WhiteCat33

@dtown1414 Thank you! We've hit the first milestone of the Supporters Shield. Now to acquire all the additional MLS & North American trophies. I did consider fully disabling the Star Ratings for the players to take that final step to a pure-statistical journey. In a way though, I like the 'rough' idea of Ability we get with the combination of Stars + Coach/Scout Attribute Highlights. It is enough that I can make big purchases for players like Ox-Chamberlain like (I'd argue) a real MLS team considering how much we love our 'marquee signings' here. I'm excited to see if I've made a huge mistake here from an efficiency perspective. This is compounded with Harper becoming like Bacuna in being a shockingly killer CM signing especially considering I found him on a free. If I was a baseball fan I would certainly be playing OOTP. I've followed that game for a long time and am a huge fan of the simulation depth it's always had. I see they just released a new version, which seems to be bringing the graphics engine to a similar level of FM. I can only hope SI are inspired to keep increasing the statistical side of the game to bring the analysis up to OOTPs level.

Final Game of the Regular Season: Can we Claim the Supporters Shield?!? Final Gameday of the season: we have the privilege of having the late-game slot so we see how every game went ahead of time. Importantly for us Sporting KC couldn’t beat Philadelphia! In MLS first tiebreaker is head-to-head, so now that all 3 of us are level on points because San Jose beat us they are ahead in the Supporters Shield. We just need 1 point in this match to claim the title! Final Game of the season: Home vs Charlote FC Lineup: Ox-C is partially fit, but with how well Harper has played I give him the start as the playmaker. I like bringing in John-Jules as an impact sub with late-game speed so D-Reid starts at striker. Play-by-Play: [First try at Gifs is pretty poor I know. I'll probably switch to Imgur Links for these for the Playoff Games] 5’ D-Reid Misses an open goal, and then 8’ he sets up J. Lowe for his own attempt. I’m liking these early chances. 14’ Harper plays D-Reid in but it’s saved wide for a corner. Immediate second highlight: D-Reid takes the corner and while the first service is cleared out its back to D-Reid who serves in a second ball finding our VC BPD Nilsson on the far post to give us an early lead 17’ in! While we have 3 more corner kick highlights all are dealt with by Charlote. However, in open play J Lowe serves a ball up the gut to Bacuna running forward from midfield and he gets himself a goal!!! 36’ we do not deal with their corner well and they are able to scrap in a goal to bring it back to a 1 goal lead. Time to focus! We make it to halftime without any other excitement. We start strong in the 52’ Harper makes it clear I made the right decision starting him as he slots a ball to J Lowe who gets 1 v 1 with the GK and scores! We continue to put up good chances, but even letting in 3 goals their GK is having a great game with a 7.3 rating however in the 66’ it goes form bad to worse for Charlotte when Jones gets a second yellow and is ejected! Then in the 83’ their sub BWM just clobbers my winger and gets a straight red so they are down to 9 men. I played the rest of the game safe to ensure we get the victory and there were very little additional highlights. We win the Shield! Now can we make it a Domestic Double by winning the Post Season Playoffs!?

SFC September Matches! (Season 2, 2024) Yes, I decided to actually play some games. This final month starts off with a tough matchup with the strong Portland Timbers, but really isn't too scary of a month with only 5 games! Match 1: Portland Home – [Actually used Harper as O-C was a little tired and Harper will be heading on international duty. Mistake?] In the week leading up to the second match we get: Oxlade-Chamberlain Injury #1 And we are in the thick of it for a title race. The result with Portland was crucial to not let them keep pulling away from us, but without the win we have some ground to make up to truly challenge our rivals Sporting Kansas City With our lighter schedule I decided to actually let my players go out on international duty as they would only miss 1 match by doing so. J Bacuna was the standout player for both match-days with 3 goal contributions and a 7.8 & 7.5 rating showing he's in excellent form. Harper & J Lowe both played well for Jamaica. I of course made this decision before Ox-C got himself injured, but I'm glad I let my CMs show their ability for their nations. Match 2: Away Montreal – [Lots of starters away on International Duty + Ox-Cham injured] Match 3: Home vs Nashville [All but Ox-C ready to go] Mach 4: Away vs Real Salt Lake Match 5: Home Vs New England [Reasonable rotation as they are in dead-last in the league so figured I could rest a few players] WE ARE IN FIRST FOR THE SUPPORTERS SHEILD! WIN OUR FINAL GAME AND THE TITLE IS OURS It is a tough game too as it’s against Charlote FC but at least its at our home ground. Charlote, while they won’t catch us for the Division top-seed, they could spoil our Supporters Shield if they beat us and Sporting KC wins. Well deserved after our almost flawless September. Our new 4-3-3 is working perfect and the AI did not see it coming and hasn’t been able to adjust to it. (Formation is showing AI formation).

