Lestri

The overall plan is if that if I have no idea what my players are doing, then how will the opposition? Stamford Bridge will definitely help out the coffers!

POST #4 - MID-SEASON ANALYSIS AND TALKING ALL THINGS CONTRACTS With 2023 coming to an end in our first season at beautiful Plough Lane, which you can see above, I always find it is a good time to take stock of how my players are going, for a few reasons. It is often around half way in the season, so it is a natural point to do a check in, to see if our players are performing, underperforming and checking them compared to their wage and squad status. Time to have a look at my own players whose contracts expire at the end of the season, and making a decision on them We are close to players becoming available to be signed on a pre-contract when the summer comes about, so this is a great time to check out any potential signings by comparing their attributes and statistical output so far. So let's get to it! How my players are going I go to the legend himself @FMStag's Player Performance Calculator and "What Does Good Like" for my analysis, as it's better than anything I have come up with on a statistical level. While the Player Performance Calculator is for FM23, it still holds well. For this I look at how our players compare to other players in League Two who have played at least 1,000 minutes, which is 11x90mins with some change to spare. Overall I am pretty happy with this, we have three players who are in the top five of Creative Output, the best Striking Threat in League Two with Josh Davison, and most of our core 15 players or so in the top 25% of their metric. Ali-Ahamdi usually starts with Robinson and Bugiel in the first team, but with Davison being the leading Striking Threat, I will see how it goes playing him in the first team. In the "What Does Good LIke", Stag benchmarked specific statistics based on specific roles after simulating the top five leagues and going through the data. Now of course we are in League Two, so I am not expecting super high levels across the board, but it does help me see how my players are going against benchmarks. After all, to see improvements, you need to baseline. Overall we are performing exceptionally well, with a number of our players in the top performing outputs for League Two. I am not surprised to see us in a position where we are first in the league, and should be based on our xG. However it was intriguing to see that we have scored ten goals more than expected, conceded 13 less and are 22 points ahead of where we should be. Is this due to individual player overperforming, or a bit of an ‘overpowered’ formation causing our metrics to be warped a bit. Either way, we’re in the position where we should be, and I can’t be too upset with that. Contract Renewals and Recruitment Priorities In the short term, we lose Charlie Lakin whose loan finishes 1 January 2024. His parent team aren’t keen to extend the loan, however his contract is up at the end of the season, so we may be able to get him on a pre-contract. He is currently fourth in Creative Output in League Two playing at the Left Wing Back position, however he is naturally a centre midfielder, so his flexibility and Decent Championship Player potential means it is a no brainer to try to get him permanently. We have 11 players out of contract at the end of the season. Using the above statistics, I have categorised them into three groups: Offer or trigger extension clause Paul Kalambayi - has come back from a significant injury so hasn't played a lot of minutes comparatively to others, but loves a tackle. Pulled the extension clause here. Jack Currie - my starting left back who is ranked #1 for Creative Output in League Two. No brainer. Huseyin Biler - similar to Kalambayi in that he has come back from a significant injury and has started like a house on fire with nine assists in 16 games so far. Ethan Sutcliffe - high potential centre back so it'll be good to keep him around. Omar Bugiel - fourth in Striking Threat in League Two. Highest shot conversation of the strikers. 15 goals in 22 matches. Probably a year until we either outgrow or he starts declining, so worth an extension. Alex Pearce - club captain, past his peak but solid to have around to mentor. Extension clause triggered. Hold until end of the season Matt Lowton - only picked him up recently so I'll run him down until the end of the season. Nik Tzanev - back up goalkeeper who hasn't played a minute so far. He is at best League Two quality and doesn't enjoy big matches, so I'll hold for now pending some end of season recruitment. Ryan McLean - similar to Tzanev, hasn't played a minute and doesn't really fit in the squad. Most likely will release. Set for release Lee Brown - handy utility player who can play Left Wing Back and Centreback, however he doesn't justify his 2.4k/week wage and is on the way down, so he is gone. Armani Little - bit unlucky as he is a good team player and plays in the CDM/CM areas, but much better players infront of him and he won't be better than League Two, so he goes. I also have three loanees that will leave us at the end of the season, who have contracts at their parent clubs that expire in June 2025, so I will reassess them at the end of the season if I want to keep them. We also receive Will Nightingale back from his loan at Ross County where he has played a grand total of one game so far this season. He is on way too much money for his quality, so I will be looking to ship him out quickly. As we are focussing on a youth-centric save, I won’t be shopping in the January window, and I don’t have the funds to go on a pre-contract splurge, so it’ll be a case of taking advantage of the generous approvals of our Youth Facilities and Youth Recruitment, however I do note to make sure you can actually afford it, as I learnt this the hard way with half of my bank balance being spent on it. How we set up I wanted to end this little update with showing you all how the Wangledon tactic looks like in practice. Below is how it looks on the tactic screen. Here you can see roughly the 3-4-3 shape that this tactic essentially sets us up in. In this situation, Alex Pearce in the right sided centre back role picks up the ball as we recover possession, with Libero Jack Simpson pushing up just to his left. We also see Matty Longstaff in the Mezzala role starting to move forward in the left sided centre midfield role, which is exactly what you want from a role that has the Get Further Forward instruction. Pearce distributed the ball to our Segundo Volante Jake Reeves, who played the ball past their midfield line to James Tilley in the Deep Lying Forward role who dropped deep. As he pushes up, you see he has five options ahead of him, the two wingbacks, the two forwards and Longstaff who has pushed up into the gap Tilley has left. Reeves and Simpson are also pushing up as well to join the attack, leaving our two centre backs as the last line of defence in a high line. This encapsulates the 2-1-7 I aim to get when we are attacking in possession, with Tilley picking out Robinson who splits between two of their defenders who then slots it on. Simpson slots in front of the two centre backs in the Libero role to aim to get back possession quickly and protect us from the counter attack if we end up losing possession. Yes it is ultra attacking and yes it leaves me very exposed (the amount of 4v2s I have seen when we have been caught on the break is quite high), but this is the plan and it's working so far! I'll leave you with the fixtures for 2024 with a spoiler or two. Until next time and as always, remember you’re a Womble.

