A Football Manager Career

36: Beating Troy

My domestic double was enough for me to once again be above Troy in the rankings. And, if that wasn't enough, the press had been right and our victory over United saw the end of his five-year reign and he was sacked on the 23rd May. I don't want to make this stage of my career a complete obsession with doing better than Troy... but... On the 8th July I replaced him at Manchester United.

Obviously the first thing I wanted to do was tap into United's vast wealth to sign my men from Barcelona. However, there was an issue. Part of my job was to adhere to the strict club vision and to be true to United's club culture. On the whole this was completely fine by me as they had a desire to develop players using the club's youth system and to play entertaining football. However, something else that was required was to not sign players over the age of 30. Broenland was now 34 and my beloved Antonio Celenza was 32. However much I wanted them, I had promised in my interview to stick to the club code and so I was unable to sign them. Not yet, anyway. Maybe if we had a fantastic season and everyone loved me by next summer than I might be able to sneak Celenza in under the radar... but there was no chance of me doing so in my first window. And, as much as I had to admit it, they were now in their twilight years and sadly neither were probably the sort of player that could now transform a side anyway. 

So, as those two were annoyingly out of the picture, I instead first looked at the actual United squad to see what was needed. This is of course in reality the better way round of doing things, but you can't blame me for wanting to work with the lads who had brought me such huge success and knew my system inside out.

What quickly became clear was that United were incredibly top heavy. I have always favoured one striker in my teams and United had four out and out strikers all of whom had high values and were on wages north of two-hundred thousand a week. For any team at any time, this is ridiculous. Even if I started two strikers that would mean we had over half a million a week of wages sat on the bench – before bonuses. That was almost as sickening as the disgustingly high fees I'd had to pay for bad players whilst at Beijing! So, like I had often done in my career, it was time to be ruthless and to sell sell sell! It wasn't just that the team had too much money invested in strikers, but that the squad was bloated. So much so that there wasn't actually space for me to sign anyone without selling anyway because of the registration rules. I don't want to bash Troy just for the sake of it... but clearly he was a man without much of a grasp of finances and squad development! I mean, let's face it, he was sacked after all and what sort of manager goes and gets himself sacked?

But anyway, back to the job at hand. To my delight we managed to get quite a lot of interest in the listed players almost immediately and we received some quite tasty offers. Most were well below the values estimated listed by my staff, but those figures seemed ridiculous to me anyway. Who would pay ninety million for a 32-year-old striker on the transfer list? That's just delusional dreaming and the inflation that comes from a player being at Manchester United. We did, however, manage to get quite a few players shifted for a few tasty fees and, unlike with a past employer I won't name, I was getting 100% of the money. A deal that I was particularly thrilled with was to get fifty-seven from Bayern Munich for the striker I had provisionally listed as my fourth choice anyway. We also managed to get forty millin for a 33-year-old winger with woefully low pace and acceleration stats. It was like the Wenger days of Arsenal: teams buying our players just because they were United players and ignoring their actual quality. There was about to be a fair few Hlebs and Songs out in the world and I was loving it, even if I felt a little guilty about how annoyed their fans would become in a couple of months time.

With the nice and steady outgoings, we were able to start looking at signing my first players and it was clear that my main investment needed to be at the back and in central midfield. Whilst I had always favoured the incredible asymmetric tactics before, it hadn't worked particularly well at Arsenal and I think that's because teams overran us in the centre of the pitch with England being obsessed with packing teams with central and defensive midfielders. To my disgust it became clear that I had to do the same and so I swapped to a 4321 with three central midfielders – the formation I had actually started my time with at China u23 and developed with them.