Building the Secondary Scouting Element to the spreadsheet: TL;DR: I go through building a scouting part into the tool. At the end I "use" it to isolate some options for a backup GK. Philosophy on Scouting I know form a technical point of view it is unnecessary to import a secondary data-set of scouted players because all these players are already in my primary dataset with full stats. However, remember to get the full datasets I use a “holiday manager” who has the ‘Gods-Eye’ view of all the players in the game universe. To use that unrestricted view to discover players to sign is IMO cheating. If you’ve noticed, anytime I’ve used the tool thus far it has been after my scouting network found a player and then I’m comparing him against the summary statistics & the Top 3 teams. In my head-cannon my manager has purchased a subscription to “WhiteCatStats” part of which is getting full statistical information on the Top 3 finishing teams in every league. Thus, when I compare player-to-player it is only with the Top 3 finishing teams. Granted I’m at a MLS club that has an unrestricted scouting range with about 1M USD a year in scouting budget so really I can do whatever I want. Considering I chose the closest region outside of our own, its not unrealistic at all for an MLS team to have excellent Caribbean scouting knowledge. Onto importing Scouting! To do this First I went back to my May1st save-point to be able to pull player statistics. Then I did this search to look for all partially Caribbean & American players that are 23 or Younger. The objective is to find some youth prospects to bring into the team that won’t use an international slot. There are 159 players known to us, but that includes MLS contracted players as well as the young amateurs around the country we can’t sign. If I drop off the American filter & exclude MLS players it jumps up to 785, so shows how constricted getting dual-national Caribbeans is for us. Again with the scouted players I’m getting weird glitches where the UID is coming in as text and not number. It only happens to players with scouting ratings, but not all of them? Must have something to do with that If I just select the cell and press enter it turns back into a number. Just an annoying manual clean I have to do each time: With it imported in, I’ve added in some important additional information about the players that will impact our decision making. We need at the very least American players so nationality has been added as well as the nation they are based in as well as birth region. For us it is even better is if they are ‘Home Grown’ thus out of another MLS Academy, but then we also need to know which team still has the ‘player rights’ to them because that will require a trade to sign them. With this, then it goes into its own simple position clean: To then create Position Binary variables: Now it’s ready to set up “UID Screeners” where I set a specific statistical and / or general condition and I build a dynamic list of UIDs who match that criteria. First up are the easy Single Critieria Screens: These are Array formula of Index-Match using IFERROR & COUNTIF to find the next UID in the list that the criteria column (Based In) have “USA” as their value. This set up is how I isolate the selected teams players in the main spreadsheet. Same works for position by using my binary variables. Notice now instead of a Var value it is hardcoded to 1 and set to the correct Position Binary, in this case “DL”. This is filled down the line for each position. A simple change of condition from “=” to “<=” allows us to isolate all players with a 7.00 or higher Average Rating. I can use this exact same thing to use the “Minutes” selector on the Main. Here are all the positions. Like always there are very few wingbacks, and unfortunately there aren’t that many GKs which is where I want to focus on for this example as with our Main GK erroneously put on SEI Reserve by yours truly and me shipping off the high-wage bad-performance Brit back to Manchester we have no backup Goalkeeper if Austin goes and gets himself Injured. I really think I need to go back and expand this with all ages because if its just for this year I can pick up an old man playing well in the lower leagues or Caribbean somewhere and go for youth later. Take Two Export: opening the age up gives me almost double the players. Import into sheet and how many GKs do we get? 20 Potential USA + Caribbean Nationality GKs. Does this match what you get in the game Search Filter? It does, Hooray! Of the GKs I found 17 of the 20 have some playtime statistics to be judged on. Now the question is how can I make a dynamic comparative analysis of Goalkeeper attributes so I can select an American + Caribbean nationality GK that I can afford as a backup? First, I need to select out the Statistics of Interest to us. As I’m going to use this against my already existing Summary statistic tables I set up a table that is linked to each position table to record the 15-18 variables currently being utilized. I added 4 additional slots to future-proof this for expanding statistics [which will be another part of this Statistics Upgrade] Now, there are two ways to use this. Either all in one cell with Index-Match-Match, or I can establish a Column variable for each position (with match) to then be used by Vlookup() to know how far into the Scouting table to look to draw out the data. I went with Index-Match-Match and while we have gotten data into the table. I know its small, Here is an example of the formula: This is the classic usage of Index-Match-Match. Importantly we need an error check to make sure it is drawing data from the right players. Since the logic is the same across all the columns the easiest is to check if the UID-Name matches what’s in the raw data. Looks good to me! Onto Part 3: Combining with Summary Statistics Easy first part of copying over the selected summary table from the main page For my lower-tier league pickups the first major filter I want to see is that these players are getting a higher average rating than Top-3 Sides in my League. If I am pulling a player up divisions, they need to be crushing it at their level, i.e. a star at a ‘Top-3’ side. The simplest way to do this is by Average Rating, which should be selective enough to cut out useless players, but still leave us a few options. How to implement this? I do a second-stage of the initial “Average rating Screen” now on the selected position. The reason I don’t do these all in advance is these array-functions add up in processing for the sheet when you change things, so I want to minimize the number of them. It’s why I have data-limits across the tool. For this part I have set the following data-limits: 2500 Total Scouted Players ; 600 players for: HG 0-21, HG 15-21, BasedinNation, AvRat & Minutes ; 250 players-per-position. Result: We filter our 20 down to 6, who were star GKs for their team. Data-Max of 50 Players with 7.00 or higher rating in Selected Position. Now just fill in the rest of the table with VLookup() What becomes obvious is the way the Av Rat filter works it also brings in the no-data players. Here while I could fix this in the spreadsheet, its much easier to restrict future data-imports to players who have played at least 1 Game. Our Three Emergency Non-Foreign Goalkeeper Options: Again, worth noting, I’ve done nothing more here than reproduce what the Scouting filter-window does for us just inside of the tool. Point is that I got the data here to be ready for larger statistical comparisons later when I want to. When making the decision for an emergency GK its not necessary. You can see my scouts hate these goalkeepers, but what do they know! GK 1: Brian Sylvestre [31] - Haiti-MAIN / USA The Haiti National Team GK as well as the starter for Arachaie, who just won the Haiti Premier Division by a wide point margin and a sizeable GD (which is a very good sign when GK Hunting!). I’d have to check in with @V50 on exactly how the Haiti league is structured, but to me this looks like a two-stage regular season with a mini-tournament for the top 4 teams in the post season after both halves are completed, considering the GK played 34 games and there are only 15 in the "Compinant". Looks like he actually had a partial season playing for Philadelphia back in 2015. Turns out there was some serious drama going on with their very high salaried Goalkeeper at the time. When their 2 alternative goalkeepers were both out injured instead of playing Mboli they opted for an emergency loan of Brian Sylvestre to fill their slot. End Of An Era: Union Goalkeeper Rais Mbolhi Agrees To Contract Termination - CBS Philadelphia (cbsnews.com) For me I actually have seen him play as he was the GK for my local League 1 side for their first year! Forward Madison FC signs Brian Sylvestre as first goalkeeper - Forward Madison FC. TBH I had no idea they made money selling him to Miami, I figured that was just a 1-year deal (like most L-1 contracts). Looks like he should have stayed here in Madison, I remember him being perfectly fine for us that season. In my universe he has left Miami to go to Haiti. He declared for Haiti late in his career in 2021, so only has 14 CAPs. Very promising as an MLS backup considering he's done it twice before. For the next two GKs who are in Lower League USA leagues I switched to my current Aug 23rd Save-point to pull up In-Game Screenshots with more data. GK 2: Angel Molinar [24] - Puerto Rico - MAIN / USA A Puerto Rican international who is currently playing for the national team and has become a regular fixture of the Westchester United squad. At only 24 he is by far the youngest of the 3 GKs. Perk here is he's on an Amateur contract so is totally free to acquire and should be open to a reserve contract or at the very least a Senior Minimum Salary contract to be the absolute lowest possible CAP expenditure. GK 3: Valin Bodie [29] - Bahamas-MAIN / USA With only 3 CAPs for Bahamas and coming out of the Bahamas the fact he wasn't good enough to get more than a couple chances really means he has no business in the MLS even if he's doing well down in the UPSL STATS: While I'll throw this up, really its pretty easy to tell that Sylvestre is the best choice here, it will just be if I can get him in from Haiti from a team who have no interest in selling him. It will be expensive compared to a normal Haiti pickup, but not sure how much that actually will be. What is great about the transfer window in the US especially with GKs is if my guy does get injured I can go acquire any of these three and bring them in then. Here I'm looking at the players before I've finished the tool so I've just hidden the unused rows/columns to put the direct comparison between these scouted GKs, Our GK & what the Top-3 in the MLS look like. First important note is Molinar & Bodie are in super low US leagues that are unplayable even with my extended database so they have minimal statistics. But when we look at Sylvestre he has done very well even when compared to our backup whose been playing the majroity of the year for us. He is better on both Clean Sheets / 90 and Allowed / 90. He doesn't press veyr well with only a 1/3 success rate, but did get 24 shutouts, which is impressive that he only let in goals in 10 of 34 games.

Nice test, your results are what I assumed was the case and which is what had me frustrated about my Luxembourg save. If my priority was to max my youth facilities I should throw my CL qualification to get into the Europa league or Conference League to try and win a Continental trophy as that gives me more club reputation than just doing well in the Group Stage but failing in the first knockouts of the CL. Probably once I'm done with my USA Statistical Excursion I'll return for a final crack at the CL in Luxembourg. If I milk every last ounce of performance out of the team I think I have a shot. Will require some serious tactical adjustments though as I need something better than an offensive 4-2-3-1 against the new-era Tycoons of Europe. 14 years is an (unfortunately) impressive run for a chairman. I've never had one stay that long. Almost always by 10 years they are looking for the door even if the club is showering them in money and success. Congrats?

It's a Miracle! Did you just gain "Develop Best Youth System in the Country"? Or notice anything at all 'get better' that would trigger opening up the option for an upgrade?

I'm pretty sure Denmark is still messed up where teams will sign your players even when they are on part time contracts. Maybe it got fixed in the winter update?

