2016/2017 Tottenham Hotspur - End of Season Review

Quick Note: I apologise for the lack of updates on Football Manager. This is due to many reasons such as having deadlines for University throughout most of December, Christmas time meaning I wasn’t playing a whole lot of FM and also new games for Christmas that took up more of my time. I also progressed past February without any thought and therefore forgot to save and so couldn’t bring you a February update; however no worries, I shall be updated you on the whole season in this update! Anyway, onto my third season review…

So How Did We Do?

I have just completed the third season of my Tottenham Hotspur managerial career and have successfully qualified for the Champions League again after coming fourth. Currently, in these early stages these are realistically going to have to be my expectations as I go through a transitional period of bringing through the players I want to.

Chelsea have won the title for the third year in a row as expected and don’t seem to be slowing down at all having won by 7 points with the second highest goals scored (we actually scored the most). Man City were the surprise underachievers this year coming a shocking 7th after coming 2nd the two previous seasons; this appears to be as a result of an awful start to the season in which they only won 4 of their first 20 games in all competitions (one of which was a 7-4 extra time win over Birmingham City in the Capital Cup 3rd Round). The only slight surprises were Southampton who managed to qualify themselves into the Europa League spot with Man United.

The three teams to get relegated were Swansea (who actually finished 6th the season before so is a shock), Leicester and Aston Villa. The three teams coming up from the Championship are West Ham, Birmingham and …

Competition Performances

When it came to competitions this year, it was a bit of a mixed bag with some impressive performances in some competitions, but not so impressive performances in others. For example, the 5th round knockout against Aston Villa in the FA Cup was not a great result, 5th round isn’t bad but to lose to Aston Villa who were eventually relegated is very bad. In addition our Capital One Cup run wasn’t great getting knocked out in the Quarter Final by Newcastle. However, my Champions League run was a sick surprise as I ended up making it all the way to the Quarter Final and only getting knocked out to PSG which is a respectable exit for any team, let alone a team who’s first time it is in the Champions League knockout stages for many years! Overall, as I said it was a mixed bag of results this year in all competitions with the highlight being my successful run in the Champions League.

We were very impressive in the Premier League when it came to goals scored, which you'll find out why later. We managed 92 goals which is more than any other team, even that likes of Chelsea who had the top goalscorer in the season and arguably one of the best players in the game in Eden Hazard.

Transfer News

So let’s talk about the players that helped to get us here! With the enormous £40m sale of Memphis Depay who had performed really poorly for me for the passed couple of seasons since his Golden Ball nomination, I decided to sell him and stick with Andre Ayew on the Left Wing position. Therefore this gave me plenty of money to work with and so the first signing of the season was Sime Vrsaijko, I didn’t even bother trying to say his name out loud. However, I realised that a left back and a right back were my positions of need in this new season and so I went forth and purchased this guy from Bayer Leverkusen for £10m which was a good deal for a player who was easily better than any of my current right backs. As aforementioned, a left back was my final position of need and so I spent a little more time than the previous looking for the right left back for the right price. Considering my current left back was Danny Rose who I don’t believe to be Champions League quality, I wanted to spend quite a bit of money on ensuring I brought in someone who was young enough to still improve, but was old enough to have enough experience playing First Team football at a relatively high football, or could adapt to such. For £17.5m I brought in Wendell from Bayer Leverkusen who had a four star potential and had stats that already surpassed Danny Rose’s so I thought was a good purchase.

My next signing was the addition of an exciting young prospect by the name of Tiziano Tulissi; I honestly couldn’t think of a more Italian name! He cost me £12.5m from Atlanta, but boasted some impressive dribbling and speed stats, along with crossing and technique. These are all signs I look for in a young winger/Striker. He actually has gone on to score 12 goals for me which is very impressive for his first season. My next signing was also a young addition by the name of Juan Soriano (these last two may be regens, I’m not sure) who’s a young ‘keeper from Athletico, who we all know have a good record for young goalkeepers with David De Gea and taking Courtois on loan! I imagined he would be a back up to Lloris and eventually be a first team goalkeeper, we’ll have to wait and see! My final signing was the addition of the central defender Alessio Romagnoli for £7.5m from Roma, an addition to hopefully partner the ever-improving Balanta!

