Berwick Rangers: An English Club in Scotland

2026/27 Season Preview

The Exodus is Here

This is going to be a long post. It’s sort of been a crazy transfer window and quite a lot of players have left…

Transfers Out

Martin McCulloch to Falkirk for £120,000

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Martin McCulloch, who we first met as a 16 year old playing for Livingston in the League One Playoff final and captained us in our first season in the SPL, has left to join newly promoted Falkirk. He will always be remembered for getting sent off in the Scottish Cup final for us after we were already down to 10 men.

Benik Afobe to Toronto for £650,000

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He was naturally declining and quite injury prone. After our 2 oldest, most experienced players played awfully in the Scottish Cup final I’ve decided to not bother buying players based on their experience. If they’re good enough they’re old enough.

Bence Novothny to Hibernian for £1.6m

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Back up centre back and not really needed. I don’t mind selling players to other teams in the SPL as long as they’re not Celtic. Although I might regret that if Hibs finish ahead of us this season. At the time it was our record sale. At the time…

Pape Samb to Burnley for £10.5m

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Pape Samb is a good player and could come to be a really good player… but 5 goals in 22 league games last season? I’ll take the £10.5m. Not a bad profit considering we signed him for £5,000.

That was enough sales for me.

Then Leicester came in with £20m for Javier Chanduvi.

Javier Chanduvi to Leicester for £20m

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We got him for free and I remember selling players for £200,000 and being happy with it so I just had to. It’s £20m!

After bringing in £33.5m and with £41m in the bank I really was done with transfers out this time.

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And so to the transfers in.

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Firstly we have a new right back and left back. We didn’t need them but they were cheap and better than our current first choice full backs. Here’s Danny Stringer and Lebogang Mokoena.

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Bryan Illanes was brought in to be our new first choice attacking midfielder.

Bryan Illanes - £2.3m from Colo Colo

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And to replace Pape Samb and Benik Afobe we bought in teenagers Carlos Cordoba and Vebjorn Aure. Cordoba was on the cheap from Colombia and will go straight into the first team but it is Aure who is our main signing of the summer.

Carlos Cordoba - £575,000 from Santa Fe

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Vebjorn Aure - £10m from Stromsgodset

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Aure was linked with PSG and Juventus but chose to come to Berwick, obviously. He’s our record signing (£10m!!!) and is on a lot of money but should hopefully form a deadly partnership with George Neil to help us topple Celtic this season.

Almost all of our signings are youngsters, the main reason being that it’s more likely that we’ll develop players rather than buy ones who are the finished article, as they’d just cost too much. Even though we sold £30m worth of players we still are nowhere near to matching the financial power of Celtic or even Rangers and could only offer a maximum of £38,000 a week to players, meaning that the top quality ones were still out of our price range.

Despite that we’re still predicted to finish second in the league this year.

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We also entered the Champions League at the Best Placed Third Qualifying Phase and were unseeded in the draw in which we were paired with CSKA Moscow.

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I think we play them and then a playoff to get into the group stage but I’m fairly certain that no matter what happens we’ll be in the Europa League group stage at a minimum.
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European Football Returns to Highbury

Our first ever game in the Champions League didn’t go too badly.

Champions League Best Placed Third Qualifying Phase – Leg One

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New signing Carlos Cordoba got two goals and was man of the match whilst centre back Jason Kerr scored the winner after coming on late in the game to see out a draw.

The return leg was played at Highbury. Fleetwood’s stadium that is.

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It seems it’s a ground where we don’t like to defend.

Champions League Best Placed Third Qualifying Phase – Leg Two

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Absolute bottlejobs. We can’t defend and can’t find any better defenders. But if we’re conceding 4 goals at home to CSKA Moscow we’d probably concede about 10 to the best teams in Europe.

Ethan Aldana came in as back up in the summer but from now on will be first choice centre back. Richard Nemec will also arrive in January, hopefully they both can actually defend.

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The CSKA result meant that we went straight into the Europa League Group Stage so the outcome of the result wasn’t a travesty; it was the conceding two goals in the last 5 minutes to stop us from progressing that was the main problem.

Nevertheless, after two seasons of being seeded 4th​ for the group stage draw, this season we were seeded 2nd​,

2026/27 Europa League Group Stage Draw

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Olympique Lyonnais
Berwick Rangers
Torino
Slavia Praha

Not the easiest draw we could of had. Torino knocked out Hibs on their way to the group so it won’t be easy making it to the knockout stage. Rangers and Dundee United are the other Scottish sides in the group stage whilst Celtic are the sole Scottish representative in the Champions League.

After playing our Champions League game at Fleetwood, we will be playing our Europa League games at Tranmere’s recently built 9,000 capacity stadium.

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And after deciding that both were not good enough to be long term first choice centre backs, Jason Kerr and Aidan Wilson gained their first call ups to the national side…

We’ve only played 3 games in the league but have already won 2 games 4-0 and are ahead of Celtic on goal difference.

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Also Sean Dyche is the manager of Real Madrid.

