Part 100: Epilogue: Eripio ex Nihilo
Epilogue: Eripio ex NihiloMay 11, 2020-June 9, 2020
Spirits are high in North Wales. Missing the Europa League is still disappointing, but we are poised for true greatness. We have money in the bank, I'm about to have a new contract, and our team is still improving every day. The bare minimum for next season will be to repeat our top half finish, we should realistically shoot for European qualification. We can even dream of making the Champion's League.
AJ_Impy promised contract discussions at the end of the season, and was as good as his word. The offer the game makes is derisory, a mere extension of my current contract despite the massive change in circumstances.
For some reason I can only ask for a raise up to 3,700/wk. I'm guessing this is the result of my past monkeying with my contract. Regardless, I monkey with it some more to implement the agreed upon 3 year contract at £50k/wk. The contract includes a 20% yearly raise, and escalators to £65k/wk for Europa League qualification and £80k/wk for Champion's League qualification.
I'm now in the same tier of managers as those from respectable clubs like Newcastle and Swansea. If we qualify for the Europa League I'll be earning what the Everton manager gets, and if we should make the Champion's League I will be earning as much as my peers at the megabastards. I am much pleased.
Just missing out on the Europe League isn't the worst thing that could have happened to us, I suppose.
That's a small bonus pool considering we finished in 7th place.
Especially considering the amount of prize money we earned.
Djurovic's contract is up after next season. He was key to our winter resurgence, but slumped badly down the stretch. I'll have to think on whether I want to extend his deal or not, but considering that the other option is to sell him when he's still getting better expect to see him signing something at a photo op soon. Currently he's earning just £3,000/wk, any new deal would at least quintuple that.
We're now a full two years ahead of schedule. It's my most rapid ascent playing Lower League Manager ever, my previous best finish in an inaugural Premier League season was 13th. Much like this club I started very poorly but in that case it took until after the January window for the players to turn on the jets.
Scott Shirra, beloved of footy writers everywhere. He still can't buy beer in the United States. He's too young.
Even with his late season slump Bastable finished three goals up on the next most prolific scorer. We would have gone nowhere without him- William Harrison scored just two goals in his twelve league appearances this season.
I'm not sure how neither Bastable nor Shirra won this award. Maybe because they had won other honors they were ineligible for this one, but that doesn't make much sense. Djurovic finishes second in the voting for the award.
They do make the team of the year, though.
Which activates Shirra's bonus.
A 100 point season is an amazing feat, but I inspired a team predicted to be relegated to a seventh place finish. The voters for this award need to get their goddamned heads checked, they appear to have misplaced it up Manchester United's ass.
This is a standard length offseason, and we'll need all of it. There's going to be plenty of player turnover as we shed our lower leaguers and I bring in a number of players suitable to our new stature.
Once again I bollix the end of year pep talk. My players are too damned modest about their own abilities. The club was about evenly split between fired up and nervous until I expressed my exasperation with the whiners, and that pissed off everyone.
Our training facilities will be close to world class when the renovations are completed, these improvements have been in the planning stages since last year.
The Coach's Nightmare
Inside His Head, 2:30am, May 17, 2020
: What do you think you're doing, Obliterati? I'm the God King in Wales!
: Mwahaha, foolish American! You have no power here.: Nooo! This is the worst timeline ever!So, I really screwed up the other night. While testing a couple concepts by letting the game play ahead I accidentally let too much time go by and the 3 month rolling autosave overwrote my main save. I was quite bereft. Our last save would have had us playing the year over again, but Ex Nihilo came to the rescue by letting me know about the restore previous version feature. As a reward for saving
As is the board, once I nag them into it. This will run us a goodly sum, but we're secure enough now that we can handle it. Building a stadium is more expensive, and we'd likely have to take out at least some loans. Plus, we have a reader who's actually from Wrexham and who would be quite irate if we wrecked a place with over 200 years of history for a shiny new Naming Rights Thunderdome.
The board readily agrees to improve our youth academy and facilities, but I am unable to concurrently request an improvement in our recruiting network. It goes into the log of votes to implement over the coming months.
Lastly, the board sets the player budget for the upcoming season at £39.2m pounds after my request for a slightly higher total was forced to compromise after it ended just two votes shy of a majority.
Now that front office business is taken care of, I can begin preparing for the next season. The first step is to extend Boumsong's loan for another year. When he was healthy, he was excellent, and I'm not going to find a better centerback on the market for anything approaching a sane price. He's still not a big enough star to break into the Manchester United starting 11, so they're happy to leave him with us. All it costs us is £17,500 a week, 50% of his salary. He, Todd, and Lewis make for a good top three at the back.