Along with Depay, there were some other notable sales such as Sergio Canales for £23.5m to Roma; I just felt I didn’t have a first team position for him and I felt that he was too good to be a substitute. Other notable names were Moussa Dembélé to Zenit for £5m, Ibrahim Afellay to Livorno for £5.5m and Lewis Holtby to Torino for £10m.

Stats/Performances

When it comes to stats and performances, it is only really about two players when it comes to the important numbers and those two players are Carlos Vela and Jovic who grabbed not only the top goalscorer but also Carlos Vela achieved joint assists with 19 with Christian Eriksen. Which was a result of a run of games where we he either scored or assisted once every 30 minutes or something absolutely insane like that (stats I worked out myself) over the space of two months being voted player of the month two months in a row. The goals ended up being 26 for Luka Jovic which is absolutely incredible for an 18 year old Striker coming from a different country to a league like the Premier League. He also came in second in the Premier League just behind Diego Costa which is really quite something spectacular. Carlos Vela came in a close second with 25 goals.

We saw once again Jorginho securing the top-spot in the pass completion stat with 85% for players who weren’t defenders (as their passes were usually simple ones to players infant of them and less crucial) and and had played more than 20 games in the season.

Another player of note was Erik Lamela who really impressed me again this season, he had an off seasons last year but did really well and came the third in the top scorers which highlights how well he played this season. He was back to the Erik Lamela who played in the CAM role in Eriksen’s absence in my first season, but he’s adopted that brilliance to the right wing. He managed to achieve the second highest rating in the Champions League, only behind Marco Reus which isn’t a bad feat at all.

Player of the Season

My player of the season is a close tie between Carlos Vela, and Luka Jovic. Carlos Vela because of the incredible run where he brought us back from some poor form almost single handedly scoring 5/6 goals a month in the Premier League alone. However, if I had to pick one it would be Luka Jovic as he was “consistently consistent” as my brother described it. Statistically he may not have, but it felt like contributed either an assist or a goal in every game he played which is literally all you can ask for from a player, let alone one who is still a teenager, something I just can’t quite take in.

Player Achievements

A few player achievements to note are Vela, Jorginho, Eriksen and Lamela came in the Premier League Team of Year which is a good achievement for them and quite impressive that we managed to get so many players in the first team. Andre Ayew was also included among the substitutes for the Team of Year.

Another achievement of note was the award given to one of my youth players by the name of John Paton who came from my youth recruitment network; the player was awarded Young Player of the Year whilst on loan in the Championship. 

Summary

This season has been one where I began to beat the bigger teams, I gained a win over Arsenal and United throughout the season, something I have failed to do in all previous seasons. In addition, I even gave the invincible Chelsea a challenge in a game that ended in an incredible draw away from home at Stamford Bridge!

Luka Jovic is a player who I believe within 2 or 3 seasons could be scoring 30-40 goals a season which is something that a team who wants to seriously compete in the Champions League needs to have. He’s a player that already has all the traits to be one of the best Strikers in the world and has the potential to grow into one of the best players in the world. He’s a very exciting player indeed.

My Champions League efforts were really impressive and something I’m really proud of the team for achieving. It will also show other teams that Tottenham are now a well established Champions League team as long as they can consistently keep getting into the top four. Qualifying and managing to get into the quarter finals is something only the biggest English teams can do, let alone Tottenham Hotspur. Watch this space!

2015/2016 Tottenham Hotspur - End of Season Review

Season End

The end of my second season has come, and to me it feels like it has come a lot quicker than the previous season. This is probably due to the fact in all honesty, I’ve had the most frustrating end to a season possible with incredibly disappointing results, highly mediocre player performances and numerous injury set-backs. Therefore getting to the end of the season was my primary objective so I could begin my reshaping of the team.

I ended up finishing 4th in the Premier League which is a place higher than last season but is far from where I expected to end up at the end of January with some incredible performances coming from my team. We ended up behind Man City, Chelsea and United respectively which aren’t bad opposition to be honest, but I still feel awfully disappointed considering how well we were throughout the first half of the season!

