Ceching You Out

This graphic is single-handedly helping me emotionally recover from last season. Wien (26), RB Salzburg (24), and Vienna (21) are cut off because of FM's weird windows, but we're on the list of leading supplier of players to the Premier Division. Keep in mind, we're not even in the Premier Division yet ourselves. I like it.

Hey, finally one of these I'm not raging about! A solid deal for a third starter/rotational player. Good work, Board!

Post-season 2028/2029 xG tells the story. We should've won the league, but instead underperformed in attack and significantly on the defensive side. In positive news, I figured out we were only two subs away from qualifying for this again so finished out the season with some bonus cash. So we've got that going for us. Will it stem the tide of bids I'm expecting this summer? No, dear reader, it will not. I will be holding on to my ass with both hands. To make sure the Chairman doesn't accept a bid for it.

Third round of matches: Heartbreak. They score with their first shot of the game -- a corner to the far 6 yard box. Yes, in minute 48. Another year in the First Division. Just absolutely crushing to lose it like this.

Second round of matches: Leoben loses to Klagenfurt, essentially ending their hopes Up a goal to Kematen, we miss a PK. Then a straight red, immediately followed by the drawing goal. We're bottling this. Wien beats LIefering 2-0 Now we really need to beat Wien on a short turnaround match. Otherwise we need a draw and Kematen to have the same luck on the last day.

First round of matches: Lustenau does indeed beat Leoben We lose to Liefering on a stoppage time goal after out-playing them. Oof. Wien beats Bischofhofen We're now 2nd on GD, but still leading the promotion chase by a point over WIen. Who we play after they play Liefering.

It all comes down to the last four games. We've got a 3 point lead over Leoben and 4 points over Wien, plus GD (at least for now). Liefering can't get promoted but could win the title, and definitely will have a say in who goes up since they play all three of us. Lustenau has the easiest run-in but thankfully they're all but written out. If they could snatch points from Leoben though... we might even send our rival a gift basket if that happens.

A good intake in terms of PA, but an inexplicable step back in terms of personalities. Made me double check that our glorious Cult Leader is still in charge, and he is. We'll need some mentoring magic to turn some of these around.

Still not quite sure what to make of these. Leading hypothesis says good PA, weak CA especially beyond the Cs. But I'm not sure I've seen much of a significant connection. I do know what to make of this, however -- infuriating. In the middle of a promotion charge our Board accepts a paltry $300K bid. I protest and then renege. Until the $375K bid the next day where it's simply too good to resist (again). Lunacy, when I can get twice that plus a profit clause when negotiating myself (below). And he'll be worth 3x even that amount if we get promoted. Such horrid short-term thinking. We need promotion to get higher player values and cool off the interest to save us from our selves.

Mid-season 2028/2029 It's taken some grinding after another flat start, but we're in the promotion mix. Lustenau started ridiculously, including a win against us in a tight game, so happy to still be in striking distance. They've nearly matched their points total from last year already, so if I were a betting man I'd say they're likely to trail off some in the second half of the season. But I thought the same for SV Reid last year and instead they won the title, so take my betting "locks" with a grain of salt or four. To be honest, I'm so so ready to get promoted just to get our player values to normalize. Right now everyone is undervalued and that means fighting off destabilizing bids every transfer window. Emotionally exhausting.

As planned, we ship off (23e) Hilti before the season starts. $500K + $100K in installments + $100K if he plays (and he has been) PLUS a 50% profit clause is good business. Value could jump since he is getting game time in the (Austrian) Premier Division. (25f) Terzic is a funny case. A terrible personality (<8 in Amb, Pro, Det) but decent talent (76 CA / 117 PA). After shipping him out on loan last season, he drew a bidding war from $50K that ended in quite a fee. More than I expected to be honest. I nearly took the initial bid from an Eredivisie team for $0 just for a sell-on clause punt. And finally a deadline transfer I desperately did not want to do. (26d) Weirather was earmarked as our long-term captain, but instead our Chairman wanted to accept silly offers. I played back negotiations a few times before landing on the deal below. I'm not sure how relevant the Buy Back will be, but if we get promoted it may potentially be a way to snap him back.

Assorted off-season news: C'mon, man! We're going the wrong way here.