Statistics Manager: Excel Upgrades! TL;DR: There is no gameplay in this post, just me nerding out about Excel Upgrades & my future plans for the spreadsheet. Intro Part of what makes this career a "Statistics Manager" is that I'm playing St Louis City not just in FM23, but also in my excel spreadsheet. As this career progresses, you'll notice that I have a tendency to go through periods where I'll primarily focus on one or the other. Since I've moved through 2.5 seasons in FM without spending time in the spreadsheet this will mark a turn towards looking at how I can build a tool that better addresses my needs as St Louis City's Manager. And this is a perfect nightly activity while I watch CONCACAF Nations League matches on Paramount + this week [They have the US TV Rights]. You see some wild things like Dominican Republic getting an Indirect Free-Kick inside the box due to an improper pass-back and handle by the GK, which they convert to score in the 94' to level the score. It's worth recalling that I built this tool while playing a Youth-Only save, so its initial design parameters were focused on how to maximize the output of my existing players rather than be a comparative tool against the league to make decisions if a player should be replaced or not. Thus, while I've been playing these seasons I've kept word doc of what I could use and have turned that into an 'upgrade plan' Three Planned Major Upgrades: The save is at a perfect position to benefit from having better statistical analysis. We have established ourselves as a title-contender and with the recent transfer of Ox-Chamberlain I really need a way to evaluate his "worth" to the team and assess if such a huge expenditure (both in transfer cost as well as yearly wage-spend) can be justified through data. Now of course, his individual performance isn't the whole story. My hope with a playmaker acquisition he will bring up the level of output for all of our attacking players by improving the chances they get. So, we need to be able to have a short-hand way to see, longitudinally, if the whole teams' performances are improving not just absolutely but relatively to the competition. One final part I want to improve is to integrate my scouting process into the tool itself. This presents three distinct upgrades I'd like to add: Player Letter Grade Relative Performance Moneyball Financial Efficiency for Performance Scouted Player Import & Comparison against Benchmarks 1: Player Letter Grade Relative Performance In my spreadsheet I have a whole sheet dedicated to isolating players in the league by position. It is here that I calculate the PercentageRank() function. The output of this function functions very-much like a school letter grade. Thus, when I see my player has a 88% for Crosses Completed I could assign that a B+. But that isn't the whole "crossing" picture. To get that I could combine Cross Attempts, Cross Completes, xA & OP-KP together to see how these crosses translate into chances for our striker. If I average all these Percentages together and assign a letter grade maybe for this hypothetical player its higher at an A- because he produces more Assists and Key Passes with it. This kind of idea would get repeated for each aspect of the game per position. Wingers would have their "Crossing", "Movement" & "Scoring" grades as examples. A big part of getting this right will be taking the time to build up proper groupings for each position so that the combined grades actually mean something. Once these groups are established and I can create useful 'Parts of Game' Ratings for each position, then I could assign an "Overall Grade" based upon my weighting of which part of the game is most important for that position/role/duty. It is here where the application can start. Here are some of the ideas I've jotted down in list format: 2: Moneyball Financial Efficiency for Performance The Second piece is to actually begin to do financial Moneyball. This will require a v2 of my Scouting View as there will be lots of financial data that needs to be brought into the dataset. Right now I just have base-salary and that isn't being used at all. I haven't started this at all and am still in the planning stages, because I want to fully sketch out all the variables I need so I'm not constantly tinkering with the import view and having to re-download data. Here I could rewrite what's in my list but I think it's a good first idea of what I'm thinking on setting up the Absolute Evaluation: You'll notice I haven't drafted out how the actual evaluation will be set up. Probably will begin with basic ratios and go from there. Most likely this will loop back into using the groupings that I build in (1) to evaluate specific parts of players games and just utilize the absolute values here instead of the relative ranking values. These could be the basis for a relative evaluation as well but I'm not as clear on that yet. 3: Scouted Player Import & Comparison against Benchmarks The big upgrade here is in setting up the sheet to import a secondary dataset that has players I've been scouting / are in range. Then add onto this a key attribute benchmark filter with a nationality filter and I can easily see what targets to focus my scouting and efforts on. Where this will help me is in actually bringing young players out of the Caribbean to see if they can develop at our club utilizing our maxed out facilities and great coaching staff. First Preparatory Upgrade: Statistics - What does "good" look like in FM23? - FM Stag Of course, today I don't have any of those things for you to see Instead, I have what I consider to be a preparatory upgrade that I've intended to do since I even thought about building this excel file. One of the major inspirations for this whole project was FM Stag's blog post I just linked. I highly recommend taking a look if you're finding my statistical journey interesting. It concludes with this awesome Low/Medium/High Graphic for players in the English Premier League. Seeing that I have all those statistics already in my dataset, its just a matter of setting up the Vlookup() formulas and choosing which of my 15 tables I want to use for the three tiers of benchmarking. I agree with FM Stag that the dataset should be limited to players playing sufficient minutes. For a full season data 2000 is a nice easy number to utilize. The way I have parsed the data is rather by how constricted the sample size is. My Top3 is the players at the Top 3 finishing teams in the league. I like this as you can get this information no matter if the league is loaded or not, just as long as it exists fully in the game. This is my "High". For the "Medium" I am looking at all the players that are in the League that is being focused on. For the "Low" it is for all the players at the same tier as the league in focus. Example 1: End of 2023/2024 Eredivisie This first example is just the league I had up last in the spreadsheet. This is an unloaded league in my game, so you can see how it still works fine in producing a benchmark to look at. Here the "Tier 1" League group is this: I plan to move Belgium up into this group from the 3.0 Reputation where I initially placed them. Still, this provides a number of reasonably similar competitive leagues to provide the widest datapoint. Example 2: Mid-Season MLS 2024 (Aug 23) Notice that since this is partway through the season I have lowered the Minutes to 1500 to make sure there are sufficient players in the analysis. You'll also notice that I realized I had the stoplight color wrong once I copied the screenshot up here so I changed it to go from the 'low specificity' to the 'high specificity' (even though i have them in backwards order to FM Stag). You'll also notice that Tier 1 & MLS are the same. That's because this data just has MLS in it due to how its a Jan 1st starting season. How it works: I am doing this the easy way first to get this data and start utilizing it. This is utilizing my By-Position Summary tables and doing an "Average of Averages" here to get a single value for each Player Archetype, which can sit in a number of positions. I know this is a gross excel formula but it is just 3 things. I am taking the average of the number for that statistic calculated for each position. Because I have cleaned the data, if there are 0 players in the dataset for that position I have used the classic If(Y=0,"",X) to put empty string values into the cells. Unfortunately, Average() will error if it sees strings, so I need to do another If(y=0) conditional to produce empty values that Average() will automatically drop to compute the average. You can see in this current example that there are no 0 values for a position but just 1 for a few. Double-Count Bias The big downside to this admittedly sloppy application is that there is significant player double-count in averaging together each of my summary statistics. The proper way to do this is to go back and create new Indvidual summary statistic tables based upon a multi-position conditional I have binary variables for each position so it is just a matter of setting up the additional conditions to AverageIfs() and then do this a bunch of times for all but the CD & GK tables. Compare our Players Against this: If I want to take the route of Absolute Evaluation of our players, this would be the base of starting that process. It would be very easy to point out the exact amount we are either above or below this value. What becomes harder is to then quantify how meaningful this difference is. Here is where SDEV() would come into play where I could standardize the magnitude of our deviation from the mean in terms of standard deviations. Again, all this is using the (erroneous) assumption that we have a normal distribution at work here, but again this just for purposes of a game not for real world use so I'm not too fussed about it. Using FM Stags "Good Table" as a Scouting Filter The direction I plan to take this first is to use these as the values for building the scouting filter to begin to create the Scouting element to the tool. Getting the scouting to work is technically the easiest of the 3 tasks I've set for myself as it just requires building secondary versions of a lot of existing formulas in the sheet. I also think I'll get the most use out of this in scouting for high performing young players in the USA as well as the Caribbean to begin building the best Caribbean Talent Pipeline ever!

