Part 71: Epilogue: The price of doing business.

Epilogue: The price of doing business.
May 6, 2018-June 9, 2018

Hey guys, I'm in the Hall of Fame!



To be fair, it's not hard to get into the hall of fame for the United States, we aren't known as a nation of brilliant football managers.



As befits the conquering heros, both Bailey and Mujkic are in the final League One team of the week.



Mujkic is not impressed by our promotion and refuses to negotiate a new deal. We might be able to keep him for a couple years, £10m is a goodly chunk of change to drop on a player who's never played above League One.



Well, they put up less of a fight than I expected. Good to see. Also, we've got two new directors who need naming. First two people who have not yet been board members to ask get named.



I'm just trying to get them off payroll so we can save a month's salary, but no luck.



Take that, Tackleford! I will steal all your useful staff!



Nice to have that up to fourteen, now I won't have to monkey with things the next time I request additional scouts.



Back to back promotions will do that.



Not a single decline amongst our players, the only question was who improved most. An advantage of running a club where the oldest player is a grizzled 26.



It occurs to me that one reason I'm seeing only bad reactions here is because we're finishing seasons on a high note, and thus players moral can only go down.



I'm expecting to have to give some players more time off, we were pretty tuckered by the end of the season and a lot of players have international commitments.



And we have our twelve scouts. Time to start scouring Europe!



I'm going to completely rejigger our scouting system.



Richard Boulding keeps his assignment of scouting our upcoming opposition. The scout on this task can't scout any other competitions, but if they have a high tactical knowledge score they can provide useful advice as to what your opponents are weak or strong against (e.g. focusing on attacking movement, or defensive set pieces). Boulding has a tactical knowledge of 13, making him the best of anyone on our staff. I really need to get around to hiring my own Jogi Löw at some point, perhaps this off-season.



Scouts can cover one competition and also scout one region or country. I prefer to have them focus on a region, where they'll move from country to country looking at talent. We've got four regions we can scout now. We had previously been limited to the UK and Ireland (England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales), but now we can also search Southern Europe (mainly Spain, Italy, and Portugal), Scandinavia (exactly who you'd think), Central Europe (Germany, France, and the low countries), and Eastern Europe (including Turkey and extending all the way out to Kazakhstan). I'm not going to spend much time looking at Eastern Europe as a region because we're mainly looking for EU citizens that won't need work permits to play for us.



I also prefer to set a fairly simple heuristic for when they should file reports on players they find, if the player would have at least a three star rating for my current senior team, or if they're under 22 and have four star or better potential. This avoids getting a ton of reports on players that aren't good enough to be worth wading through. It also means that I can basically set up the scouting program once and then leave it for ages as it'll still be a good setup even as our team improves. Which is nice, since it's a bit of a hassle if you're making major changes. You can also delegate the task to your chief scout, but I'm a micromanager.



Four scouts are assigned to the UK and Ireland, three to Central and Southern Europe, and one each to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. This should start paying dividends quickly.



We've got our friendlies arranged already, starting with local lads Garden Village and Castell Alun before jaunting over to the Netherlands to try our hands against Ajax and PSV. We've also got that friendly against Swansea that was part of the Michael Upson deal, and then Tackleford is paying us to come in and wreck them just before the season starts. Altogether we should make about £400,000 from these matches.



We need to convert our standing room only seats into actual seats as per the rules of the Championship. It'll run us a fair amount, but nothing we can't afford. I was hoping that our landlords would pay for it, but I guess I can't have everything. If this were the US, we'd just threaten to move to another city until they built us a brand new stadium.



Work also gets underway on the improvements to the Tom Cannon Memorial Youth Barn.



Tottenham continues to lowball us for Todd. We'll be selling for 5.5 million pounds or above.



And now Todd's agent wants to squeeze us for some cash. Tough luck, you're under contract for two years at 600 pounds a week.



I'm getting headhunted! Maybe if it were a better league and a better club...



Show the world what you've got, Meteor. /slapass.



There are no winners when Chelsea plays Man City for the FA Cup. It's merely which oligarch from a repressive society you support for plowing untold million's into your club.



AU Daniel Levy is as much a penny-pincher as he is in real life. I'm in no rush to sell Todd, the transfer window hasn't even opened yet and I'm determined to get what we deserve for him.



