The Revolution : Part One

The French Revolution, funnily enough we’re not talking about the one from 1789-1799 and it certainly isn’t going to take us ten years to do this. We’re also not talking about the abysmal 2010 world cup run they had, when the team revolted against their manager led by Arsenal legend Theirry Henry and Nicholas Anelka who told his manager “Go f*** yourself, you son of a whore,” after losing to Mexico in the 2010 World Cup group stage 2-0, which then saw France Knocked out of the World Cup and a lot of the big french superstars such as Franck Ribery, Patrice Evra, Thierry Henry and of course Nicholas Anelka would never play for the national team again.

One positive would be that France went onto win the World Cup in 2018. So, we’ve established that this isn’t going to be about the actual revolution or the 2010 disaster, so what is this going to be about?

Firstly let’s give you a more broad spectrum of what we’re dealing with and how using some of the tips I’m showing you can improve your Football Manager skills whichever team you decide to go.

We can all agree that the top five leagues in the world are seen as so:

(Each League has Revenue that the League earns each year next to it)

The Barclays Premier League (England) – 6.02 Billion
The Bundesliga (Germany) – 4.02 Billion
Ligue 1 (France) – 2.52 Billion
La Liga (Spanish) – 4.48 Billion
Serie A (Italy) – 3.08 Billion

Therefore France makes the least money compared to all of the top five leagues.

This is a Champions League save, our job is to win the Champions league within five to ten seasons only using the money we’re given and obviously trying to create a good steady net profit.

Remember this above, because we’re going to use “soccernomics“ to try and get France to top of Club Football. Arguably they’ve produced some of the finest players to ever grace the pitch, so why don’t they stay in France?

Simple answer is money, there is more money in other leagues and because of that they end up leaving their hometowns and youth academies to go join some of the biggest clubs in the world for a very small fee as well, which doesn’t help their case because they then have to try and fill the void and gap of the player they’re missing. This is why Internationally they’ve won the World Cup very recently in 2018 and that’s because France are consistently trying to fill their voids with either scouted South Americans from Brazil and Argentina or Africa.

Here is a list of players from Africa that chose to play for France instead of their home country. With Kylian Mbappe probably being one of the most successful:

France’s Africa contingent at 2018 World Cup

Kylian Mbappe – Cameroon / Algeria roots
Paul Pogba – Guinea
Steve Mandanda – Democratic Republic of Congo
Blaise Matuidi – Angola / Congo
Ngolo Kante – Mali
Ousmane Dembele – Senegal, Mali, Mauritania
Nabil Fekir – Algerian
Samuel Umtiti – Cameroon
Adil Rami – Morocco
Benjamin Mendy – Senegal
Djibril Sidibe – Senegal
Presnel Kimpembe – Democratic Republic of Congo

NINTCHDBPICT000597363728-e1595436567491 — No need to smile Kylian, you haven’t won the UCL just yet.

The most incredible stat that I’ve come across is that only ONE French team has won the UEFA Champions League and that was 1993 with Marseille, a few teams have managed to get to the final as runners up, however they failed to win the final game of the season, Monaco and Reims are great examples. However, how on earth has only one French team won the Champions League, once as well, not even multiple times, just the once?

Here is how the top five leagues stack up on total Champion League Wins:

Spain – 18 Champion League Titles
England – 13 Champion League Titles
Italy – 12 Champion League Titles
Germany – 7 Champion League Titles
Netherlands – 6 Champion League Titles
France – 1 Champion League Titles

That is completely shocking, France, a team that has won multiple world cups and created some of the finest players from past to present has won the same amount of Champion Leagues as Romania, a country which has a GDP 239.6 billion USD (2018) compared to that of France being 2.778 trillion USD (2018). As an Economics student there has clearly been some sort of algorithm put into place and it clearly isn’t working in France and we’re here to change that.

This simply isn’t good enough, what are our aims then and how are we going to fix this?

Football Manager 2020: The French Revolution Aims and Goals

Win the Champions League before PSG
Increase the Stature of the French League
Stop Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) from letting it be a one horse race
Sign French, African and South American Players
Demonstrate how we can use Finances to make any team in Football Manager the best team in the world

The last one is the most important because I really want to demonstrate to you guys how easy it is to make any team in Football Manager a great team. After all, Football Manager is just a game of excel and databases, it’s all about how you play the databases and there is no better way than finding loopholes through Soccernomics.

Don’t worry we’re not going to pick PSG, they’re completely out of the question, we’re going to pick another team, a team with lots of potential already and decent finances.

We’re going to choose a team that has talent from France, has potential and decent Finances, we’re not choosing Lyon because I believe that is too easy and I believe there is no point doing Marseille or PSG because one of them has won it already and one of them has a nine million average wage p/m compared to second (Lyon) with 2.6 million p/m.

This demonstrates how far PSG are away from everyone else in the league, winning seven league titles out of eight just shows the dominance and only then it was Monaco that won because of the brilliance of players like Bakayoko, Bernardo Silva, Mbappe, Sidibe, Benjamin Mendy, Fabinho, Thomas Lemar and Radamel Falcao. Mbappe alone was sold for a Ligue 1 record to PSG, which they obviously knew would secure future titles.

Monaco: The Shadow of Takeovers: Chapter 2

Despite the title win in 2016/2017 season, they managed to finish 2nd and 17th since that, mostly because they haven’t reinvested their money very well from the transfers of their players and they’ve also made some quite questionable and risky managerial appointments.