SFC Season 2 Month 5 & 6: July-August 2024 So Did we have a good short month and summer tournament? Key point to note: International Transfer Window opens on July 9th, which is when our first two Midfielder's arrived. Due to Registration headaches Ox-Chamberlain wasn't added until later in the month. Match 1 July 3rd – Home LA Galaxy [Significant Rotation] Match 2 July 7th – Home Orlando City Match 3 July 12th – Home vs NYCFC (League Cup) Match 4: Away Montreal (Leagues Cup) [rotated all the wingers and both DMs as well as a CB. Will be a first test to our U22 Dev RB Signing] Summer Transfers: Players Waived to Make Room I could have waived more and probably should have. There will be some major winter cleaning happening at the end of season. Tim Klein: He had a Great Season-0 with the NextPro team, which got lots of teams excited about him. When I assesed his debut season he was certainly the 3rd best AML at only moderaltly okay performance as a crosser but terrible finishing ability. This year both sides of his game degraded and I literally couldn't get him to produce anything. On 4.5k p/w he was not worth the salary space. Isak Jensen no one would buy him and he's international so he was let go. Players Out Trott was let go on a free to Manchester United as i could not get him to perform well at all in the squad. Additionally he is foreign so takes an international slot while Austin has USA 3rd nationality and plays better for us. An easy decision. With the exception of Wilock the rest are all development loans for young players. Sending Wilock Out on Loan: With Ox-Cham coming in, I want him out and no one is bidding anything worth his value right now. Middlesbrough will take him on loan till the end of the year and hopefully that will improve him? I dunno but it will give us tons of wage room for strengthening our defense. Players In I've covered the first 3 in detail. The 4th was a new find in Europe of a Home Grown American who was on the outs with his club. This means we can bring him back on a U22 deal that is off-budget and he gives us defender depth. Tavyon Gray - Transfer Logic: Formation Change for New Acquisitions & Initial Tactic: I know the Stars are meaningless, but with Oxlade-Chamberlin joining it has shifted all the star levels down with him above everyone else. Second rung is my GK, SF(A) and CB showing how good 2 of the starting players for SFC are. New 3rd Tactic: 4-3-3 (1 DM) Instead of shoe-horning Oxlade-Chamberlain into my 4-2-3-1 I figured I’d try playing him properly as a playmaker. Hopefully him and Bacuna can form an awesome partnership! I’m trying to use Overlaps on both flanks with Winger roles in the hope this will push both Lowe and Ainsworth further inside but keep them looking to deliver crosses to our attacking midfielders. Bacuna has ‘get forward’ instruction on support so should trail with O-C who should be the focal playmaker. Summer Friendlies to test & tweak New 4-3-3 Formation Match 1: minimal rep team Match 2: El Paso (Championship) [Remove overlap and change Bacuna to CM(A)] Match 3: Charleston Battery (Championship) One August Competitive Match: Top of the Table Rivalry Showdown against Kansas City Making that I-70 Rivalry actually meaningful! A win here would put us within a game of SKC. Final Version of the 3rd Formation After July & August: MLS Standings & Fixture Summary:

SFC Season 2 Month 4: June 2024 Well, this was not a fun month for St Louis. Here the downside of having your team with a large number of International players hit us hard. MLS doesn't break for international windows. Instead they make this the busiest month! Fun times. While we had our whole team for the first match, they were all absent for matches 2 - 4. I had the whole team again for 5 - 7. Insane schedule. How did we do? June 1st – Away LA Galaxy [Light Rotation prepping for international departures] June 5th – Away Charlotte FC [Missing 4 starters on international duty] June 9th – Away Atlanta United June 12th – US OPEN CUP: Away Minnesota June 15th – Home Minnesota [Final game without my international players] June 22nd – Away Seattle June 29th – Home Cincinnati June Results: Competition Standings: While we are still leading our Division it is only because we've played an extra game. That pairing of our 2 hardest games for when our Jamaican & Candian players would be away from the club was really unfortunate. We are still on track though to win the division for the season if we can regain form going into the summer break. July Schedule: The 'break' where we are forced to play another tournament. If we win games will get added, if we lose games it will be some easy friendlies to build back morale. International stuff Here were all the Callups: I canceled the players doing friendlies (Bacuna, Hayes & Labeau) In the first match, all my players played eachother as I have 3 for Jamaica and 1 Canada Next they face the hard teams of USA & Mexico in the Nations League final & 3rd place. Canada Took USA to ET, but lost. Mexico demolished Jamaica. The last are friendlies that annoyingly I couldn’t pull them back from because its in the same window. League Cup Draw: I don't care about thsi competition at all. Youth Intake Preview: Apparently a Golden generation of Midfielders, STC & CBs I upgraded my HOYD from the one SFC starts with. He has at least 15 WwY & 10 Det, JPA & JPP. I then chose the best personality/rep/formation that fit what I liked. Since it's staff I consider this a necessary attribute filter as there's no way to pick a quality HOYD otherwise. He's Light Hearted + Evasive & Reserved Media Handling.

Thank you! For me only putting this strict of limitations on my transfers had made the MLS engaging. If I didn't limit it to Caribbeans it would be way too easy to get good options into the club. While the Salary Cap places some interesting challenge of not bloating your wage bill, the interface is real frustrating (as evidenced above with my Ox transfer as well as the failed CB acquisition) In my mind SI still have room to improve on the data display to make this convenient to do in the game. I'd love for them to let you compare the /90 stats of any player you're scouting against the average of the league their in. In the scouting they tell you the rank of total stats, but really you need standardized metrics for proper comparative analysis.

You're right @BML it even says it in the deal itself that I took a screenshot of, I just didn't notice going through. He has a deal for 2 years left for Liverpool so its a 'more modest' amount I'll get form them. There have been some registration issues that have changed the terms of the deal in our favor. I'm pretty sure the whole 'pre-buy down contract with GAM' part of the negotiation is bugged because once my two DMs were at the club I had to re-buy down their contracts to free up salary cap space. Because of this the initial Ox deal failed so I had to go back to Liverpool: They dropped the fee by 2 Million and upped the wage contribution to a staggering 72k p/w! Even if that is only for 24 months that is 72*52*2 = 7.5M off the balance sheet. Re-negotiating with Ox yielded similar results, still pretty nuts on the bonuses: My expected yearly cost is = Wage + Goal/Assist bonus + Appearance Fee = (135*52) +(2*1200+575) + (58*30) = 7020 + 2975 + 1740 = 11.74M. So For the first two years I'll save 32% of his total costs from Liverpool. Is he worth it? The multi-million dollar question isn't it? From a transfer fee perspective I think it's pretty easily a yes, especially with this renegotiated deal. I am paying the same transfer fee I received for my outgoing Designated Player. Thus, the net-cost to the club is pretty minimal. The hangup is of course his steep wage demands that are to keep him earning in the ballpark of what he got at Liverpool.

SFC Season 2 Month 3: 2024 May How did we do? May 1st Away Orlando City: May 5th Away Vancouver Whitecaps: [Defensive Rotation] May 11th Home San Jose Earthquake: [Unfortunately this will have offensive rotation especially with my playmaker getting a knock in training right before the match]. May 14th Home Montreal Impact: [Offensive Rotation]. May 18th Away Coloardo Rapids: [Bacuna and Wilock need rest prompting a cascade of rotations] May 26th Away Chicago Fire: [1st team with a test of the other GK] May Results: We remain on an undefeated streak, but the 3 draws to end the month aren’t good going into the busiest month of the year June with at least 7 games and possibly an 8th if we win our US Open Cup Match We still are on top of the Eastern Conference, which is significantly weaker than the west this year. Next month we face Charlotte and Atlanta who are two of the better teams in our division back-to-back. Minesota is tied with us on points in the Western conference, with Cinci then in 4th in ours. Lots of hard matchups to come. And because it wasn’t hard enough we drew Minnesota in the cup, so we play them back-to-back within 3 days. Great. They say we are the “Rich” club, but their bank balance wasn’t much off ours at the start of the season, and our income/expenditure isn’t far of. I’ve just made transfer money And June gets even worse for us with the International Call-Ups Announcement: We have 4 starters called up for international duty on the 5th: CB, RB, AMC-SS (DP), AML/R. At least its just a single match instead of the whole window? They will miss at least 1 game, maybe 2 and of course they are the 2 biggest games of the month.

