Let me finish this football manager seasonal report thing… the Season 18 was played in 2022 but the report was never written, presumable because I was terribly ill with COVID-19.

Now, the FM25 (the next version I planned to buy) is approach. Time to wrap this up.

Player Changes

Transfer-Ins

This season had lots of money flowing around. The biggest incomer is Tony Audi (€26M), an appropriately luxury-sounding central midfielder. His personality, unfortunately, was changed by this very luxurious transfer and contract, to the casual side. Money corrupts! He started 12 league games and 3 cup games, and was good but not spectacular.

Then the close second, Federico Duranti (€18.5M). He also featured 12 starts, but scored only one goal and created two assists. Not a good start.

Percy Figueroa (€2M). What can a 1.79m centre back do? Well, he started 19 games, scored 3 times, and was excellent. At the end of this season he is described as a wonderkid. The price tag feels like a steal.

On the other hand, his height probably implied that using him is tricky, and I need to look at each opponent to see if he is good against.

The biggest incomer for the second half of the season is Luciano Dossena (€8.75M). The tall target man that every team doesn’t want to rely upon, but ultimately needs one. He then started 3 games plus 2 more as subs, scoring 2 goals. Sounds decently efficient.

Vyacheslav Saveljev (€5.25M), not good enough for this season, but has future.

Transfer-Outs

Sergey Lebedev (€15M) makes a timely departure. As the first-pick goalkeeper he is definitely worth this much, and I guess there is less worry about a star player with balanced personality and decent leadership.

Christopher Pettersen (€2.8M) and Niko Zec (€3M) make way for newcomers; veterans such as Alexey Fedorov (€450K) and Roman Tarasov (€55K) also depart as they are no longer good enough to start.

Youth Intake

This season’s youth intake is somewhat disappointing.

The highest potential guy is probably Sergey Alexandrov. Spirited + Evasive + Unflappable is actually indicative of high professionalism, by the way.

The other promising player is Vitaly Rodionov. He seems to be of balanced personality and quite far away from usable.

Maxim Karasev has a troublesome position. The question is whether he could fetch us some transfer fee in a future season.

Season Summary

Similar to the last season, we defended the league title as well as the two cups. In European competitions we fared barely better than the last season though.

We have a completely new fan favorite list. Giraev is suddenly the big star; Ovsyannikov and Audi for the more offensively minded fans.

Ovsyannikov has been the top goalscorer and the best performing player.

Player Improvement

Elşän Yusifov gets even better, and apparently found his lost mental attributes back.

Rustam Romanov is now fit for some first team starts.

Percy Figueroa turned out to be better than he first seemed. On the other hand, there is early signs that he is already at his top now.

Nikolay Popov, who joined in the last season, had made amazing progress as well.

Finances

The big investments managed to exhaust the savings we made last season. Fortunately, we do earn some bonus money from good results. And the board seems to still have faith by injecting another generous €25M.

Concluding Words

I am not sure how many seasons are ahead, but there are still European dreams to fulfill… and squad building is always a question to tackle.