It's also time to start selling off those pieces that we don't need. This includes Billy the Kid. Harrison was a great, great player for us. He scored 69 goals for us over the last five years, but he is not a high enough caliber player to succeed at this level. He played thirteen games this past season and scored just two goals with one assist, earning a poor 6.57 rating in the process and seldom impacting the game despite his speed. It'll be a sad day when his sale is finalized, we wouldn't be the club we are without him. But we won't become the club we are capable of being if we allow nostalgia and fond feelings to overwhelm our reason.
I schedule a mini-Cwp between Welsh teams for late July, but Newport County refuses to play us. The New Saints take their place as the unlucky small club lumped in with the three Premier League teams.
Preseason cups don't have any prestige attached to them, but it's a good way to get in a couple quick friendlies. Each team plays twice, with the winners of the first game playing for the cup and the losers playing a consolation game.
We'll be on the road for most of the pre-season, touring several respectable clubs in Scotland, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. I never knew this before, but choosing the “schedule multiple friendlies” option is far better than arranging them individually- we'll be making £1.6m in appearance fees for our matches against Celtic, Marseilles, PSV, and Stuttgart. If I had set them up individually we would have made nearly a million less. Our pre-season is capped with our neighbors to the north coming to town for one final tuneup. We might not face a single powder puff opponent, which is what I want. The team needs to be prepared for good competition from the word go when the season starts.
Djurovic gets a reward for his play, going from £150k a year to a £750k. It still leaves him modestly compensated given his ability level.
Durand is sold quickly, leading me to believe that I didn't ask for enough money. We turned a solid profit on the deal, having bought him for only £550k last year. That profit is reduced somewhat as 15% of the fee goes to Durand due to the sell-on clause in his contract.
They did the double and won 100 of a possible 114 points. This season is going to go down in English football history as one of the greatest of all time. Maybe their coach did have a credible argument to be lauded as manager of the year.
If I hadn't already arranged our pre-season schedule this would have been neat to participate in. But accepting commits us to playing four games in a five day span, and it would exhaust us to a dangerous extent.
Bradford is all the way down in League 2. I'm a little surprised that Simpson was willing to go there, but he'll be one of the best players in the league. I'll try to keep tabs on him as the years go by, and invite him back as an instructor when he retires. He can hold his head high, having captained us to 7th place in the Premier League.
There's that tax bill I was talking about. Our taxes for the 2019-2020 season come to £9.5m, making it our third highest expense after player salaries and transfer fees. Clearly we're not spending enough money, amirite? /fingerguns.
Smart move, board. We're now at a £20m balance and in robust condition.
The ingame board set the budget similarly to what we decided upon, I don't have to make much by way of modifications to the transfer budget or the wage limit.
We lost 5,000 supporters despite having a dream season. It's not even like we raised membership fees, the price is still twelve pounds a year. Even so, with over 35,000 dues paying members we certainly have the capacity to draw up to 30,000 a game in the future.
Third time's the charm, apparently...
Wait.
What?
Press Conference
St. Mary's Stadium, June 5, 2020
: And now, let me introduce you to my hand picked board of directors. Cielo Shadowing-: Hola.: Marco Shadowing-: Buon giorno!: and Awyr Shadowing.: Hawddamor!: Any questions?
(the entire room of reporters look at each other for a moment, then in unison raise their hands and start querying)
I'm not sure I would have realized that our old club president took over Southampton if I hadn't renamed him, it wasn't even until I was cropping the screenshots that I noticed the wonderfully meta occurrence. Once I did, though, I knew what I had to do.
Ah, good. Our first signing of the offseason. I felt we needed more depth on the right wing with Matko developing slowly after spending long chunks of last season injured and Djurovic not being comfortable playing in the AMR slot.
Dmitri Nieddu
Attacking Midfielder
Nieddu was available on a free transfer from Italian giants AC Milan. Given our limited budget, high quality players who can be had for no transfer fee are high on when I regale listeners with a karaoke rendition of “My favorite things.” His contract demands were entirely within our capacity, he'll be making £30k/wk. The only real question is how well he'll adapt to playing mostly out wide, until now he'd spent most of his time in the center of the pitch. His crossing is not very good for a wide player, so it's most likely that I'll play him as an inside forward rather than a pure winger. That will allow him to cut in from the flanks and wreak havoc amongst defenses while making him more of a goal scoring threat.
Goodbye Billy. I wish you the very best of luck in all your future endeavors, except when you're playing against us. I'll try to come up with something clever to name after you!
Durand, Harrison, and Simpson take their leave while Nieddu arrives as the window opens. We've got some serious wheeling and dealing to do. We need an additional defensive midfielder, a left back, some defensive cover that can play at least two of the back line positions, and not one but two new strikers. But we've got plenty of time to do it, the season doesn't start until mid-August and the window doesn't close for 11 weeks. And when that's done, it's time to force our way into the consciousness of Europeans. What a time to be a dragon.