Its done! Also, looked closer at the "Selling Team Salary Contribution" clause and its even better than i budgeted for. It lasts the duration of the current contract. We signed him onto a 4.5 Year deal (7/9/2024 - 12/31/2028) which is 233 weeks. Therefore Liverpool will pay us 11.2M in wages over the duration of his contract. Basically, we get the transfer-fee back over 5 years in wage-reduction for what easily will be one of the highest skilled players currently playing in the MLS. Of his base salary that will bump to 135k basically immediately so Liverpool's payment is 35.6% of his base. Granted, he will still be a massively expensive part of our wage bill and I'll have to make sure to manage his fitness properly. In this game he hasn't had trouble with injuries but his past is downright terrifying in how brutal his injuries have been.

Big Money Designated Player Acquisition With the departure of Loewen at the start of the season, we have had a free Designated Player slot and a large transfer budget [for an MLS side] to make a move for a top-quality talent to make our offense a step above the rest of the MLS. With May I pulled data from all the European leagues and updated my Spreadsheet to evaluate what options we have available. As a 2nd-rate league we are looking to pick up unwanted players from the top sides in Europe where they are willing to part with them for a reduced transfer fee and ideally will pay a portion of the wages. I've focused my initial 2 years scouting on England for three very obvious reasons 1) The most Caribbean second-nationality players in Europe generate in England ; 2) With English as the shared language, it is easier to work a new player into the squad ; 3) England (especially in FM) has some of the top talent in the world. If players can cut it there they can easily compete in the MLS. The result of this is the vast majority of our squad have come from the English Championship or Premier League. Only a couple talents have come from scouting the Caribbean directly or domestically from Canada/USA. Premier League Transfer-Listed: I’m trying the media campaign to get Marital interested because that would be unbelievable and hilarious at the same time. Antonio is retiring this year, which leaves the youngest Wilock brother and Oxlade-Chamberlin who are both playmaker/attacking Midfielders I could get for somewhere between 12-16M. Sean Baptiste of Brentford is a cheaper option in all ways at 6.75M, but with 2 free decent DMs coming through there’s very little chance he’s worth going for. Here its ‘go for big name transfer-listed or wait till free’. Oxlade-Chamberlin vs Joe Wilock Neither has played enough minutes this year to make the 1000 cut off. O-C is at ~200 Min & Wilock at 770, so I’ll use the Summary Statistics for CMs and then look at their in-game printout of the statistics. Career Sheets: Spreadsheet Note: Here is where it would be perfect to have an ‘import scouted players’ function so I could compare these two against the EPL benchmarks and see how they do. Part I: Dribbles/90 Wilock is on target for what we are looking for (though its not in the CM stats – again need to add). Similar passing and sprints but O-C has failed to produce any assists for Liverpool and has a much lower pass% than the average at 79% vs Wilock 83% and average of 86%. O-C does produce slightly more OP-K Passes at .93 vs .7 Wilock, but bother are way below the average of 1.31 for EPL. Same with ChC for Wilock Part II: Attack - O-C (top) ; Wilock (middle). Here we see that O-C is slightly more scoring focused vs Wilocks providing with 1.39 ShT/90 & .29 xG/90 vs Wilock’s .47 & .15, but Wilock did end up scoring so he actually has a goal/90 stat. Wilock beat the odds with his goal with a 1.75 xG Overperformance, while O-C slightly under-performed with -.63 which was his xG in 200 mins. Wilock scored 3 goals with a 1.25 xG in 770 mins. O-C’s Shot% is very high at 60%, with 2.32 Shots/90 and .29 nPxG. Wilock’s, while lower is fine at 33%, 1.40 S/90 and .15 nPxG. The standard is .34% and 1.0 S/90 with .1 NP-xG/90, so both (even with limited minutes) are overperforming in offensive potential. Defense - Both are bad aerially, but that’s to be expected. O-C actually tackled a lot when he played though he didn’t win possession anymore and also was very bad at intercepting the ball. Wilock on the other hand got a good number of interceptions while also doing some tackling, blocking and clearing per 90. Looks more well rounded. They both have strengths and weaknesses defensively, but I feel level out to about average overall. Seemed reasonable rotation/sub options for good Premier League teams. Statistical Evaluation: If I could get them at the same cost & same wage Wilock would win not just based on Stats, but also because he’s 6 years younger at 24 while O-C is 30. I would consider both to have performed well enough to be acquired by us and to be a star playmaker its just how would it fit into my formation and is it worth the cost. Financing a Deal: First Up - Liverpool: First pass at O-C was a contractual failure, but 2 weeks later I got his agent to come back to the table and I did a better job with the transfer deal with Liverpool. Liverpool were open to payin 48k of his salary, which amounts to just shy of $2.5M per year in wage they would pay. I think these deals last 3 years so that is worth (in my head) 7.5M. To get this we increased our overall transfer bid to 13M over their listed price of 11M, which is even less than the 1st year payments so I see this as a great deal. The Transfer is also very well structured with the bulk of the fee happening in year 2 when he hits 50 games, but it’s still only about half the total fee. Second Part: Oxlade Chamberlin I was able to get Oxlade-Chamberlain’s agent to agree to an absolutely ridiculous contract. Now to decide if I want to confirm this monster. I’ll be sleeping on it that’s for sure. The question: is he worth paying 1/3 of our payroll budget for. The acquisition costs I’m very happy with as its essentially an even financial deal to what we got paid for Loewen by Hertha. A player of this caliber in our offense though... What about Wilock? Newcastle won’t do a deal like this for Willock without us forking out over 23 M in fees. And then even if I agree with that because Wilock is a lower reputation player (without the English CAPs) my board won't even let me put up anywhere near the size of contract that i can for O-C and to come over to the MLS in the prime of his career he wants a stupidly high wage that there's no way I can get down so I don't even bother. Sadly no brother-combo for us at SFC. Where to Play Oxlade – Chamberlin: False-Nine: Liverpool fans react to Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain as a false nine (hitc.com) [2021] I think my fast counter and break strategy with our main striking coming out of our AMC role D-Reid, my tactic is apt for a False-Nine conversion with a player of the skill of O-C. Additionally, I’ve already confirmed acquisitions of two new DMs in Rekeem Harper & Kevin Stewart so we are set for the direct replacement to Loewen. Budget for O-C: Looking at the squad it really is the Striker position where the team has been purposefully quiet in the transfer market. We easily could have the lowest wage-bill spent at striker with our 3 natural strikers being: John-Jules (8k p/w U-22 Development contract = 0 Salary Cap) ; Labeau (11.5k p/w, 5.75k p/w Salary Cap) ; J Lowe (5.75k p/w, 2.9k p/w Salary Cap). Thus, we are spending 8.65k p/w out of 105k p/w or 8.24% of our Cap on strikers right now. Adding Ox because he’s a Designated player doesn’t even double the Cap Space we are giving to strikers. DP Contracts are a fixed 13.5k p/w cap space. You can then buy that down with GAM to 6.5k p/w CAP. That only takes 350k GAM and we a ton in the bank from the transfer deal with Loewen, so it isn’t any kind of cost to us. So 6.5 + 8.65 = 15.15 / 105 = 14.42% of CAP for Strikers. Now that seems high, however keep in mind that J Lowe is a utility attacking player who is a natural for both AML/R as well as Striker so is a perfect bench player for all three. Also, if I can finally move Wilock out this transfer window [which is my objective] we will again return to 2 DP players that hopefully I can turn into something special. What about Club Finances? So far we are doing very well keeping the team financially safe with a very healthy 24.7M bank balance. We even managed an almost neutral year our first year, which included some heavy transfer spending Note the Payroll has red because I have moved the transfer Budged around to make sure the deal will clear, I can slide it easily to bring us within payroll. And our Current Salary Cap Expenditure? Again, no problem as we are well under the CAP. Here a rookie mistake by me was putting our GK Burki on SEI because I can’t actually waive his salary commitment against the CAP. I should have just eaten the international slot & Roster spot for 2/3 of the season to have him for playoffs. The only upside of having done this is my younger GK prospects are improving significantly with valuable 1st team playing experience. One key caveat is I'll be adding the two DMs into the squad at the same time this summer, so will have to move on at least one or two backups but I have plenty of players who aren't featuring who I can waive no problem. Getting under the CAP will be the easy part of this whole thing. Status: I have just gotten O-C to agree to the deal and am the only one who has gone in for him this early in the transfer-cycle. Part of why I'm moving so early is if I let it wait till we are properly in the window I can see mid-table Premier sides vying for his signature and him losing the willingness to take such a wild contract to come down to the MLS. Will I Follow Through? This is a pretty big deal we will be making and if he agrees I am feeling pretty excited about it. Yes there are downsides to him especially having mild injury-proneness and not playing regularly at all for Liverpool this save (or in real life). But to get a Premier League caliber player into the MLS there will always be negatives to the deal. The question is, can we get him to perform like he did for the Gunners?