Who likes tiny charts? Apologies for the loose formatting here. I'd fix if this was for a client, but I think it's sufficient to get the point across. I'm just going to freeform my observations and try to summarize at the end. For the record, the order right to left is: Ambition Professionalism Determination Loyalty Consistency Temperament Pressure Versatility Adaptability Dirtiness Sportsmanship Injury Proneness Controversy Important Matches Total Personality Changes These are the total attribute changes for the 47 players who were with us at least one full year between March 2026 and May 2028. Big oof. I'm poking at the numbers and this seems to be legitimate. We've generally made our players worse! Very impressive. Looking more critically, there are some positives here. Determination, Consistency, Temperament have all improved. Then the obvious big hits to Ambition, Professionalism and Loyalty; more specifically the damage was done here. Things would look rosier without these drops. I remember (25d) Frick getting hit and being sad. He'd originally been one of the Professional personalities. The Professionalism hit for (25b) Fehr could be similar - (VDZ 24) Foser was a very influential personality with lower Pro & Amb (10). I'm shocked at the others. We clearly don't have any players with rock bottom Ambition or Professionalism that would explain (25f) Terzic or (26e) Hilti. Intra-individual changes then? I'll spare y'all the rest of the evidence, but here's what I'm walking away with: Our squad personality has not been as beneficial as anticipated. I think that's because we've had so few highly influential players in our hierarchy, which may drive the frequency of positive "general squad characteristics" events too Mentoring is still the largest driver (for us so far, anyway), both at the senior and B level. I can't recognize any impact from U18 mentoring, tricky as it is to find players with influence Personalities did not change as much as I thought behind the scenes given I can recognize a wide swathe of them came with notifications, mentoring or otherwise Players who stayed within the U18 squad generally didn't seem to change, despite highly influential players within the hierarchy Safe to say our cult of personality has largely been driven by how our players came in plus my hype. If only there was a phrase to describe something largely built on narrative rather substantive facts...

Cult of Personality Is this a recurring segment, worthy of it's own header? Who knows! Let's see what we find, or at least whether anyone finds this an interesting detour. First, context - I'm playing with the In-Game Editor (IGE) enabled so I've got access to the hidden attributes. I've actually quite liked playing that way but, more importantly for this point, it means I've been collecting full attribute data each year on the date of youth intake. March 2026 will be our baseline; I made a concerted effort starting that summer to do a few different things. March 2027 will be our first year, March 2028 the second, plus May 2028 as our far-from-evenly-spaced finish line. Working backwards, our current squad personality is impressive. I'm pretty happy with where we're at, but I believe there's one more notch above this that I'd love to hit ("Ultra Professional"). Here's an information-overload view of our top 30 or so players by PA at the club in May 2028, sorted by appearances. B Team and loanees make this less obvious, but the lowest players by Professionalism that see play are stand-outs (23e) Hilti with 12 and (VDZ 24) Spellecchia with 13. Not too shabby. Until we dive into the numbers, it's a bit hard to know which (if any) actions to attribute this to. In summer 2026 I changed our captain to (25i) Begic, a Model Citizen, replacing (VDZ 24) Traber. (24d) Ospelt was our vice captain, starting the year before In summer 2027 I changed our captain to (26d) Weirather and bumped (25i) Begic down to vice (VDZ 24) Traber remained very influential regardless and was our primary tutor Where possible, I mentored with (25i) Begic and (24d) Ospelt but it was a constant game of whack-a-mole to use their "Light" influence on players who wouldn't in turn change them (influence "None") I distributed our youths with questionable personalities across the three squads (senior, B, U18) to try to get each weighted towards Professional rather than go all-in with one at the expense of others In a large part this was driven by my belief that the excellent personalities of solid B players (24e) Hahn and (24k) Goop could be leveraged as influencers as captain and vice-captain for my B team I also tried tutoring with these two, but that proved more challenging that I thought A few observations: Some players did see a 2-3 point jump in Professionalism, as called out by notifications. Another couple seemed to have changes without them Overall, there were far fewer notifications about mentoring changes and general squad characteristics than I expected to see given how heavily our squad is weighted towards Professionalism I'm not sure how much, say, Determination or Pressure changed over this period since my eye was primarily drawn to Professionalism I'd wager that our squad has at least half a dozen players that would be Model Citizen but are Professional/Light-Hearted instead since one or two attributes are only 1-2 points too low What I'm hoping to find: Our senior squad moved significantly towards Professionalism, with moderate gains in Determination, Pressure, and (maybe) Ambition Our U18 squad moved similarly, despite the high concentration we started with Our B squad improved, although maybe not as much Time to do some Excel analysis and report back!

