You can't spell laughter without Slauter(n)

[dalenichol]

1.FC Kaiserslautern 
Takeover and 1st Season Review. 


Well, I said in the end of my Polish save that I was going to start in either USA, Japan or Brazil but I've somehow ended up in the familiar realm of Germany, one of my favourite places in the world, both in general and in footballing terms. I did start a save in the MLS with DC United but it just didn't work out, which is a shame, but it's somewhere that I'll definitely be playing on FM21, so there's that.  I've played through my entire first season here just to make sure it was going to stick and so far so good!






Based in the south western city of Kaiserslautern, the club play their home games at the almost 50,000 capacity Fritz-Walter Stadion. The club have an incredibly rich 120 year history. They are the 10th most successful club in Bundesliga history with 4 titles, they've reached the Champions League Quarter Finals in 1999 and two UEFA Cup semi final appearances and in the 1998/99 season completely a unique feat, becoming the only team in German history to win the Bundesliga in their first season after a promotion. The stadium is named after the one club legend Fritz Walter, who scored 357 goals in 364 games for the club and won the World Cup with Germany.  Other notable former players include Mario Basler, Andreas Brehme, Miroslav Klose and Michael Ballack.  A recent downturn in fortunes for the club has seen them fall into the third tier of German football and it is my job to rectify that. 



As far as the save is concerned, there's no real objective/goals/restrictions other than the usual for an FM save. Get up the leagues, win the Bundesliga, beat the fuck out of Bayern a few times. Other than that, it's all fair game. This will, hopefully, be my save to see out FM20. We all know it wont be, because it's me, but hey, god loves a trier, right?


3.Bundesliga



Mission accomplished and we're off to a good start. I knew we'd be there or thereabouts by the end of the season but I didn't really know what to expect. A media prediction of 3rd meant we were considered a strong team, but I know reputation dictates a lot of that in FM. An irl finish of 10th made me pause for thought a little. There were times when we were sloppy and let a couple of wins pass us by, but by and large we were consistent. 

Team Stats

Theodor Bergmann was the absolute star of the season, 17 assists and a 7.52 avg rating. Whilst Andri Runar Bjarnason popping up with 24 goals in all competitions, along with Lucas Roser's 17 reminded me of what it was like to be in a team where your strikers actually consistently score goals. It was consistency from the entire team as a whole, but I could probably do with a bit more squad depth (and I really need to learn to rotate more!)


Domestic Cups:

We went out of the DFB Pokal at the first round, losing to Bundesliga side Union Berlin, and there's no shame in going out to a team 3 tiers higher.  A bit of a nicer draw next season wouldn't go amiss. 



But we did manage to win the most prestigious cup in Germany, the Sudwestpokal! Where we beat a bunch of powerhouses such as FV Dudenhofen and TSG Pfeddersheim!  (Okay, so we're the only professional team in the competition, but so what!?)



Youth Intake:



Nikolaou is a fairly decent prospect from our first intake and a few of them look okay.  It's nice to have a good intake in the first season after about 12/14 of my Lodz intakes being absolutely awful.  Being Germany and a club with good facilities, we should get more good than bad, which is a great. 

A couple of the prospects that were already at the club/day one newgens include: Lars Altegoer, Phinees Bonianga, Michal Kuczera and Dennis Gaitan. Not sure they'll all make it, but they look decent to start with.  I definitely need to focus more on developing my youth players, as opposed to just signing young players my scouts recommend, although I'll obviously try and do both. 



AOB:



Not the best financial position to be in when you're spending 100k p/w on wages and 115k p/m on a bank loan. We started on around £5.5m in the bank, so at least we stay in the black. We will make around £4.5m from sponsorship payments and club membership income and I'd assume we'll make some increase on the £2.1m season tickets we took in last season. So I'm not too worried. We'll likely have to make do with loans and free transfers for our first season in the 2.Bundesliga and prize money means that simply surviving relegation would net us £7.8m...so there's that!



I think that's all for me just now. As always, if there's anything you'd like to know, hit me up!
 

[chaodck]

Love managing in Germany as well Dale, the mix of high prize money and good reputation/facilities makes up for a good foundation to build up a fantastic squad. Good luck on this already a promising start (promotion to the 2.Bundesliga is what makes of breaks a save like this). Decent look in the first intake and I really like Altegoer from the bunch created with the save, he seems like a useful lad.

[dalenichol]

Awh for fuck sake, it's Poland all over again!





EDIT:




Not the worst intake ever, contrary to my intake preview (also, they should just scrap this feature for next year if they can't have it work accurately). None of them will likely feature in the first team at any point, although they're all still young enough to prove me wrong, but there's not really anybody worth pointing out. 

The one thing that stands out is that one of my players is called Cristoph Metzelder. This is probably the only time I've ever noticed a regen having the same combination as a notable ex-pro outside of maybe England, where a name like Alan Smith or Ian Wright is fairly easy to see crop up. This is bittersweet however, given Metzelders current legal issues which I wont go in to here. 

[jawzy]

youth intake preview, never lines up with the next youth intake

[dalenichol]

1.FC Kaiserslautern - 2020/21 Season Review







A jump in class as we moved into the 2.Bundesliga but we weren't too phased and managed to handle the move up fairly well. It's a tight league which spread out towards the end, we spent time as high as 6th and mostly sat around 9th/10th but dropped some form a little towards the end finishing in 12th place.  I don't mind too much, as it's obviously progress and we had almost entirely the same squad as last season so I know that we're good enough for this level and I'm ready to push on for next season. 


