New FM 2011 Story: Southampton

Hello everyone and I am delighted to bring you a new Football Manager Story featuring South coast club Southampton. I hope that this new adventure will be as entertaining for you as my previous Cambridge story and again my apologies for the somewhat rash decision to end that story early. Still, out with the old and in with the new.

Southampton are very familiar to all of you so I won’t go into the details of the club, their ground and so on other than to say I take over as they mark their 125th anniversary. In terms of objectives I hope to take the club to the Premier League.

On meeting the board their expectation is that the club wins promotion and in order to fulfill that I was handed £500,000 as a transfer budget and £105,000 for salaries.

Southampton look to have a pretty strong squad but there’s always room for improvement and I decided to build from the back. My first signing was a central defender as I had an aging CB whose pace and acceleration was below 8 so Brazilian Eric Botteghin joins us from Dutch side FC Zwolle. I spent nearly all my transfer budget on this player and there was much competition for him especially from Spanish clubs. As my current best central defender Jose Fonte is Portuguese he should pair up nicely with Eric.

This time around I’ve made a departure from a flat back four as you will see later and so I needed a RWB and acquired one on loan from Man City. Javan Vidal is no stranger to the FM aficionado’s.

With wing backs I was going to need someone solid to sit in front of the two CB’s and help support the defence. In fact I feel I did a good job in finding two anchormen to plug this hole, one from Iceland and the other from France and here are their profiles.

With several options already available to me in midfield I felt it was unnecessary to buy a player but I did loan Jordan Mutch from Birmingham for the season and he can rotate in and out as required.

On the wings I found a decent player on my U’18’s squad and put him right in the first team. I’ve already received offers for Alex from Chelsea which I’ve rejected and have signed this 16 year old to a new contract.

On the left wing I already had Adam Lallana but then noticed that Jason Puncheon was on loan which I immediately terminated as he’s too good to be playing for anyone else in my opinion.

So here’s the complete look at the transfer situation prior to the start of the season. You will notice Fred Sears on the list whose loan I terminated almost immediately. Although he’s got great attributes he’d just be one striker too many.

Tactic:

As I mentioned earlier I’ve changed my tactic for this story which I’ve lovingly called “The Jarren” as it’s somewhat based on a combination of Johnny’s and Darren’s current tactics. The formations and set up is a little more daring than I would normally go with but as you will see from pre-season it wasn’t too bad and was very entertaining to watch. Hopefully this will carry on in League One action!!

Results:

So, as I said I’m pretty happy with the way things went and even the loss to Ipswich is I think somewhat misleading as we really should have won that game based on our performance.

Fixtures:

The season will begin away to Charlton followed by a League Cup encounter with Barnet.

Finances:

Things are looking quite healthy with a very tidy bank balance and so far the board appear to be unperturbed that we are £10,000 over the weekly salary budget!

That completes my first update of this new story and I look forward to having you follow along and reading your comments.

Kevin.