Amsterdamsche Football Club DWS - Strong Through Willpower (From grassroots to the top)

[BillHoudini24]

I know, I know... A new save this late in the FM24 year, while I have my Panionios save going, doesn't make the most sense. BUT

I've been living in Amsterdam for 4 years now and I've been having this crazy itch to try to bring a local club to the Eredivisie. Well, there is no better team than DWS to do that.

 

AFC DWS, besides having an awesome name with a beautiful message, which is to stay strong through sheer willpower, also has an interesting story. Founded in 1907 under the name Fortuna, they went on to become Eredivisie champions in 1964, becoming the last club in the country's history to do so without having red as one of their predominant colours. Since then, Ajax, PSV, Alkmaar, Feyenoord and Twente FC have dominated the top of Dutch football.

After shocking everyone in the Netherlands, they couldn't keep up with the financial realities of modern football and ended up playing at the absolute bottom of the Dutch football pyramid.

Despite their small standing in Dutch football, they are trying to forge collaboration with the football community in Amsterdam and have a program with the following principles:

• Develop talent in a broad sense, combining football with social responsibility and a sense of community
• Strive to achieve progress, but without excluding players, the point is to provide opportunities for holistic growth to local kids

From my side, I want to bring DWS back to its former glory, while developing a youth program comparable to Ajax (De Toekomst) and Barcelona (La Masia). This of course will not be easy, since we start at amateur level and won't be getting close to professional or semi-pro until we get up to the third division.

Starting such a long-term save, this late in the year means that I will be migrating this into FM25 when the time comes, as I don't see myself getting to the finish line before October. This would be something like:

1. Turn professional
2. Reach the top league (Eredivisie)
3. Have academy products feature in the Dutch national teams (U18, U21, Main)
4. Establish a local rivalry with Ajax FC
5. Push other local clubs from Amsterdam upwards by loaning players, providing financial help, etc

What intrigues me about this club is that they play at a level I could be playing at, if I hadn't "retired" when I moved here to study and subsequently, work. So for maximum realism, I gave myself one coaching badge and added my true football experience, which is semi-pro.

The club is a complete blank canvas, with no one working there, besides me:

Getting staff with amateur contracts will be a struggle, as well as filling in the squad since I have less than 14 players on day 1. Tactically, I will keep things simple while starting to apply my modern tiki-taka approach, which I'll be refining and adding variations to as we progress through the leagues.

 

Disclaimer no.1:

I am playing a custom Dutch database with all its lower leagues loaded. The problem is that it has not been tested enough, so we might encounter game-breaking bugs, or inaccuracies. In that case, the thread will be deleted and hope for a better version in fm25.

Disclaimer no.2:

I have read and researched a lot on the club, but I've done so by using translating tools, so if any locals are reading and want to provide more context or corrections, feel free to do so.

Let's dig in!
 

[BillHoudini24]

The 2024 pre-season was busy and frankly, stressful. I've never had to search for amateur staff before and without an Assistant Manager to filter out the uninterested ones, my search became a slog. After placing adverts per staff role, things became a bit easier and I was able to assemble my first staff team for DWS.

Everyone is on amateur contracts, so I could easily fill in the entire team, which seems to be good enough to be the best at this level of football. I don't know if this will have a significant impact, especially considering that we train twice a week, but we should be getting an advantage over the rest of the league.

The DWS board seems to be quite ambitious, asking for a playoff finish as a newly promoted team, but there are reasons for optimism. Most of the league is not able to sign enough players to have a proper starting eleven, meaning that as soon as we show up and play 11 real players in a way that makes footballing sense, we should be able to beat most teams around us.

After four preseason friendlies when I struggled to field 11 proper players, I was able to wrap up our transfers on time and get ready for the start of the season.

4 wins and 1 draw while playing more games away is definitely a sign of being on the right track. We are playing a relatively simple possession-based tactic, while making sure that we utilise our 4 best players as efficiently as possible.

Starting from our midfield, Burgzorg is the conductor of the team, playing as an Advanced Midfielder and getting involved in most attacking movements we try to develop. His 93% pass completion along with 2.7 key passes per 90 show more than his 1 goal and 1 assist so far. Unfortunately, he's 37, which means that we'll have to learn how to play without him pretty soon.

