A Football Manager Career

20: Third Season Blues

I decided to be incredibly aggressive in the summer as we had a respectable budget of sixty-million. This was further boosted by the sale of seven more players meaning that we ended up with just over a hundred-and-fifty-million to spend. The priority was obviously to boost the depth of our strikers – especially as I was toying with playing two up top for the first time at the club. Neither of our first choice attacking midfielders had created much the season before and so playing two up top seemed a sensible transition for the side: 41212 (asymmetric). I also wanted a new central guy for our engine room to help the creativity too and fortunately Inter's Luiz Antonio was transfer listed by request as they had missed out on Champions League qualification. He was one of the best players in the world and we grabbed him for a club record seventy-seven million. Next up I raided my English scouting network to find the best striker in the country. Well, the best striker under the age of twenty and available for under thirty-million anyway. Thanks to the fantastic network we were able to grab Tom Summerfield from the Championship. He had gone under the radar of the club scouts because of being in the second tier, but I was incredibly excited about his potential and was pleased with the signing. But we weren't finished there! Next up I returned to Italy to raid Lazio once again. This time for my old China buddy Zhongguo Lu. He had done incredibly well with Lazio since I signed him and had scored forty-eight goals in his three seasons. However, they hadn't managed to get into the champions league and so after a bit of seduction in the media and some heavy negotiation we snapped him up for forty-million too. We had spent a fortune and now had three world class strikers to keep happy during the season, but I was fully ready for the fight.

Thanks to our successes the previous season we had two cups to compete for right from the off. Some pundits and managers look down on these style tournaments, but personally I see them as nothing but good. Who doesn't want to start the season with additions to the trophy cabinet? Annoyingly, however, the Community Shield against United went to penalties after an incredibly boring 0-0 and we lost the shootout when the clearly distracted Celenza blasted the ball over. Ten days later we got a chance to redeem ourselves in the Euro Super Cup against Barcelona. I made sure we were ready for the match by rotating a little in our opening league game against Newcastle (another 0-0 draw) and we headed to Sweden with some degree of confidence ahead of the match. For 91 minutes things were going identically to the previous games with both sides cancelling the other out in incredible tedium. Finally, however, on the 92nd minute my new lad Summerfield came through for us and smashed in a winner. It may just be a season opening cup, but it remarkably counted as the second biggest achievement on my CV after the FA Cup and I was thrilled and ready for the remainder of the campaign.

Things didn't quite work out as brilliantly as I had hope though and it took barely any time for a wave of pessimism to descend around me. It wasn't that anything dramatically bad was happening, it was more just that after the boost that I had brought the club when I first signed, things had now settled down into boring mediocrity. We were predicted in the media to finish sixth and the board were just focussed on us qualifying for the Euros and it was all feeling a little bit too much like my days at DL Yifang again: competing to be the best of the rest and busting my balls without hopes of winning. Yes I was at my childhood club and yes I was in the best league in the world, but if I wasn't competing for that league, what was the point? even Henry left eventually - it's just what happens. 

I regret to say that my frustrations and the mediocre expectations began to manifest themselves in the side and by January we were securely nothing more or nothing less than a top four contender. This is obviously great in many ways and there are hundreds of clubs and thousands of managers that would love the opportunity to fight for the top four in the Premier League and that qualification into Europe. But... I wasn't one of them. And, just as importantly, many of the players were beginning to get a little disillusioned too. I had no less than four transfer requests from players as the January transfer window approached with them wanting to move to a side competing for league titles and, whilst I obviously tried to appease them, my heart wasn't entirely in my protestations that we could compete at Arsenal and the whispers from their agents were more powerful.

Things were made all the worst on the 2nd January when we were smashed 5-0 by Manchester City in the third round of the FA Cup. The board and fans were of course disappointed, but everyone understood that we were beaten by a better side. For me, this was more depressing than the defeat: The fact that nobody seemed to really care that we lost.

I don't even know if there's much else worth mentioning really. We reached the 1st knockout round of the Champions League (which was all the board wanted us to achieve), but we got drawn against Barcelona and so naturally were defeated 2-0 over the two legs. Meanwhile, in the nine league games left of the season after that we performed pretty poorly and won just four of them and we finished the season in fifth.

The board was happy and the fans were accepting, but I was dejected as hell. I entered the summer months seriously considering my position at the club and dreaming of being at a title winning side. However, before making any decisions there was something big to look forward to and focus on...