Part 146: Epilogue: I'm like a bulldozer, with a wrecking ball attached.

Epilogue: I'm like a bulldozer, with a wrecking ball attached.
May 27, 2023-June 9, 2023

Short epilogue here as there isn't long until the season switches over because holy crap we were just in the Champions League final! And we won! I've done an FA Cup/Champions League double before but this is my first EPL/CL double and it's definitely more impressive.



Woooo!



Hard to argue that I'm not one of the best coaches around right after I win a double.




The dual achievements make me the greatest American coach in history. Not that it's a particularly high bar.



Even the normally unflappable board is pleased.



As are the fans, naturally.



The man we beat out for both the EPL and CL titles is willing to tip his cap to us.



Justin Bailey! He's not anything special even after his, ahem, upgrade, but he's still a useful piece that I find myself giving playing time out of sentimentality. He can still provide moments of joy, and that's enough for me.



The Golden Boy locked up this award with his great final.



He's joined by Laux, Collett, and Bastable in the Dream Team.




On a more prosaic level, winning the CL just about paid for itself...



And then some. We've currently got just shy of £50m in the bank.



Everyone's morale is maxed out, and doing the double has convinced them that we can defend our title.



We'll have a five week pre-season, and perhaps an early training camp somewhere overseas.



You probably didn't have to wait so long to give this to me, guys. The season ended over two weeks ago. It's the third monthly award I took home on the season.





Thanks, board! Youth recruitment has also been improved. Hopefully we start churning out better academy players now.



I guess that's a reasonable use of our cash, we did have close to £15m in long term debt and this halves it. I'm not convinced of AJ_Impy's business acumen, we picked up that debt from payroll expenses over the course of the last two seasons, and we really should have been looking at short term revolving lines of credit rather than loans that amortized over 15 years. But what do I know, I'm just a footy coach.




Heh.



Can't we incorporate as a non-profit to avoid taxes? That's what NFL teams do!



We're up to over 200,000 club members. What a bunch of plastics, but at only about 6 quid for a membership I can't deny that it's great value for money.



I mentioned that we'd be getting a lot more money from sponsorships, but I'm disappointed that our new jersey deal is only £7.5m a year. By comparison the big clubs get at least £20m a year in real life for their jersey rights, though we are above any real life EPL club not from London, Manchester, or Liverpool.



For the first time in a long time the Goon board is more generous than the ingame board, with our transfer budget remaining at £53.1m and our weekly wage cap up to £1.75m a week, or a whopping £91m a year. That's below only the megabastards, only 13 clubs worldwide have higher wages than that, and puts us at the same level as clubs like Borussia Dortmund and Atletico Madrid. We're not megabastards yet, we'll need to be spending another £20-30m more before we reach that rank, but we're able to match wages with almost everyone now.



The ingame board is going to max out our stadium size, and this time we won't have to move while it takes place. We should be fully finished with renovations by the end of September, and be able to fit 28,000 screaming Wrexhamites into the Racecourse Grounds at the end of it. We'll have no more room for expansion after this, so we'll remain at a disadvantage to the Megabastards in their 70,000+ seat stadiums.



We had zero senior team players reaching the end of their contracts this year, and only four staff members to deal with. The three scouts I re-signed, while our Head of Youth Development gets released as he's only found a single player in his tenure that has a chance to stick with our senior team.



One thing I learned recently about the Head of Youth Development position was that the staffer's personality matters a lot as to who they're bringing in. Their ability to Judge Potential is also very important. And their reputation matters, they're able to bring in players from further afield if they're a high reputation fellow. Jamie Mitchenson was a fairly determined guy with only 15 JP and a regional reputation, whereas Maurice here has an 18 JP, a model professional personality, and a continental reputation. We should see a significant improvement in our academy output over the next few years once he gets comfortable in Wales. He's got a 14 adaptability, so it shouldn't take too long for him to do that. Given his contacts in Germany and Spain, I also expect to see players from those nations showing up as well.



The minute June arrives I field numerous calls about the biggest of megabastards circling Cirjak, Feruga, Morvan, and Bastable. The only one of them I'd consider selling is Feruga, barring an offer that blows me away.



Now it's time to turn my attention to the USMNT, and see if my Wrexham success can carry over to winning my first trophy for America.



It looks like everyone is hyped about winning the tournament. Good.




No, take all the time you need!



Blergh, the Preliminary announcement is in a week and the final roster has to be submitted before the Gold Cup will be over. We're going to get killed at the Copa America.



Ryuta Ikeda is getting a call-up to the Japanese senior team, I'm going to submit for a work permit after his first cap under the exceptional young talent clause. It'd be nice if he could be in England and/or we could loan him out to a club in a top division of a major nation. Overall our senior team has 17 players out of 25 on their senior national teams, and only Bailey and the still hobbled Collett are not on an international squad on any level.



The other choice was the USA, which I'd like to reserve as a potential location for a foreign tour and which we've already started making inroads into. China remains a huge potential market even with the static wealth and population numbers of Football Manager, and I want to sell jerseys.



Come on. You have matches scheduled on the 9th and the 18th, that's plenty of time between matches!



You don't have a match scheduled between the 8th and the 30th! I'll have to wait until later to see if I can arrange a friendly somewhere.



The man is a terror on the pitch, as anyone who watched the Champions League final can attest to. He'd be willing to join us for £175k-220k/wk, but United are entirely unwilling to sell him.



Our first transfer of the window is grabbing a very good, young midfielder from Arsenal on a free transfer. I guess he was blocked by Lee Nash, but he's got a ton of potential and if I don't loan him out he's going to make Julio obsolete. This window is going to see us hopefully sign a few players on free transfers that we're going to loan out to top division clubs for seasoning, in the long run I want to see us look like Chelsea and have great players that we can't even fit on our squad because we have so many of them.



The same is true for Gabbianelli. He's already about as good as Aarts and Stringel, but I have no compunctions about sending him off to a team at the fringes of the Champions League for a season. He cost us basically nothing and his salary is small for a club our size... and we can make millions from the loan fees we'll get for him.



That's pretty good, and it's nice to see our sales growing overseas.



I will be shocked if we can beat the French U20s in France.



We deserved better than this scoreline, and our midfield actually played quite well. But this is no surprise considering the vastly greater quality of the French youth team.



Like the France match, we deserved better than this scoreline. We had 5 clear cut chances to Morocco's zero. We're going to need to beat Romania while Morocco gets thumped hard by France to advance.



I'm honestly not sure, besides free transfers, what we should be adding to the team. We have players with world class potential at every position, but only a few positions have blossomed thus far.




Well, we're already almost out of the Toulon tournament, but it's largely due to bad luck. We could still advance if we play well against Romania and France runs up the score on Morocco, but the more important thing is to aim for victory in the Gold Cup. Mexico will be a hard opponent to top, but the games are being held in the United States and that will give us a significant edge.



What a great run to end the season. I can't wait to see what we do with another years experience under our belts. I'm mainly going to look to add depth to the club, and perhaps see if we can't land a superstar. It'd be nice to pick up a box to box midfielder who's an upgrade on Petts and Morvan. We're at the top of the highest peak, now it's time to start building our tower to the heavens.