Season 1 - A New Start

From today I am starting a new Football Manager save/blog to follow, and I have decided to start with Newcastle United to keep the league and players familiar to most, as well as a little bit different from using my own team in Arsenal. So let's get straight into it and see what we are beginning with.

The Squad

First Team Squad

I have chosen to go for the classic 4-3-3 formation, which seems to fit in best players of Newcastle from the get go, however the players outside of the bench are mainly deadwood to me and will need to move as many of them on. The only ones I'm looking at potentially keeping around is the Greek keeper who I won't even try and spell his name, Jordon Hackett as a young left back with plenty of potential and William Osula who will be backup to my strikers or potentially go out on loan. This means we have quite a lot of change that we are going to need to happen to get the squad size and competition where I want it to be.

Under 21's

Under 18's

Unfortunately both our youth teams only have a few good potential players, but they're nowhere near ready to play at first team level either so we can't strengthen from there either this season. However it's worth remembering some of these players are about instead of blocking their pathways with multiple signings when we can develop these and get them in a few years time. I am mainly looking at Rory Finnegan in the under 18's who looks quite the youth player for us, so I'll be monitoring his development over the next few years and see if we can give him any cup games or minutes when he hits 16/17 and look to loan him out to good enough leagues around that time too.

Squad Planner/Depth

So, we've worked out a bunch of players we want to get rid off, so once I've removed them from the squad planner I can see where our team is weak and strong, both immediately and in depth. So from this I am working out which positions I want to focus on signing and whether it's a first team player or a backup option for now with potential to move into the starting role. So as we have a lot of change wanting to happen, budgets are going to be tight and we may not cover everything we need to straight away, which means January could also be an important window for us for buying and selling! Especially when we're only starting with a budget of £30,000,000 and the players we're trying to sell, not necessarily too valuable.

The positions I'm looking at signing are a first team advanced playmaker to improve on Joe Willock, after that it'll all be younger players to create competition and hopefully develop into first teamers over the next few years. The positions I want those players in are the Left Winger, the Striker, The Keeper, The Centre Back and finally our Defensive Midfielder.

The Transfers

So lets start with the players that we sold, as you could see from the initial squad there was a bunch of players we needed to move on to remove wages and potential unhappy players due to not playing. They wasn't going to be too valuable either so the extra money raised wasn't going to be great, but we did manage to get rid of the below:

Mark Gillespie to West Brom for £1,900,000

John Ruddy to West Brom for £145,000

Rodrigo Vilca to Amiens SC for £205,000

Matt Targett to Nottingham Forest for £13,000,000

Jamal Lewis to Wolves for £4,300,000

Emil Krafth to Fiorentina for £6,000,000

This gave us a little bit extra money and moved our budget up to around the £50,000,000 mark for outright spending, so to cover the amount of players we wanted to bring in, I'm going to have to use bonuses and instalments to try spread the money out as much as possible.

So now for the players in, straight away the main money spender was going to be our advanced playmaker for to be a starter straight away, and I spent BIG. When I say big, I mean it was the record transfer for Newcastle United, it was the record transfer for a player of this nationality and now we have a lot of pressure on our new player to live up to this price tag. We spent £95,000,000 by using instalments and potential add on's which could also raise it up to £115,000,000 to bring in Florian Wirtz! This is most of our budget gone already and making the additional signings looking a little difficult, so we may have to reassess in January if there's anyone else we could sell on to increase funds to cover the other positions.

Florian Wirtz

We did however with a little left manage to spend £4,000,000 on a young French winger from FC Lorient to provide a bit of cover for our left side and he has plenty of potential to grow into, the exact sort of player we are looking for for the other positions. We have signed Theo Le Bris, who looks like he could end up brilliant if we manage him correctly, and also can play backup and cup games this season to help us out with the depth. Plus being so cheap, after a few years if he isn't cutting it we should be able to make a decent profit on him.

Theo Le Bris

These were the only 2 players we could bring in this transfer window due to budgets and how much went on Wirtz, however we have set up our scouting to look for young players from 16 different nations to try uncover us some more gems before other teams have discovered them. We are scouting: England, Spain, France, Norway, Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal, USA, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Argentina, Scotland and Saudi Arabia. Fingers crossed as the seasons progress we're able to pull some young stars from these countries before their values shoot right up and become impossible to sign.

The Games

Fixtures

So with it being the start of the season, we've got our preseason to go and then we will focus on the first 3 games of the season as we will be playing up to the end of the transfer window in this episode. I will show the results a bit further down, but lets just say that the friendlies were a mixed bag. Not the ideal build up to the start of my first season but fortunately we had no injuries going into the start of the season so we were able to start with our first 11 straight away.

Chelsea 1 - 0 Newcastle

This game did not go to plan at all, within the first 10 minutes Isak was injured, and then by the half hour mark we had also lost Bruno and Lewis Hall to injuries as well. However even with those 3 going off early we were still edging it as the slightly better team. However our finishing wasn't great and despite creating more chances, we didn't take any and Nkunku took the only goal of the game for Chelsea to give them a 1-0 win. There was optimism created from the game, as Chelsea are a strong team to start against and despite losing 3 of our starting 11 in 30 minutes, we still matched them all the way through, and maybe if Isak wasn't one of those injuries we would have had a natural finisher to take a chance or two.

Newcastle 2 - 0 Spurs

That optimism from the first game was very nearly stolen from us, as within the first minute of the game Callum Wilson went off injured, leaving us with no recognised striker in our team as Osula has gone out on loan. We moved Gordon off the left wing to up front, and played with Barnes and Murphy either side and fortunately for us, Spurs are as bad as they are in real life. Barnes ran the show, starting on the right wing and beating his defender before cutting back for a tap in for Gordon to score the first competitive goal of my managerial reign. Only beaten by Murphy receiving the ball on the right wing, knocking it across for it to fall to Barnes to add his first goal of the campaign to it as well. In the end a comfortable 2-0 victory and we're up and running for the season.

Aston Villa 2 - 0 Newcastle

However in the final game of today, we suffered our 2nd away defeat in as many games. Another game where we were matching the other team for most parts of the game, so much so that in the first half we were dominating up until the half hour mark, where we went to sleep for the end of the half and conceded twice. First Kamara took advantage from a corner where our defender let him run free, and then later Wirtz gave the ball away to McGinn who put the ball on a plate for Watkins to score against us and make it 2-0. In the second half we came back in and created a few chances ourselves, but never really looked like scoring any of them. On a positive note, we have got half hour back into Isak so hopefully we can keep him fit and he will be scoring for fun for us soon.

This leaves as after 3 games down in 12th place, not the ideal start we wanted but with plenty of time to turn this round there's no reason why we can't be competing for the Champions League places. We're going to need to keep people fit and we're going to need better away performances that we've started with, but lets see how we get on!

Next time we'll be playing the below fixtures.