Indeed it does! I think we'll eventually have a correction, but I'm hoping it's in the shape of draws with a few losses rather than the dreaded red circles!

POST #3 - AUGUST TO DECEMBER 2023 - RESULTS, SIGNING & MURDER ON SUTTON'S FLOOR I must admit, this update took a lot longer than I expected, however sometimes life gets in the way, and since the last update I have changed jobs, started some renovations at my house, and now within six months until my wedding day, so I haven’t had much time to come up for air. I left you all with the foundations of my save, being a youth-centric save where we take AFC Wimbledon back to the top level playing a high octane tactic dubbed ‘Wangledon”, which is a 3-4-3 of sorts that when in possession is a 2-1-7. We also finished our pre-season and won our first three games, though with a number of injuries. This update will take us to the end of 2023 and will have a look at how we are going and what signings we have made. REST OF AUGUST - click on the image to see the match stats, FYI - left to right for chronological order on desktop view We started off knowing that our last game against Wrexham broke our attendance record, which I’m putting down to rumours that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney were in attendance, more than anything football related. Our next game was away to Colchester, where we were passed off the pitch, however we scored a lovely headed goal by Omar Bugiel to give us the win. We followed that up with a 2-1 win away to our rivals Sutton, where we had half the shots at goal, and were doubled in the xG battle by Sutton, but goals from Zach Robinson and Omar Bugiel did enough to get over the line. We had a week off, and the rest was exactly what we needed, dispatching Forest Green 5-0, with five different goalscorers, and all the starting XI averaging more than 7.3. Nicely done indeed. We finished August with an absolute bonker match against Crawley Town where we came from 2-0 down, to 3-2 ahead, to 4-3 down with 8 minutes to go, only for Zach Robinson to equalise in injury time. Drama over? No chance, with our goalkeeper scoring on the 11th penalty kick to take a 10-9 win on penalties. We finished off August with Morgan Williams taking the Young Player of the Month with five assists in four games. We also picked up Manager of the Month, which is always good for the reputation boost. SEPTEMBER We started September dropping our first points of the season, where our 24 shots on goal and a late penalty by Harry Pell was only good enough for a 2-2 draw against Newport County. A heavily rotated side dispatched Colchester 4-2 three days later in our first Pizza Cup, aka the EFL Trophy game, aka the Papa John’s Trophy where Aron Sasu became our youngest goalscorer with a brace. We then had put five past Stockport, with James Tilley scoring a hattrick and the first perfect ten rating of the season. I had the first transfer window closed, so with September, comes the free transfer window coming open. We were lacking some quality in the Libero and Mezzala roles, so using an attribute calculator, I identified a range of players that fit the criteria, and after a trial where I was able to get both a coach rating on them, I picked up three signings throughout September. Signing #1 We picked up Jack Simpson on a free who was last at Cardiff. A good signing right? Well after signing him, I googled him and realised he was left by mutual consent because amongst other things, he racially slurred a teammate in preseason, leading to a FA charge, a ban and a fine after he left. So although he looks handy, I will get rid of them at the end of the season because I don’t want that at my club. Lesson? Do your research offline as well. Signing #2 We picked up the younger of the Longstaff brothers for free after he was released from Newcastle to play in the Mezzala role. Although he will need some TLC as he recently recovered from an ACL, so if I get him firing, I expect he will play a major role in our push up to the Premier League. Signing #3 Our third signing was Jamie Bowden who was released from Tottenham. He looks pretty capable to play in the Segundo Volante role, but he may be handy in the Libero role if I can get those heading numbers up. Our first two games with the new players didn’t disrupt our form with a late winner against Crewe being followed by Longstaff scoring a hattrick in his first start at the club in a 4-2 win against Walsall. We went into our third round League Cup game against Championship’s Leicester in good form and were 2-0 up after 40 minutes with Jake Reeves having a blinder. However we conceded a goal late in each half, leading us to penalties. Again. Thankfully this was done in regulation, winning 4-2 on penalties with Reeves scoring a cheeky paneka to take us into the