SFC Season 2 Month 2: April 2024 April Match Play-by-Play: April – 3rd Home vs Inter-Miami [Full rotation except Nilsson as BPD-Captain & Trott in Goal]. April 6th – Away vs NYCFC [Full strength (minus Wilock) and rested], can we overcome a very strong side that is tired but at home? April 10th – Away vs Dallas FC [Partial Rotation] April 13th – Away Columbus Crew [Partial Rotation, Bringing D-Reid on in the second half]. April 20th – Away Toronto FC [First Team] April 24th – Away San Diego [Rotation Squad with D-Reid & Nilsson still starting]. April 27th – Home D.C. United [Mostly 1st Team]. April Match Results & Standings: Backroom Developments: Uped JR Coaching & Got a Coaching Badge: Injuries: No new injuries this month, its a miracle! As you can see from the Match-Highlights Wilock is back to fitness and actually had great contributions to end the month. Europe Scouting Season: With May 1st comes my full season data-rip for the main Europe Leagues to start hunting for squad upgrades from the big leagues. I've played half of May already and have done some major transfer market moves so look forward to an upcoming statistical analysis post of potential new players. May Schedule: Month starts with a top of the Eastern Conference face-off in Orlando. We then have at the high-congestion mid-month two really tough matches against San Jose & Colorado who were both teams we faced in last seasons Playoffs with the former being the team that knocked us out. Very difficult month ahead, at least Wilock is back fit and in form. Hopefully my strikers can pick up the pace a little.

The Caribbean is where it's at!

SFC 2024 Pre-Season & Month 1 [March] Results: Pre-Season: Everything was going well here. We played a mix of beat-em-up's and real matches against mid-tier MLS teams and did well. Month 1: Then Willock got upset, and we started stacking up injuries just in time for a 6 game March where we had a very underwhelming start. The first 4 games i went with the same exactly tactic I ended the season with and it obviously wasn't working. For Houston I changed my Right-wing player roles so that it mirrored my left wing and added 'hold position' to the DM-L. This opens us up a lot more on the counter, but it paid off offensively for us in Houston, and against Philadelphia (who are the reigning champions) we were able to hold them off and record a 0-0 draw. It will take some more games to see how this works long-term. Goalkeepers: It's still early days, but due to Nathan Trott joining the team earlier he played all of pre-season and was the GK the last two games where we actually had good performances. He did awful against LAFC, which had me rotate to the other GK, but you'll see why I switched back after only 3 games. I plan to give him the #1 for April and then will re-evaluate how he's doing. The positive news is both are training well and are getting improvements to their abilities as they learn our SK-S style play. Both are 25 and have potential left according to the coaches so hopefully they can bridge the large gap till our star GK is back. Brandon Austin has had 3 senior matches. He played well in the first against Red Bulls, he wasn't tested against Toronto, and then did miserable against Austin. He has played a couple reserve matches since then and is inconsistent. We will see how his April goes in the NextPro Injuries & International Duty The MLS doesn't really break for international duty. Luckily for us this March was Olympic Qualification in Noth America, so we only had 1 first team player missing for the Jamaica U23: Christopher Ainsworth. With his injury at the start of january he has only played 1 match for us all year, and only that was a substitute so we were already playing without him. Big news for our recent waiver pickup of Anthony Beaufort, is Canada used their Main squad so he got his first CAP. Other than that it was Pan Yang heading out to China, where they failed to beat North Korea and a few of our loan & reserve players. Looking forward to Month 2: April April is even more congested with 7 games with only one 7 day break the entire month. We get a rematch against Toronto Away this time to see if we can improve on our home performance. Of the teams DC & San Diego are pretty poor teams, but with them at the end of the month hopefully our Morale is in good shape to take advantage of these matchups. Here are our current injuries: Probably won't be able to work Wilock in until the final 3 games of the month as a substitute. Hopefully, he can return to the starting lineup by May to put some good performances together to make him attractive for the transfer window. After April I'll look at the first 2 month performances in a little more detail as well as talk about any transfer targets / scouting priorities.

