Varbergs BOIS — Preseason 2025

Back for another update of my story? Thought so ;)

If you missed it, last update was purely taking you through the ins and outs of my adventure with Varbergs BOIS so far. Hopefully it gave you a good insight into club at present, and highlighted a few things that were problematic in trying to get my BOIS to the next level.

Last time I left you (whether you read on the Forum, or the summary of the last post) we had just finished the 2024 season with a Swedish super cup, Europa League, Swedish premier league and Swedish cup in the bag. Domestically, we were looking forward to the new season and rummaging through the sack-fulls of under-18 talent that lay in the transfer market. We also had a First round Champions League knockout tie with Liverpool to look forward to! Varberg’s furthest stint in Europe yet… All to play for then eh? Lets get started!

And we will start with the pre-season transfers:

We will start with the ‘Outs’.
Sebastian Johansson and Mikael Dyrestam were surplus to requirements at the club and promptly released before I even had chance to post their profiles up in the first post!
Samir was loaned out to Öster for a season. I thought with him now being ‘Home Grown’, I would let him have the chance to prove himself in the first team of another club. At the moment, he is just about the last midfielder I would introduce into the First XI so fingers crossed he improves!
Smalling then went to Dundee for £170k. I realised that now Luciano was fit, I didnt need him in my squad anymore and I happily offloaded the free agent for a profit. Odd thing was he said he was sad to leave and that I had been a great mentor? He had been with us for 6 months?! Typical fickle united fan ;)

As stated in the previous post, our main man in the midfield Bruno had stated his desire to leave the club. Obtained him on a free transfer last season, he was one of our star men that helped us to an historic Europa League victory. Unfortunately, he wanted a new challenge so I offered him out to other clubs for £15mil. Tried to be sneaky as his MFRC (Minimum Fee Release Clause)* was £10.5mil but Palmeiras didn’t fall for it and they quickly snapped him up.
Still, it was a great deal all-round and I was up nearly £11mil!

* Abbreviation is purely because it has been so much of a pain in the past and been such a large part of my transfer disappointments, I had too as I know it will come up again. Watch this space ;)

So now onto my ‘Ins’!
Kaká

Only the one this transfer window and it couldn’t have been a much better deal. Kaká will join us on a free transfer! With a starting value of £4.7mil and an MFRC of over £17mil, we could have another Bruno on our hands and make a large profit out of the ex-Cruzeiro man. Very versatile, he will be challenging Ronaldo for that left wing spot.

«So is that it for the transfers?» I hear you cry!

Well no, you would be wrong.. Fact is, we have a couple more new recruits that I need to tell you about!

Paulo

Here is the first one then. Touted as the new ‘Naldo’, Paulo has great attributes for a youngster his age. Snapped him up for a cool £1.7mil, and it was easy to see why. Doesn’t come till next season though which benefits me I suppose as he is in the hands of a team’s academy that really know how to nurture talent. Hopefully he would have come on leaps and bounds until then though and I am excited to see how well he develops.

Joãozinho

Again, touted by the media as the next ‘Naldo’ this 15 year old has some talent. He wont be arriving in Sweden till he is 18, but the investment of 900k for his services until then are justified. Again, excited at his potential to improve and at such a young age, he has bags of it!

Hopefully we will be getting a Naldo-esque type defender with atleast one of these lads! Will just have to wait and see..

Go to the next page to see how we started the season..

Although I wont bore you with the friendly results, I would like to say that they were very important in getting our lads back to full match fitness when they came back at the start of February. I, however, didn’t realise this and before I could do anything we were only two weeks away from a match with Liverpool at Anfield.
Bummer, bad management. Sorry.

Excuses out of the way then, and we can concentrate on the game in hand. A first-leg match against the mighty Liverpool in the first round of the Champions League knockout stages, very tasty. My lads were fired up and wanted to get a decent result to kick start our season off.

Not exactly as I planned. In all fairness though, they completely outclassed us and I was surprised it ended up being only 2-0 in the end because it could have been plenty more. Didn’t help as well that Kemal got sent off as we were starting to get back into the game :(. Still, it wasn’t impossible to turn around a 2 goal deficit so I was quietly confident being at home..

Oh. So, we crashed out of the Champions League this year in the first knockout round! A 1-1 draw wasn’t nearly enough to dispose of Liverpool, even though we took the lead just after the half when Bastos rounded the keeper. Luciano was injured before half time and this may have impacted on the defense a little as straight after the restart, there was an almighty lapse in concentration at the back to feed in Galvan.
Still, I was mightily proud of our players for coming this far in the competition and coming top of the group was the cherry on top. Got a nice sum of £2.5mil for the adventure too which is brilliant and will help towards the cost of the new players and facilities! Happy days :)

Maybe we could spare our blushes with a Swedish super cup trophy?

Oh and we did just that, retaining it in style with a 3-0 victory over Hammarby. William Olsson with the pick of the goals, a brilliant 30-yarder that flew straight into the top corner. It might have been a bit of a nothing trophy, but you get 3x more prize money than you do with the Swedish cup. Weird I know..

Anyway, that raised the lads spirits just in time for another season of the league. I was looking forward to see how well we could cope with Bruno being sold off. Totally dominated the league with him last year and i’m sure the defense can hold tight while Kaká can find his feet. Here are the results in March:

Not bad in all fairness. Great win against Malmö helped us get off the mark, Kaká scoring on his league debut and a brace from Adam Lecomte eased us to victory.
This was before drawing 1-1 away at Mjälby. They are frankly my bogey team along with Elfsborg when playing away from home. Not sure why, but they play like Barcelona every time and always grab something out of the game. Adam Lecomte again with the goal to grab a point.
To round it off though, we thumped Örebro a good 7-0. Absoluetly brilliant that match with goals from 7 different scorers. Hope this isn’t a one off and is the kind of scoreline we can continue on producing!

Onto the news then..

Only the one piece this update and it was to do with the stadium upgrade. With this, our new capacity is just under 25,000 which is great as ill be getting just over £1mil every time I fill the stadium. Pretty decent as I didn’t have to ask them to upgrade, i think the chairman knows that I would like to see everything maxed out and i’m glad he shares my ambition!

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So onto Uruguay now..
A couple of results to show you in the qualifiers:

Peru up first then! A 1-0 win which flattered them really as we had over 20 shots on target throughout the game. Was really pleased with the way the lads performed though, especially since Peru, at the time, were only 3 points behind us. Next was the turn of Bolivia..

Easily dispatched in a comfortable 3-0 victory. If we keep this up for the next couple of games, we will be securing our qualification to the World Cup! Cant wait :)

The table as it stands on 1st April:

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Alright, thats it for this episode. The next one will be after the Champions League qualifiers in August, when we will see if the new Brazilian Adriano will have made an impact from the 1st July.

Till next time then, Hej då :D