Part 116: Epilogue: Make it rain.
Epilogue: Make it rain.May 18, 2021-June 30, 2021
The board has agreed to spend over £68m this coming season on transfers and wages. When added to the £10m already in the transfer budget from winter window sales I've got nearly double the money to play with as compared to last year, and over four times the amount of our initial budget on entry to the Premier League.
Podium sweep! This turns out to be the tiebreaker for the season prediction contest, with Trundel just edging AJ_Impy. Arsenal can breathe a sigh of relief, while Welsh club Colwyn Bay gets a new Canadian owner who's determined to show that hockey is basically soccer on ice and with more manly brawling. I'm not sure if he realizes, though, that Lord Stanley's Cup is not a competition Colwyn can enter.
Nieddu adds a third place finish in the goal of the year category to his Young Player of the Year award.
We're well represented on the team of the year, all four of our best players made the squad while Petts likely just missed out.
I can't begrudge well earned bonuses. I hope I have to pay them out next season as well.
Who's so special now, McLeod? I am the greatest of
That makes for five Manager of the Year Awards, earned at five different levels of competition. If anyone still doubts my brilliance they probably read the Sun and never get past page three.
Reading and Blackburn are now both takeover targets, and this comes a year after Arsenal and Southampton were sold. That's a lot of ownership churn for a 20 club league.
I promised Todd a raise if he played well, and he deserves the new contract. It's a fair price for a player who's become one of the better centerbacks in the league.
Likewise, I give Bastable a new deal to make sure he stays happy despite having two years left on his current contract. To his credit his performance never suffered despite his disappointment that I wouldn't sell him.
I also checked to see if we could re-sign Stewart Lewis at a cheap rate as cover for the squad. He's not interested in being just a backup, though, and we'll have to wish him happy trails. Perhaps we could keep Boumsong, though?
Well, that's not going to happen.
Neither is that, I'm not paying over £12m to rent him for a single year.
Di Martino and Dos Santos both head back to their clubs, having completed successful loan spells with us. Both got better as players and provided us with the depth we needed to finish top four and win our first major trophy.
Heh, you jokers. Wait, you're serious? HAHAHAHA.
I'm still waiting to be asked if I want to take the lead in finding a feeder club, with a long tenure at the club and good results the board will usually give you a free hand in picking feeders. Hopefully this will finally get done, two full years after the initial request was OK'd. There's been half a dozen teens from South America and Africa that I've had to pass up for want of a place to send them.
The stadium purchase cost us £15m, but thanks to our healthy bank balance we didn't have to take out a dime in loans. It's wise of the Board to not go completely overboard with the amount of money they've given me to spend this offseason.
That's especially true considering they also agreed to improve our facilities and moved us up a youth development level.
For once I don't bungle our end of season chat, the entire team looks motivated going into the summer break at the prospects of earning Champions League qualification again.
We'll have a one month pre-season, I want the players to get rested before what will be a grueling year.
Manchester United does a double, and would have pulled off the triple if it hadn't been for our standing athwart their ambitions.
Five and a half million pounds for four friendlies? Yes, please.
Our first non-friendly match will be against Manchester United in the Community Shield, August 8th. We'll play either Swansea or Cardiff in the finals of the Mini-Cwp a week before that.
We've finally got our foreign affiliate, Fudbalski klub Radnicki Niš. They play in the city of Niš (pronounced Nish) as a part of the top level Serbian Super Liga. Radnicki is a common club name in Serbia, and denotes a connection to workers unions and the labor movement in the club's past. They're one of the better teams in the country, and on good years could qualify for European competition.
Serbia's immigration laws mean that the foreign players we send there will earn citizenship after three years. I'm not positive, but they may also need to learn Serbian. That shouldn't be a big issue, if they can't learn a language after three years of immersion and tutoring they're probably going to have trouble adapting to England as well. We can now start hunting young South American and African talent to send there, though I'll have to take care to only pick the best of the best as Super Liga rules prevent more than four non-EU citizens in each match squad.
The tax man gets us for another large chunk of money, it's good fortune that the bill was calculated only after we finished purchasing the stadium.