Post-season 2027/2028 So...did you pull it off? Good news, everyone! Congra-- Wait. Isn't that what the old man from Futurama says? And then the news is... not so good. Professor Farnsworth. Great, you know his name. What about the promotion chase? We looked dead and buried after the Kematen result above. Ready for a bouquet and eloquent elegy. And then? We closed the gap on SV Reid, battling through four games against the other top five teams. Beating them and Liefering in a row was the peak of our season. If that was the peak... How awful. Did we die painlessly? Huh? To shreds you say? What about his wife? I don't think you did that right. All the grace of a cat on rollerskates. To shreds you say? We finished second in the promotion race (Liefering is ineligible), with a bag of mixed emotions. I was ready to throw in the towel if we fell any further behind after the Kematen result. Then we slowly clawed our way back and had to see it out. Much of that coincided with pushing (27e) Bidermann into the starting lineup at AML, a 6'5" 16 year old that grew to a ridiculous 99 CA / 122 PA by the end of the season despite only substitution appearances for the first two-thirds. He's a cheat code in the air against all but the leapy-est fullbacks. Despite the stretch against Wien, Ried, Liefering, and Horn (the other four top sides) we were excellent to finish the season. Only one win was a snatch and grab, the rest deserved. But two small breaks in the run-in could've changed the outcome. How we didn't win this game against Horn, I do not know. Then Reid snuck a win against mid-table side Bischofshofen after a 90'+2 goal. That four point swing would've seen us through. I also suspect if I had backed off our approach from "Positive" to "Balanced" earlier on we would've picked up more points through the middle third of the season. So we definitely wrap the season with regrets. You'd think we're odds-on promotion contenders for next season but (VDZ 24) Spellecchia and (25c) Vikario will return to the clubs that purchased them in August. Extending them for one more push would come at too great an opportunity cost to our class of 2027 on the cusp of bigger roles. (23e) Hilti will probably be sold to fund the season, so that makes three new starters on top of how we finished the season. We do have good options in those spots. I think we should still challenge but it will depend how quickly our up-and-comers gel together and grow. (And for real -- next post will check in our cult of personality. I need to do the analysis anyway to see if my approach bore fruit, or if I've been watering fake plants)

Woof, can't lose these kinds of games to the 12th place team. 8 points back with 9 games to play, and a worse GD. Our promotion challenge is teetering on the edge.

I can see the fullbacks as an "A", I suppose. Maybe it's sensitive to volume? We can definitely use a GK with a higher ceiling, so (28b) Pfiffner is quite welcome. (28d) Hepperle would be great if his Determination wasn't awful; maybe we can turn that around. And then we've got our raft of outside backs who we'll see how they fit. The rest don't have high enough PA or a strong enough personality to set the right personality path for our U18s.

Good CA full-backs incoming? Decent PA overall? Let's gather another data point, he says scientifically.

Mid-season 2027/2028 I'm having a hard time matching our performance to how I feel about it. If I take my hand and cover the very top of the table, I'm not sure how I can be any worse than satisfied. 28 points is a haul and essentially on pace for matching last year which would've been a title-challenging total in most years. We've allowed the fewest xG and notched the 5th most. What's not to like? The fact that we're looking up at Wien. Every dropped point feels like our opportunity this year dribbling away through our leaky fingers. If they could just lose form for a moment and stumble... lose key players to injury... or get bit by turned heads in the transfer window... then I think we can do this. Liefering can't get promoted and I just have this feeling Ried won't stay in the hunt, so promotion feels tantalizingly close. If at the end of the season we haven't managed promotion, this will feel like a largely wasted year given how much playing time we're sinking into loanees and nearly maxed players. Keep beckoning, sweet regrets.

We don't make it through the remainder of the transfer window unscathed, with Vienna circling (VDZ 24) Spellecchia until our Chairman snapped a stupid offer. So with a bit of negotiating magic, I'm able to up the fee. He'll see the season out with us on loan.

