FM20: Stabilization and Renewal
Creating a platform for success in the first few seasons with JK Narva Trans
Now that we’ve gotten to know the country, league, and team a little bit (see the first post in this series FM20: Fighting for Survival on the Edge of Europe), I’m going to explore how I took a team with little in the way of money, fans, or reputation and put them on a path to success.
First Season Blues
The first season of any new save is by far the hardest. In essence, you’re inheriting the previous manager’s team, and you have to figure out how to get the best out of them. It’s especially difficult when taking over a small team, as there’s likely no money to bring in new players (if you even have the scouting capability to identify them).
When I took over Narva Trans, the situation was not dire — they had a few decent players, adequate training facilities, a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and a reasonable wage budget (~250k per year), which translated to an “Okay” financial status in game.
But there was not a lot of game-changing quality or any squad depth to speak of us. The board wanted mid-table, which in a 10 team league basically means anything outside the relegation zone. This left us one goal for the first season: survive.
Letting the Staff Help
We managed to hit our goal fairly comfortably in the 2019 season, finishing sixth (side note: this was the same final position as the team achieved in real life). It was an ugly grind at times, but a few key additions pushed us past some of the usual bottom half teams in the league.
What made it comfortable in the end was not what I did, but what I asked my staff to do. Specifically, I set my Head of Youth Development to search and make offers for players to help the reserve/youth teams. Given the financial situation, this meant finding Free Agents willing to play on amateur or part-time contracts, but through this process I found several players who would become important pieces in the early seasons. Two examples are shown below:
In case you thought I was just sitting in the manager’s office playing solitaire while my staff did all the work, I was able to fill a vital hole in our team by bringing in left back Kalle Makinen from the Finnish amateur leagues. He was never an amazing player, but he’s proof that you can find talent for free at lower levels, and that even modest wages (~$11k per year) can be enough to lure them. When you’re building a team, sometimes you just need a few workhorses to eat up minutes as you work to improve elsewhere.
The goal with all of these moves was incremental improvement without costing the team too much money.
Lessons Learned
- Always let your HoYD/DoF/GM search for young players, especially early in the save and/or at small clubs that lack a large scouting network. There’s really no downside, and the players they find can be a great supplement when you need to fill gaps in your squad. Note: always retain the responsibility of confirming the transfer just in case your staff get drunk with power and start promising away all of your hard-earned wage budget.
- Don’t overlook amateur players. They’ll likely never be the players that vault you up the table, but they can stabilize your team and fill gaps left by poor squad building
Money Management (Without Much Money)
I was a fan of American sports before I got into soccer, and one of the major differences is that every major league in the country operates with some form of revenue sharing or salary cap. This means that all new signings are not just evaluated on how good they are on the field/court/park, but also how much value they represent as compared to the relatively hard limit of the salary cap. Giving a player a contract that outstrips his ability can doom a franchise for years. This kind of thinking was taken to its most famous extreme with the Moneyball strategy of the Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s. World football may not have the same official kinds of financial restrictions, but taking the value-for-money approach is something I still try do in FM. For a small club like Narva Trans, it’s essential to avoid crushing debt.
Attendances and prize money are very low in Estonian football, so the only real way to make money is to qualify for the UEFA competitions. Because of it’s low coefficient, only the top team makes the Champions while 2/3 other teams make the Europa Conference League. This meant that in order to progress, I had to thread the needle of building a team that was good enough to finish in the top 4, while keeping the payroll small enough that the prize money from one or two qualifying rounds was enough to tide me over until next year.
Methods for Keeping the Payroll Down
Here are a couple of the ways I kept the payroll down while still acquiring good players. In other words, how I kept the quality/cost ratio as maximized as possible:
- Let overpaid players run down their contract. It hurts to lose players on a free transfer in FM, but in small leagues there aren’t a lot of teams that can actually pay money for players. Sometimes the smart financial move is to let someone go at the end of the season even if you didn’t make any money off a transfer fee.
- Identify big clubs in the region and loan in their youth prospects. This is a strategy adapted from the classic English lower league save method of getting a Premier League youth player to carry your League Two team. In the case of Estonia, the places to look for loan signings are the teams in the region (in our case Eastern Europe) that play in the Champions/Europa league (and therefore have the budget to loan you players for free). One fruitful source for me was Belarusian heavyweight BATE Borisov, who were happy to pay the wages of my loanee. Paying nothing in wages is the ultimate value move.
Conclusion
If there were a single word to sum up my strategy during my first few years at the helm of JK Narva Trans, it would be “value.” Identifying and bringing in players that were adding more in quality than they cost in wages was what laid the foundation for future success. It hurt to pass on better players at times, but I knew if the club were to survive I had to be patient and build up the squad through sound fundamentals.
The next post in this blog series will detail how I built on this foundation to start winning silverware and ultimately become the strongest team in Estonia.
For smaller bits and pieces from the save, follow my twitter account at @FMBowser
