We are now through the back end of the first season and you’ve already seen that we’re already guaranteed promotion to the Mid Sussex Football League Division 9. But did we win the league… Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 9 – Slightly Ambitious Attempt to Build Suspense
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 8 – A Bit of a Giveaway
At this point we are still a few games away from the end of the season, but there is some pretty big news, even though as the title says, it’s a bit of a giveaway and takes the suspense out of the end of the season.
But it’s not exactly a bad thing that we’ve ended up running away with the league so far and I’m sure there will be plenty of tense endings to the seasons as we potentially move up to more and more challenging leagues.
Hopefully this encourages you to join me next time for the run in to the end of the season and crunch time as we come towards the final stages of the Tester Challenge Cup.
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 7 – Epic Elliot Hogan
A very short post just because I think this is worth showing to demonstrate just how brilliant this guy has played for us this season…
14 goals in 12 games with an average rating of 7.82, certainly can’t complain about that. Not worrying at all about him being stolen off his amateur contract by a bigger club now…
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 6 – A Little Mid-season Assessment
This is just a quick post based around the ‘Team Report’ page which I’m using as a brief mid-season review of the effectiveness of the tactics, which players are having the most impact and what are our weaknesses etc… Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 6 – A Little Mid-season Assessment
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 5 – It Was Only A Matter of Time
Yes it was indeed only a matter of time before the amateur contracts began to cause their trouble. So far we have avoided the vultures of bigger teams quite well and we’ve only had one player approached by another team. It was actually Louis Ezewele, one of our young centre backs with good potential and by some miracle he chose to stay.
But now…
If you remember, Jim was actually our scout who wasn’t really a scout, so we were already in a fairly desperate situation with staff. But now as he was offered his preferred role at a much bigger club, Carlton who are in the Ev0-Stick First Division South, he has jumped ship and rather left us in the lurch a bit.
Luckily our squad seems to be performing well enough in this division and new players won’t be desperately needed for us to succeed this season. But I do like to always be looking out for good additions to the squad as one of the advantages of amateur contracts is that new additions don’t cost you any wages.
So the search for a new scout begins and let’s hope this isn’t the beginning of the bigger clubs ravaging my team…
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 4 – Competitive Matches
After a rather uninformative and not particularly useful preseason, we reached the beginning of the league and not long after that, the first round of the cup which is called the Tester Challenge Cup.
At this point, we are at roughly the half way point of the season. There are only 16 leagues games per season as there’s only 9 teams in each league in these divisions.
So there’s a list of all the results up to this point and now I’ll go into more detail about some of the best matches and then end on a few general notes about the team’s performance over this period. Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 4 – Competitive Matches
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 3 – Tactics and Pre-season
Last time, I showed you the players chosen to kick this club off and now we’re going to see how I’ve arranged them and what I’m telling them to do (formation and tactics).
So I ask, what’s wrong with the good old 4-4-2? Personally I think nothing. Generally I think its a great formation, especially if you have the right players with the right strengths.
And in the lower leagues, and they don’t get lower than this one, it just keeps things relatively simple and doesn’t risk weaknesses and failings due to players not having great positioning or not being able to perform more complicated roles. It is also a balanced formation and as we are not yet sure how we measure up compared to the teams in our league and our players have never played together before so they have no cohesion or understanding as yet, things are complicated enough already.
Also, I had a rough idea of how I wanted to play (for the first few seasons anyway) and so the players that I signed were selected to play in this formation.
So the style revolves around direct football aimed to try to get the job done in matches and not risk stagnating and getting stuck in any of the lower leagues because of cautious football. But in order to keep things slightly sophisticated, the directness is mainly focused around a crossing game. So the instructions are… Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 3 – Tactics and Pre-season
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 2 -Fresh Faces
After finally employing a scout who was actually trained as a coach, badly trained as a coach, I started to bring in some players capable of kicking off our ascent of the leagues.
Signing a whole team means a lot of transfers and here’s what it looks like…
And as you can see, there’s a scroll bar on side so that’s not even a comprehensive list of all the players. But I won’t Bore you describing every single player, I’ll describe a few players I believe (and hope) to be important players. Continue reading Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 2 -Fresh Faces
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Part 1 – Pitch? Yes. Anything else? erm…
So we have no coaching badges but plenty of Sunday league football experience, ambition and passion.
And that must be what they were looking for so we’re in, we got the job!
The board of three of the old team’s players is headed by Chairman Danny Dodd (Randomly generated and slightly scary looking) who is now paying me the colossal wage of…
…wait for it…
…£0 p/w (I suppose we’re going to have to make money for living on some other way, or get those promotions coming thick and fast). But we are an amateur team so that’s fine.
I told you he was quite scary looking
And on that amateur note, we have a stadium called Adastra Park which if we’re honest is just a pitch. It has a capacity of 1,000, which I think means that there’s space for 1,000 people to stand on the remaining grass around the pit
ch. But we have the lowest rated training and youth facilities, limited youth recruitment (at least there is some), about £2,000 in the bank, oh yeah and NO PLAYERS.
Of course we’re building the club from the ground up, quite literally, so that’s how it should be but now we have a whole load of browsing and scouting to do….. ahhhhhh yeah forgot to mention, no scouts either.
But no bother (sort of) as we can just hire one for free as with all amateur contracts. Or the only scout available to us and our meager reputation can reject us before even negotiating because he wants a paid contract which we aren’t allowed to offer. Anyway, we eventually hire a coach with decent judging ability and potential stats and begin to go about our business.
The (hopefully) more interesting events of which and the chosen players to pioneer this fresh faced club are coming up next time…
I hope you join me
Pub Team to Manager’s Dream Introduction – Keymer & Hassocks FC
With the help of a custom league database available on the internet, this is perhaps the ultimate football manager journey to the top as Keymer and Hassocks FC are the lowest playable team in the largest one country database. They play their football all the way down in the Mid Sussex Football League Division 10, that’s level 23 of the English league system.
And yes that is the actual badge of an actual football team albeit an amateur one, a very amateur one.
I won’t bore you with their club history… …because they don’t have any. Nothing that is publicly available or of any significance anyway. This is because they are a pub team (clue’s in the title).
On the badge you can see the real life established date of 2003, but in the game database their date founded is 2015 so from here the idea spawned.
The pub team has folded due to lack of funding. However a few ambitious former members of the pub team have noticed a lack of youth activities in the area and lack of money flow into the area. So teamed with their love of football, they set out to build the club that the area needs and their passion for the game desires, always remembering the community spirit of their pub team roots.
Also check out Haighyorkie’s great youtube series that gave me the initial idea to use this team if you’d like: https://www.youtube.com/user/haighyorkie/videos
English Lower League to Level 23 database can be found at:
http://www.passion4fm.com/fm16-english-lower-leagues-level-23-database/
FM Real Virtuality - Football Manager Touchline Tales, Tips & Tactics 