fourth round against Liverpool. We finished off September unbeaten where we struggled, probably because we were still in party mode, and got lucky against Tranmere, with a hattrick from Josh Davison dragging the team to a 3-2 win. OCTOBER Seven games, seven wins. Can’t get better than that. We had Josh Neufville to thank for a 1-0 win against Harrogate, and followed it up with a 3-2 win against Mansfield where we made it closer than it deserved. We continued our good form in the pizza cup aka the EFL Trophy with a 4-3 win against Northampton with Ali-Hamadi getting the second perfect ten rating. Jack Simpson scored his first for the club with a long range deflected strike as we cruised to a 3-0 win at home against Bradford City, getting us a rare clean sheet. Josh Davison led the comeback with a brace in a 2-1 win away to Barrow, before two consecutive 3-0 wins against Accrington Stanley and Morecambe rounded off the month, with Huseyin Biler scoring his first of the season after coming back from a long term injury. NOVEMBER Our first game of November was also our first loss of the season, where unsurprisingly we were outclassed by Liverpool, losing 3-1 at Anfield, which was very flattering for us. A fourth round run in the League Cup is nothing to frown about though, and what better way to make up for it than the first round of the FA Cup, where we went to Doncaster and battered them 4-1 with a heavily rotated team. Unfortunately for them, they then had to then travel to our home ground against our first team who decided to make up for the loss to Liverpool by putting six past Doncaster in the first half, with five different scorers. We were then back to the pizza cup where a rotated side beat Ange’s Spurs Under 21s 4-2 at home in a proper tale of two halves, where we were 2-0 at half time, and a right old bollocking galvanised the team to score four in the second half. We then went to Milton Keynes to play our arch rivals MK Dons, and you could tell our players were nervous with a scoreless first half where there wasn’t much on offer from our side and were lucky MK Dons couldn’t put the ball in the back of the net. An encouraging half time team talk allowed our players to relax and start to play the football that’s been working all season, and three goals in the second half led us to a 3-1 win, causing chaos for MK Dons who were seeing themselves stuck in the mid table as we took a bigger lead at the top. We finished November with two 5-1 wins against Notts County and Gillingham, where we saw two hat tricks for Robinson and Neufville, who produced our third perfect ten of the season. This game also produced the Goal of the Month, with Matty Longstaff scoring a belter in injury time. DECEMBER We started December with another free signing! We picked up Matt Lowton on a free after he had been released from Burnley. With Biler coming back from his injury well, it allowed me to push Isaac Ogundere out on loan for more regular football, so getting in an experienced head at the Right Wingback role was deemed beneficial. He comes in on a seven month contract so it is low risk. Our first game of December was away to Conference South team St. Albans with an absolute bonkers game where we were 7-0 up, turned off the engine and ended up winning 7-3, with Jake Reeves having our fourth perfect 10 of the season. A heavily rotated team three days later stumbled to a 3-2 win against Forest Green, where we conceded a goal in both half’s injury time, and we were gifted with arguably the most bizarre goal I’ve seen. A 5-0 demolition at home against Swindon helped take our winning streak in the league to 15 games, with Omar Bugiel scoring a hattrick and providing us with our fifth perfect ten of the season. Our winning streak ended with two back-to-back draws against Salford and second placed Grimsby. Both were disappointing, considering Salford played with 10 men for 30 minutes and Grimsby scored with their only shot on target. But regular programming came back into fruition, with a 3-1 win away to Crawley, a 4-0 home win to rivals Sutton and closing out 2023 with a 5-1 win at home to Colchester, with Matt Lowton scoring a brace. Unfortunately this game left us with Neufville with a broken ankle, out for nearly the rest of the season, and Joe Lewis with a twisted ankle, out for January. We also lose Omar Bugiel to the Asian Cup, so we have lost a bit of our depth for January. Huseyin Biler claimed the Player of the Month with one goal and four assists in the five games played over the month. HOW WE ARE GOING Very nicely. Nearly averaging four goals at home, and 22 points ahead of second place. I'll follow up this update with an analytical take on these four months, and how we plan to approach our signings. Until next time, and as always, remember you’re a Womble.