Next to him, as the Sunday League version of Iniesta, we have Hiensch. He is having similar numbers to Burgzorg, but I believe this happens because of how good Burgzorg is. I am not so sure that Hiench would perform similarly with another partner in our midfield.

On the right wing we find the speed merchant Mulder, who looks unplayable at times. 2 goals and 5 assists in 5 games indicate his advantage over the average fullback in this league.

Finally, our best player is upfront. Poepon had an insane career for this level, playing in the Eredivisie (Ajax, Willem II, Sparta Rotterdam) before moving to France, Azerbaijan and back to Amsterdam for his twilight years in football. He's scoring for fun, but similar to Burgzorg, I think we'll have him for just this year.

The performance of our first creative quartet has led to first place in the league, after 5 games. Hopefully, we can stay there and avoid the promotion playoffs, as this has been a weak spot for me throughout my time on FM.

[BillHoudini24]

 

In this early part of the save, the main objectives are to get used to the realities of amateur football (lack of training, horrible facilities and having my players approached by other clubs on a daily basis) and establish a consistent way of playing.

Luckily, after the end of the transfer windows, teams stop approaching players in general, so I was allowed to start working on our tactic, knowing more or less which players we will have for this year.

It would be unrealistic and frankly, immersion-breaking if I asked too much from my players. It was basically a loss-loss situation for me:

• Either they wouldn't do what I asked successfully and thus, fail to progress.
• Either they would excel in my super demanding tiki-taka, making everything seem unrealistic.

With that in mind, I tried to stick to the overarching principles of this save, while simplifying where possible, to reflect our current level.

Moving forward, depending on our level and the players available, I would change certain roles for more technical or specialised ones, or add individual instructions, but for now, this should do.

And because I don't like teasing, it definitely did! We went to the top of the league on matchday 4 and never left. Achieving promotion unbeaten was definitely unexpected but not particularly notable at this stage, as most teams are as mismanaged as it gets.

But besides winning, what I enjoyed in this first year in the Dutch lower leagues is that we were able to play according to my preference, principles and ultimately, tactical instructions.

Having 63% average possession with 89% pass completion and 7.3 shots on target is a step in the right direction. We kept the ball and were patient enough to find opportunities for chance creation, mostly through our pacey wingers.

Another element that reinforces my belief in this project is that our U19s won their league as well. Turns out you can play with this tactical setup in all levels of football.

Our youth intake was nothing of note, which makes sense if you look at our youth setup:

But at least we are balanced financially and the board was eager to help me further develop my managerial skills

Let's see how we can improve our squad in the 6th tier of Dutch football.

[BillHoudini24]

Turns out that going from tier 7 to tier 6 would not be a huge difference in terms of the overall level. So, keeping most of the team intact while adding a few quality signings meant we were bound to dominate and get back-to-back promotions, something I haven't done in FM since my dafuge challenge in 2017.

This time it was closer, we even lost a couple of games during the winter transfer window, as I tried to integrate too many new players too soon. Our sporting project seems to be working at all levels, since our U19s won their league for the second time in a row as well. Unfortunately, due to our horrendous facilities, none of them are even close to the main squad's level, but more on that later.

The most interesting part of the season was the regional cup. We reached the final for the first time in the club's history, which meant:

Next season we are playing the proper Dutch Cup! Great experience and hopefully a small financial help as well, since at those levels there are no financial prizes. But again, more on that later. To stay on topic, unfortunately, we lost the cup final. Being 2-0 until the 88th minute made it one of the most painful losses I remember. How can a regional cup final between two amateur teams bother me more than Champions League losses? That's FM for you!

Outside of the pitch, things have been quite busy for the club, with a new board coming in and plenty of youth-related improvements taking place.

The problem is that I probably got over-excited with having my requests accepted and I think I went too far with the junior coaching budget. At the stage we are at, our only income comes from fundraising organised by the supporters, some very small sponsorships and the very rare Dutch Cup participation fee. Getting anxious about our financial survival, I went ahead and requested a senior affiliated club, to get some direct cash, plus the yearly friendly. For season 3, we got 8.3k plus 11k from the tickets for our friendly match. 20k is a huge amount of money for a team in the 5th tier, where there are not even semi-professional clubs.