That's not a bad chunk of change, though still nothing like what we'll see in the higher divisions.



But the high league bonus means we pay out the majority of it.



Chesterfield had a man sent off just before halftime and still beat Bournemouth. They get promoted after never having been higher than fifth all season. I hate playoffs.



That's great, so long as you don't bust up his leg or something like that.



Mujkic fully deserves this. I told you guys he was going to be amazing.



I also fully deserve this. I told you guys I was going to be amazing.



As predicted Bailey and Mujkic both make the team of the year. I'm very happy to see Stewart Lewis join them, I wasn't sure if he'd make the first team or if he'd just miss out.



Of course, now that we're going up a level it's going to be no mean feat to create a competitive team with one of the smallest wage budgets in the league. Note that this is ordered by players who want the least amount of money. If we were still at £42k/wk I'd have a very hard time strengthening the team at all, and merely staying up for a season would likely be the only accomplishment I could manage. The Championship is where money starts getting tossed around, they regularly buy and sell players for over a million pounds, and the biggest teams have wage budgets that make Sunderland and Tackleford look downright skinflint.



Our players also want to get paid, and for some reason I can't offer better than £4,500 a week despite having £66,000/wk available in the wage budget. I'm going to be waiting until December to renegotiate contracts, I want to see how we're doing before giving big raises to players who might not be able to handle this level of play.



The silver lining to all this is that we got another big shot in the arm to our reputation, meaning we can now sign players whose agents would have pretended that we didn't exist less than eighteen months ago. Our reputation is actually higher now than two clubs, Queens Park Rangers and Brentford, that actually played in the Premier League last year.



I should probably get around to doing this, huh?



Having twelve scouts allows me to get reports on a lot of players, though they're not as effective at their scouting assignments when also giving me reports on players I've asked for. Scouts compile one to four reports a day, depending upon their determination/motivation/discipline stats. I don't know what the exact breakdown is, or if all three of those play a role in their work ethic, but it's safe to say that a scout with 15's across the board in those stats will get more done than one with 5's.



I need to remember that on June 30th Sampdoria's players return from loan so I can jump on any of them that could be useful.



I set myself a reminder note. You can set reminder notes for all sorts of things, one of my favorite uses is when I'm a megabastard club myself setting a reminder to charm the pants off of a great player at another club each month so that he grows to like me and will demand a transfer when I make an offer for him.



I also often make reminders for various nation's youth intake days so that I don't accidentally miss them. They're set to go off once a year, so I don't have to make new ones.



Hmm. Intriguing. I hadn't considered selling Harrison, but he is in the last year of his deal and he is about to get quite expensive. Given that we don't have a replacement for him, I doubt I'll sell unless they blow me over.



Who took out a loan?! We had plenty of money to pay for the improvements out of pocket! Now we're going to be paying this thing off for 10 damned years.



I can't give these two away. They're only earning £875 between the two of them, so it's not a major issue, but given that we just took out a gigantic bank loan I want to keep the finances well in line.



That's not an auspicious tuneup for the World Cup.



Neither is that.



I didn't expect Shirra to gain much technically from Bailey, but any mental gains are all to the good.



I also don't expect to see many of these. But I'll put up video if it occurs.



Take that, Tax Man! Capital improvements are deductible, we're going to amortize the hell out of them!



That's a big lift from last year's £200,000. We're up to over 27,000 dues paying members. I bet we have some soccer hipsters starting to pay attention to us, talking about our good youth system and how we're the third oldest pro club in the world, and how they're ordering Mujkic jerseys so that when he's playing for Barcelona they can wear their Wrexham kit and go to the bar to brag about how they knew him coming up.




And we're finally getting some better sponsors. Good job on locking these down, Sky Shadowing. Though I wish they weren't for quite so long, we'll be in continental competitions before we can renegotiate them. This also makes the decision to take out a loan look even worse, we're back up to £1.4m in the bank right now.



It's that time again. We've currently got 20 players on the first team signed for the coming year with the promotions of Tony Holt, Scott Shirra, and Adrian Read from the youth squad. One of those, Todd, is likely to be gone in a couple months. We need at least one fullback, striker, centerback, and keeper. It's time to play Pawn Stars, the game. I'll give you 10 bucks for that four star wingback. Can't go any higher, honest.