Part 130: Epilogue: Home grown youth at rock bottom prices.

Epilogue: Home grown talent for rock bottom prices.
May 10, 2022-June 9, 2022

The board acts quickly, authorizing an expansion of the stadium, a fresh infusion to the wage/transfer budget of £81.79m, and suggesting that we tour the United States and Australia. I get right on meeting their desires.



The expansion gets underway, and it's slightly larger than I anticipated. Must be a result of the ebullience over our second place finish.



Hey, I'm the highest paid manager in England now. Why would I leave to leave? Unless, of course, I'm not getting paid what I owe. By the end of the LP I expect to be earning £250k/wk.



Go Dick Petts! I hope he makes the final cut. Two of our former youth prospects, Michael Upson and Adrian Read, both made the preliminary squad as well, I guess England is truly desperate for a striker because neither are very good.



These are just the preliminary 30 man rosters, there will be seven more cuts after training camp. But having 8 of our 22 man senior team in the World Cup is more than I would have expected. In the real life World Cup the club with the most players making preliminary rosters was Bayern Munich, with 18.



Chelsea wins the Europa League, giving their manager two lesser awards to hang his hat on. It's enough to keep him from getting fired.



It's the takeover that never ends, it goes on and on my friends.



My original diamond in the rough. Mair is a player with several warts but he's still better than almost any player on any non-megabastard squad. That he's a rotation option for us is a sign of how far we've come.



He stepped into the first team for us after Manchester City released him. I have no qualms about paying him what he deserves.



Not gonna happen unless you're willing to show me £80m. Bastable's price will only increase so long as he's productive, we'll only grow richer as time goes on and have even less reason to sell him.



I don't detect any noticeable difference, he's still listed as “Right Foot Only.” Training this might have been a waste of some of his potential, increasing a player's weak foot is one of the more expensive things you can do when it comes to using up their Potential Ability.



Congratulations on the double, Pattison. And congratulations at keeping Ryan McLeod and Manchester United from earning a single major trophy this year.



Their first option (moi) having rebuffed them, they go and hire a foreigner who has come up a long way since starting the game coaching Barnet down in non-league football.



Nth verse, same as the first...



Wait, really? The Dutch bought Manchester United! And they're thinking about firing Fergie 2.0? Oh how marvelous!



He was at very insecure when I first checked right after the buyout, and a poor start to the season could quickly see him sacked. That would be a mindbogglingly poor move on the part of the new owners, so I'm really hoping it happens.



I was very confused as to why it was late May and we still hadn't gone on vacation, but apparently our U19s made it to the finals of continental youth soccer. One more win gives us a (meaningless) trophy.



Damnit. A whole year and not a single addition to the cabinet except another Mini-Cwp. Even Manchester United won the Super Cup, the Community Shield, and the Club World Cup. I feel like Arsene Wenger.



This soothes my disappointment some. I had completely forgotten we were also in line for Champions League television money, that's a huge boost to our bottom line.



Everyone made the cut! That's surprising. Morvan, Petts, Cardozo, and Taborda have never played for their national team, them getting a look this late must be due entirely to their club form. They probably won't see much time in the first team at the World Cup, but making the squad for nations like France, England, and Argentina is a real accomplishment, especially given that Petts is the only one older than 22.



We've finally got the top quality youth academy that we deserve. I'm going to need to make a move when it comes to our head of youth development, he's only found one player that could play a role on our first team in his whole tenure. Once I figure out who to replace him with, he's getting the sack.



Wales and Ukraine will have their own World Cup, with blackjack, and hookers!



The board apparently decided that nickle and dime increases in our capacity is not nearly enough. This will bring The Racecourse Grounds up to a 25,000 seat capacity, or almost the maximum it can be increased. Because of the time it will take to complete the massive renovations we're going to be playing all of our home games in Wolverhampton for the next year. I'm not sure how they picked Wolverhampton, it's an hour and twenty minutes from Wrexham and there's other stadiums closer by (Anfield and Goodison Park in Liverpool, Britannia Stadium in Stoke), but our home field advantage is going to be significantly depressed for the coming season against English clubs.

It's also going to use up most of the Champion's League television windfall. Easy come, easy go.




Really, I'm going to be aiming for the title. But no need to increase pressure on them before we go into the offseason.



The World Cup isn't due to end until July 10 and we just got through playing 60 competitive matches in a season, more than ever before. An extra week off would be good.



Or... not? Well, I'm not going to complain about a trip to the U.S. of A. The other option was China, and while I did enjoy the summer abroad I spent there close to a decade ago, being back in my homeland has much more allure for me. It also dovetails nicely with the Board's desire for a tour of the United States.



It's probably just as well that we're expanding the stadium, the tax write-off alone saves us hundreds of thousands of pounds that would otherwise go to Her Majesty's Government.




