Plymouth Argyle: Season 3, Preparing for The Championship

Welcome back friends to My Football Manager Story which left off last time with a decision to be made as I received a very tempting job offer from Leicester. To be honest my finger almost clicked on the accept button but after considering Ana’s passionate comment for me to stay in my last post I pulled away at the last second and clicked reject instead. So I’m staying in Devon with The Pilgrims and I hope it’s the right decision.

Season Three:

So with the job offer out of the way it was time to knuckle down and build for the new season in The Championship. That would require some money of course which started to arrive in early June with a new kit sponsorship deal.

The board announced the initial budget for the season which was about 10% of what had been on offer from Leicester but was indeed a significant jump from anything that had been previously presented.

With the £2million in hand I went after a couple of Polish youth internationals that had tremendous potential and were real bargains as well. Just like their English counter parts they had no intention of coming to Plymouth. That left June being a somewhat empty and long month with the exception of Conor Coady whom I secured on loan from Liverpool for another season.

The last week of the month began with the club receiving a tidy sum of money in TV revenue and the same afternoon I met with the board to set out the season’s expectations.

I don’t think we have a particularly strong squad for this level of football so chose avoid relegation which turned out to be less money the the initial budget.

Aside from the budget the board capitulated to some earlier demands and increased our scouting range to continental Europe.

***Authors note

I’d just recently added the Dutch league to the game profile so hopefully that will prove beneficial.

June 29th saw another job offer this time from Southampton which I turned down, but again was tempting.

July 2013

The first day of July saw the arrival of James Wallace who was released by Everton whom I’m really excited about as I feel he can switch between both to box and a holding midfielder.

Our biggest transfer fee to date of £ 425,000 was spent on Blackburn reserve Josh Morris who arrived just a few days before and will play on the left flank as Bhasera will drop into the left back position.

I had to give this one some extended thought but in the end did sign Kudus Oyenuga who was released by Tottenham and felt he would add value to the team despite not playing that much for us last season when on loan.

By the end of the first week of July I shattered the Plymouth record transfer fee by paying Liverpool £600,000 for American ML Mike Pelosi who will battle with Josh Morris for that starting left flank position.

Our first two pre-season games, though not fierce opposition went extremely well with wins against Barnstaple and Stockport. I was happy to see Oyenuga score in both games.

Following those back to back wins two more players arrived at Home Park. The first was goalkeeper Aaron McCarey who I paid £200,000 to Wolves and will back up Loris Karis between the sticks. The second was a rather interesting arrival in the form of MR Ilyas Zeytulaev who is from Uzbekistan and has by far the best all round attributes in the entire squad. Even with 24 caps for his country this new player represents a gamble as he doesn’t speak English!

Kudus Oyenuga scored twice in our next game against Aachen but an injury picked up in the match will keep him out for the start of the season. We played very well against a Spurs reserve side led by Jermaine Defoe up front but it was our own Sanmi Odelusi who captured the headlines with a tidy brace as we won 2-1. The Rovers game was too soon afterwards and ended in a bland 0-0 draw and that was followed by an inspired Truro team whom we eventually dispatched thanks to Odelusi and Boateng.

Before our final warm up game of the summer there was yet another arrival from the distance land of Uzbekistan and that was striker Alexander Geynrikh who has won 67 caps for his country. Lets’ hope he becomes Alexander the Great at Plymouth!

In the end I spent £1.4 million and adjusted the budgets a couple of times along the way to compensate for salaries. All the outgoing players at least so far did not provide any revenue for the club as they were all released on a free transfer.

Finances:

They are not in too bad a shape and are at least in the black for now though I did spend far more on players than I originally intended back at the end of May.

We finished off pre –season with a comfortable win over Newport County which featured a spectacular 40 yard free kick by Simon Walton to open the scoring and a powerful drive into the corner of the net by winger Zeytulaev.

Plymouth Squad: 2013 / 2014 Campaign

The bookies don’t give us much of a chance in The Championship and feel we are in for a long season at the foot of the table.

We start the season off with a very difficult home game against Bristol City and aside from Crawley the rest of the line-up makes very tough reading as well including two teams who I turned down job offers from!

That concludes this report and I hope you like the blue font color and the use of hyperlinks for the player profiles. Thanks for taking the time to read this and I look forward to your comments.