New Football Manager 2011 Story: And the weakest team in England is…

The poll is now closed, big thanks to all of you wonderful friends that took the time to cast your votes and decide which way my Football Manager 2011 career would go. There were no less than 541 votes, a fantastic response that really puts pressure on me to deliver a great story. As you can see from the right sidebar the option that gathered the most votes was «the weakest team in England», 149 votes or 28 percent of the total.

The majority decides, that’s the democratic rule, but since I want to make as many of you happy I decided that once this story will be finished I will automatically go for the second placed (Univertistatea Craiova) and then for the third (Arsenal) and so on. I guess it’s just a small consolation for those who voted for other options than the winning one but I don’t think there’s more I could do about it.

And now let’s see which is the weakest team in England! I checked all the teams in Blue Square North and South, I also had a look in the game database through the editor and I can tell you that I found a club who stands out of the crowd: Vauxhall Motors FC! They have the lowest possible reputation among the English clubs, they have a tiny stadium, no transfer money and a financial balance of -75,000 pounds! Their stadium, Rivacre Park, has just 266 seats but there’s plenty of room for people to stand behind the ad billboards as you can see from the pictures below :)

I also selected the Romanian leagues as view-only when I started the game, hopefully I’ll be able to find some good cheap players in my homeland again. To make things even more difficult I turned on the «player attribute masking» option, that will make it quite tricky to find new players to transfer.

And then I picked the club, Vauxhall Motors, predicted to finish last in Blue Square North! It will be interesting to see how we’ll manage to fare when we’ll meet my beloved Blyth Spartans :)

You can see a brief background of the club in the screen capture below, it was established in 1963 in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, and it was originally the works team of the car manufacturer Vauxhall as they opened a new car plant in town. The best player that ever came out of the club is Stoke City’s Danny Collins.

Here’s a nice picture of the town, looks fairly quiet… That’s before I’ll manage to bring Real Madrid to play here :)

Now let’s move to the actual team. I asked the assistant manager to compile a team report and I was quite surprised to see so many shiny gold stars next to the player names. There seemed to be a big problem in the centre backs area but still, the report looked much better than I would have expected.

But then I checked the assistant manager’s profile (he’s a player too you know…) and I discovered that his judging player ability and potential attributes are just a bit higher than my mother’s! I guess I should be looking for a new assistant manager…

The board kindly announced that they expect us to fight bravely against relegation. I told them we could achieve a top half finish and they generously gave me… nothing more!

I moved some of the weakest players to the reserves team while offering them out to other clubs and I was quite surprised to see one of those players confronting me about that! Here’s the nice chat I had with the lad, he came in as a lion and left as a scared puppy!

The club announced me that there was some interest for a press conference so I went to the club to meet the press. Well, «the press» was represented by just one single journalist! He had more than one question though :)

After the lonely press conference I checked the staff that I had at the club and I found quite a lonely atmosphere in there too: just an assistant manager, a goalkeeping coach, a physio and a scout… That’s all the club can afford at the moment so I’ll have to do what I can with these people…

I organized an intra-squad friendly right away to see the players in action and I have to say I was not impressed at all. The Reserves team, made entirely out of amateur players, had us 2-0 down at half time! I also discovered that we seem to have a buffoon for a goalkeeper… No, not Italian keeper Gianluigi Buffon, but a true clown dressed as a goalkeeper. Overall the lads seem to look alright all dressed up as football players but there seems to be just one thing that causes them problems on the pitch: the damn ball!

It seems that I have a lot of work to do in order to make a football team out of these lads… I’ll be trying to grab as many free transfers as I can but the wage budget isn’t too generous either. Anyway, it’s a huge challenge and I hope you will enjoy reading the story as much as I’ll enjoy playing it and writing about it. Thanks for reading, see you later with a more detailed post about the transfer activity!