In other cups, we were knocked out of the FA Cup by QPR, who along with Norwich became our bogey team throughout the season. But WE WON the Europa Cup! It was a hard fought competition, beating competition like AC Milan, Shakhter Donetsk and Galatasaray! Very impressed with my team to accomplish this as I feel that having won this shows the board and even maybe the world that we can compete for higher European football and shows that we have improved after the previous season which is important!

The board appear to be very happy with performance and if you discount the awful results and disappointing end to our Premier League season, we actually did quite well. We won a cup for Tottenham which is apparently their first since 1978 and we’ve also managed to qualify for Champions League football next year which should bring in more TV revenue and hopefully financially secure us, paving the way for us to become a European super power!

Player Performances/Statistics

If you were to ask me who my player of the season was going to be in January, I would have said Carlos Vela without a second breath, however a poor second half to the season in which he only scored 6 more goals means he’s not so quick to the award for me. Our highest average rated player was Christian Eriksen who also won English Players’ Player of the year which is nice for him. His high rating and award was probably down to his high level of assists of which he managed 18. I love to be able to see centre attacking midfielders getting a high level of assists as I feel that means we play good possession football.

Jorginho once again had an incredible season in the centre of the park, averaging 87% pass completion, higher than any other member of the team (obviously excluding the players who played less than 5 games) which is something he’s constantly improving on which is exactly what I want to see. Jorginho also surprisingly ended up coming second in our highest scorer list with 18 goals which is very impressive for a central midfielder, this was thanks to his 100% (10/10) penalty taking record and his hard work in training on his finishing.

Memphis Depay appears to be severely declining and hasn’t been half the player he was in his first season with the club which is very disappointing. Along with that, Erik Lamela has shown no signs this half of the season of improving on his poor start, I may have to alter his position to benefit him a little more Eriksen out on the wing, we’ll see.

I have a couple of youth players I have been trying to implement into the team in the form of Nat Beeney and John Paton. Beeney is the more exciting of the two youngsters with a four yellow star potential and five black star potential. He’s a striker, who as you can see is all about his physical stats. He’s a young player who has the physical potential to be great, he just needs to work incredibly hard on his actual footballing skills as he lacks dearly in those.

Future Plans

When it comes to next season, I’m going to be looking at bringing in some youth looking toward the future. I hope to maintain my current place and assert my dominance as a top four contender in the Premier League. I have minimum expectations to get passed the group stages of the Champions League and anything further than that would be above expectations. The other competitions aren’t important to me, however if we don’t make it out of the group stages of the Champions League, I shall make the FA Cup and Premier League my top priorities.

Looking forward I can see that we need to improve upon our Left and Right backs with two weak players in Danny Rose and Kyle Walker occupying these positions currently. I’m going to look into the potential of buying some fairly young full backs (under the age of 24) who have room to grow, but are also quality enough to be brought straight into the side. Apart from that, I may look to get rid of Depay as there are rumours he’s currently worth around the £40m mark which is exiting to hear and Canales, my signing last January is struggling for games with his positions all taken up by better players.

In summary, I feel that this process is going to take a little longer than previous Football Manager saves for me. Previously I have been Manchester United (my supported team of choice) and have always managed to start buying the next young incredible talent within my second season and begin to see incredible regens developing within my fourth season. However with this Tottenham save, I can see I have a lot of work to do before I can consider taking risks by bringing in talented youth. In previous years, my teams have been famous for having an average age of 23 or something, this time round, this process could take an extra few season. But trust me, keep reading and evolving yourselves in the story and it’ll all be 100% worth the wait!

2015/2016 Tottenham Hotspur - January Update

How I’m Sitting

I currently sit in second position of the Premier League having had a very strong first half to the season with Manchester City only two points ahead having only lost 3 games so far this season. I’m very impressed with the team in general and the addition of Carlos Vela has been a definite positive signing and a brilliant managerial move if I do say myself!

I’m still in the Europa Cup with my first game in the knockout round coming up against Hoffenheim; I have a fifth round match against QPR in the FA Cup and unfortunately I was shockingly knocked out by Norwich in the second round of the Capital One Cup… but that’s not important really.