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Me neither.​
 
I was going to say i don't know what's more shocking, your collapse against CSKA or Sean Dyche in charge at Real, but given the historic nature of the team conceeding late goals and the fact it's Sean Dyche, the biggest heads gone has to be Real's gaffer!
 
neavie pops23 said:
I was going to say i don't know what's more shocking, your collapse against CSKA or Sean Dyche in charge at Real, but given the historic nature of the team conceeding late goals and the fact it's Sean Dyche, the biggest heads gone has to be Real's gaffer!
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I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. Turns out winning the League Cup and Europa League with Arsenal gets you a job at Real Madrid...
 
Table Toppers

Our first game of the Europa League group stage was away against group favourites Lyon. In that game we had 5 shots on target… and scored all 5.

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The result reflected our brilliant start to the season. We’re beating some of the inferior teams in the league very comfortably.

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We’ve had 11 different goalscorers already this season such is the strength of our squad. George Neil has 11 goals, which includes 3 hattricks.

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Although we lost to Rangers at home, Celtic have also lost once this season so we are top of the table.

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At the halfway stage we’re also top of our Europa League group.

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We have two big games coming up. First we’re up against Hibs in the League Cup semi final. Even though we’re defending our trophy I’ll still put a rotated side out as our game after that one is against Celtic in the league.

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Our 4 league games against Celtic this season will surely determine who wins the SPL. Hopefully we can beat them for that reason but also for some sort of revenge after they thumped us 4-0 in the cup final last season.
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Just read through most of it incredible where you've taken the team, places like the Amsterdam Arena, San Siro and Fleetwood and Tranmere's stadiums
 
Been catching up on 2 weeks' worth of updates. Brilliant, and there's so much I could comment on, but instead I can only bring myself to mention arguably the greatest achievement I've ever seen on FM......Sean Dyche.
 
ninjaskill said:
Just read through most of it incredible where you've taken the team, places like the Amsterdam Arena, San Siro and Fleetwood and Tranmere's stadiums
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I know it’s crazy when I look back. We’ve gone from losing to BSC Glasgow in the Scottish Cup to destroying Ajax in the Europa League.

TheBattman said:
Been catching up on 2 weeks' worth of updates. Brilliant, and there's so much I could comment on, but instead I can only bring myself to mention arguably the greatest achievement I've ever seen on FM......Sean Dyche.
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I removed La Liga as a playable league last season because my laptop was being slow so can’t see how he’s doing, but he’s taking over at a team who’ve won La Liga 4 times in the last 5 years.
 
We've Broke the Match Engine

Firstly a rotated side beat Hibs after extra time in the League Cup semi final to put us in the final for the second year in succession.

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We will face Celtic (of course) in the final to see if we can retain the only trophy we won last year.

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Our next game after that victory against Hibs was Celtic in the league. They changed their formation to a 4-3-3 with 3 central strikers and were 2-0 up at halftime. So I gave an aggressive team talk and changed our tactic to mirror theirs. This was the result.

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8 goals in one half! Against the best team in the league!

Not that I should be complaining, but I feel like we’ve only won that game because the 3 strikers up front is such an overpowered formation this year on FM. Maybe I’ll just use the 3 up front against Celtic…

For our next game against Slavia Prague we reverted back to our 4-1-2-1-2 formation. We scored 8 in that game too.

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I have no idea what’s happening! It should have been about 14-0, we had 31 shots and they had 1. The exact same tactic failed to score against Rangers and Torino at home earlier in the season but then we come up with this.

That win confirmed our qualification to the knockout stage for the third season in a row. The goalscoring calmed down after that, but the winning didn’t.

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If our second string side can beat Lyon 1-0 then we seriously have a good squad on our hands.

Also Celtic have dropped more points meaning we are 6 points clear at the top of the league!

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It’s fair to say our new signings have done well but none more so than Vebjorn Aure. Our £10m signing has 17 goals and 11 assists… in 18 games! He’s only 20! No wonder Juventus and PSG were after him.

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Our next game is the League Cup Final; can we make it two League Cups in a row?

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Thats quite a few goals you've scored there
 
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Celtic losing 3 after 12 games is a bit of a shock! Great results for you though!
 
the 3 up front does seem a little overpowered. I tried it and just beat Celtic 14-1. each striker with a hat trick. Wish i kept a screen shot of it
 
neavie pops23 said:
Celtic losing 3 after 12 games is a bit of a shock! Great results for you though!
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I know, Roberto Di Matteo was their manager last year but left to join Schalke (again) in the summer. Roberto Martinez replaced him and they’ve already lost more league games than they did in the whole of last season.

ratmsm1 said:
the 3 up front does seem a little overpowered. I tried it and just beat Celtic 14-1. each striker with a hat trick. Wish i kept a screen shot of it
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Yeah especially when I have 3 pacey strikers with 15+ finishing… and I can’t wait for the day when we’re good enough to beat Celtic 14-1 haha.
 
League Cup Final... Again

Once again we faced Celtic in a final. And once again we lost.

