Success Stories

For the first away tie of our 2020/21 league campaign we travelled to Stuttgart, for the Baden-Württemberg derby.  Early exchanges weren’t great, and we went behind in the 6th minute before somehow equalising (through Christopher Avevor’s own goal) despite not having a shot of our own on target.

A tweak was made at half time, as well as the players being told how poorly they were performing, and 45 minutes later we left the pitch on the back of a 3-1 win.

Despite all of our success, I think it’s only now that I’m finally feeling like we’ve genuinely ‘arrived’ and deserve our berth among the top sides in the nation.

‘But wait a minute,’ I hear you cry, ‘what about last season? All what success? You’ve won one title.’

This is true, as at the last blog update we had just won the Bundesliga in a nail-biter finish, let me ‘quickly’ fill you in on what happened next – then we’ll be up to speed again, and I can hopefully try to get back to a more analytical approach.

2019/20 – A SEASON IN REVIEW

The summer transfer window of 2019 saw a series of fairly low-profile events that would shape our season. First up came the departure of a number of players at the expiry of their deals, seven in all but just the one first-team regular – Lucas Bijker.

I had no intentions of making any significant signings, still with one eye on our income levels from fairly modest home gates. It’s also fair to say that I wasn’t entirely sure what our priority area would be for any strengthening, although I was tracking one possible replacement for Bijker; we needed to offer Hasek competition in the important left-wingback slot.

A week later, with a whole raft of youngsters heading out on loan, I brought in Andjelko Konta for a £500k fee. His ability to player all up the left side was a bonus, meaning that he could also potentially slot into attack in a pinch – although our use of wide AMs was already on the wane, and was about to become even less of a feature.

The really key development in setting our strategy for the coming campaign was when Racing Club Genk came in for Milan Mares. I didn’t think on the offer for too long, I took a leaf out of @AFHStewart's (formerly @putnielsingoal) book, and his Moneyball approach to FM – if an offer is received for more than a player’s value then let him go.

Mares was a player I was having to juggle time for along with Daniel Bednar – the latter having established himself as a regular starter in the Box-to-Box Midfielder slot. Realistically Mares was only getting games in the increasingly rare outings for our 4-3-2-1 tactic (playing wide right AM). A £2m offer from Genk saw him move to Belgium with my blessing and, in the process, allowed me to feel less pressured into finding spots for wide men. It also set a new club record for a transfer fee received, although that would be blown out of the water within a year (more on which later)

The upshot was the following tactical set for the campaign ahead.

Note that in the narrow 4-2-3-1 (right) I would still occasionally deploy a man out wide (mainly Dorian Rotariu), where the opposition’s formation suited – particularly where they played with 2 central Defensive Midfielders, or to try and keep an attacking fullback honest.

The middle variation is one that I briefly touched on last season, as an idea that was bubbling under with a possibility of  being developed. The decision to do that came after some input from @PaulCook – mainly the suggestion of using an Enganche instead of the more mobile Advanced Playmaker in the central AM slot.

I decided to give it a whirl and it’s proved very effective. I particularly like the fact that it can readily operate with the same players as the more defensive formation; it requires only two players to be switched over as indicated by the blue arrows – the Regista steps into midfield as a DLP, whilst the Ball-Winning Midfielder drops deeper to offer protection for the DC pairing. He also frequently shifts across to assist one of our wingbacks in covering a threat on the flank – cutting out a passing lane into the centre of the park.

The idea is to create a simple defensive triangle with a creative player sitting just off the front. The wingbacks continue to provide width, albeit with one adopting a slightly less attacking role, whilst the CM-A acts as the ‘Central Winger’ – making driving runs beyond the Enganche and into the channel.

With the Enganche playing a more static role than the AP, it gives us a pivot in the attacking third that our Shadow Striker, CM-A, and wingback(s) can all provide runners for. This, along with the more defensive formation, would make up more than 85% of our playing time throughout the 2019/20 comapaign.