The board appear delighted with my performance and are very happy with my leadership qualities. They say apparently last season’s disappointments still have a small part to play in my review. I find this a little out of order seeing as I’ve only ever seen Tottenham come higher than 5th in the league once in all my years of watching football!

January Transfers

Only one signing throughout January and that’s the signing of the exciting young prospect in Luka Jovic! I initially thought that I had found a gem here that no one else had seen, however after a bit of Reddit searching, I realised he was a player that many had already found before. However, he looks exciting to me as addition to my scoring side and only at the age of 18. He’d already scored 14 goals in 21 goals by the time he’d arrived from Red Star, which for an 18 year old is really quite impressive; what’s more impressive is that he played as their lone Striker as well which shows real confidence in such a young talent. As you can see, so far he’s got 4 goals in 4 games having scored a hat-trick in his very first appearance for me with an average rating of 7.78 which is a brilliant way to start his career to be honest. Really exciting!

In terms of sales, I’ve made two pretty big ones that were done to balance out what seems to be a VERY under-funded club. I was given £30m to spend on January 1st as a reward for my fine form, however by January 2nd, they had retracted the money and given me a mere £360k which was annoying! Paulinho was the first at £10m to A.C. Milan and the second was Ben Davies to Liverpool for £15m. These helped me not only afford Jovic but also balance out my negative numbered wages!

Statistics

There’s no surprises when it comes to Top Goalscorer this season, Carlos Vela has 24 goals, streaks ahead of anyone else, proving to be the exact player I wanted him to be! The man behind him is Christian Eriksen who has managed 12 goals so far which is average for an attacking midfielder of his quality. Lamela has been a shadow of the player he was last season with only 2 goals so far this season which is probably due to playing on the right side as opposed to that central attacking role like last season. Eriksen has impressed once again with his impressive assists rate with 17 assists so far and no one else near him with this number either.

When it comes to the center of the park, Jorginho has continued his impressive performances from the second half of last season with our highest pass completion at 85%. Oddly Jorginho has also become our penalty player with 5/5 and 100% penalty conversion which is nice also.

As a team, we’ve remained fairly consistent in our high pass completion with 75% as opposed to 76% last season. Young Kaboul has been a rock for us at the back with 93% tackle success rate which is crucial when it comes to the final third.

Future Plans

My plans for the rest of the season are the keep this brilliant consistency up and hope to push for 2nd or maybe even win the Premier League. However, with Chelsea on a brilliant run and destroying everything in their way, after a rough start to the season, I feel they may keep us on our toes. When it comes to the other competitions, the FA Cup isn’t important to me and soon as we’re out of that, the better as it currently takes away layer fitness in my opinion. However I’m very interested in at least attempting to reach the final of the Euro Cup as I feel if we win that, despite our Premier League performance, the board will have respect for us showing that we should be in the Champions League next season.

When it comes to Transfers, I believe next season I need to improve my defence as I just feel that we concede far too many goals from the wings due to our poor wing-backs and this is something I’m looking to improve on.

2015/2016 Tottenham Hotspur - Pre-Season Update

The Main Story

Last season didn’t end the way I wanted it to with our form severely dipping due to a lack of any prolific goal-scorer. When the pre-season Transfer Window came around, I knew this is exactly the type of player I needed to purchase. I delved into the Scouting tab and searched for a player with some pace, acceleration, who could finish and could dribble past players if needed. I searched high and wide, but with a transfer budget of £30m, I struggled to find that player that I felt could take us into Europe and keep us there. Last season’s Strikers (Kane, Soldado & Adebayor) showed me that I severely lacked any pace when it came to the final man on the ball, therefore I set my initial attributes to Pace:15, Acceleration:15, this was the base stat that I wanted my new Striker to have. Next was the obvious addition of the ability to Finish as there were countless times last season where Harry Kane, Soldado or Adebayor would miss absolute sitters when any Striker with some real confidence or real finishing prowess would put them in the back of the net with ease.

Eventually, I came across the answers to all my prayers in the form of Carlos Vela, he appears to have the perfect attributes for what I’m looking at. He can dribble, finish, has fair amount of pace and incredible Technique which is something I feel is something that makes for an exciting player along with high flair which he also has! I genuinely feel he can be the player who starts getting me the 20 goals minimum a season that I require.

