Beating the Swiss at their own game

[johnb6]

Hello and welcome to my very first Football Manager story, I have played every Football Manager since 2010 and I thought now was the time to finally create and share my own adventure with the FM community. There have been several careers I have done over the years however I decided to go a bit left field after doing some more research about UEFA competitions.

Whilst I was looking into the coefficients of each country and how many teams qualify for the Champions League and I managed to find out that Liechtenstein have 0 teams who qualify, although every country in Europe gets at least one representative in the Champions League even the likes of recently certified nations Kosovo and Gibraltar. When looking into this further I managed to find out that Liechtenstein don't actually have, however Liechtenstein football teams do play however they are part of the Swiss football league system and there are only 7 of them in total.

Although there are none in the Champions League, there is one participant in the Europa League which is the team who wins the Liechtenstein Cup out of the 7 teams and 3 reserve teams.

The challenge of this is to try to qualify for the UEFA Champions League with a Liechtenstein team whilst trying to conquer Switzerland and ultimately Europe.

 

[johnb6]

FC Vaduz have welcomed John Beirne as their new manager, located in the capital city of Liechtenstein are based in the Swiss Challenge League which is the second tier of the Swiss football pyramid.

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Looking at the history of FC Vaduz, it seems as though we are practically nailed on for the Liechtenstein Cup having won 45 of the 72 tournaments. FC Vaduz have been participating in Switzerland since they were founded however do not have the Swiss Super League as part of their trophy cabinet which I will hope to add to the collection at a later date.

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The board have obviously got very high expectations for me to achieve, however my goal was to always try and get promoted in my first year. Getting to the third qualifying round of the Europa League seems achievable however we do need to get past Derry City in the first round and possibly followed by the Montenegro champions in the second round.

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Derry City will be the very first game I am in charge of with a fairly nice start to the season however partway through we have to face the three other teams vying for the title consecutively from Aarau to Servette FC.

 

[johnb6]

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The squad looks fairly good and balances however we are majorly struggling with only one person able to play on the left hand side of midfield which is a 35 year old who is one of Liechtenstein's national team's highest capped players. The three best players for the team are Mohamed Coulibaly, Marko Devic and one of my most promising players Robin Kamber who aged 21 is already wanted by Hamburg St Pauli and I will look to tie him down to a new contract very soon.

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[johnb6]

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So my first game in charge wasn't the best of games, although we had more shots the draw was probably the fair result, the only annoying thing is that Derry City have the away goal and the advantage going into the second leg in Ireland.

We then played a friendly against Meyrin FC which was a solid 2-0 win before reaching the second leg in Derry.

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Well that performance was better, a good start from a corner which was then almost doubled by the same centre back however it was ruled out for offside. The penalty was a stupid one to give away and with extra time looking likely, a 25 yarder from Gajic took us through to the second round where we will face Mladost Podgorica of Montenegro.

 

[johnb6]

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We get the first leg win, however looking at the stats it should have been at least 4 or 5, we didn't take advantage of the sending off. Despite being one of our best players, Marko Devic is missing chance after chance, however we don't have any other out and out strikers that are anywhere near his ability.

We then beat Serie D side Como 1-0 in a friendly in between the legs again to gain more match sharpness, before travelling to Montenegro for the second leg.

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The second leg came quickly and we got off to another great start getting the crucial away goal needed, obviously after that the team thought they were basically through so sat back and conceded two to make the last 20 minutes very nerve-wracking however we managed to pull through, the decision to drop Devic worked in some way as the person who played striker was our right midfielder Coulibaly who scored and is capable to play as a striker. However we ultimately lost so whether I carry through with this tactic leaves me with a bigger dilemma than I originally anticipated.

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Although this draw will be by far the hardest test we had yet, considering the other teams we could have got were either PSV, Maritimo or my team Everton, I think we've got off lightly.

 

[johnb6]

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After such good work in the Europa League so far, we came up against Wil, and it was a poor performance from start to finish, stats were practically even but we didn't even come anywhere close to the level we needed to win. The only silver lining of this game was that Devic managed to get on the scoresheet, hopefully this carries on into more scoring form.