We're up to over 58,000 members. The 10,000-odd fan trust members from prior to my arrival look at all the Johnny-Come-Latelys with mild disdain.
That's a nice increase from what we were getting when the sponsorship was first negotiated after our promotion to the Premier League, but somewhat less than I expected.
That represents a doubling of our weekly wage cap and about twice as much money as we've spent on all prior transfers combined. It's time for a shopping spree.
OM and Valencia are both interested in left back Suslov, both are roughly similar to Wrexham's status but have moderately stronger reputations. Hopefully neither decide to jump into the fray.
I'm going to have to keep an eye on things to make sure we don't violate the continental Financial Fair Play regulations, losing a year of Champions League eligibility would be devastating.
I've finally got my towering centerback!
Mattias Laux
Centerback
What Laux lacks in height, which isn't much, he more than makes up for with NBA-level ups. We were lucky to get him at this price, he's not even close to his full potential and is already our second best centerback. I'm likely to use youth sensation Alex O'Hanlon as our fourth choice central defender, meaning that we've already replaced Boumsong and Lewis before the transfer window is even open.
Stay the hell away from that left back, Marseilles. I don't want him being wooed by the thoughts of playing in Provence instead of North Wales. The Welsh tourism board has been doing well by us, but making Wrexham look more attractive than Marseilles is a tough ask.
: Cześć! We saved up Polish remittances from recent years for buying Blackburn. We couldn't miss seeing look on UKIP members faces. 
Shahed Parr, who I've had my covetous eyes on for years, is demanding a much larger contract from Manchester United.
We've got 16 players first team players still under contract from last year, I'm going to want to add at least six or seven more on top of whatever youth players graduate to a role on the team.
I tell Manchester that the price for Bastable is £60m, and not a penny less. They keep upping their offer, but quit after I refuse an offer of £35m.
Meet our new backup goalkeeper. This will allow us to loan out Novotny, and more importantly give us the solid replacement we dearly need if Kovacevic were to get injured.
Ibrahim El Sayed
Goalkeeper
El Sayed is well rounded, with no real weaknesses, and should not only do a good job as a backup but also push Kovacevic to keep his game up. He's got a professional attitude, which means he won't come to me whining about playing time when he's mostly on the bench. As a free transfer, he also doesn't cost much by way of our budget and allows me to focus on shoring up our front line talent.
That's roughly 20,000 jerseys being sold in Wales. It's also a sign that we don't have a strong international presence yet- we'll know we've hit the big time when non-domestic sales are ten times the size of our domestic sales.
You think you can afford him?
That's what I thought.
C'est la vie, mon ami.
We are no longer totally screwed if Meteor gets hurt.
Rodrigo Taborda
Left Wing
The Argentine earned his work permit courtesy of his massive potential, he could become just as good as Mujkic. He'll need some time to get acclimated to Wales, but his professional personality will go a long way towards making that easier. Until he's comfortable at the club he'll spell our talismanic Australian when we're deep in the fixture thicket. There may come a time when we have to decide which of the two players to keep, Taborda's 4.5 star potential is matched only by Mujkic, Shirra, Cirjak, new signing Mattias Laux, and teen phenom Kais Rouissi.
That's right, we're now buying players away from the likes of Bayern Munich. Suslov was in the youth academy at Dinamo Kyiv, after originally having grown up in Охтирка, a town that Wikipedia claims is known historically for the valor of the Cossack and Hussar regiments formed from the locals.
He was caught in the middle of EuroMaidan, and naturally feels torn between Ukraine and Russia- he grew up speaking both languages. He chose to accept a call-up from the Ukrainian national team, though, and at the age of 23 has already been capped 32 times at the senior level after earning 24 caps for the U21 team. All of this is ingame except for his thoughts on Euromaidan and the current Sino-Ukraine standoff, but I think it's safe to say that a guy who grows up less than an hour from the Russian border, speaks fluent Russian, and was playing for Dinamo Kyiv's youth squad when the protests began and then later accepted a call-up to play for the nation is a pretty interesting and possibly conflicted fellow.