2024 January Transfers: Learning how Targeted Acquisition Money Works (the hard way) There are two pools of money you can use to buy-down players salaries to get your team under the cap. General Acquisition Money is like it sounds, a pool that is always there that you can use on any player in your roster. There is a special pool called Targeted Acquisition Money that can only be used when signing a contract with a foreign player that is over the Senior-Contract "threshold" (~14k p/w) you want to bring into the MLS. Unlike GAM that is a forever-pool, TAM resets yearly. Additionally, it isn't just a singular "TAM" pool, the game has it set in yearly-pools. This means we had 2023-TAM until 12-31-2023 and then on 1-1-2024 our 2023-TAM went to $0, and we were gifted our yearly allotment into 2024-TAM which was $2.8M. The bug, which broke my transfer, is that when you make a transfer deal with TAM in the Fall but the transfer finalizes/occurs on Januray 1st instead of December – 17th (league reset) it doesn’t switch to utilizing the next season’s TAM to make the deal. Instead, it keeps with the past year’s TAM which has been zeroed meaning the transfer will fail even if you still have budget in your TAM. Here are some screenshots for what happened: Of course, when I went back in to re-negotiate to acquire Gravillon both Reims and the player wanted 2x what we had agreed to, which just doesn't make sense from a Moneyball perspective. I waited till the end of the window, but when they finally would negotiate other French clubs entered the fray and he chose to stay in France rather than move to us in the MLS. Thus, the hunt will continue for a quality BPD CB. English DM End of Contract Pickups Rekeem Harper [23] (Ispwich: Jamaica-Main/English) Another cheap acquisition of an England Championship Jamaican International. The goal here would be to make Lowen redundant thus able to be transferred out to free up the DP slot. Dude was great, but I have another SV(A) who is better creatively even if he’s not as offensive and Harper could be the backup for Baccuca. [Note this for later] Scout Perspective: Statistics: Form: I hadn’t considered him strongly before because he was playing at League 1 level. But he’s doing just as well at a championship level as Ispwitch’s rotation CM which is exactly what we want him to be for us. For a contract he requires a 3M release clause, but we are getting him for free so that’s fine. This is how you get young talent into the US so its part of the story. Because of the sell-on I’m able to negotiate him down to a 5.75k p/w contract which is excellent! I did guarantee it though so no option to waive him to reduce the salary. Don’t see that as being a problem though. As this is an end of contract it will happen July 1st so midway through the season. Also Guaranteeing the contract does provide some risk as he will have to be transferred to get off the salary cap, but it lowers his salary which again is what we want. Only bad part of this is its such a short contract, however I do intend to find a top level DM playmaker so eventually he will be redundant. Kevin Stewart [30] (Blackpool – England Championship {Jamaica/English} A second cheap Jamaican from the English Championship is going out of contract at the end of the season. I knew going into this Caribbean focus that this would be a major trend of the save. I am less interested in him due to 1) His age & 2) He’s heavily injury prone. Together that’s not rhe best mix. He asks for a similar contract: Both on frees with Kevin not having high demands of playing time means I can take both in and evaluate them in the pre-season and decide who I want to keep in the squad and who I want to loan out to start. Also notice Stewart doesn't have a 'guarantee' in his contract, so i can waive him if he doesn't perform for no real risk to the team. Stats: Buggy Trading Interface It took me a while to figure this out, but if I start a trade with an Enquiry it won't display in the active trade window. Even worse, when you accept the trade in a negotiation you don't get any indication that that has actually happened. You have to just wait a few days and an inbox message will display to let you know you actually got your trade accepted and its ready to confirm. This was the frustrating part of getting Powell through that trade with Cincinati. I discussed the trade above. Youth Academy DM Promotions: David Leibman – Professional DM. Very excited to try this guy out in the rotation and see how he fairs Pan Yang – Unambitious Chinese International. Older Youth player I signed in S0, so will be finishing his reserve contract this year and has already agreed to a senior contract afterwards. I really want to keep this guy in the squad, he played in China last year and did fantastic there and for the national team. Just need an international slot for him. Would seriously help him to get mentored by our DMs, but its hard to prioritize this 17 year old over bringing in my hot prospect 18 year old Jamaican AML. I have some thoughts for how the Summer transfer window might play out… Issues with Willock: Yeah, I have not had a good time with Willock this Pre-Season & First Month of Regular Season. I was underwhelmed by his contributions last year, so already was considering how he would be replaced. This dumpster fire has solidified my thinking that his "Ambitious" personality is going to be a problem for us. First, he wants more Money: He's already on a DP contract, but at only 20k p/w he wants a large bump in his wages (~35k p/w) which he claims is due to his performance. if he scored goals for us last year I'd agree, but honestly I'm not seeing it. Also, with J. Lowe acquisition they can play a similar role for our offense (cutting in from the left with dribbling and flair) so his 'extra value' to us for his ability just isn't there as it was when he was hired. Of course, he is kicking up a fuss and is doing his best to turn the locker-room against me. He gets maybe 8 or so players on his side, and while I can keep the morale up with wins in pre-season I can tell its getting dragged down somewhat because of him. Second, he won't agree to Transfers: I’ve had him listed for 10M since he became unhappy about his wage and Midlesbrough have been mildly interested the whole time. While they weren’t willing to go to 10M they were open to a structured 9.5M without any conditions. While there is a 2M net (Purchase price was 7.5M) there are a lot of fees owed on his transfer. On the total fee 10% will go to Chris and 5% in solidarity payments. That is 1.425M. Take that and the purchase cost off and our net-fees is barely 500k. Now 20% of that goes to QPR which leaves us a measly 400k. Proof I bought him for way too much money. We have tons of depth at AML, so I'm happy to just break even on him and move on. Now hopefully they can agree on a contract.... Well, can’t say I’m shocked. Tells me I’m right to not be wanting to offer him a higher salary. If he can't agree to terms with a Championship club he thinks way too highly of himself and has unnecessarily high wage demands. Third he injures himself: Only positive here is he is no longer unhappy about his contract and throwing the locker-room against me. Bad news is he's out for at least a month now, so he will have played maybe 3 of the first 10-12 games. Add this onto missing my star GK for the whole season and it hasn't been good for SFC injury-wise. Departure of Designated Player DM: What I prepared for at the start of the transfer window happened without my intervention just days after Willock rejected his Middlesbrough contract. Non-negotiable but a structured 12M for him from Hertha Berlin is just too good to ignore. While he is good offensively, and played great for us I have prepared for this situation with 2 bridge plans: 1) 2 Youth Prospects into the Pre-July team rotation ; 2) 2 Good-Quality English players arriving on free transfers in July. Yes it is taking 4 players (now) to replace a current star player. However, the key is if they manage it I have freed up a Designated Player slot. BMG refused to pony up to match Hertha, so to Berlin he goes! He played great for us, but a 9.75M up front with a 2.1M additional if he becomes a regular for them (that might never happen). But I am happy to make this deal. And guess where we got him from in the first place? Yup, Hertha. They paid 7.75M for him in 2019 and now paid up to 12M to get him back Now something to always keep in mind is MLS takes 25% of any profit made by the club which makes it harder to make money with transfer fees in the US. Trading Away our Disappointing Backup GK & Replacing him: NY Red Bulls came in for an offer for Jeadine White, and I actually upped the GAM and added draft picks and an extra year of an international slot for us. With the sale of Loewn we have 4.17M of GAM available right now, so this is a good way to start building back up our draft allocations not to mention hoarding international slots. Then I’ve made the trade with Orlando City for the player rights for the Leicester GK who has American citizenship, so I’ll bring him in as a 3rd GK who won’t take an international slot/ He’s on a 9.25k p/w contract in the premier league and with fee release and the sell-on I got him to come down to 6.5k Final transfer screen

Congrats @fries! That must be some Tycoon takeover that got Aston Villa as the team to beat in England.

St Louis City 2024 Super Draft Super Draft Preview: Two weeks before the super-draft, each team gets an inbox message that includes all the players entered into the draft with the leagues Draft Rating of them (basically a Scout Letter Rating). This is where I cross my fingers and hope we get some Caribbean players entering from the NCAA Schools I've been scouting. Sadly, this year there were only 5, and none were highly rated. With that low of ratings really any pick would do to acquire who I wanted, and here is a reminder of the picks I had hoarded leading up to the draft: 4 First Round Picks, 2 Second Round, and 1 Third Round. I did not need this many picks, so it was time to use them to pick up players to fill out the squad. A point to recognize on the draft is this is taking college age players into the MLS so these are mostly 20 – 22-year-old players. The “Generation Adidas” players, which are the ‘cream of the crop’ do tend to be younger around 18 and have higher potential. Still, if you set up your academy correctly youth intakes will produce better players and all these players get salary cap exemptions being “Home Grown”. Trade Overview: Here are all the trades I made, which were all to gain international slots for at least this year and in some cases further on. The big trade I made was the final one with Cincinnati just 2 days before the draft on 1/12. Cincinnati Trade: Their demand for top SD picks was high enough that I was able to convince Cincinnati to give me their starting RB I’ve wanted all save, an international slot for 3 years and a trash pick at the end of the draft for 2 very good 1st Round Picks (5 & 9 overall). Powell is a 31 year old Veteran Jamaican International, so will only be good for a couple years, but there’s no one I can draft that has the potential to start in the team. If you scroll up, Powell was my target for RB earlier and I went into his statistical performance for Cinci there, but here are a couple screenshots to show what my scouts think. Key is he's still very fast, and has great mental attributes. Downside is he's injury prone. Even with his light injury prone he has played the vast majority of matches for Cinci the past two seasons. This does overload us at RB with 3 now who are 31, 33 (Barry) and 29 (Yaro). It's 4 if you count Cato. Cool part of this style of ‘statistics manager’ is you end up with a lot older players which is (imo) more realistic to how a real squad would look. I will be looking to offload Barry hopefully for some cheap draft picks or something. STC 2024 Super Draft Picks: We ended up with just 2 picks in the 2nd round of the draft to pick up who i considered the 'best of the bad' Caribbean options available. we got lucky and the best player of the bunch was still undrafted by our turn Paul Banton - Even being Unambitious with awful determination, Banton was the best of the bad Caribbean options available in this years draft class. An AML he really isn't necessary for us as we have multiple other Jamaicans all better than him with even 1 being younger. He will be headed out on loan to see how he fares. You never know, he could be like my Chinese DM who has done well even with those two big red X's on his player info. Solon Namphy - Haiti / USA. Natural DM, AMC & AML he is the utility player who doesn't really provide use in any of them. He was picked because of his technical skill and dark green consistency and big match performance. Have real doubts if he will ever feature for us, but that's what the loans to the USL are for to see if he surprises.

