Post by chaodck on Apr 16, 2021 22:11:19 GMT
TSV 1861 Nördlingen Takeover and 2020-21 Season Report
Overview and Rules
Well, a new save. The third for the year. Ever since the end of the FM 2020 cycle I envisioned a save like this one and despite it changed a bit, the concept is still very much the same. The idea was to take a minuscule team in one of the big 5 leagues and try to become a big, european powerhouse. This has been done and re-done so I decided to add a bit of a restriction to make things more interesting. In the end, I had settled for a save in one of the Moroccan territories of Spain (either Ceuta or Melilla) and the restriction being only to sign African players. Well, this is not Ceuta or Melilla, right? Thing is I decided to end up on a less-restrictive league regarding non-EU players. Spain's somewhat relaxed regarding african nationalities, but one of the big ones, Egypt is counted as non-EU, and there's only a 3 player-limit for non-EU so in the end I recanted from my initial idea. In the end, Germany is always the more relaxed league, only requiring for 12 german players in a 99-man max. squad. This can easily be achieved with the youth intake players and thus I have freedom to mold the squad to my choosing.
So, why this team? Well I was researching the German lower leagues, and I've done similar rags to riches journeys with teams from Berlin and Saarland, so this time I wanted to go a bit differently and face the monster at their home turf. So I decided to go to Bavaria. There I found TSV Nördlingen, a team with not much history, except that they were the team where the legendary Gerd Müller started off his career, before selling out and going to the monster Bayern München.
Finally, what settled it was that the town of Nördlingen (a beautiful walled medieval town), is built in a meteor crater produced some 14 million years ago. The impact of the meteor made the subsoil to be filled with 72,000 tons of microdiamonds. Also the town and its architecture is what became the basis for the fictional "Shiganshina" town from "Shingeki no Kyojin". This led me to nickname the team "Diamond Titans" on the editor (I haven't watched the anime, don't kill me if the reference isn't accurate or what it's meant to be).
So, rules and regulations:
1.- The only acceptable transfers in must have an African Nationality. It's not important whether it's the main nationality or a secondaty nationality. It's not important for the player to play for the African national team, they can play for another team, but as long as they have an african nationality, they are elegible.
2.- This applies to paid transfers, free transfers and loans.
3.- The team has no real players to start the game. I will have to use what the game generates at the start of the save, and that's the base to build upon.
4.- Youth Intakes are an exception to the rule. I can use non african youth intake players, but with limits. While we are in the Bayernliga (where we start), we can use a maximum of 10 non-african intake players per season, which are to be nominated early in the season (hopefully on a pre-season update). This reduces to 8 in the Regionalliga, 6 in the 3.Liga, 4 in the 2.Bundesliga, 2 in the Bundesliga and only 1 whenever we are an established team in the Bundesliga and playing in European Competitions.
5.- Non african players who aren't used as exceptions can be treated as cash-cows. Loaning them to get them football and develop is encouraged.
6.- Regarding staff, there's no restrictions. Except when I hire coaches only due to their personalities, these must be african.
Save Setup
I loaded the other 4 big leagues, Premier League, La Liga, Ligue 1 and Serie A. Plus, I loaded the top 20 african countries' top division (according to the FIFA Rankings), they are: Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Congo, Democratic Republic of The Congo, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. I also loaded all Germany leagues up to the Landesliga (one tier below my starting level).
All leagues are playable and thus fully loaded with player and newgen generation. As my team had no players I fiddled with the idea of playing with fictional players, but then decided against it.
Transfers and Tactics
So, I inherited a piss poor squad. This is no understatement, and made the first season a monumental challenge. We were projected to finish the season 17th, which meant relegation playoffs and The Board wanted to fight against relegation. I signed around 11 players, all of them poached from other region teams and didn't have contracts. Nothing really of note I won't delve on these players much as they are barely good enough for this lacklustre level, and the ones that have potential might not even get there. Maybe I'll start doing a bit more of player focus on later seasons.
