With this year's FM Edition I struggled way more to pick a club than in other years. My first Intention was to do something different that year as I've already managed in Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain and Holland over the last few years. One of the first ideas was going to Austria, but in the end I didn't follow that one

After watching the Netflix series about Carlitos "Apache: La vida de Carlos Tevez", another idea was to start a save with All Boys.

But seeing Ed thriving with AZ and all the amazing scout reports about the newgens during my Beta save with GC Zürich, made me want to go back to Holland.

Club Vision

The board expected the following club visions to be completed over the following years:

• Avoid Relegation battle
• Develop players using the club's youth system
• Play entertaining football

Evertything seemes pretty much achievable expect the "Develop players using the club's youth system". Why? The youth system was in shambles. None of the players in the first team from the academy, who weren't already firstteamers like the first-choice goalkeeper Drommel, or anyone in the U19 was good enough to play a role in the first team, now or in the future. Besides that we even hadn't a reserves team at all! Over the course of the season, I saw that a "B Team" could be requested by the board, but it wouldn't make any sense yet, because none of the youngsters was going to play in the first team in the moment...

Somehow funny that the visions after the first season changed somehow to the way we were playing in the first season (We made a lot after set pieces and played a high-tempo pressing football):

But yeah, the youth system needed a lot of investing....

Tactics

With the board demanding entertaining football, we had to set up an an attacking tactic. Somehow, I decided to go with an attacking Gegenpress.

You might have notices I've started to play with a generated tactic and decided to tweak it a bit during the winter break to suit it a bit to the players. (Especially, using a winger on the right side, as we signed Runar Hauge during that transfer window)

I've also created a view, in order to be able to focus on certain attributes, which in my opinion where in important for our tactical approach: press, recover the ball fast as possible and attack quickly as possible again. For the future I did plan, to take the needed attributes as well into player acquisition, but more about that in the last chapter of this blog.

Players of the season

In the end we've over performed massively finishing way over the expectations and finishing on a lovely 3rd place and qualifying for Europe in the first season (being over 2 years ahead in the 5y plan, where a top 6 was expected in 2years). The following key players had a major impact on our great performance in the 2019/2020 league campaign:

Joël Drommel: The young goalkeeper, who is also an academy product, put on some lovely performances. He did develop lovely and increased his value from 1M to over 3M in just 12 months. He rewarded himself with named as goalkeeper of the season in the dutch Eredivie:

Javi Espinosa: The spaniard playmaker managed to put in high performances on a high level and managed to grab himself a toal of 11 assists in the league and having an average rating of 7.21 in these games, besides not complying at full with important mental attributes needed for the Gegenpress:

Rafik Zekhnini: Personally, I have started to really enjoy the young norwegian who was on loan from Fiorentina managed to score a total of 8 assist and 14 goals for us was clearly the man of the season for me. Surpisingly, we managed to renew his contract (paying 0K/y for him) for another year at the end of the season:

Besides that I've also could've written here about my main striker Berggreen, who surprised me with all the goals he scored or Oriol Busquets, who was on loan from Barcelona and managed to get some amazing performances in the midfield

Transfer Strategy

With having so much freedom about signing new players I wanted to start with my save with a few regulations on which players to sign, as I wanted to do it a bit different that year, otherwise I would ended to sign all the fucking wonderkids again.

One regulation I had in my mind was to restrict my transfers to Holland and their "neighbouring" nations: Holland, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and other scandivian countries.

With already having 5 spanish players (Cantalapiedra, Busquets, Espinosa, Matos, Pleguezuelo) in the squad, I wanted also to keep on bringing these lads in. To summarize it up: Holland, Belgium, Scandivia and Spain where the main countries I wanted to sign players.

Another regulation is that I wanted to make sure the players at the club would match the attributes for a Gegenpress-Tactic pretty early on. That's why I wanted to focus on the following attributes:

• physical: Acceleration, Pace
• technical: Passing, Technique and Tackling
• mental: Workrate, Teamwork, Detemination

In order to still have some options while buying players, I've decided that both regulations would be pretty soft in the beginning, but especially the attribute regulation rules would be taken into account while signing new players.

Sining only two norwegians lads (Runar Hauge and Jonathan Parr) in the first season was the first step in trying to comply the regulations. In the second transfer window, with no real offer coming for my players I decided to bring in the following lads:

Chirivella, Aleix and Eric Garcia, Carbonerll where all spanish players, so now the amount of spaniards at the clubs was at 7.

So that's it from my 1st season. I hope you've enjoyed it, any feedback and sharing's welcome as always! on the FMSlack in the #nestorfm channel.