With my plans in place, and no real expectation of further signings, we then suffered a long-term injury problem just days from the closure of the transfer window. Marcel Büchel, who shares Regista/DLP duties with Oliver Norwood, tearing a hamstring and ruling himself out of contention for the opening 3 months of our season.

I’d been scouting in the Far East, mainly with an eye on seeing whether FM replicates the financial boost from signing Asian players, and I decided to pull the trigger early on another development target to help alleviate the pressure on Norwood. £1.8m brought in Baek Hanoh from Pohang, with a further small outlay to add one Park Ji-Sung to our coaching team – like Mitrovic, I hoped that the Korean would benefit from having a countryman on hand.

I had an eye on one or two other Korean players too, who would no doubt help each other to settle, but decided to leave them on the backburner as we had a fairly sizeable first-team squad already.

I failed to grab a picture of Hanoh at the time that we signed him, but here he is at the close of the 2019/20 season – after 5 starts and 11 appearances off the bench.

I’m looking to develop him into a specialist Regista in due course.

The other move of note was a loan deal for Jimmy Marton, seeing the young striker head to Werder Bremen – once more in the hope of kick-starting his development. It was a short-lived affair though, with a lack of starts not helping matters, and he ended up back with us after Christmas 2019.

RESULTS

We faced Bayern in the curtain-raising DFL-Supercup (Germany’s answer to the Community Shield) in August 2019, losing on penalties after coming from behind to draw 1-1 in regulation time. After that we embarked on an undefeated eleven game run (two games each in the Cup and the Champions League, and seven in the league). Picking out individual highlights isn’t easy, although a 0-0 Champions League tie at home to Barcelona was right up there. We also notched two big league results, a 4-1 win away at Schalke, and a 4-0 home demolition of Augsburg.

The run was ended with a 2-3 league defeat away at HSV, but we were handily placed in second spot and bounced right back with three clean sheets and a total of 8 goals – including a 5-0 win over Fiorentina in the Champions League group stage.

By the winter break only HSV and Dortmund had beaten us in the league, and only Barcelona in Europe (a 0-4 masterclass that I’d expected to derail our morale).

Overall things were looking very good, but it was some of the individual performances that were pleasing me the most. Rüdiger Braun’s work at wingback threatened to usurp the spot of club captain Matthias Zimmerman, whilst our attacking trio of Rotariu, Ducksch and Mitrovic looked lethal.

As mentioned previously the 4-2-3-1 was seeing very little play time, and mostly Rotariu was switching in for either Ducksch (Shadow Striker) or Williams (Enganche/AP) in the other formations.

POST CHRISTMAS

A very minor blip saw us drop down to 4th spot briefly, but we embarked on a run of 10 straight wins in the league – switching regularly between our two 4-1-2-2-1 narrow formations. That set the stage for a dogfight battle for the line with Bayern, who simply would not let us break clear. We sat six points clear when we visited the Allianz Arena, but Bayern had a game in hand.

A 1-2 defeat saw them close the gap, and when they won their game in hand they leapfrogged us on goal difference.  We came back with another five maximum points hauls, but even then we could have lost it on the last day...

...if Dortmund hadn’t held our rivals, and we hadn’t  picked up the win at Freiburg...

Last time around we’d won it with 78, a 3 point margin over the Munich side, this time around our 85 points only gave us a single additional point cushion. Beating Bayern on penalties, in the final of the DFB-Pokal, was the cherry on the cake.

Unfortunately I didn’t grab a squad-roster screen shot at the end of the season, but Rotariu’s haul of 15 goals and 10 assists was enough to secure him the Bundesliga Player of the Year award. Hasek and Almamy Touré joined him in the Team of the Year roster, whilst Mitrovic’s 23 goals were another huge factor in our success.

All of which would only make it that much harder to take when we lost Rotariu in the run up to the current campaign.

