Rapid rise to the top

[Dirk Nowitzki]

Rapid București

Background
I wanted a change from York City, and whilst the club colours aren't too different, the circumstances certainly are. Romanian football has been characterized by lots of issues, often involving dodgy owners and corruption. Basically all the big teams went bankrupt (several times in some cases) and the league history page of previous winners shows a lot of "no longer exists" or phoenix clubs with a different name. You may remember teams like Timisoara, Unirea Urziceni, Otelul Galati and Vaslui that dominated the league around 2010. Well, they either don't exist anymore or play in the 3rd tier. Rapid Bucharest also had to start over in 2017 and are now back up to the second tier. They are known for their loyal and fanatic fanbase, and I want to give them back the joy of beating Bucharest-rivals Dinamo and Steaua, currently known as FCSB.

The club
The facilities are mostly average, and this season we'll play at a 'stadium' with a capacity of 450. I think it's more of a playground really, as I couldn't even find pictures of it. Next summer we'll move back to Giulesti, which is being renovated for EURO 2020 (or 2021 now), where it will be used for practices. It will have a capacity of about 14.000. The current stadium is way too small for us and we'll lose out on income from ticket sales, although the average ticket price is €0.64, so we won't become rich from that anyway. We had about €200k in the bank at the start of the season and the projection is that this will remain the same this season, but so far we have lost almost €100k in a month already.

The squad is nothing special and there are no real talents, but all positions for a 4-5-1/4-3-3 are covered so it will do for now. I don't plan to make any changes to it until next season (or the youth intake). We also have a second team who are in the third tier, so hopefully I can make good use of that in the future to develop Romanian talent.

The league
The Liga II contains 21 teams who play each other once. Then the best 6 teams play each other 2 more times for a total of 30 games. The other 15 teams go into 2 groups I think. There are 2 direct promotion spots and 1 more via play-offs, so it shouldn't be too hard to get back to the Liga I. We are projected by the media to win the league as well. There is, however, a rule that forces us to field at least one -19 player and one -21 player, which is a bit problematic. They'll have to be promoted from the -19 team I think.

Goals
First and foremost we need to win promotion to the top tier, and I'd expect problems with the board if we don't make it in the first time of trying. I have quite some Eastern European leagues loaded, but I intend to use as many Romanians as possible. We'll need to improve the youth scouting since we are fishing in the same pond as FCSB and Dinamo. I have no clue how difficult it will be to overtake the current best team in the country, Cluj, but I think it shouldn't take too long till we can qualify for European football.
Romania is currently 28th on the European coefficients list, just 3 spots above Liechtenstein, so this needs to be addressed if we want to up the level of Romanian football.

[jawzy]

Some might say the true Steaua side are in the third tier currently too, as that current top tier FCSB is abit arificial

[Dirk Nowitzki]

Jan 29, 2021 19:55:29 GMT jawzy said:

Some might say the true Steaua side are in the third tier currently too, as that current top tier FCSB is abit arificial

Yep true! I was reading that a 4th tier game between CSA Steaua and Rapid had 30.000 people in the stands, the best visited game of the year in Romania. Even more than games of their national team or FCSB - Lazio.

[Marshdweller]

Great premise for a save Dirk, I'll enjoy following this.

[Robson]

If they knew they were getting the manager of York City the mayor would already be commissioning a statue outside the stadium.

[Reiver]

Oooh, I like this premise.

[Dirk Nowitzki]

Thanks guys, appreciate the responses!

Jan 29, 2021 22:35:22 GMT Robson said:

If they knew they were getting the manager of York City the mayor would already be commissioning a statue outside the stadium.

Haha, I guess that depends entirely on the preferences of the mayor. He may want to get me out of town as soon as possible, or hope it's the Mordovia Saransk manager instead!

[Dirk Nowitzki]

New kits

Tactics
We'll line up in a 4-3-3 this year, nothing overly special. The front three all have roaming added as a PI, and their roles may change as personnel changes. I'm also playing around a bit with the width.
The idea is to have enough runners, whilst still having always at least 3 men back.

Pre-season
Early results have been very encouraging! We started off with 3 games against Liga I opposition and won 2 of them. It's only pre-season, but it tells me we should have a good chance to win this second league. The other games were won as well, but were against weaker teams.

[Dirk Nowitzki]

January update

Results
We are halfway the season, and things are going well! We are still unbeaten in the league, but we got knocked out of the cup immediately which was a big disappointment and the board also was not too pleased with it. Form dropped a little around the cup game as I was playing around with the width of the tactic. It's now back at where it started off: at extremely wide. There are 5 more games to play till the league splits up, and we are already qualified for the championship group. You keep 100% of your points when this happens, so barring a disastrous run of form we should be in good shape to win this league.