915989efa2061df30c89507e107d1023--international-soccer-arsenal-football

This man right here, didn’t get off to the best of starts as manager (Thierry Henry).

You might remember they were taken over by an owner once they gained promotion from Ligue 2 however they’ve been in the shadow of PSG’s takeover for years and because of that, its been a one horse race, the owner has lost of his fortune and because of that he’s now had to reinvest the money into the youth academy for a bit of success. Instead of spending big money of names like Radamel Falcao and James Rodriguez for £50+ Million.

With Monaco we have just over £125 Million and therefore we have some money to play with for definite, which should be expected, however we need to create a consistency within the club because league finishes are consistently varying and that isn’t acceptable for a champions league winning team.

We’re spending £15 Million a year on Cesc Fabregas, Gelson Martins and Bakayoko, this isn’t terrible, however £6 Million a year for a 32 year old Cesc Fabregas, that could go on someone a lot better and potentially grow that player instead of harnessing the talents of Cesc Fabregas.

In Moneyball, we’re hold to exploit the cheap and value them high to make the most of what you’re getting, therefore Cesc Fabregas needs to go ASAP and Ben Yeddar needs a new contract, so we’ll use some of the Cesc Fabregas money to give that to Ben Yeddar as the quality is 20+ goals a season and therefore is very important.

Golovin and Pellegri will also be getting some of the Cesc Fabregas money. In this case, we’re not wasting any of the clubs money and we’re keeping our very important players to build onto for the future.

The First thing I did with my club was go to the Team Comparison page and look at what my average yearly wage is compared to all the other teams, because this can be a great indicator where you should finish, not all the time, sometimes its different as football is so predictable, but you’ll be able to establish depending on your league finish what needs improving over the next few years.

3rd Monaco £2.32 Million p/y and 1st PSG 9.8 Million p/y average thats a big ass gap that we need to try and restore, therefore getting rid of some players now would be a great option.

The Second thing I do, is go to the team selection tab to look at how much my players are on p/y on their contracts, obviously this is very important because you can distinguish between what players are worth their money and which players aren’t worth their money.

If you’ve ever finished a transfer window which about 99% of you surely have, they always show the new “Player Wage Contribution” e-mail, this will show where you rank, its very important that you’re either up there as 1st or definitely top 3, but you don’t want to be so far behind like we are with PSG, therefore we need to be ideally 1st and we’re going to have to do some amazing financial work to build Monaco up as greats.

You can apply these main principles in any save, its how I managed to get back to back promotions with Portsmouth and win the league and champions league and also win the premier league in five seasons with Leeds, its a great benchmark to guide yourself to success and ever sine using it, I’ve had nothing but success and players that wouldn’t usually do well, doing very well for me.

Chapter 3: Getting Started

Firstly I’ve decided to bring in some top players for the french league and got rid of the players that I felt weren’t good enough.

I’ve Signed seven new players and decided to give everyone that was good enough new contracts, it should help us play a lot better. I know it sounds silly, but sometimes a player just needs a little bit of extra dough to slash.

Inside “Soccernomics” the author goes onto say that player wages nine out of ten times can correlate to that of a league position and that is why your Manchester’s finish in the top 4 most of the time and your Chelsea’s and Liverpool’s are consistently at the top of the league or there about.

Signings

8ccbaec359264ecaf49e4e9a314466cd — A picture of the players brought in, seven new players, all paid for, NEVER do instalments until you’ve fully established your finances because otherwise its the best way to build up your debt and if the debt gets worse and worse it will go on to become a new bank loan for the club and therefore you’re in more trouble than you were in before.

Try to buy the players with money straight up rather than doing instalments and add on’s because in accounting that would just been seen as a finance option and therefore are paying monthly for it, which sometimes is good and sometimes is bad, however in this scenario it would be seen as liability.

Liabilities are really bad, as they create easy debt, so buy players fully, NO instalments!

OUT Transfers

fcd486a98ae76559909dfb6f9e23e79e — A picture of the players that I sold either because they are old, not good enough or getting paid for too much and because of that, we have no room for that.

It’s completely up to you, you can either sell the players for cash straight up, however you can sell the players for a lot of money if you accept instalments, clubs are more willing to buy high, for Gelson Martins for example I accepted just £20.0M but with instalments probably could have got an extra £10.0M decided that the money is key right now.

But in a book called “Rich dad, Poor dad“ which is a great book for any aspiring football sporting directors or anything related to business, you want to be able to create revenue whilst you sleep and obviously in this scenario, you’re earning money whilst skipping to your next match, which is important because that can go back on the club or it can go on other things such as wages.

Tactics

This is your most basic set tactic, 4-2-3-1, goes into a bit of a 3-4-2-1 or a 3-3-3-1 which is always key for me because I like to play possession or feel like I’m a little bit in control of the game and that the counter is my weak spot, which I feel is easily controlled with a good defence.

Nothing too advanced here, I do believe that there are uses in tactical geniuses like Bielsa and Guardiola however I do massively believe that player recruitment and keeping control of the clubs finances are the key to success on the pitch and thats more important, better examples are Leicester in 2016 winning the English Premier League Title.

First 10 Games

The first 10 games have been nothing short of exceptional and unexpected, I knew we’d do well obviously because everything I usually do, I’ve done and I pretty much always overachieve because of it, however I drew to PSG at HOME which could become quite costly come the end of the season as they’ll probably get 100+ points knowing PSG but at the moment, we’re top of the league and I’m very happy with how its started.