Also worth a mention are some of our bit-part players, like Henri Lansbury who has fallen down the pecking order and only made eight starts (plus a handful of substitute appearances) in the league, and yet still chipped in a couple of goals and half a dozen assists; a 7.06 average rating was nothing to be sniffed at.

SUCCESS BREEDS CHALLENGES

The closed-season period of Summer 2020 made for tough times as players and agents alike had clearly decided that we were now genuine title contenders, and no longer a side who had punched above their weight for a season or so. Players who had been paid £25-30k per week were now demanding upwards of £60k and there were a lot of nail-biting negotiations as, one after another, I talked them down to figures in the £35-£50k range.

I find that if I offer significantly lower than their demands, and they drop just the tiniest bit, then I know I can get them down by quite some way. I’ll often stick to the same offer for 3 or 4 rounds, and as long as they keep dropping their demands by small increments I can keep things tight – once they get into that ‘red’ conversation territory then I can throw in an extra few thousand and usually get the signature at well below their initial figure.

That happened with most of them, but not with Rotariu. His agent would not shift from a base wage demand of £81k per week, with his current deal being a little under £30k. With a cap of £60k or so I tried to play hardball, before giving in and pushing into the fifties, but there was no budging on the other side and a transfer request followed.

I accepted, as a big payday was always going to be better than an unhappy star, and after some nervy wheeling and dealing with Schalke he left us for a deal worth £27.5m in total - £23.5m more than we’d paid for him 18 months earlier. Schalke set him up on a contract at £125k per week - we may well be a firmly established title-challenging side now, but we're a long way from having the wherewithal to pay like one.

He wasn’t the only first-team player to leave us in the summer, contract expiries saw Alfred N’Diaye, Ilian Micanski (retired), Lukas van Eenoo, Patrick Bauer and Marcel Büchel all depart – along with a raft of backup players – but Rotariu’s is the one most likely to hit home.

Fortunately we had contingency plans in place, especially from the scouting mission to the Far East that had turned up Baek Henoh. £2m later and Rotariu was replaced with Kim Young-Hun, and I was delighted to receive a news story to the effect that the Korean’s arrival had had a significant impact on merchandising revenues from Asia.

Whilst there’ll no doubt be some settling required, and I’m not expecting instant fireworks on a Rotariu level, the young Korean looks like a real find for the money.

Also arriving, and marking a club-record transfer fee of £9m, is Danillo Ferreira Moraes, or Nillo to his friends. He has the makings of a great all-round midfielder, offering the option to compete either with Williams/Lanbsury in the provider role, or Bednar as the Box-to-Box/Central Winger engine.

His personality type (Model Professional) is a nice bonus too, and I’m hoping to settle him in as a long-term servant for the club both on the pitch and in a mentoring role.

LOOKING FORWARD

So that’s where we stand now, and our season has started in great style.  The 3-1 turnaround win at Stuttgart, mentioned at the start of this update, was preceded by a solid 1-0 home victory for our first league game. That sees us third in the (very) early table, based on Goal Difference alone, and as holders of the DFL-Supercup – courtesy of a 2-0 win over Bayern, rounded off by Martin Hasek chipping Manuel Neuer from 20+ yards.

More importantly it feels like we’ve firmly established our playing identity (narrow is very much the order of the day), and we’re building a young squad of real talent whilst holding on to (most of) our key players.

It’s by no means job done, but it definitely feels like we’re moving into the next chapter of our story. I can start to focus more on squad development now, and on minor tactical evolutions (I have in mind a two-striker system again). There’s also the minor point of trying to make a dent in Europe, beyond the group stages.

That gets us up to speed though, so I'll leave things there for now. I'll aim to get another update online soon, however a new job means that the previous weekly schedule is likely to be difficult to maintain - apologies that you may have to wait a little longer for your Karlsruhe fix.

For now thanks for reading, feel free to drop your thoughts into the comments or grab me on Twitter at @flipsix3_FM.

Cheers.