Youth intake
We have a golden generation coming up but that doesn't seem to mean that much on this version (and last year's). I hope the goalkeeper is quality and ready for first team football soon, because that would help to adhere to the squad rules easily.

The board
So far, the board isn't overly happy with me and grades me with a 6,5 (out of 10). They are disappointed that I haven't signed any players under 23, which is a bit annoying since there wasn't much need to strengthen anyway. A little infuriating is that the board is unhappy that we are only on course to finish in the top 6 (which is the amount of teams that go in to the championship group). This should be solved I think when we actually start to play games in that group, but still. Liga I also has a league split, so hopefully this won't turn into an annual annoyance.

The finances are becoming a problem as we are €265k into the red, but the sponsorship of over a million that will come in the summer should help with this.

[Dirk Nowitzki]

League split

Results
I had played a bit more yesterday and we convincingly reached the league split leading the league. There are 10 games to go against the other 5 teams that made the championship group, so we should end up with the trophy in our hands.

Youth intake
I'm quite happy with the first intake! There is some decent talent and the personalities at the top are generally pretty good, we even have model citizen. Priseceanu has an unsporting personality and I wonder how bad that actually is. One of by best players at York, Stiven Hoti, was unsporting and I didn't really notice any problems with it. It also changed to perfectionist after some tutoring.

Dogaru seems to be the best of the bunch, and if he can become a bit quicker I think he can become pretty good and hopefully start for us in the future.
The other most talented players in the intake are Priseceanu, Lepadatu, Cernica and Ivanica.

[Dirk Nowitzki]

2020-2021 Season Review

Results
We had a minor bleep on our way to the championship, and lost our unbeaten status, but it didn't really matter. We secured the title with 5 games to go so we are back where Rapid belongs: in the Liga I! The main man was Adrian Balan with 18 league goals.
Universitatea Cluj will go up with us, and the 2 playoff teams both lost their games with Liga I teams, so they'll remain in this league. My second team almost got promoted from Liga III, but they lost in their last playoff tie so they'll stay where they are. That might be better for now actually, given the lack of quality in that squad.
CFR Cluj won the top tier this year, making it 4 in a row for them.

Finances
Sponsorships of €1.5M came in which is the 4th most in the country, so we are out of the red for now. The board gave me a bit of money to spend but I don't think I will use it. I don't plan to make big changes to the squad, but instead will just sign some players on a free who can hopefully help us, and let some of the old/bad players go.

[chaodck]

Good first season mate. Decent intake and a direct promotion is the way to go. Do you think you can get into Europe right away or the leap in quality will be too much in the 1st tier? Keep it up!

[Dirk Nowitzki]

Feb 2, 2021 13:45:34 GMT chaodck said:

Good first season mate. Decent intake and a direct promotion is the way to go. Do you think you can get into Europe right away or the leap in quality will be too much in the 1st tier? Keep it up!

Thanks! It's hard to tell actually. We have done well in friendlies against bottom half clubs from that league, but real games will always be different of course. The league set up allows for pretty much any team that goes on a good run at the end of the season to qualify for European football, I'll expend on that in the season preview.

 

[Dirk Nowitzki]

Season preview 2021-2022

Preparations
We won Liga II with ease, but a bigger task now awaits us. To step up our level a bit, I didn't make huge changes but I let some deadwood go and old players retire, and replaced them with a few players on a free. Corbu should cover the right back positions, while my scouts found a great player in Pinto to bomb up and down the left flank. Rauta will give us depth in midfield and Deac should improve our weak right winger position. Finally, we brought in Babic on loan from Red Star Belgrade as an option for the striker position till we prepare Dogaru from last year's intake to be ready for first team football.

There isn't a whole lot of confidence from the media in us doing well, but I think we should be able to avoid ending up in a relegation fight. The good news is that we finally play in an actual stadium again. Last year we made a grand total of €12k from (season)ticket sales, so having a stadium with over 30 times the capacity should help boosting that.

League format
This is where it gets interesting. Teams play each other twice for a total of 30 games and then the league splits up, with 6 teams going in the championship group and 10 into the relegation group. No matter what group you end up in, your points are halved so everything will be close together again. The bottom 2 teams in the relegation group go straight down, and the 2 teams above them will face the 3rd and 4th team from Liga II in a promotion/relegation play-off. The two top teams from the relegation group (so basically the 7th and 8th best team in the league), will play each other once for a Europe Conference League playoff, after which the winner faces the number 4 (or 3, I guess this depends on the cup winner) from the championship group. They play just 1 game as well, and the winner goes into Europe. This means you can be pretty terrible all year, get the gap to better teams halved, do well in the relegation group and win the last 2 games of the season to get into Europe. Teams in the championship group play each other twice and also have their points halved.

The way this is set up means that you'll probably have something to play for all season long, which is exciting. Nothing will be secured till the very end.