Whoops - meant to say, if the scouts are Spanish/Mexican and your preferences, that should keep it close. Forgot a few words!

I would assume that keeping the scouts to Spain and Mexico should keep it relatively close regarding your intake spread?

It does get frustrating when the Board starts to prioritise the first team over the youth production line. I was always under the impression that Youth Recruitment was more focussed on your ability to be up the pecking order for domestic pre-intake, i.e if you have a higher rating, more likely to pick up those pre-intake players without any good ones being poached before they join the Youth Intake for that year. I was under the impression the nationalities of your intake players are dependent on scouts/HoYD country familiarities and any club linkages overseas. But I have no evidence to back that up! Handy positions for your three teams to be in though, can't be upset with that.

Will be great to see the pathways in action!

I kinda see it as, 15-18 is when you start seeing people actually going into the gym more to build muscle mass, so I think you can see that grow. I often take a combination of Natural Fitness, Work Rate and Determination, combined with the personality as a good indication of whether they'll go well or not at developing those. Those aren't based on any specific reasoning other than I think they are relevant to fitness growth.

Similar to Shrew above, love the work you've taken there to go to that level of granularity when it comes to the opposition. Looking forward to seeing how the next season starts!

Nicely done, always good to get a win over Juventus, regardless of the circumstances!

Solid effort in the cups! As an Australian, I do always try to pick up Volpato as he does provide something quite special. Shame he done himself an injury! Will you change it up for the end of the season or stick to the guns?

Look forward to where you go with FM24!

I must admit, I enjoy logging onto the forums and seeing there's an update, as I know I'm in for some detailed, great analysis. Intrigued to see how you go with a "more established" top tier team!

Fair point! Completely agree that it's about the 9 now, especially with the lack of quality CFs that are available for you due to budget constraints.

I wonder whether a Mezzala might help a little to complement your use of Barbaro to sit a little inside. That way they hopefully stretch the midfield for the CM(A)/Striker to move into the space? Probably would have to go to a flat 5 in the middle though.

Magnificient effort!

I wonder if the height is an issue as well here - I have found often in my FM24 save so far that, for corners in particularly, height comes up trumps.

Time to leave! You deserve better

Enjoyed the turnover there, out with the old and in with the new!

Looks like it'll be one of your toughest seasons yet with those huge outs and player disharmony! Look forward to see how it goes!

What a result! Great to see your breakdown of how you actually thought you went versus what the table says. Looking forward to see how you approach the start of the next season.

Probably the biggest issue I had with playing in the Italian leagues was the only way out of not going broke was promotions. I'd say Parma. Great history and narrative of a fallen giant which I think will go nicely with your save objectives.

