ML United - Season 2 - Mid-season update
Sad news: not a single default has retired.
Even Huylens, which was the bookmakers' favourite to be the first to wave us goodbye, chose to renew his contract for one year.
Financially we were in a decent place, with at least as many PES points needed to renew everyone's expired contract - and there were a few of them, including our money-hungry Minanda who at the age of 37 still believes he should get a massive raise. I gave it to him because secretly I'd be willing to pay Minanda whatever money he asked for, also because the rules of the challenge force me to renew every single contract. But mainly because he's King Minanda, the eternal number 10.
Because most of the expiring deals were from older players like Iouga, Zamenhof and Huylens, we got to save a few PES points too as they all asked for less expensive contracts. Nice to know that our defaults have some kind of self-awareness.
So no one retires, and I'm stuck with these 28 players for one more season.
I used the pre-season to focus on our training and I think I mentioned it before, the individual player training system (which I didn't know it even existed) is remarkable. Take El Moubarki for example: I focused heavily on his stamina (to adapt him better to the RWB role). This means that over the course of his training, the only Experience Points he gets are applied to the stamina stat...but here comes the best part: let's say all of his stats have currently 60 Experience Points, which makes him evolve all of his stats at the exact same pace. Because I focused on his stamina, now he has 70 E. Pts. for his stamina stat and 60 for every other stat, which makes him more likely in the future to develop his stamina a lot compared to his other stats, even after the end of pre-season training, and throughout his career.
You're able to recreate your players according to the plan you have for each of them, and just a single pre-season is likely to have impact for many years of ingame player evolution.
As the save progresses I'll find out exactly how this works out.
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The season began and for a while it looked like we never left Season One: we hardly got any points in the first matches. This time around it was even worse, for I couldn't single out any player who was playing at least at a decent level. Mind you, the players are exactly the same as last year, the strategy/tactics are the same, and even the starting eleven with which I finished last season remained unchanged.
A few matches in and there we were in same-old rock bottom, 8th place, dead-last. After half of the total number of fixtures was completed, this was our record:
8th - ML United - 5 pts - 1W / 2D / 4L : 9 goals scored / 12 conceded (4th best offense/worst defense)
Goals: 4 Sychev (Lokomotiv), Iversen (Rosenborg), 3 Burgic (AIK) 3 Burchet
Assists: Ruskin 3
We had as many losses in just half a season than in the whole of Season 1. It was that bad.
Throughout the first half of the season I had to come up with solutions to fight this obvious moment of crisis, particularly benching players who were underperforming. Players such as Giersen, Fouque, Ceciu and Burchet had barely played last season but I gave them a chance to take El Moubarki, Minanda, Libermann and Ordaz's roles. The striker duo Ordaz and Gutierrez barely played together, as Huylens, Castolo and Burchet took over.
Though my strategy doesn't include a winger role, I had previously discussed with
@Matt10 on this thread the fact that Burchet never quite seems to fit any team in any tactic, as he too was having issues with getting something out of him. I told him Burchet could be an interesting fit for the striker position if he played just a few minutes. As I was having trouble with finding some consistency in our striker duo - Ordaz and Gutierrez were doing horribly...-, I tried Burchet as a striker, often playing alongside either Hamsun or Gutierrez.
On the next four matches he scored three goals, which made him our top scorer by the time the winter transfer window arrived; still, his effort was not enough to turn things around.
The only positive thing about this period was that we kept fighting for the D2 Cup, advancing past the first round and therefore completing one of the objectives I had planned for this season.
Fair to say the fat lady is warming up her vocal chords!
The worst part is I'm playing 20 minute games so that's actually two hours of game time without a goal!