Restoring Traditions – 2.3 Lovro, Alfie and Xadas run riot

Welcome back and I want to say a thank you for the support with the blog, be that retweets on twitter, interaction on slack or just reading and following along – it’s really appreciated and I’m considering giving away a copy of FM19 on Christmas day, any thoughts on that are welcomed.

In the last piece I went through some of our best youth prospects in a bit of a different save update feel, before that in a previous post we reached the end of January in our 2nd season. We discussed how our new signings had fitted in and the sales we had made to fund those moves and were unbeaten domestically as we sat 8 points and a game in hand ahead of unlikely title challengers Motherwell with Celtic down in 5th position.

Atletico Madrid would be our challengers in the Last 16 of the Champions League after we somehow knocked out Bayern Munich within our group, we had already won back to back League cups after a late Morelos goal in extra time saw off Celtic and won our only Scottish cup game v Livi so a double treble was still on – let’s delve in to this more.

Scottish Premiership

I mentioned previously how either brilliant or frustrating Alfredo Morelos could be, he turned it around in the second half of the season especially in the league where he scored 14 times in 16 appearances to finish on 23 league goals matching his previous campaign but also 40 goals overall. A mixture then of brilliance by the attacking midfield pair Xadas and Lovro Majer were equally as important in the run in. We smashed in 104 goals, 102 points and completed an unbeaten season.

Hearts 3-3 game where Xadas scored in the 94th minute was special and we survived an onslaught by Celtic in the last game of the season but apart from those results we dominated the majority of our games.

Uefa Champions League

A 1-0 victory in Glasgow represents a positive outlook, however Saul was red carded for a shocker of a challenge after just 2 minutes and I was frustrated we couldn’t assert any sort of dominance with the man advantage. The match statistics show the game was even and they restricted us to few clear cut chances, our goal came from Xadas sneaking in at the back post from a quality Barisic set piece.

With hindsight in the away leg I’d probably have changed our set up to possibly a 4-1-4-1, dropped our mentality from positive to cautious but we were flying at the time and showed a bit of naivety to think we were better than we are. Olmo and Grizi up front were causing us all sorts of problems.

I generally have a high defensive line with an offside trap and pressing high but I had to make in game adjustments as Olmo would often break our trap and Grizi was dropping deeper before playing some defence splitting passes, the less we pressed and deeper we became to stop this, simply allowed Atleti more time on the ball and their better quality showed. Pumped.

Scottish Cup

I felt we were just going to keep winning as we had done previously and a 4-0 win over Stranraer and 3-0 humbling of Dundee Utd seemed to suggest we would. Drawn against Hamilton in the semi finals hardly screamed danger and the match stats below would suggest a routine win if not a battering but this was a 2-2(8-7) loss after penalties with Rajkovic missing and their keeper scoring.

To make it worse we went back ahead in the 100th minute via Barisic then Majer contrived to miss a penalty which would have made it 3-1 and then we allowed them back in it in the 116th minute. Quite reliant on long shots in this game but it isn’t a common theme or I’d be more concerned.

Key performers

Xadas – 14 of our players averaged a 7.0 or over through the duration of the season so some big performers missed out and a top 3 is the set up I’ll go with. Xadas improved from an already impressive first season, in his 2nd season he smashed in 22 goals, 11 assists and a 7.46 average rating.

Notably he scored v Celtic twice, the winner against Atletico Madrid in a glory night and a goal against Bayern Munich. Best £500k I’ve spent on FM19!

Majer – What can I say about Majer, his attributes are filthy, he’s currently worth £14m but if he was playing in an elite league I’m sure that almost triple. He’s made strong developmental strides but on the pitch he has contributed 23 goals, 11 assists, 8 man of the match awards and a 7.36 average rating in his debut season with us.

I negotiated an improved contract meaning he’s our player for another 5 years but more importantly I improved his wages in a trade off to get rid of his £20m minimum release clause which was a non negotiable clause when he signed.

Morelos – You’ll have heard my delight and frustrations with Alfie but in his second half of the season he came good with 14 goals in 16 league games to the end of the season, 40 goals overall means he has to be included in the key performers.

His 5 goals in the main Champions League (from group stages onwards) represented great value and went a long way to securing our surprise place in the knockout stages, he’s someone I don’t think it will be easy to replace as his all round game is important to us but you’ll see he’s at Southampton on massive wages.

I received an enquiry so I asked for a fee I felt they would never go to and a deal for £36m up front and 25% of the next sale was thrashed out, so the deal could easily represent more than £45m with his next move. For a club in Scotland, sadly these deals need to be accepted to allow the club to grow.

Financial summary

In our first season we made a small profit of £640k, we made a profit of £34.57m for season 2. This was largely down to prize money which went from £3.95m to £33.97m. Over £31m of this was due to our Champions League run showing how important this is to us.

Gate receipts were up £6m from £12.2m to £18.2m, player sales rose from £2m to £44m due to big sales of Katic and Goldson.

Player wages only rose around £1m from £15.8m to £16.8m which is the equivalent of £20k per week so we’ve done very well to grow and develop the squad/club with minimal cost increases. One poorer aspect of this was sponsorship went up by less than £100k, hopefully more strides in our co-efficient can improve that.

Club Progress

I always really like this screen, it helps when you’re the most improved side in Europe! Due to Rangers recent problems and the 5 year cycle co-efficients work in, we start off alongside other Scottish club sides such as St Johnstone but we’re improving at a steady rate.

I do wonder if a 3rd place finish in next CL would be better given it will take a bit of time to reach a level I can compete vs elite clubs.

Every version I ask for a stadium upgrade then moan at the cost quoted, for an extra 13k seats I think £80m is shocking but we have the money in the bank right? Oh no a bank loan was taken out with an estimated £22m to be paid in interest. Great business lads.

Also a shareholders payout of over £9m when we had this fucking massive expense surely doesn’t make sense but hey ho. In a season time we will have the biggest stadium in Scotland and will garner extra income from this.

This concludes the end of the 2nd season, the first full season with our 3 parts and I think I like the set up, but do you? We’ll try to continue our domestic dominance, how would you bridge gap to the elite clubs? In the next part I’ll discuss our change from the 4-3-3 system to 4-2-3-1 and how we line up.

Once again any comments are welcomed, be that via the comments section, twitter @johnmcintosh19 or on my slack channel #johnmcintosh-19.