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The lads really put in a shift today and arguably deserved to win the match, which considering we were major underdogs we should be really proud of how we did, its just unfortunate that the class of Gent held us but Kubo's strike for Gent was superb.

After that game I felt we needed some reinforcements so in came three loan signings:

Timothy Tillman (Bayern)

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Noah Okafor (Basel)

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Afimico Pululu (Basel)

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Pululu will provide competition for striker with Devic, and Tillman is now our starting left midfielder as we lacked a lot of quality on that side. Okafor provides depth as he is able to play in either position and will be used relatively often throughout the season. This gave us more strength as we went into our next game away against the team predicted second to last Chiasso, both Tillman and Pululu started with Okafor on the bench.

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Despite the new signings on top of the squad we had, we still couldn't beat a team predicted in a relegation battle. Chiasso were by far the better team and even with Okafor coming on for his debut, it all amounted to very little, we need to up our game in the league and soon.

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Player of the month-Mohamed Coulibaly

Not much competition for this award, as nobody really shined, however out of the 7 games played Coulibaly has one goal and 3 assists, so wins the award for July.

Summary for the month

-It has been a strange month for FC Vaduz, the season started well as we progressed through the first two qualifying rounds as was expected of me however two disappointing results in the league has left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth especially as we had such a strong result of the draw against Gent sandwiched between the two league games.

 

[johnb6]

Unfortunately it won't allow me to upload a photo of the second leg vs Gent, however after an impressive first leg, we went into the second with our heads held high, however the class of Gent again shone through with two goals that we could do very little about, we always needed at least 1 goal as even a 0-0 would have meant we were out, so as the game went on more men were pushed forward and it ultimately cost us the game but we still performed with merit.

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Despite the disappointment of our Europa League campaign ending, we performed the best we had so far in the league resulting in a 2-1 win over Rapperswil, it was good to see the 17 year old winger Okafor get a goal, it's going to be hard to choose between him and Tillman over the year, but we finally have our first win and let's hope we move onwards and upwards.

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The first of the three games against the other promotion challengers was Aarau, and despite being on the receiving end of the match, I believed we deserved the point we got and it bodes well for future games against Aarau as we do have to play them 4 times in total. It was good to see Coulibaly score in consecutive matches, our player of the month for this year is well on his way to another.

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We then played Winterhur who occupied 2nd place in the league, and step up the constantly under-performing Marko Devic to get two goals in a vital win, there seems to be an ongoing theme of us only performing when a team goes down to 10 men, but hopefully Devic can find some form after his brace here.


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Forget what I said about Devic, he's back to normal. Xamax were top of the table however I thought we could make our stadium a fortress, but its already been broken into. No words really after that, if Xanax carry on in the same form then we won't be getting promoted this year as only the title winners get promoted and we won't be able to catch up with them.

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I did before this game notice an on-going trend of scoring more in the first half of games and conceding more in the second half such as against Mladost, and this only emphasised this statistic. The first half of this game was the best 45 mins I have seen us play after scoring 3 good goals, it could have been 5 or 6, however the lads must have thought the game was done and decided to not play football in the second half, with Servette constantly attacking even when they went down to 10 men, the late goal made things a bit more interesting but we came through with the win, good to see some slight consistency in the team though

Player of the Month-Mohamed Coulibaly

For the second month running Coulibaly wins our player of the month, having scored 3 goals and getting 1 assist and because without him we would be struggling a lot with the lack of form from Devic and the other players not really providing much. Although this form has caught the eye of Valladolid in Spain and I just hope that Coulibaly wants to stay, however I don't have enough wage budget to offer him a new contract so it is entirely possible he might leave.

Summary for the Month

-It was good to see us get our first league wins of the season, and the fact that Marko Devic has actually managed to score is a good thing, on the other hand it is unfortunate we're out of Europe however we matched our expectations that were set out of us, and we definitely didn't embarrass ourselves. Hopefully with a couple more signings we would be able to progress against a team like Gent and get that bit further in Europe to try and reach our ultimate goal

(Just thought I'd also say thanks for the people who've liked the post so far, if you've got any replies or questions you want to ask me just pop them in the thread and I'm more than happy to respond)