I decided to play with a super simple tactic, without much instructions as this is a fairly low level team as of yet. I shifted, depending on the game and personnel from a 4-4-1-1 to a 4-2-3-1.
Bayernliga Süd
We had a bad first campaign, as we clearly had a team of lower quality than the other teams in the division. The first semester was decent, as we won 4 games, drew 4 and lost 6, while the second half of the season was mostly bad, as we only managed 4 wins, 3 draws and 13 losses. In the end I managed to stave relegation away with a few games in hand, but only because the bottom two teams were dreadful.
Bayerische Pokal
We also played in the Bavarian Cup, a regional Cup for teams in the 3.Liga and below. The Board wanted us to get to the Second Round and we managed to beat expectations, beating Rimpar from Landesliga in the First Round, 3-0 and Kahl from our same level but the northern division in the Second Round 2-0. In the Third Round we faced Memmigen from the Regionalliga a tier above us, and lost 0-2.
Squad and Stats
Not much to talk here, as we were awful. A few decent performances, mainly from Johann Bretfeld and Khaled Mahmoud two players who might be decent a level above us even, and our top performer was Uwe Pachonik, someone who clearly isn't cut even for this level, but somehow managed to be our best player (which tells more about our squad than about Pachonik).
Off the Pitch
- So yeah, at this level there's no money whatsoever. Our costs aren't that high, but we're still losing quite a bit of money monthly. Our current bank balance is -€150k.
- Regarding facilities, the team's not in a bad shape, we play in Gerd Müller Stadion, a 9,000 (3,000 seated) capacity stadium and the club boasts Below Average Training Facilities, Great Youth Facilities, Adequate Junior Coaching and Adequate Youth Recruitment. Obviously I will not be able to improve upon that anytime soon.
- We had a good first intake, with a few decent players who are already comparable to our senior squad players. Again, nothing worth showing, specially as none of the players were of African origin.
- For next season, hopefully we can improve the team a lot, hopefully to fight for promotion, but most probably we'll be at most a mid table team. This will be slow.
Well, a new save. The third for the year. Ever since the end of the FM 2020 cycle I envisioned a save like this one and despite it changed a bit, the concept is still very much the same. The idea was to take a minuscule team in one of the big 5 leagues and try to become a big, european powerhouse. This has been done and re-done so I decided to add a bit of a restriction to make things more interesting. In the end, I had settled for a save in one of the Moroccan territories of Spain (either Ceuta or Melilla) and the restriction being only to sign African players. Well, this is not Ceuta or Melilla, right? Thing is I decided to end up on a less-restrictive league regarding non-EU players. Spain's somewhat relaxed regarding african nationalities, but one of the big ones, Egypt is counted as non-EU, and there's only a 3 player-limit for non-EU so in the end I recanted from my initial idea. In the end, Germany is always the more relaxed league, only requiring for 12 german players in a 99-man max. squad. This can easily be achieved with the youth intake players and thus I have freedom to mold the squad to my choosing.
So, why this team? Well I was researching the German lower leagues, and I've done similar rags to riches journeys with teams from Berlin and Saarland, so this time I wanted to go a bit differently and face the monster at their home turf. So I decided to go to Bavaria. There I found TSV Nördlingen, a team with not much history, except that they were the team where the legendary Gerd Müller started off his career, before selling out and going to the monster Bayern München.
Finally, what settled it was that the town of Nördlingen (a beautiful walled medieval town), is built in a meteor crater produced some 14 million years ago. The impact of the meteor made the subsoil to be filled with 72,000 tons of microdiamonds. Also the town and its architecture is what became the basis for the fictional "Shiganshina" town from "Shingeki no Kyojin". This led me to nickname the team "Diamond Titans" on the editor (I haven't watched the anime, don't kill me if the reference isn't accurate or what it's meant to be).
