agent and you. Depending on the traits of the person you're dealing with and your personal relationship with them they have more or less willingness to keep trading offers. At one point in my last save I had to sell the midfielder who I'd raised with the team since he was in high school, despite my being listed as his favorite person, because his agent had a patience of 1 and my relationship with the agent was “Hatred.” The agent would demand contracts worth more than my board would let me offer, then refuse to negotiate. So the moral of the story is, don't get too attached to the bits of binary that make up players in this game. Also, fuck agents.
If the person you're trying to hire's background turns yellow it means you've got one last chance to get them to accept an offer. I sign McLaughlin after haggling him down to £240/week. In a few days we'll get a message in our inbox signaling that he's accepted our offer, and he'll join the team. Next up we quickly find a team doctor that won't kill our players by accident while trying to treat a stubbed toe, and our sawbones's physiotherapy attribute goes from 2 to 16. Then we add half dozen or so scouts whose job will be finding us players from the UK and Ireland. I also hire some coaches to train the players, but I'll hold off on showing them until I explain how training works.
On their way out the door, one of the sacked staffers leaks our contract offer I made to a cromulent young goalkeeper, setting off five other teams also making contract offers. I want that 28k in severance package back, jerk.
Now that we've staffed up, it's time for our first match.
At Fleetwood, July 16, 2013
Friendly
We're going to start off in the 4-4-2 formation. 1 goalkeeper, 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, 2 strikers. We'll get fancier as we go along, but the old 4-4-2 is a classic and basic formation for a reason as it's both simple and balanced. We're still going to get murdered.
What makes it even worse is that our temporary players apparently tied one on last night, and are in horrible condition. Generally you don't want to start players who are at less than 95% because of the decline in performance due to fatigue and increased chance of injury. Starting players who are already down to 64% means the ones playing a full match will be in the 30s by the time the game is over.
That went about as expected. On the bright side, we literally have nowhere else to go but up from here.
Fleetwood 5-0 Tackleford