SFC Caribbean Internationals of 2023 As a save interested in my player's statistical performances, I feel it apt to highlight how they performed for their respective nations in international matches. Also this is a way to track how well different nations are represented in the squad. Cuba: World Rank – 169th Team Performance: A year to forget for Cuba where they only won 1 competitive game against Haiti 2-0 in last season’s Nations League Div A. Lucky for them it was enough to not get relegated so they remained in Div A for 2023. One draw with T&T 1-1 was their only point in the competition with a tough draw of T&T & USA in their group. SFC Players of Nation: 1) Gonzalo Pena – A 2022 Super Draft pick, he has spent his entire career out on loan first in the USL-Championship team Detroit City and now USL-L1 Chattenooga. He hasn’t done particularly well at either and I plan on letting him go when his contract expires. For Cuba he has had 6 starts in 9 games and was replaced in 5 of them where he did not perform well. Only against Aruba did he have a good game, which is a pretty low-ranked team even for the Caribbean. Curacao: World Rank – 83rd Team Performance: Had a surprise Quarter Final Appearance in the Gold Cup this year losing 1-0 to Costa Rica. Granted for whatever reason they had “Qatar B” in the group stage, which is all kinds of strange so got an easy advancement. In 2023 they won their group in the NA Nations League Div B, so will play with the top nations in 2024. SFC Players of Nation: 1) Juninho Bacuna – I mentioned him above and is considered the Key player for Curacao & the 5th highest reputation player of the nation. He played in 11 of 13 competitive fixtures doing well for them as the DM BWM or Segundo Volante – so very similar to where we play him in our lineup. Jamaica: World Rank – 57th Team Performance: In 2022 Jamaica dominated Nations League B and got promoted to Nations League A, where they swept Costa Rica & Suriname winning all 4 matchups. Gold Cup was a disappointment where they went out in the group stage to Canada. SFC Players of Nation: Bobby Decordova- Reid. Played 8 of 9 games available, almost always as an Advanced Forward and produced 5 goals and 2 assists which is fantastic. Even better, in every game he started he produced either a goal or an assist with his late entrance in the 77’ against Nicaragua as the only non-productive fixture. His brace against Suriname in October was the highlight of what can be considered a fantastic year for the national team. Jamal Lowe [Signed at end of season] 7 of 14 games when selected into the squad from 3/22 – 12/23. He had a much better 2022 performance, and then seems to be the odd man out in 2023 more often than not. Makes sense considering Jamaica is playing him and Decordova-Reid in the same slot, so when one plays the other rides the pine. When Lowe got the nod he did well, scoring 6 goals and provided 1 assist with consistently good ratings. His worst game was a 7.1 and he had a 8.8 rating when he scored a brace against Cuba. Excited to see if he can bring that consistency to St Louis! Martinique: World Ranking – N/A [French Overseas Department thus not FIFA member] Team Performance: Martinique was relegated from Nations League Div A in 2022 and spent 2023 dominating their Div B group. Unfortunately, they failed to qualify for the Gold Cup proper losing to Guatemala 2-0 after a penalty win against Guadeloupe SFC Players of Nation: 1) Brighton Labeau – 8 goals in 7 games Labeau played their Poacher and did just that against the soft defenses of St Lucia, St Vincent & Guyana. He was hot for us and for Martinique at the end of the year, which was great. Hope to see him continue this form for club and country into 2024. Trinidad & Tabago: World Ranking – 106th Team Performance: A lackluster year for T&T just barely avoiding relegation in 2022 NL-Div A only thanks to Martinique doing even worse. Then in the Gold Cup they couldn’t advance out of the group stage only winning against St Kits. 2023 NL-Div A was a tough group with USA & Cuba, where again they survived with only 4 points just because Cuba did miserable with just a single point. SFC Players of Nation: 1) Codell Cato – Considered the 4th highest reputation T&T player Cato is a regular fixture in the T&T squad Cato making 12 of 15 possible appearances primarily playing as their DR-WB though sometimes moving forward to MR-IW. As he plays further back for the national team you don’t see him producing the chances that he does for SFC, though he did manage 3 goals and 1 assist all coming in the 2023 fixtures he played. Turks & Caicos: World Ranking – 206th Team Performance: Even playing down in NL-Div C wasn’t enough for the tiny English territory to have a good season. They finished dead-last in a group with Barbados, St Martin & Dominica with only 4 points in 6 matches. They weren’t good enough to even get a shot at the Gold Cup through playoffs. SFC Players of Nation: Thomas Hayes: Considered the highest reputation T&C player, and only playing at the MLS level, he is their go to defensive player playing in all 3 of the positions and accumulating a number of yellow cards. He is both footed and natural at all 3 so is most likely their best choice in every slot. With their poor performance he only had one good game against the US Virgin Islands, but got sub-ed off before the end.

The Immortal Blackshirts! Well Done @the_hdk

I believe it! Curacao is glad (in my universe at least) to have them though. Leandro is the team captain and Juninho is their Key Player & thus Top 5 as well: Edit: Also, he was just named into the North America Bext XI, which I think is pretty ridiculous. That 6 M release clause might not be enough now, but that's a good problem to have and I already have a solution ready for that outcome. Edit 2: And the MLS took notice as well considering him the 3rd best signing of the season for the league. Fair to say this was an epic success of a find

From my understanding Union are the best at the youth pipeline in the US. Chicago hasn't done too bad especially with Duran & Slonina's big money moves to the Premier League though Duran was a scouting find for them. I don't follow the other teams closely enough to really know in depth how things have changed recently. As their USL-L1 affiliate we have gotten Chicago's youth players in the past, but none it seems this year. Instead, I will be getting to see one of Salt Lake City's Talents Julio Benitez this year in Madison. What he's done career-wise is actually mimicking what I'm doing with my players in game. Generate at 16. Sign on a Reserve/Development contract with the MLS parent club and send directly to my Championship affiliate to see how they do or keep them in my NextPro team. Then rinse and repeat to see if they mature. Maybe SI aren't as off as I want to believe they are... The thing they absolutely have to fix is how bugged viewing your youth players is. It is unacceptable that I have to scout my own academy to know get CA & PA ratings from my coaches considering my HOYD is running the stupid thing Still the way we play Youth-Only just doesn't fit with a forced high contract + draft system in MLS. For example: the most recently class I signed just 1 midfielder, becuase I'll be picking up