Now that I am 2+ seasons in and the core of the team seems somewhat stable, it's the right time to introduce our most important players.

The oldest player of the club and the only one still here from the start, Poepon will probably end his lucrative career with us. His Attributes are absolutely bonkers for this level of football, which translated into 47 goals and 4 assists in 60 games. In our third season, he's not playing as much anymore, but he still managed to score twice so far, showing that no matter how old you get, the art of goalscoring never leaves you.

Mike Mulder was electric in his first two seasons with us. His 23 goals and 36 assists were one of the major reasons for our back-to-back promotions. In season 3, the level has increased quite a bit, so he's demoted to a squad option, luckily without any complaints. An early club icon in my book for sure.

To kick things off with the newer guys, van der Lee is basically Mulder's replacement, mostly because of his vastly better Off the Ball, Work Rate and Pace. His Strenght of 1 lets him down occasionally, but hasn't stopped him from registering 15 goals and 9 assists in 43 games for us.

Another new guy is Joep Offermars. How can you not sign a guy with this name? But besides his promising name, he's a versatile player for all 3 positions we use upfront, while having a great personality. His 6 goals and 5 assists in 20 games might seem low, but he joined when we started playing at a way higher level than before.

The most recent addition is the best player at the club according to my staff. Willem seems to have all the right ingredients to succeed in our system, but so far he's been underwhelming. Injuries, frustration and only 1 assist in 8 games, but I will be patient with him as he's by far our best option on the left.

Spoiler for the next post: After two borderline boring promotions, we finally found our level.

 

Edited August 23 by BillHoudini24

[_Ben_]

Good luck with this! I know very little about Dutch football but, from what I remember, there was no relegation from the 2nd tier? Is that correct? If so - what are your plans?

[BillHoudini24]

5 hours ago, _Ben_ said:

Good luck with this!

Thanks! At first, it seemed like a breeze, but now in season 3 things are starting to look like a proper lower league challenge! The only difference is that teams actually try to play football, no low block and Route One shenanigans, which I despised during my time in England.

5 hours ago, _Ben_ said:

I know very little about Dutch football but, from what I remember, there was no relegation from the 2nd tier? Is that correct? If so - what are your plans?

The Dutch Football Federation's plan irl is to abolish this rule and allow teams to get promoted into the 2nd tier. The reason there was no relegation for all these years was that teams from tier 3 and below could simply not afford to participate in a fully professional league. Now teams will be allowed to choose, which is reflected in this custom database, probably by forcing the newly promoted teams to become Professional.

The first major step is to become semi-pro, increase our training days and hopefully find a better training ground through an affiliation. Otherwise, player development is just impossible.

Edited August 23 by BillHoudini24

[Deisler26]

Ahh, lovely. A country close to my heart. You will forgive me if I wish you suffering at the hands of RKC, but wins everywhere else. 

[BillHoudini24]

15 hours ago, Deisler26 said:

Ahh, lovely. A country close to my heart. You will forgive me if I wish you suffering at the hands of RKC, but wins everywhere else. 

Suffering at the hands of RKC would mean that we made it to the Eredivisie, I'll take it!

[BillHoudini24]

Season 3 was the wildest I can remember having on Football Manager in quite some time. To keep things easier to read, I'll divide season 3 into two parts.

First, we are going to have a look at the events that took place around the club and then we'll have a separate post about the crazy end of the season. Spoiler alert: Read the league rules more carefully

Training Facilities Upgrade (Kind of):

Having 1 in Training Facilities and 1 in Youth Facilities basically means that our players will never develop. At the same time, there is absolutely no money for upgrades of that size, so I asked for an affiliation, in order to share facilities with a club in Amsterdam that is a bit more fortunate than us. Luckily, the board came through and found us DCG. They train in Ookmeer, a small neighbourhood at the South-Western border of Amsterdam, near the famous for its (lack of) beauty, Lelylaan.

During the same period, our highest (and oldest) ever goalscorer, Rydell Poepon, retired and was good enough to become my Assistant straight away. His experience will be very useful moving forward.