Two Brilliant Frees

The other interesting stories in my transfer dealings are the brilliant contract-free captures of Andre Ayew and Ibrahim Affelay. I’m sure anyone reading these has heard of both of those players. Affelay, a player who had potential but could never squeeze into arguably one of the best domestic Barcelona teams in history. Andre Ayew, arguably the better of the two Ayew brothers who Arsenal always signed in the two previous Football Managers.

Both players have speed and good dribbling skills, fitting them perfectly into my winger positions that I currently have Lamela and Depay playing. However, both will struggle to make first team appearances with arguably my two best performers last season playing in those respective positions. Therefore, as it stands, Ayew and Affray will be used as rotational substitutes throughout Cup Games and as back-up to the aforementioened characters. However, a massive positive to Andre Ayew is that he is worth £25m despite not costing me a penny which is something that screams profit to me, even if we gets a few games he should retain such a price, selling for £20m minimum if he isn’t a player that benefits my team.

The Exciting Youngster

My only other incoming transfer before the season properly gets underway is one that anyone who has played Fifa 15 or FM15 at all this year will know. Your Tielemans, an incredibly young midfield playmaker who screams potential with incredible passing, vision, technique, speed and dribbling skills. What excited me was the price I managed to get him at, due to his age, I managed to grab him for £7.5m which is an absolute steal considering that potentially by the time he’s 20, he could be one of the best midfielders in not only the Premier League, but the world with his attributes going up a couple of points almost definitely if he gets first team football!

Sales

The main sales throughout my pre-season period were the sale of Nacer Chadli (Napoli - £6.5m), Vlad Chiriches (PSG - £13.25m) and Harry Kane (Leicester City - £6.75m). These are quite interesting sales and some of you may question my choices. However, if you go over my purchases, you’ll realise my choices. 

The sale of Harry Kane was to add funds to be able to afford Vela, simply put; I still have Soldado and Adebayor as back up Strikers in case Vela needs a break or gets injured. 

Chiriches wasn’t getting much first-team action and I thought the sale of £13.25 was a nice amount of money to receive for him, especially with Balanta, Kaboul, Dedé, Eric Dier and even Stambouli who can all still play in that central defensive role.

Chadly was a player that never really worked for me, and I felt that the additional funds from his rather pricey contract and from his transfer would allow me to bring in some other players now and then throughout January also.

Going Forward

Throughout the season I expect my players to feel more comfortable in the formation I’ve chosen, which I realised I didn’t mention in my previous posts. It’s a 4-1-1-3-1 formation which really takes advantage of not only the players we have, but the attacking philosophy I’ve adopted as well.

I have a strong feeling that Vela will be the player I’ve been looking for to get my 20-30 goals in a season. Along with that, Depay, Eriksen, Lamela, Tielemans, Balanta and other players all have more room to improve as players and gel together over the season which I’m excited to see.

In summary, I want to see more gelling from the team and a faster style of football, with Vela causing some real excitement when it comes to the striking department on my part, I feel I have a team here could really challenge for Europe and a team, with a few more player (next season signings) could push for the top of the Premier League and Champions League football!

This has been my summary of the pre-season going into my second season as Tottenham manager, hoping to improve in nearly every area and hoping to really continue on to a LONG career as a manager for a team with such incredibly exciting potential!

2015/2016 Tottenham Hotspur STANDOUT GAME - vs AZ (First game of Euro Cup Group Stages)

So I felt I'd like to do a set of little blog posts that I write alongside my main update posts that highlight the games that stand out to me! Here's my first one...

In-game date: 17 September 2015

I’ve just had solidly one of the more exciting and pleasing games of my Football manager career. It wasn’t a massively important one or one that relished in goals, it was just one felt great to watch when you see your team play brilliantly and do everything you want them to do!

We played AZ in only the first game of the group stages of the Euro Cup, but it was a very interesting game indeed. Throughout the first 10 minutes of the game, I felt we were in control, creating all the chances, Erikson and Jorginho were dominating the passing in the centre of the park and Depay (Ayew picked up an injury in the 3rd minute) and Lamela causing some problems for the full backs. It all came wrong because of my assistant manager to be honest!