Schedule
I got caught a bit off guard by the schedule. After last season there was hardly any off-season and we had some friendlies in June already. When the league update came on the 29th of June I was surprised that the first league game was scheduled on the 9th of July! I still had to do my transfer business and most players had limited match fitness, so that wasn't great planning.

A look at the schedule causes some anger. The season starts really early, but there are only 8 league games planned from September to December. That's a whole lotta nothing! How can you have 40 league games, and still have massive gaps!? We don't even play in November!
Then, in the champions/relegation groups you get overwhelmed with games, especially if you have a deep cup run. And that's even without European football!
So if we ever get to the point that we still play in Europe in April or May, we better have a deep squad. Those are worries for later, however, as we first have to make sure we stay in this league!

[Dirk Nowitzki]

January update

Results
Over the course of 6 months we played only 14 league games, but they have gone well! We played loads of friendlies as well, but I kept them out of the screenshot. Dinamo beat us in the 93rd minute and we had a poor showing at Sepsi, but apart from that we dominated most games and deserve to be where we are. We would have even been equal with Cluj, had they not come back from a deficit 3 times in our away game there.
The highlight was the 2-0 win over FCSB in a sold out Valentin Stanescu, it feels good to play in front of an actual crowd. Interestingly, CSA Steaua Bucuresti are in the same third tier group as my second team, and they had 26.318 people in the stands when they played each other! That's insane for a team in a garbage league.

The cup has gone much better than last year so far, and we are up to the quarter finals. We'll face a third tier team there, while Dinamo and FCSB face off against each other. Cluj has already been eliminated so I feel like we have decent chance to win it!

We have loads of games coming up in the next few months, so I hope we can stay clear of bad injuries and will try to rotate where possible to keep the squad relatively fresh.
Qualifying for the championship group is the goal, but just missing out isn't too bad either since you still have a good change on European football then by simply finishing in the top 2 of the relegation group.

Youth intake
No golden generation this year, but there are enough green lines that I have hopes for some decent talent.

[Dirk Nowitzki]

League split

Results
We were off to a great start in 2022 with 4 comfortable wins at home, including a 3-0 over rivals Dinamo. The Cluj game had a disastrous start for us and we were 0-2 down after just 5 minutes, but we almost got away with a point there in the end. More worrying was a bad loss to Universitatea Cluj where we didn't really deserve any better. Nevertheless, we are top of the league at the league split! Everything is really close and with the halving of the points all 6 teams in the championship group are within 4 points of each other. This should be exciting!

In the cup we easily took care of third tier side Avantul Reghin. We'll now play a two legged semi final against Gaz Metan, who you'd expect to be backed buy loads of oil dollars, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Youth intake
No golden generation, but this intake looks way better than last year's! Gabriel Pop looks really good and may get some game time next season. Stanca, Neaga and Marginean are the other players with 5 star potential.

[Dirk Nowitzki]

Season Review 2021-22

Results
We couldn't do it unfortunately. I feel like we were the best team in the league this year since we accumulated the most points and had the best goal difference, but the halving of the points came to haunt us. We were just too wasteful in a few games (most notably Cluj at home and Gaz Metan away) to bring the title home. To make matters worse, Marco Rus, whom I had at York City for about 4 seasons, scored the winner for Gaz Metan. We regained our form at the end and beat both FCSB and Craiova, but it was too late. Finishing 3rd in our first season back up is still good though, and I'm certainly happy with it!

This championship group is amazing, even if it hurt our chances here. It was such a roller coaster, teams would jump up and down from fifth to first and vice versa all the time. FCSB somehow got away with the title while having a negative goal difference. Cluj won the last 4 titles but were surprisingly bad in the championship group, except when they played us. We played them 4 times this year and still have to beat them.

We did get our first silverware and qualification for European football this season though! We lost 2-1 in the away game of the semi final to Gaz Metan and when they went up 1-0 in Bucharest, I though we'd blow a great opportunity to win the cup. However, great comeback followed and we beat them 4-1. Dinamo waited in the final and we trashed them, helped by a red card when we were already up 2-0. We'll have to survive 3 qualifying rounds to get to the Conference League, which I doubt we'll be able to do, but here's hoping for a favourable draw!

Finances
Income from sponsorship rose from €1.5M to 2.2, putting us comfortably back in the black. The board allows me to spend about a million, and I may use some of it if I can find players worth spending a transfer fee on.
The board has been willing to improve youth recruitment 3 times already and I think it's almost maxed out, and they also just agreed to improve the junior coaching for the second time. If we get to the group stage of the Conference League I will ask to improve facilities too, but I'm afraid it will hurt the finances too much currently.

It's the end of the season now so I'll give a list of all the days the players are free to do whatever they want:

May 30th.

That's the list.