But the show must go on and if we want to make DWS successful in an organic way, we need to look inward. Our Junior Coaching and Youth Recruitment investments seem to take us in that direction slowly:

Nothing to be very excited about in terms of immediate impact, but I like two of our "elite" talents:

Pete seems to be ready Mentally to play with the big boys, but he needs to improve his Technicals and Physicals before challenging for a spot in the main squad. If he develops nicely, and that's a big "if", then we might have ourselves a leading figure in the dressing room for the most challenging part of this save.

Peter looks more ready, but his low Composure and Stamina might be low enough to stop him from making it into the first team for now. On the other hand, he's very quick, brave, determined and technical for our level, so I decided to give him some minutes towards the end of the season. But more on that later

And finally, on more personal news, I had the biggest offer of my Dutch career. NAC Breda came knocking, which is huge considering they are currently an Eredivisie club, but I hope we can meet them there soon with my local club:

[_Ben_]

3 minutes ago, BillHoudini24 said:

Training Facilities Upgrade (Kind of):

Having 1 in Training Facilities and 1 in Youth Facilities basically means that our players will never develop. At the same time, there is absolutely no money for upgrades of that size, so I asked for an affiliation, in order to share facilities with a club in Amsterdam that is a bit more fortunate than us. Luckily, the board came through and found us DCG. They train in Ookmeer, a small neighbourhood at the South-Western border of Amsterdam, near the famous for its (lack of) beauty, Lelylaan.

That's beautiful (the idea not the scenery)! Can't say I've ever seen that before.

3 minutes ago, BillHoudini24 said:

During the same period, our highest (and oldest) ever goalscorer, Rydell Poepon, retired and was good enough to become my Assistant straight away. His experience will be very useful moving forward.

Such a shame but it just feels right to keep him on. At your level, he's actually a good staff member too!

4 minutes ago, BillHoudini24 said:

Pete seems to be ready Mentally to play with the big boys, but he needs to improve his Technicals and Physicals before challenging for a spot in the main squad. If he develops nicely, and that's a big "if", then we might have ourselves a leading figure in the dressing room for the most challenging part of this save.

 

What tier are you in again? Semi pro or amateur? Is there anything you can do to make him better? Or is it just give him minutes and see how he goes?

[BillHoudini24]

9 hours ago, _Ben_ said:

That's beautiful (the idea not the scenery)! Can't say I've ever seen that before.

Barely scraping by is the definition of what we've been trying to do for these first 3 seasons, we are talking about literal amateur football. To put things in perspective, in real life, these teams get most of their income from memberships, meaning that most (if not all) of the players are actually paying to play.

That also means that with the worst possible facilities you can have in the game, anything would be an upgrade. I remembered from an older version that part of my deal with a club (I was the senior affiliate back then) was that they could use our facilities, so I had a lightbulb moment and luckily, it worked. Even going from 1 to 5 on the scale helps, as I see some minor and very slow improvements in the players.

I could be even more patient/realistic and work 100% with what I have, except for a couple of marquee signings every year, but ideally, I would like to get to the Eredivisie before all real players have retired. It would add an extra level of interest to sign old Ajax players for mentoring roles for example, or try to revive the career of an underachieving ingame wonderkid.

9 hours ago, _Ben_ said:

What tier are you in again? Semi pro or amateur? Is there anything you can do to make him better? Or is it just give him minutes and see how he goes?

With the urgency that we improve the squad every year, I don't see this intake being relevant for more than 2 seasons, but with 14 in Junior Coaching and 9 in Youth Recruitment, we might be able to get a couple of youngsters with enough Current Ability to help us almost immediately. I wouldn't hold my breath though, I expect this to start happening once we are financially more secure, which would be around tier 3.

[BillHoudini24]

I realised I had stopped on a cliffhanger, but life happened. Luckily, we can now have a look at the end of the 2026-27 season and the beauty of the Dutch league system until the Eredivisie.

So, as you probably know, the Dutch lower leagues have a "period" system for establishing the promotion playoff participants. This means that the team that gets the most points in the first period for example, also gets a playoff ticket, irrespective of how they perform for the rest of the year. Major note here: I didn't know that. I thought that the objective was to be as close to the top as possible by the end of each period. Anyway.

In the first period of 2026, we started quite inconsistently, ending up not only missing the first playoff ticket but also being close to the relegation playoffs.