The Board was willing to make this upgrade which... I'm kinda torn on. I mildly regret asking for it, although it is needed more in this save than my last attempt since I'm bringing along players more slowly and working with a larger squad.

Didn't want for him to leave, but once our clueless chairman accepted a bid that meant he was out the door. My personal rules for playing mean I can only play around with different offers to make sure we receive maximum value -- no tricks to keep players, just trying various negotiations much like I'd done with the experiment above (which was actually helpful here). Chairman had accepted $70K. Seriously, $70K. For a 17 year old 102 CA / 139 PA. Instead we take home a tidy $1.7M which we may be able to parlay into upgrades. EDIT: Ha, swing and a miss on both Youth Facilities and Junior Coaching due to finances. I suppose we'll need to get promoted and/or have another big sale before we'll get one of those through. I'll give both another try next time we have a winning streak to see if that helps at all.

So I tried a few different ways of offloading the above three players and recorded it here: What did I learn? Well, it wasn't as straightforward as I'd hoped. A few tentative conclusions: You're never going to maximize value without trying a few things first, probably Agent --> Intermediary --> Transfer List and Intermediary in that order Asking Price makes a big difference on outcomes, for both Agent and Intermediary initiated sales. Too high scares off bids or reduces offers; too low leaves a lot of money on the table There are weird sweet spots where the transfer AI maximizes your returns, but doesn't entirely operate rationally (unless there's a built in "negotiation" buffer or something opaque like that) Finally, in a lot of cases I think price is driven by a limited number of clubs, hence the sensitivity I may stare at the data again tomorrow, but nothing else jumps out at me in the moment. What did we actually do? (VDZ24) Foser leaves us for Sampdoria in Serie B. Then funny enough, Premier Division club LASK was behind the bids for both (24b) Wanger and (23b) Wenaweser with only enough cash for one. I sold the former, happily, and will see if I can still get a good price for the latter later in the window. I'm doubtful, for what it's worth. Had we been able to cash in we would've cleared nearly a $1M, which would at least start our season in the black. EDIT: Well, what do you know. LASK's interest returned and we cashed in on (23b) Wenaweser anyway. Excellent!

Rather than deep dive into personalities (which, guys, I'm still totally going to do), let's get sidetracked by a transfer experiment. Throughout the season I'd landed on three players we want to sell this window: (24b) Wanger is obviously talented. So why are we getting rid of him? A combination of three factors: (1) he's pushed for the exit already, (2) he's not in our starting pair of DCs and unlikely to be where we prioritize dev minutes, and (3) his personality is middling (Ambition 8, Determination 12, Professionalism 12). Yes, that is becoming middling in our cult of personality, especially the Pro. (23b) Wenaweser is actually a player I'd like to keep. Determination is a bit low (10), Ambition the same (10), but Professionalism is solid at 14. He's been with us from the beginning, an original youth product. However he's still upset at the end of May that we rejected transfer offers for him in January. Time to cash in on his value. (VDZ 24) Foser, signed from Vaduz in 2024, is our starting GK. He's just about capped out given his, you guessed it, personality (Amb - 10, Det 14, Pro - 10). That level of Professionalism makes him the worst of our regulars by at least 2 points. And he's highly influential. I've stopped just after the season finished, on the day when I received notification of the next season's budgets (May 24). Ostensibly this means other club's should have their funds available. I plan on running through a few scenarios a few times to see which maximizes value. This means trying a tactic, pushing forward a couple days, then reloading. You could make the argument that we'd be better served waiting until a bid comes in for (23b) Wenaweser, but I think moving earlier might open up foreign options that tend to go quickly. Any tactics in particular you'd like to see me try here?

Post-season 2026/2027 While I'm a little bit disappointed because my eyes had gone up the table and convinced myself with a good run we could close the gap, ultimately this was a great season. We nearly matched the pace of the champions over the second half of the season (gap only increased 3). And that's an Altach side which blitzed the 2nd division with the most points for a promoted side so far; Liefering put up 77 in 24/25 but is a B-side for Red Bull. This also reflects how well we played, finishing with the top scorer, (25e) Wolfinger. But also, three of the top 5 progressive passers and high xG for (25e) Wolfinger. This doesn't feel like a fluke finish. I think we're a legitimate threat to go up next season.