Just finished S2 and I couldn't believe it, we end up winning everything except the Community Shield, which we lost to Liverpool.
More surprising was VDB stepping up and doing the honors for us.
It wasn't smooth sailing and we really had to manage tantrums thrown by Martial and Shaw who wanted to look for new challenges. We bought Rijkhoff in anticipation of Martial leaving but there were no takers at the end of the Jan window. To top that off, the match engine kept insisting I don't give the players enough playing time so for most of the season we kept having that bit of a morale issue. It also prevented us from rotating as much as we like so that we can keep these unreasonable players happy.
Most of the youth prospects sent out were also not given the agreed playing time and so that was the other main frustration for the season.
Transfers:
Miretti was the only player bought in the pre-season although we concluded other deals in June :
Leonardo proved to be a good replacement for CR7 and end up being the club's overall top scorer with 21 goals (CR7 gave us 36 before he left :P). Scalvini is proving to be the key player for us so far, usurping Martinez position and partnership with Varane towrds the end of the season.
Trubin has not really proven himself and is looking to be a bad buy. Guler is not developing as well as we had hoped.
We finally managed to lower to wage bill to less than $5M. We are also looking at about $100m to spend in S3. An added bonus was we snagged this dude on a free:
Have decided not to start a new save so not sure how the Winter Update would affect S3. In terms of tactics, we primarily used 2 this season; 4231 was the main one and 433 was the other one.
Initial thoughts for S3:
We are thinking of offloading some players that didn't really perform. Would love to recoup the entire outlay for Anthony who is really inconsistent. Martinez seems to be a good CDM so we might convert him. Martial and Shaw remains to be sold at the moment and Laird seems to be a good replacement for Shaw. GK is now a very key position and it looks like we might have to really break the bank for Costa as a more worthy replacement rather than relying on Trubin. Henderson did not look good as a replacement as well.
We also need to be mindful of homegrown restrictions. in S2, we barely made it. If Shaw, Henderson and Maguire leaves, we will need at least 3 HG replacements.
So signing off this S2, a word from the game's journalists: