The third consecutive league win. And, with 78 points, it was a historic high among the in-game simulation seasons. Improved financial situation and ever increasing fan base, the game has indeed transitioned into another phase.
Player Changes
In this season the squad was mostly stable. Part of the reason was that I didn’t see much immediate problems to fix, and instead was worrying about future team leadership.
Transfer-Ins
William Gustavsen (€5.5M) was a response to selling Fernández. He struggled in his first season unfortunately. (Repyakh was generally the super-sub for the right wing)
Ignacio Alvarez (€1.6M), because Goreta was in poor form for some time and the price is cheap for the potential and the extra depth he offers.
Roman Tarasov (tree transfer) returns to our team after spending 15 seasons somewhere else! He was mentioned in the Season 1 post, and he’s still better than the 16-year-ago himself, but he couldn’t do much contribution now, since we as a team improved more than he did.
Andrea Signorini (€1.6M). I need tall midfielders.
Srdjan Popov (€550K). Probably not a good deal, short center backs have many limitations.
Transfer-Outs
Henneuse (€10.5M) and Kurbanadamov (€21M) were sold because they were too influential and didn’t have good mental abilities (after complacency). Fernández (€15.25M) and Milicevic (€17.75M) I could not hold on.
Novitskiy (€3.7M) wanted to leave the club for a bigger one, and was unhappy when I refused one of the proposals. Then I agreed to sell him, only to find only smaller clubs are interested now. He left for less, and to a smaller club. Lose-lose.
Youth Intake
This year contines the trend of having actually useful youth intakes.
Rustam Romanov is the biggest excitement. Right after he joined the team, he started to score in cup games. And he also scored once in the league. Immediate impact.
Nikolai Popov. The game continues to attempt to fix my midfield woes with hopeful players.
Arsen Veselov. All my left backs eventually goes “determined/driven” for some reason, so perhaps he is just following that trend.
Mirko Rinderknecht. Hopeful center back. And, in case one’s wondering, that’s a German surname.
Season Summary
We have won the league, the domestic cup and the super cup. That’s about all one can do in domestic competitions. Hopefully, the European performance would gradually improve as well.
Pinto is the fan favorite now. Considering he is the captain and a model citizen, I am sure he is part of the success formula of us. Rybin stays at 2 star rating from the coaches, but man, he’s useful in matches: good defensive movements, good touches, and even scored a few.
Erasmo José provided an important target man option, enabling myself switch between a “find space” tactical style and a “ball to target man” one. His 15 goals and 5 times Man of the Match validates the latter style.
Player Improvement
Elşän Yusifov kept improving, but unfortunately lost his professionalism due to complacency.
Sergey Lebedev is now the first pick goalkeeper. However, I start to doubt if his personality and leadership is going to cause problems…
Carlos Méndez now has a higher rating than Marcinkevicius. He is still not as good in actual matches, and I am sure why his personality changed to “Driven”. So far no notice about complacency, so I would guess his professionalism is still there.
Finances
Unless I made big investment failures, the financial situation should be stable for the foreseeable future. Well, I say this because I did make some questionable decisions at the start of the next season, but that’s beyond the scope of this post…
One thing to keep watching for is the average attendance, which had been improving. One factor to take into consideration is that I played both the European Championship and the Europa League, so that probably inflated the numbers a bit. But the trend seems to be there, and we might need to buy or build a stadium a few years later.
We also finally repaid our all debt.
Concluding Words
The game is not yet over: Pinto is aging and there are much rebuilding to do. Hopefully I can win the Europa League once before getting results in the championship, but the path to glory remains difficult.