Blyth Spartans FM 2009 Story – The Third Season Begins

So here we are, ready for the third season with the Blyth Spartans in my Football Manager 2009 story. In only two seasons we climbed from Blue Square North to League Two, winning the Blue Square Premier championship last season. But beside that the biggest achievement was that after winning promotion to League Two the club turned professional, they won’t call us part-timers anymore :)

The board expected us to fight against relegation in League Two but I told them that we could finish in the top half of the table. That tricked them into giving me a bigger wage budget, the transfer budget remained the same but still, it was the first time I had a transfer budget above… zero!

I sold and loaned out 14 out of the 27 players I had in the squad and I got some money for them too. I considered that they are not prepared to play in League Two although some of them were good prospects when they came to Blyth.

I added 10 players to the 13 that remained in my squad, two strikers, two attacking midfielders, three central midfielders, a versatile midfielder that can cover all roles in midfield, a centre back and a right back.

The centre back that I chose is Clayton McDonald from Millwall, a very tall player with decent pace. Along with the three centre backs that I already had I think that we’ll build a decent defense.

Swedish midfielder Fredrik Sjokvist is the first regen player in my first team squad. He’s only 19 years old and very aggressive, I hope he’ll gain a lot of balls in midfield.

The first non-EU player in my Blyth squad is Oswaldo Chaurant, 26 years old versatile midfielder from Venezuela. I was very happy when they gave him the work permit, I think he will be very important for us because he is quite skillful and he can play in very role in midfield, CM, AM, AMR and AML.

Last but not least, one of the strikers. Laszlo Csongor, a player that I knew from real-life Romanian football, he plays for a good second division team and I signed him because he’s a hard working striker that fights for every ball. He also has decent skills for a striker, I hope he’ll score a lot of goals for us.

I also brought in 6 more coaches and a couple of scouts to make the non playing staff more competitive. Unfortunately with all these signings I went well over the annual wage budget. The wages also went up because most of my players had a 25% promotion increase clause. It’s a difficult financial situation and the only way out will be a good run in the cup competitions to get some prize money. Or maybe sell one of the players for a huge amount for us, more that 100 K. I have to figure out something…

As usual the bookmakers don’t think we have many chances to win promotion. Also the media predicted that we would finish… last. I’m used to these predictions by now, no problem.

We had 5 friendly games this summer and we won all five! OK, four of them were against weaker opponents, but we managed to beat Liverpool Reserves 1-0, a team with the likes of Voronin in the first eleven!

The preparations for the new season are over now, we’re in a difficult financial position and we have a tough season ahead of us. We’ll have to fight for every point right from the start of the season and we’ll see at halfway how high we could be able to go. From the football that we shown in the friendly games I have some small hopes of fighting for a place in the top half of the table, maybe even for a promotion playoff place. We shall see, stay tuned to find out!