POST #2 - PRESEASON, SQUAD AND OPENING GAMES FOR THE CRAZY GANG For those who didn't grow up with English TV, above are some members of the Wombles. They live in burrows on Wimbledon Common, where they aim to help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in creative ways. They also had a catchy song called “The Wombling Song” which has become a regular melody used for football chants. The wonderful lyrics of “Underground, overground, wombling free The wombles of Wimbledon Common are we” hangs behind our manager at his desk in Wimbledon as he looks towards the preseason. Today we will look at the tactical approach we are taking at Plough Lane as well as our squad, before we look at our preseason games before the opening stanza of League Two. TACTICAL APPROACH WITH OUR WOMBLES aka squad We go back to our opening post to see that our very influential fanbase demands direct and attacking football, and fortunately for the Wimbledon fans, that is what our manager is all about; high octane, crazy, Wangball. What a great opportunity to test out whether we can turn Wimbledon into Wangledon (shamelessly stolen from @Oaky-FM on FM Slack). As you can see, it doesn’t really scream tight at the back. Direct forward with our bombing wing backs in the Complete Wing Back roles, and three up top, our plan is to move fast, suffocate the opposition in their defensive third, and cause chaos. I am also using the opportunity to play a Libero in the centre of a back three, so when we attack, we should be playing a 2-1-7, with our Mezzala and Segundo Volante joining the front three late, and the Libero sitting in front of the back two to stop any quick breaks. Seems reasonable in theory, but we will need the players to make it work in practice. Speaking of players….. Overall, according to our Assistant Manager, we have a pretty solid squad on paper, though our best player, forward Zach Robinson, according to him is out on loan, which bemused me. But more about him later. I am a recent convert to disabling the first transfer window, so this team is what I have to work with until 1 January 2024. Now for those who have followed me on FMSlack (look for #fmlestri), one of the tools in my armoury/arsenal is a calculator I use to rate a player’s role suitability by their attributes. There are many on the web now that are much cleaner and better usability, so just do a google for it. I plugged in the inputs and identified the positions I want my players to train and play in. A few players of note are our captain Alex Pearce, who is vastly experienced and a strong leader, his pace could be a worry though, so it may be a short stint with me. Ali Al-Hamadi will be our main threat up front as he is both quick and tall, something that comes in handy with the way I play. While injured with a long term injury, Jack Currie will be our mauranding left wing back when he comes back in, does need a bit of work in the gym though, but I am very excited to see how he goes. Pre-season I usually take a two game a week approach to pre-season, and although I saw some very different and intriguing approaches, especially the one from @danielgear in his Sporting Lisbon save (link bolded), I stuck to my tried and testing, of two games a week, and building match fitness and tactical familiarity throughout this time. So how did we go? The good news is that we went unbeaten, winning six games and drawing two. But unfortunately we lost a couple of players to injuries that when we were about to play our opening game of the season, we got this lovely message Fortunately we were able to recall Zach Robinson from loan who has the potential to play Championship level football so I hope he can be our star striker I also took the opportunity to have a look at the state of my staff, which to be fair wasn’t too bad. I brought in two first team coaches, in former Crewe manager and Gibraltarian international David Artell and former English international and short time Hull manager Nick Barmby. Thanks to these, I have the highest coaching levels for all the training except for goalkeeping distribution, which I’m sure I’ll remedy very soon. I also had this ex-Football Manager wonderkid pop up as an option, who became my Under 21 manager. How often can you say you have an ex-Premier League, FA Cup, Europa League winner in your League Two staff aye? Opening games Now just a reminder, the media has predicted us to be 19th, while our board has a required goal of reaching the playoffs. So needless to say, our board is expecting something magical that the media can't see. Click on the photos for full match statistics. Our first game of the season saw us head to Grimsby, which my dad said had “the best fish and chips I’ve ever had in England”. Good intel which was taken as we left Blundell Park with a 3-2 win with Josh Davison having goal involvements for all three of our goals (1 goal and 2 assists). While we just lost the xG battle, we won on Wangball metrics of Progressive Passes, High Intensity Sprints and Opposition Passes per Defensive Action (OPPDA). Three days later we hosted Championship team QPR, where we fell behind early. But we swarmed all over QPR, dominating the possession, which in turn gave us more shots on goal, and more importantly more shots on target. We left it late, but two late goals by Robinson and James Tilley made a 3-1 win. Wangball is up and running! We followed up the glamour of Championship standard opposition with entertaining Hollywood owned Wrexham at home. This game pretty much nailed what Wangball is all about, loads of shots, tonnes of Progressive Passes, aka how vertical we pass the ball, and a bundle of goals, with AFC Wimbledon taking the three points with a 4-2 win. Player of the match was our retrained Right Wing Back Morgan Williams with the three assists. SUMMARY So it's early days but I am excited at where we are going, the players have bought into the system, and although we are leaky, we are scoring more than we are conceding, which can only mean wins. I wanted this to be a little shorter from actual games as I wanted to provide some information about how I set up for the season ahead. The next update will cover the rest of 2023 and take a stock at our expiring contracts and any recruitment focus. Until next time - Remember You’re A Womble.

Isak looks a great piece of business! Intentional Japanese scouting or just where the talent is?