Southampton: Preparing for The Championship

Hello everyone and welcome back to my Football Manager Story which this time will update you on all the activity following our promotion in dramatic fashion to The Championship last season.

May 2011:

Following the exciting end to the season the players went on a well deserved break whilst at St. Mary’s I began planning for life in The Championship. We received a parachute payment of £325,000 from the Premier League but it was too early to look for other players as I had no idea what our transfer/salary budget would be and I currently had no money to work with.

We also signed a new kit sponsor deal that will bring in some additional revenue.

Until the meeting with the board I decided to get out my three ring binder, a pencil and buy myself a coffee to aid the process of reviewing the team. I spilt the players into two groups based on my Assistant Managers recommendations those being “Above and below 3 stars”.

Three and Above:

Below Three:

Some of these players below hardly featured last season and will tried to be sold or released though I can immediately see I should be looking for a new goalkeeper of two!

June 2011:

The month was long and hot but finally the meeting with the board arrived to determine this season expectations. The day began with a hefty sum of money from TV rights which topped almost £3 million. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from the board and was surprised by their packages on offer.

***I accidently clicked confirm so ended up with this having meant to go for top half finish***

The new seasons’ fixtures were announced shortly after the meeting and we will open our campaign away to Derby County though the League Cup will feature in there somewhere.

The bookies give us a fair chance at promotion too!

July 2011:

With the money side of things organized I set about replacing some of those “below 3 star” players with the objective of bringing in most of the new faces before our pre-season campaign began at home to Woking.

The goalkeeper situation was quite troublesome so after much searching and rejections I settled on two players to fill this role. My new starter will be former Ipswich player Brian Murphy with the back-up being Elliot Parish from Aston Villa, Both were picked up on a free transfer.

The back four was my next area of focus and I picked up two players from Stoke City. Left back Carl Dickinson was released on a free and I paid £675,000 for central defender Andrew Davies. Gavin Gunning at Blackburn also caught my eye and he was acquired for £475,000.

In the right back position Javan Vidal returned to St Mary’s as a permanent player having been released by Man City and will be backed up by Richard Ekersley who we acquired from Burnley.

In the middle of the park I brought in Connor Clifford on a season long loan from Chelsea and to the delight of the fans snapped up Slovenian international Dalibor Stevanovic on a free transfer.

With Lallana, Puncheon and the up and coming Chamberlain already on my flanks I felt the need to add just one player here and that was Tom Cleverley who we signed for a season long loan from Man United.

As I had already decided on The Manchelona being my formation for the season which operates with a single striker I brought in on loan Cedric Bakambu from Man City after selling 29 year old Rickie Lambert to Wigan. Bakambu will rotate with Guly do Prado and Lee Barnard.

After all the deals had been finalized I felt that a pretty good job had been done in managing both the transfer and wage budgets which leaves some room for any unforeseen emergency.

Here then is the full squad (at the time of writing) roughly split between Defence and Offence.

Transfer Summary:

Pre-Season Results:

We had six games arranged for the summer and they all went exceedingly well winning them all and conceeding just one goal along the way at that was from a free kick against Woking. The Championship will not be so easy but at least morale is high going into the start of the season.

Well that concludes this update and many thanks for taking the time to read it. My next one will not be as quick as I’m back to a full week having taken a few days off from life in «big business».

If you haven’t already please feel free to vote for my next team which will feature in FM 2012…only 4 weeks to go!!

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