Oleg Suslov
Left Back
He's our new record signing, ringing in at £11m after future considerations (£9m initially with another £1m after 50 league appearances for us and £1m after 10 more international appearances) are included in the price. He's a do everything fullback, and makes incumbent Dinko Mejasic look decidedly second rate. He's got the stamina to run all day long, the defensive skills to strangle opposing wide players in their crib, and the smarts to make himself a creator in the opponent's third on overlapping runs. Oleg is also comfortable playing midfield, giving us additional depth for our ball-winning midfielder role. He's a big get, upgrading our weakest link and giving us a starting eleven that should be able to advance to the knockout stages of the Champions League. We're lucky that Bayern Munich were willing to sell for £500k less up front than they paid Fenerbahce for him two years back.
My secret plan to develop a world class Scottish team continues apace.
At £1.2m per annum, that's still a relative bargain. It's a sign of how huge the financial differences are between the lower leagues and the Premier League that we didn't have anyone earning that much money until Mujkic was given a new contract when we reached the Championship, and even then virtually no one was earning more than 50% his wages.
Our first loaner arrives. An “explosive centerback” thanks to his 18 pace and acceleration, he's also fully comfortable at right back, and gives us depth at both positions.
Elvedin Pejkovic
Defender
One of the biggest challenges when first reaching European competition is getting enough team depth that you're able to handle the large number of matches thrown at you. Pejkovic now makes us two deep at right back and five deep at centerback, and does so while being an upgrade over Dos Santos and Lewis from last year.
I'm going to assume that the Premiership moved back up to #1 over La Liga because of Wrexham's ascent, rather than because an English club has won the Champions League two years straight and we're coming off an all English Champions League final.
This will start to become an issue as our team gets older. If we don't have enough homegrown players we have to leave spaces open on our roster for them. Players 21 and under don't need to be registered, though, and given that we have up to ten players who will play for us next year that qualify as U21 we'll actually have more trouble meeting the minimum squad size of 15.
Players from South America are sometimes partially “owned” by agents, that is their agents will purchase a percentage of the player from the club that owns their contract. That essentially means that you must pay off the agent before you can actually use the player. In this case the amount wasn't much, only £800k, but for some of the best South American talent you can wind up spending millions extra on a player above and beyond the transfer fee due to their rapacious agents.
Carlos Matias Cardozo
Striker
We swap out loaner Josue Di Martino for a fresh faced Argentinian wonderkid who shares the last name of one of the greatest Supreme Court Justices in American history. El Juez will make for a solid backup to the Bastard, and I'll likely blood him during the easier matches we face over the course of the season. He already sports a number of very good attribute scores, and his Model Professional personality means that he'll put in the extra hours at training to reach his full potential.
Meanwhile, I'm looking to let our young players out on loan. Plymouth wants Jefferies, and it would do him good to play first team soccer.
Spending is basically done for now, barring the appearance of a great player for a reasonable price.
We've earned a continental reputation, give us a couple years and our name will ring out around the world.
He was also picked as the best signing of the season for the Premier League, understandable as he joined us on a free transfer and went on to be picked for the team of the year.
Our Best 11 continues to get updated. At this point the only player remaining who does not date from my tenure with the club is now retired fullback Joseph Essomba, who was their best player in 2013/2014.
Argh. Cardiff pulled out of the Mini-Cwp because they're now in the Championship and have games that start two weeks before the top division. I should have realized that and scheduled the Cwp for a week earlier.
Colwyn Bay will take their place. Colwyn Bay got themselves relegated out of the Conference Regional, so it might take some time for their new Canadian oil sands magnate, Francois Trundel, to lift them up to respectability.
We're all about excitement and entertainment. The first pre-season odds have us at 16-1 to win the title, that's a good
Goodbye Boumsong. Don't expect us to go easy on you when you come back to town.
Goodbye Lewis. Goodbye Bailey. You'll always be welcome at Moss Road, and we'll always keep you in our hearts.
The season calendar is turning over, and the first step is integrating our new purchases into the team. We look very good on paper, with health and luck we'll have a chance at winning the Premier League and advancing to the quarterfinals of the Champions League. One free transfer has yet to arrive, and I'm pleased that we've filled more or less every hole before the team returns from their vacation. That will allow me to spend July and August determining which of our reserve players might go out on loan and which ones will have a chance to get some first team minutes.