In the second period, we were focused on surviving comfortably, consolidating and maybe finding some better players to upgrade the squad, in addition to our huge Youth Intake Gamble.

I always try to sign as many players before the summer, so that I can get more time for team cohesion. Luckily, these players didn't need a lot of time to adjust to our values and the way we play, resulting in one of the craziest runs I ever had on FM.

We basically went undefeated in the 10 games of the third period, ending up first in this mini table and getting to the promotion playoffs! Back-to-back-to-back promotions were at stake. This is where things became even more weird. Remember the intake striker I talked about in my latest post, Peter Stam? Thinking that my season was basically over, I started using him in those last games of the season and he shocked everyone, including me, by scoring a debut 4 goals in the playoff-deciding game. Thanks to his 4 goals, we now have all to play!

But he didn't stop there. He scored the first goal in our huge victory against Hercules in the playoff semi-final and then scored again in the playoff final against ARC.

And finally, he also scored in the second leg of the final in a crazy 4-4 draw, getting us promoted to the fourth tier of Dutch football! Overall, he had 7 goals and 1 assist in 5 games, absolutely phenomenal.

Here is our crazy run to get to the playoffs:

And the greatest news of this post is that we became a semi-professional club! Exciting, but also dangerous, as this is the type of club structure that makes it easy to get lost financially, I have to be very conscious of my contract and bonus decisions, otherwise we'll be living in the red, which is already an everpresent danger, as I keep on gambling with our Youth Setup.

Going back to Peter Stam, after his crazy "Jeremy Lin" (for the NBA fans) moment, he quickly became obsolete due to the reinforcements we had to sign for the next division. In the year that followed, he scored 47 goals in 44 games with our U19s, but the speed of our progression through the leagues will not allow him to have a career with us. Nonetheless, Pete will be remembered as a cult hero here and will be inducted into our DWS Hall of Fame.

Edited August 30 by BillHoudini24

[BillHoudini24]

Being on the Netherlands' 4th flight meant that we would finally have some proper and consistent income, in the form of TV money. 70k for a newly semi-professional club is no joke!

Having never played this high up the Dutch pyramid before, or being anything more serious than amateurs also meant that the odds were stacked against us. This, along with our total financial failure in our youth development had me worried, not only about our survival in the Derde Divisie, but for the club's longevity as well.

To not bore you too much with finances, this means that we're relegation favourites while paying 500k/year on a youth setup that hasn't produced a single player who could even be a squad option.

To continue progressing without running the club into the ground and back to literal Sunday League, we would need to:

1) Finally get a couple of youth players good enough to play for the first team and subsequently sell them to finance our youth-related costs or,

2) Speedrun our way into the Eredivisie, to become self-sustainable by TV money, competition prize money and slowly establish a vfm farm.

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I've done everything I can and I am risking more than I should for (1), so let's see how (2) could work in parallel. And here comes my first "problem" with the database:

Not having enough people playing it in this forum means that I have no idea about how realistic it is and what is the real life differences in level between divisions. I am starting with that, because this time, we not only got promoted (again), but we also did it without playing promotion playoffs.

Having the 2nd best attack and defence definitely helped, along with some free transfers I did during the season:

Milan Engelander (PF): A very tall midfielder turned striker, Milan was instrumental with his 16 goals in 31 games. It's his best season ever, considering that his previous best was just 1 goal.

Mees Adrichem (CM): An ex-Alkmaar academy graduate, Mees is an incredible athlete who has been instrumental in our high-press and possession-based game. His 7 goals and 7 assists underplay his significance for us.

Willem Siahaya (LW): Remember the underwhelming winger I mentioned last season? That is no more, since Willem settled in, he became an absolute monster. He was arguably our best player, with 12 goals and 11 assists, most of them in crucial moments.

But enough with the positivity, it's time for some more Dutch complaining. I mentioned already that we spend an ungodly amount of money on our youth setup. Here is this year's harvest:

Bruce and Raphael look like they could become useful for a tier 2 team, but that is with proper facilities and full-time training, tools that we currently don't have.

Should I cut my losses and scale down all youth-related elements? Next season should be the make or break point. At least they're pretty good for their current level

Edited August 31 by BillHoudini24