It all began when he commented “we should take advantage of our dominant possession”, I took this to mean that we should change my passing style to more direct to get more chances on goal, so I switched to this, along with early crosses. However, almost 10 minutes after this change, Aron Jóhannsson went ahead and caused an upset with a goal in the 23rd minute. 4 minutes later, Dedé went ahead and made a rash challenge earning himself a yellow card and giving away a penalty to a team on the up in confidence; Celso Ortiz and stepped to put them 2-0 up in the space of 5 minutes in a game I felt we were dominating. 7 minutes before half time, they finished off their rout with a goal from Guus Hupperts which really caused some anger on my behalf. Throughout this scoring period, I was mashing the ‘Demand More’, ‘Push Forward’ and ‘Show some Passion’ team talks assertively to no avail. At half time, I Aggressively told them to show some passion and asked if they even wanted to win the game, I also had personal team talks with each individual position assertively telling them that I needed them to perform how I knew they could - this apparently was exactly what they needed! Every player reacted with a motivated boost and a generally positive response.

In the second half we came out with much more conviction, going back to controlling the ball in the midfield and settling down a bit when it came to the defence, as a result making more intelligent tackles and choices. The first break came within the 52nd minute with some lovely play around the box which finally resulted in a ball out to Rose who whipped a ball across the box for Jorginho to get on the end of far post, blasting in the first goal towards a potential comeback. At this point I felt that there was no way we could come back from this and that AK only needed one more goal for this to be unrealistically out of our reach once again. However, 8 minutes later, on the hour mark, Balanta came up with a goal from the near post from a corner. It got me really excited and made me realise, that we had half an hour to score just one more goal to come back from an 3-0 loss. Currently we sat at 3-2 and were dominating in possession, we very rarely lost posession, if at all from the highlights that I saw. Lamela and Depay were dominating the wings, whipping in some great balls for Erikson, Jorginho and Vela to get on the end of; Jorginho and Stambouli were giving the opposing ‘keeper, Esteban some long shots to think about. Then finally, on the 78th minute, we’d been dominating for the majority of the second half. Erik son played a cross in that is cleared to Depay on the edge of the box, he appears to head back towards his own goal before quickly planting a back heel right at the feet of Lamela who lets it run infant of him before blasting it into the roof of the net causing the fans and me to all jump up screaming. Scaring the life out of and demanding a high five off my girlfriend was my celebration for this goal as it was a game that had made me felt cheated by the game and then made me feel like we’d really earned back the draw!

The highlight players that stood out for me have to be Christian Eriksen, Erik Lamela and Jorginho. These were three players that throughout the whole match constantly showed the composure and ability to perform their respectful positions to a high quality consistently! Jorginho showed his incredible passing skills once again with the highest Pass Completion of any player on the pitch completing 58 out of his 66 passes throughout the game. When it came to the passing game, Christian Eriksen managed an incredible 6 Key Passes throughout the game, Guss Hupperts for AZ was their highest with 3. Christian Eriksen also completed the most successful Runs Past Opponents stat with 6. 

Erik Lamela didn’t really have a statistic that highlighted his performance, but his goal and overall work rate was impressive enough for me, covering 8.3 miles throughout the match, only 0.1 miles behind Jorginho whose job as an advanced playmaker is to explore the pitch, covering a lot of ground.

This was one of those games that Football Manager is famous for; it makes you feel like those dots on your screen are real players and that everything they do is as a result of personality, your training, your touch-line commands, your tactical choices and when it pays off you feel a real sense of accomplishment. If you don’t play Football Manager, this won’t sound possible, if you do, it is definitely possible!

2014/2015 Tottenham Hotspur - End of Season Review

Season End

So it’s been a couple of weeks in-game since the season ended and in summary, I’m a little disappointed with my ending to the season and am now sure that I need to improve the squad in the transfer window.

I finished 5th in the Premier League which means I ended up dropping 2 places from 3rd when I updated you towards the end of the January. I reached the Second Knockout Round of the Euro Cup but was knocked out by Wolfsburg which was above board expectations, but below my own. And knocked out at the Semi Final of the Capital One Cup by Chelsea which I said I wouldn’t be too disappointed by in my January update. This has disappointed me somewhat as I expecting at least Champions League football and I promised a few of my players the same which I’m sure is going to come back and bite me in the butt later on in the coming few weeks when they come to me complaining and demanding transfers.

