Major League Soccer

Hello friends and welcome to the wonderful world of Major League Soccer known simply as the MLS. As I live not far from the home ground of Toronto FC I thought that it might be interesting to provide an insight as to how the MLS works as I really don’t know myself as well as adding something different in terms of content to this amazing Football Manager Story website.

I’m really going into this without any pre-planned structure though for sure this will not be in a story format as with my Cambridge United save, but  most likely informational postings every now and again. Naturally there will be the results, transfers and standings as I attempt to win the Major League title.

So, as for my team selection it’s Toronto FC of course and  in my manager profile I chose my nationality as Canadian which I am in real life, though I’m still British as well . As for the game set up along with the MLS I picked Mexico and Brazil as these other two leagues are realistic enough to ensure some continuity in this undertaking.

Toronto are in the Eastern Conference of the MLS which as you can see comprises of 8 teams with the same number in the Western section. The top two in each division progress to the play offs and then onto the MLS Final. There seems to be another competition called the MLS Cup which I believe the winner of enters something called the SuperLiga the following season though we will have to wait and see.

Toronto FC play their home games at BMO Field just west on the CN Tower and the downtown core. The rail link or GO Train is just 2 minutes walk from the north stand and Lake Ontario is naturally to the south of this compact and very noisy stadium. My home is about 10 miles or so to the east but I can easily get here on the train.

So enough of the background, let’s get on with the game which starts in January 2010 so a bit behind real time which means Vancouver is not included in the game. The first thing I did was set up some pre season friendlies as there was only one planned and to make it realistic all the games will be away from home as it’s freezing here in winter!

I will be using my Wrexham 1.3 tactic so I’ll be making sure my left flank of the field is strong and tight when reviewing the squad. Nick Garica my Assistant provided this team report to give me some transfer targets to look at but this is where it gets complicated.

On the team registration screen it provides the squad rules, a maximum of 26 players, 10 can be internationals, 5 can be Americans, then there’s Designated, Supplemental and Academy players…what??  I think I need a Masters’ Degree to work all this out.

The first thing I noticed when reviewing the team is that I have 10 Americans already so I guess I will have to offload five of them?

My coaching team was not too bad with the exception of Danny Dichio who agreed to mutual termination.

My transfer budget was only £30,000 so any new players will be most likely out of contract players. The temptation is to load up with Brazilians but I’m going to try and avoid that. The other thing is that you cannot offer players to clubs if you no longer need them. You can put them on the transfer list but if no one is tempted by them they are automatically waived at squad registration time so I’m going to lose some money on players. Best bet then is to sign out of contract players.

Here are the players I brought in.

I’ll just show you a couple of players for now and mybe the rest of them as the season goes along.

My starting ML is Brazilian Moreno and should do nicely for my left flank tactic.

Up front and on the left side too is this young Ecudorian.

My pre season games started in February which I’ll show the results later but whilst those were going on you are given a news item about  player registration.

As you can see I had two more internationals than the rules allowed but I was within the maximum squad size.

Next was the MLS draft but as I already had my quota of internationals and Americans I passed on the draft picks.

Next was the final roster

So I had to let go of some decent players to comply with the regulations and these were the players that I waived.

We got off to a very slow start in our pre season games and picked up several injuries along the way but finished strongly with a handsome win in Belgium against Westerlo

The season will kick off against rivals Columbus and our first home game will see Philadelphia visit BMO Field

So that’s it for now. This was quite a hard post to put together so I’ll do more player profiles next time. In the meanwhile thanks for reading and have a great weekend!