We need to score more goals and tighten up the defence for next season. This is hardly revolutionary thinking, of course, but we weren't anywhere near as lethal this season with Roser topping the scoring charts on 12 and last seasons top scorer Bjarnason only managing 9 compared to 24! So we have something to work with, but I'm not overly concerned, you can see from the league table that average goal differences are a common theme in the league, even the promoted teams were conceding almost as much as they were scoring, with the exception of Dusseldorf. 

So I guess the key for next season is to clear some of the deadwood, strengthen key areas and try brining up some youth players. You know, the obscure things that nobody thinks of in this game!




 
We weren't able to defend our Sudwest Pokal trophy this year now that we're in the 2nd tier, which is a shame as it was a nice wee morale booster. A win against Hannover was followed by an admirably close defeat to Werder Bremen and our cup run was over. Could've been better, could've been worse, not going to complain at this point. 






Despite falling as low as -£1.4m by the end of the season, the ever efficient German prize money was enough to stick us right back up to £6.3m and between that and the incoming sponsorship and season ticket money, I'm in now way worried about our short or long term financial standing.  We do need to clear out the wage bill a little, as we're currently spending 167k of our 173k budget and that just isn't on for a newly promoted club from the 3rd tier. So I might need to be ruthless. I have no issue spending this amount of money, that's not the problem, but we need to be looking at spending those wages on a better quality of player.   I'll be taking a close look at the released players from the Bundesliga and anybody available on loan.  We've got Dortmund as a parent club, but we've yet to be able to make any real use of that relationship. 



That's really all there is to say at the moment, sorry!  There were only two transfers, a bit part defender in Tim Reider from Augsburg for 85k and a loan deal for Arthur Zagre of Monaco who was decent but nothing special. 
As always, any questions then ask away. 

If I can get more activity, I'll see about splitting my updates a bit more, but at the rate I play the game and the little activity often associated with it, single season updates might be the way forward, at least for now. 

[jawzy]

I am hapy with single season updates. unless something incrediable happens

What are board aims for next season, now you managed to starve off the threat of relegation?

[chaodck]

Good first season in the 2.Bundesliga mate, do you think you can make the leap into the proper Bundesliga next year? What have you loaded regarding foreign leagues to recruit talent from?

[dalenichol]

Oct 1, 2020 16:31:52 GMT jawzy said:

I am hapy with single season updates. unless something incrediable happens

What are board aims for next season, now you managed to starve off the threat of relegation?

We're predicted to be relegated once again, so the board simply want us to fight bravely against relegation.  Thankfully there's nothing too drastic, because whilst they're somewhat of a "sleeping giant" in the loosest possible terms, they've been in the lower leagues long enough that reputation means we're not expected to pull up any trees any time soon thankfully. 

chaodck  thank you, it was a decent enough season. We're still some way off being able to think about promotion though, no.  I've just about finished season 3 and there should be an update tomorrow, and whilst we've made some improvements, it's definitely not enough of one to be thinking seriously about promotion.  Maybe another season or two after this one, as long as we can continue to progress. 

In terms of leagues, it's a custom db with extra players loaded worldwide to help increase regens, and I've loaded England, France, Italy, Spain, Scotland, Portugal and Holland with at least 2 tiers in each. Germany is loaded down to either the 4th or 5th tier, can't quite remember which. 

[dalenichol]

1.FC Kaiserslautern 2021/22 Season Review




Another season in the 2. Bundesliga is done and dusted. We improved a little, having a rough start at both ends of the season...we only won 1 of our first 6 games and 1 of our last 7 but did fairly well in between all of that.  We won two more games than last season, lost 1 less game, scored 8 more goals and conceded 3 more. So whilst I'd have liked us to push on that little bit more, I'm still fairly happy with how things turned out. 


We switched from a more hit and rush style 442 to a slightly more confident, technical 4231 and whilst that's definitely helped us and we've been playing better with it, it certainly brought its own teething issues and we threw away a lot of points with late equalisers or an inability to put away our chances. I hate my tactcial inefficients with this game, because it feels like you have to play with 5 in the midfield but the game seems to actively punish you for only having one striker.  But whatever, we'll need to see how we get on next season and make any adjustments where needed. 

One big positive this season was the impact that some of our young players had. We had a few of the day one regens break into the first team this season and give some good accounts of themselves. Kacper Radoszewski, Nurettin Aksoy and Lars Altegoer all making a decent number of first team appearances, with Radoszewski actually finishing top scorer with 8 goals. 



Transfers:



We switched tactics as, admittedly, a bit of a panic move after a poor start to the season and this meant I needed to rush in a few signings. Dennis Waidner and Kolbeinn Birgir Finnsson were signed at the start of the window for the first team as replacements for our existing fullbacks. Zamburek and Scott were signed at the end of the window on loan to help facilitate our move to a 4231. Radoszewski has done a great job out wide this season, which gets rid of one of my headaches, but we're going to need to find some better depth in this new positions (AMC/L/R) that we hadn't been using this season. 


Intake:



A decent enough intake here, with a decent bit of depth to it. 

Maatkabylov looks like he's going to be a solid prospect and Ufuk Cinar looks good too, but we'll need to get rid of his poorish personality or there's a chance he's not going to reach his full potential. But both are still young and there's plenty of time for that. 



AOB



There's not too much else to talk about at this point in proceedings.  We lose money through the season and fall into the red, then we claw it all back with league position money and sponsorships. Our facilities are great and the stadium is fantastic, so it's just about trying to do enough to get the finances a bit more stable. 

I might need to start looking around at the regens that will now be popping up around places like Africa, Asia and South America because I'll likely be able to get a bunch of players that are better than what I have, on wages that are significantly less than what we're currently paying here.