Perfecting Pre-season

Welcome back again!

I’ve loaded the game up spent 6 hours on day one of the save sorting everything out from contracts, training, staff improvements and most importantly for preseason, the friendlies.

I started off cancelling all the previously agreed fixtures. It had us playing Galatasaray, Lens and Hertha Berlin.That was no good for anyone. So I set on making a plan for the perfect preseason for us. First of all I looked at our fixture list. 7 games in August. It is going to be a hard start so we need to be ready for kick off. Fitness and Match Sharpness needs to be high so we can start with a bang and claw back the -12 points.

So after reviewing the amount of games, 7 potentially 8 if we beat Shrewsbury I decided on these fixtures for preseason.

I know we’re in a lot of debt and most people would have money spinning fixtures but that’s not going to do us any good. I started off picking what should be 3 easily winnable games which will increase morale, match sharpness, condition and tactical knowledge for the players. We then increased the strength of the opposition, one from each division of Championship and leagues one and two before ending against another weaker side which i could play the players who aren’t at full match sharpness yet.

As you can see it was pretty much the perfect preseason only drawing vs Championship side Barnsley and only conceding one goal all preseason.
The best sign for me though was the fitness and sharpness of the starting 11 for the first game of the season

We were ready to go!
Oh and my god were we ready.

The first month was brilliant for us we have started off on fire and wiped out the 12 point deduction by the end of the transfer window. Again we have only conceded 2 goals in 6 league games. You can probably tell by now I’ve built quite a defensive tactic but more on that later.

Without the deduction we’d actually be top of the league right now. I’m happy with the start and hopefully we can keep going. We are starting to pick up a few injuries and we have a few players leaving us in January so the younger players will have to start stepping up but we have given ourselves a chance.
It was also nice to end the month with an award

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Thanks for reading guys. I’ll be back with a tactics post and a save update post after the winter window closes to update you on my progress so far.