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It was set pieces that done it for us. We conceded from a corner and a free kick, which was very annoying considering we had enough chances to win the game.

Once our young centre backs develop into star players (and we learn how to actually defend set pieces) we should be able to beat Celtic in these kinds of games. In all honesty it was probably more beneficial to beat them in the league than in the League Cup final.

Defeat in the final didn’t do anything to disrupt our form though. We continued winning in the league and also thrashed Torino in the Europa League.

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Consequently we finished top of our Europa League group and go into the knockout rounds for the third successive year.

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Europa League First Knockout Round – Berwick v Brøndby IF

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We’ll play Brondby in the knockout round. We played them in the group stage last year and although we didn’t beat them we did finish above them in the group. Elsewhere Rangers will play AEK Athens and Dundee United will play Wolfsburg.

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The cup final loss to Celtic actually inspired us into form and we won our next 7 games.

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In fact, the final was the only game that we haven’t won in our last 17.

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Furthermore Celtic have actually started losing games as well, so this is what the league table looks like.

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12 points clear! We’ve only dropped 5 points all season!

Berwick players are dominating all the individual player stats as well.

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Our next league game is against Celtic. Win that and we go 15 points clear. Even if we lose, the gap between us will still be 9 points. Surely this is our year? Surely…
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Put Our Name on the Trophy

We made a huge step in our push for the Premiership title by beating Celtic in the league for the second time this season.​

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However, after that, we did lose our first league game in a long while to relegation threatened Hamilton.

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But that loss didn’t matter, we are miles ahead of everyone in the league.

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We also comfortably beat Morton in the cup and will play Ross County in the next round.

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The next post will have the results from the two legs against Brondby in the Europa League First Knockout Round; hopefully we’re able to mirror our domestic form in Europe.

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ninjaskill said:
Thats quite a few goals you've scored there
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Didn't see this until now! And we've always scored a decent amount of goals but this season it's just been ridiculous. It's typical us that we'll score 8 goals two games in a row when we went 2 games in a row without scoring before that.
 
Europa League Knockout Round and Imminent Title Win

The first leg of our Europa League tie against Brondby was away in Denmark and we more than did our job in that game.

Europa League First Knockout Round – Leg One

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The win was our 8th​ in a row in all competitions and practically put us in the next round.

Europa League First Knockout Round – Leg Two

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Job done.

Rangers and Dundee United were both knocked out so we’re now the sole representative from the Scottish leagues in Europe.

Europa League Second Knockout Round Draw

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In the second knockout round we will play Werder Bremen.

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They’re favourites for the tie but it could’ve been a worse draw for us and with the form that we’re in I’m quietly confident about our chances.

As for the league it’s only a matter of time before we’re confirmed as champions of Scotland.

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With 10 games left it would take a monumental bottlejob to lose it from here as we’re 18 points ahead of Celtic.

We were also taken to a replay by Hibs in the Scottish Cup as we seek a domestic double.

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Next up is Werder Bremen in the Europa League. Hopefully we can progress to the quarter finals for the first time and wrap the league up soon.

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Going great in the league and europe mate! Are we looking at just a domestic double or you looking for a treble ;)
 
neavie pops23 said:
Going great in the league and europe mate! Are we looking at just a domestic double or you looking for a treble ;)
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The English teams always takeover in the Europa League so I'm not expecting to win it but do think we could cause some upsets... or so I thought.
 
Uninstalling Football Manager 18

We travelled to Germany for the first leg of our Second Round Europa League Knockout Game against Werder Bremen having won 21 of our last 23 games in all competitions. So the result in the first leg was not one we were used to.​

Europa League Second Knockout Round – Leg One

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Even though we lost from a winning position we can’t really complain at the result, as they were the better team on the day.

However I was still confident for the second leg. This season we’ve beaten Lyon 5-0, Torino 6-1, Slavia Prague 8-0, Celtic 8-4, Motherwell 7-1 and Dundee United 5-0 so I had every reason to be.

So, with the tie delicately poised, the unimaginable happened in the second leg.

We lost…

6-1!!!

Europa League Second Knockout Round – Leg Two

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What is it with us and bottling big games? What is it with us being incapable of defending against any team who are mildly good? How can we beat Lyon 5-0 in the group stage then lose 6-1 to Werder Bremen?

It’s absolutely infuriating. The match stats don’t make for great reading either.

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We’re going to win the league and I’m actually the angriest I’ve ever been during this save. I can’t remember a loss this bad… probably because it’s our biggest loss since I took charge!

There were lots of fines handed out after that game; I struggle to think of a more horrific sight than these average ratings.

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I blame Tranmere’s ground…


Only a very specific set of circumstances could have made me more annoyed after that result.

For instance, the only way I could possibly be more annoyed after losing 6-1 would be if we were to play Hibernian in a quarter final replay, with our squad already knackered, and for that game to go to extra time, then in extra time we’d have a player sent off and our former centre back would score a 20 yard volley to win Hibs the game.

That would be the only possible scenario in which I would be more annoyed.

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Ridiculous. Just ridiculous.

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