Our bookkeepers are earning their pay. The day after we've submitted tax filings showing an £8.4m profit, we submit Financial Fair Play filings showing a £72.4m profit. I'm guessing the difference is in what's counted towards expenses. If I recall correctly player wages are recommended to be somewhere around 60-70% of total turnover, whereas we had player salaries and bonuses of £52m against total turnover of £159m. That would get us close to that profit number once you take into account our £20m net transfer spend. Suffice to say, we're at no risk of being penalized for overspending.




¡Felicitaciones, El Juez!




¡Y tu, El Compadrito!




And not least to you, Petts!



Club membership keeps growing, up to nearly 68,000 now. We should probably increase the price of membership. Giga-bastards Barcelona have 220,000 socios who pay close to 20 times the amount we charge for a membership. We don't want just any Llewellyn-come-lately to pretend he was with us from the start.




Now that we're an established Champions League club our endorsement income is going to skyrocket. By way of comparison our main kit sponsorship brings in just over £500k a year, and started when we were in the Championship. It will very likely command an eight figure sum when the current deal runs out after this year. I wonder who our sponsor will be, I don't think Glyndwr University can afford that.




Our player contract situations are almost all taken care of. Bram Aarts has a prick of an agent who refuses to negotiate with me, leaving him as the only player with a contract ending in 2023 that needs a new deal. On the staff side of things there's only a handful of coaches to renew or release. Two of these are staffers who have been with me since I first arrived at Wrexham, our former GM and our former head scout. Both have me listed as their favorite person, I guess I didn't let on how frustrated I occasionally got with each of them. The GM especially ended up being more hassle than he's worth, while I like the concept of someone to take care of tedious minor transfer stuff I spent more time correcting his mistakes than he saved.



Should have made a deal when you had the chance, Wigan:



I offered £5.5m for him 18 months ago, today we get him for £3.2m. His price dropped so precipitously because he's now only a year away from the end of his contract, and he's got no interest in staying with Championship level Wigan. They're forced to sell, and we're the recipient of their desperation to get something for him. It's good to be a bastard.

Ed Hammatt
Centerback


Feast your eyes on this big lug! What a physical specimen! He lacks quickness and a couple mental attributes at the moment, but he's a legitimate Premier League centerback at the age of 20. He'll spend a couple years developing, and by the end of it should be a monster of a defender capable of locking down opposing strikers in the box and defending against any set piece. He's also English, and counts as a “home grown player” for the purposes of team registration. That's very important, as my habit of signing foreign players had left us with fewer than the minimum eight required on a 25 man squad. This will become important in a couple years when our team are all over 21 and we need to have eight useful home grown players to maintain a deep roster.



Just like Hammatt, Reed was a wonderkid who was stuck on a Championship team, and whose contract was running out in a year. Fulham had demanded in the vicinity of £50m last transfer window, which fell by nearly 90% to the price I paid for him.

Steve Reed
Right Back


Reed and Hammatt are not going to displace one of our current starters. What they do give us are viable backups that I'm happy to play when the first team regular is fatigued. Our biggest problem last year was not having players that I felt comfortable throwing into the fray when we had injuries or when my first choice needed a break. Both Reed and Hammatt are under our control for the next five years, neither of them were very expensive, and both have the potential to become world class players. They're going to make me very happy for a very long time.




Félicitations, Patrice!



As we buy some players, we sell others. I'll miss our little Croatian thug, but I won't miss all the yellow cards he collected. He was one of five players still on the team, along with Bailey, Todd, Shirra, and Mujkic, who were with us before we reached Premier League promised land.



I can't complain about the services rendered by a four star youth coach who joined us back in the non-league football days, but he's become dead wood and overtaken by more competent coaches. The U18 team is assigned to our new U21 coach, a guy who's earning the previously inconceivable salary of 8k a week. All but two of our senior team coaches are rated at 4.5 stars, one of our Goalkeeper coaches is just a 4 while one of our new fitness coaches is a 5 star god of strength conditioning.



It's a Croatian exodus. Matko never featured regularly for us, getting into 51 games over three years. He got injured too often to reach his potential, was a year away from the end of his contract, and thus was deemed surplus to requirements.



The Bastard finishes as top marksman in all of Europe. He's the best £4m purchase I've ever made.



Our whole team was outstanding this year, we had eight players in the top 25 for average rating.



Good teams will naturally dominate the top of the average rating lists, it's hard not to have them when you're racking up piles of assists.



Same for racking up scads of goals. Bastable, Shirra, and Cardozo were all in double digits for the club in league play.



Even third stringer Bram Aarts had an impressive Goals per Minute stat.



For all our pretty stats, we still didn't win anything. I want this to be the final year of my reign that this can be said about. Next year, I want it all.