Going Global

2040 – that is the year I have managed to reach on my latest #FM20 journey. After staying around 13 years at Racing Santander in Spain to bring them to the top of Europe, to finally win the UCL in 2032, I have moved to another continent to play for a brief number of clubs:

• 2032 - 2034: Everton de Viña del Mar (more here about the management in Chile)
• 2034 – 2035: Chivas in Mexico
• 2035 - until now: Vélez Sarsfield

After winning a lot of titles (five times the Copa Libertadores and 4/5 league titles) I would normally move on clubs again, but this time I wanted to try something different, I wanted to create a global football network. While at Club Atlético Vélez Sarsfield, we employed over 13 scouts all mainly scouting in South America and already had a few affiliated clubs around the continent with Danubio in Uruguay, Fluminense in Brazil, Juan Aurich in Peru and my former club Everton de Viña del Mar in Chile.

I did also try to get one in Colombia, but so far, the Board only suggested clubs in India, Serbia, Hungary and South Africa.

Using Microsoft Excel, I did create a “Country Presence Rating”, which I would calculate how strong our presence in a certain Country is. As a starting point I would give following values to calculate the total rating:

• Managed Club: Is there a club I do manage personally? 5 Points
• Scouting: Are there any scouts deployed to get specific country? 3 Points
• Affiliated Club: Is there a non-managed affiliated club? 1 Point

Recruitment

So, with the scouting network all over South America, we did sign a lot of affordable newgen wonderkidz (expect the Brazilians) playing in Argentina or other parts of continent. After the first win of the Copa Libertadores, we also had our reputation increased that much that a lot of talented Europeans (which I found using the player search hackz) wanted to join us too.

Seeing those talented youngsters in Europe has made want to go back a bit. So I thought why not combine those things with a small European club and use Vélez Sarsfield as footballing “Hub” in South America and move them over at a certain point to an European club which would allow us to generate more money of the transfer fees as we were doing in Argentina.

Managing a top club in Argentina is all fun, until you receive tons of shit offers from Mexico, China and Europe because your world class players will not be valued more than 5M. Some of them can be sold for 20M but most of the bids were not enough in my view and a result of those offers the players were demanding higher wages.

While talking to @FM_Samo on the Slack DMs about my idea on starting a multi club save he suggested me to choose Nacional Madeira as a “second” club. I did that and in order to start off with the 2-club save I did the following steps:

1. Add all playable leagues in Portugal
2. Wait/Keep on playing until all leagues in Portugal were added into the game
3. Add a new manager as Manager of Nacional Madeira (obviously I did name him Cristiano Ronaldo)
4. Purchase the In-Game editor
5. Link the two clubs as affiliated clubs

One of the first challenges at Nacional Madeira, who was lying in the 2nd tier in Portugal, was that the scouts could only be signed on a part-time contract. I felt that scout report would take forever with that – not the best thing when you want to revamp the club and add some cracking talent to the club.

The other thing was the reputational gap between the clubs was so big that I was not able to move players between clubs as freely as I wanted yet. So the only player moves where 3 loan signed by Madeira to help us challenge for a promotion place in Portugal (while a top 4 finish was expected, from newly appointed Madeira manager)

The following players, all playing for the reserves/youth teams, where moved to get some game time (something they would not have gotten at “El Fortin”):

• Morgese, a talented academy product playing at CB
• Sayavedra, talented but already 22y old striker who should fill the gap on the striker position
• Thomas Hubert, a French left winger who had no future at Velez

Thomas Hubert did play some lovely football in Portugal, scoring a total of 14 assists and being a key factor on winning the 2nd Portuguese division.

What's next?

After the promotion, the goal was to keep on improving our network. Which meant adding new affiliated clubs all over the world, employing more scouts (especially at Madeira) and improving the stature in Portugal, to be able to attract better players there.

I am back on twitter - feel free to give a follow (if haven't already)