So how did I manage to drop down two places in the space of around 5 months? Well, our main problem throughout the whole season was clearly the fact we lacked a prominent goalscoring striker. Don’t get me wrong, I feel I got the best I could out of Harry Kane, who turned out to be top goalscoring Striker, but I didn’t feel he was very consistent in his performances and was often subbed on and off as a result of sporadic performances. Speaking sporadic, we often lacked consistency when it came to getting wins. Our longest run of winning form throughout the whole season never reached above 4 wins in a row and none of these streaks were ALL within the Premier League so never resulted in 12/12 points. On top of that, we’d often go on runs of poor form, such as 3 or 4 games in a row where we’d lose/draw against arguable competition which was often frustrating when I was hoping to keep some consistency. As you can see from the images, the poor strings of form are often against very average competition and even sometimes at home which, as any Football Manager player can relate with, caused some serious frustration and often arguments between me and the girlfriend as a result, ha!

Player Performances/Statistics

The first player I’d like to commend is Erik Lamela as he played above and beyond my expectations throughout the whole season and as a result ended up with 26 goals and ended up being my top goalscorer, my top assister with 20 assists throughout the whole season AND ended up being my highest average player with 7.50 being his score. He’s been the driving force of my team throughout the whole season, overtime he was on the ball he’d cause problems for the opposition whether it was a darting run, a crucial pass or a wicked shot or goal to demotivate the opposition fans.

The second player I’d like to highlight is Jorginho, my £14.25m signing in the January Transfer window. He’s not only come and dominated that midfield position, he’s been one of my best tacklers in the team since his arrival around 5 months ago. Despite my positive reviews of him, no stats suggest he has performed that well, however when I watched him play throughout the highlights he seemed to never lose the ball, play some crucial balls and keep a consistent pass completion.

Memphis Depay had a fairly quiet second half to his season which was absolutely fine as he more than performed win the first half. Personally, I feel he needs to be trained to pass the ball rather than shoot as he’s a bit shot-happy (although his shots are never far away).

Future Plans

All I know for the future is that I definitely need a striker who can produce 20 goals a season minimum. Now some of you may say Harry Kane can do that as he himself managed to get 20 goals by the end of the season. However, I’m talking 20 goals minimum in the Premier League alone, not including all other competitions. Therefore in the new season I shall be investing as much money as I can into the most affordable striker I can!

I’m happy with Jorginho in the centre of the park, I’m very content with my attacking midfielder choices in Lamela, Chadli, Erikson, Depay, Lennon and the incoming Andre Ayew! My defence could still do with some work, but Balanta is progressing into a very solid defender rapidly and Dede and Kaboul are both still young enough to be here for a few more years before they need to be replaced. My two weakest points are probably right back and left back, however these aren’t as vital as my defensive record wasn’t too bad last season!

This has been an update to the end of my first season! A little disappointing and a striker is definitely needed! What are your thoughts?!

To those asking for more on Reddit...

Hi, as you can probably tell, I've not been updating as fast as I possibly could. This is obviously due to me only being able to go through the game as fast as my fingers can click and as fast as my mind can work.

HOWEVER, I shall be updating with an end of season summary at some point in the next couple of days and I shall then be doing a transfer summary as I feel a BIG transfer market coming up in my second season as there often is when it comes to me and football manager!

HOW OFTEN SHOULD WE EXPECT POSTS?
Now every time I upload a post, I'm going to upload the story to Reddit, I should hope that feedback will let me know how often people want to see these posts...

I can do what I initially intended to do which was post in January and then the end of the season summarising everything that had happened in-between. However, if people want to see more content I can go into upload more with little insights, such as tactic changes, player interactions and other little aspects of the game that I feel are noteworthy.

However, as I've already mentioned, I can only update as quickly as I play and being a student near Christmas time with deadlines every day is NOT an easy task, let alone to then find enough time to bash out a couple hours of FM every day.

SUMMARY
Let me know how often you want to see these posts and WHAT you want to see in these posts!!
Comment below or on Reddit!!