So, rules and regulations:
1.- The only acceptable transfers in must have an African Nationality. It's not important whether it's the main nationality or a secondaty nationality. It's not important for the player to play for the African national team, they can play for another team, but as long as they have an african nationality, they are elegible.
2.- This applies to paid transfers, free transfers and loans.
3.- The team has no real players to start the game. I will have to use what the game generates at the start of the save, and that's the base to build upon.
4.- Youth Intakes are an exception to the rule. I can use non african youth intake players, but with limits. While we are in the Bayernliga (where we start), we can use a maximum of 10 non-african intake players per season, which are to be nominated early in the season (hopefully on a pre-season update). This reduces to 8 in the Regionalliga, 6 in the 3.Liga, 4 in the 2.Bundesliga, 2 in the Bundesliga and only 1 whenever we are an established team in the Bundesliga and playing in European Competitions.
5.- Non african players who aren't used as exceptions can be treated as cash-cows. Loaning them to get them football and develop is encouraged.
6.- Regarding staff, there's no restrictions. Except when I hire coaches only due to their personalities, these must be african.
Save Setup
I loaded the other 4 big leagues, Premier League, La Liga, Ligue 1 and Serie A. Plus, I loaded the top 20 african countries' top division (according to the FIFA Rankings), they are: Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Congo, Democratic Republic of The Congo, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. I also loaded all Germany leagues up to the Landesliga (one tier below my starting level).
All leagues are playable and thus fully loaded with player and newgen generation. As my team had no players I fiddled with the idea of playing with fictional players, but then decided against it.
Transfers and Tactics
So, I inherited a piss poor squad. This is no understatement, and made the first season a monumental challenge. We were projected to finish the season 17th, which meant relegation playoffs and The Board wanted to fight against relegation. I signed around 11 players, all of them poached from other region teams and didn't have contracts. Nothing really of note I won't delve on these players much as they are barely good enough for this lacklustre level, and the ones that have potential might not even get there. Maybe I'll start doing a bit more of player focus on later seasons.
I decided to play with a super simple tactic, without much instructions as this is a fairly low level team as of yet. I shifted, depending on the game and personnel from a 4-4-1-1 to a 4-2-3-1.
Bayernliga Süd
We had a bad first campaign, as we clearly had a team of lower quality than the other teams in the division. The first semester was decent, as we won 4 games, drew 4 and lost 6, while the second half of the season was mostly bad, as we only managed 4 wins, 3 draws and 13 losses. In the end I managed to stave relegation away with a few games in hand, but only because the bottom two teams were dreadful.
Bayerische Pokal
We also played in the Bavarian Cup, a regional Cup for teams in the 3.Liga and below. The Board wanted us to get to the Second Round and we managed to beat expectations, beating Rimpar from Landesliga in the First Round, 3-0 and Kahl from our same level but the northern division in the Second Round 2-0. In the Third Round we faced Memmigen from the Regionalliga a tier above us, and lost 0-2.
Squad and Stats
Not much to talk here, as we were awful. A few decent performances, mainly from Johann Bretfeld and Khaled Mahmoud two players who might be decent a level above us even, and our top performer was Uwe Pachonik, someone who clearly isn't cut even for this level, but somehow managed to be our best player (which tells more about our squad than about Pachonik).
Off the Pitch
- So yeah, at this level there's no money whatsoever. Our costs aren't that high, but we're still losing quite a bit of money monthly. Our current bank balance is -€150k.
- Regarding facilities, the team's not in a bad shape, we play in Gerd Müller Stadion, a 9,000 (3,000 seated) capacity stadium and the club boasts Below Average Training Facilities, Great Youth Facilities, Adequate Junior Coaching and Adequate Youth Recruitment. Obviously I will not be able to improve upon that anytime soon.
- We had a good first intake, with a few decent players who are already comparable to our senior squad players. Again, nothing worth showing, specially as none of the players were of African origin.
- For next season, hopefully we can improve the team a lot, hopefully to fight for promotion, but most probably we'll be at most a mid table team. This will be slow.
