Stade Malherbe Caen: Player Transfers pre 2010/2011

Hi Again! This is the much anticipated transfer update.. well it’s at least my favourite time of the season and I can spend hours browsing through several shortlist/player searches to make sure I don’t miss any good buys.

First up is telling you the Transfer kitty for the season and my teams expectations.

I chose a mid-table finish and raised the budget from 9,25 to 10,5 and the wade budget also increased with 75k or so.

I decided that I’d do good with some sort of strategy before setting of. You can only have 4 foreign players in your squad. I don’t think African players counts as Foreigner due to all french colonies in that region. They usually do have double nationalites anyway but i saw this one of my signings who was from Burkina Faso and has Ivorian nationality aswell. The Ivory Coast used to be a french colony (Cotê D’Ivoire). Maybe it’s the same for all African nations, I’m not sure.

• So my strategy was this. Sign foreigners in pairs or exclusivly from one foregin nation. This makes adaption of players go smoother, especially since i buy players to put in the starting line-up. Don’t have time for blending in and starting matches from the bench and so forth.
• Next up was, try to buy french talking players. I had to replace a lot of players to build a competitive squad in ligue 1 and speaking the language would help the gelling process of the whole team.
• Last point — Buy some experienced starting players. I tend to go with young prodigys at the age of 17-20 so by adding a few good experienced players in the age span of 28-31 i get some great teachers and also balance out the age of the squad. A young squad is always good but it could lead to a much too inexperienced team, not being able to cope with pressure from the bigger teams.

This is how it went:

12 new players in total is a small disaster for any team, in the sense of making them play well together in a short amount of time. But having followed my strategy pretty well i got 4 new foreign players, selling of the old ones like Eluchans and Barzola. 2 Colombians who you got the chance to guess on — James Rodriguez and Fredy Guarin. 2 Argentinians in Luciano Figeuroa and Fabian Monzon. These all speak spanish and can converse with each other, while Guarin knows basic french already from his time with St-Etienne.

Other french talking players were Koné, Kakuta, Diakhité and Morientes. That leaves me with just Verkhovtsev (Who speaks ukrainian with Kryvtsov), Görlitz and the two italians Verratti and Russotto. Andrea Rossi is already in the club and will help out with these two. Görlitz is the only one I’m worrying about but he was a free transfer anyway.

That’s pretty sweet, I’m also happy with the age factor of the squad though I could’ve balanced it better between attack and midfield. I have a lot of youngsters in midfield and only old Strikers. Rodriguez, Yatabaré, Guarin, Russotto in midfield gives me an average age of  21,25. My strikers are all above 28 yrs old, but routine is always needed in attack and I’m not to worried about this.

Here’s some of the players in picture form

Marco Verratti, Morientes and Monzon wasn’t shown. Verratti is just 17 but is already pretty good and will do good as a substitute for the AMC position. Morientes will act as a 4th striker and will probably only play a handful of matches. Fabian Monzon is a good left back but I’m sure you all now him by now and found it unnecessary to show him. He’s just as good/bad as he usually is in the game. He’s not a great fullback defensivly, but he’s great in the crossing and dead ball situations. He also has the pace to get him into the situations were he is in need of those qualities.

As for my new starting line-up I’ll probalby go with this. Oh I almost forgot. I didn’t by a new Gk, which might have been a big mistake. I couldn’t find a cheap and good goalie so I kept Thebeaux between the sticks and thanked him for the good work he’s been doing. I can only hope that he keeps it up.

                        Thebeaux

Görlitz    Kryvtsov   Diakhité    Monzon                                        

                           Guarín

Russotto                                     Rodriguez

                         Yatabaré

             Dady                 Figueroa

Bench: Perquis (Gk), Rossi (LB,RB), Verkhovtsev (CB,DMC), Kakuta (ML,AMC), Verratti (AMC), Deroin (MR,DMC), Koné (ST)

Well that’s that! I had 6 pre-season friendlies, mostly against lower level french teams.We had one test against Panathanaikos but we won it rather easily with 3-1. Others scorelines were 5-0,6-0,3-1,6-0,6-0.

Cheers,

Majk