Brechin the Bank - Brechin City

[Desmond's Tutu]

Brechin City - An Overview

Famous for having a hedge that runs down one side of the Glebe Park stadium, Brechin City have had quite the tumultuous period of their history. The 2017/18 season saw them relegated from the Scottish Championship without winning a game, the 2018/19 season saw back-to-back relegations to Scotland's lowest professional tier, League Two. A small matter of a global pandemic kept the club from a third successive relegation and despite that warning, the 2020/21 season saw the club fall out of League Two and into the wilderness of non-league football, becoming the third club to fall out of the league structure since promotion and relegation was brought in. Since that relegation, Brechin are the closest of the relegated clubs to return, having won the 2022/23 Highland League. Winning the league isn't enough though, promotion is ridiculously tough to achieve. Once you win your league, you have a two-legged play-off with the Lowland League Champions and if successful, you have two legs against the team that occupies bottom of Scottish League Two.


Objectives
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• Promotion back to the Scottish Football League - A tough one but not impossible. There's a handful of good Highland League sides and the rest are of a lower quality but even then, there would still be four games before promotion was achieved. We're going 4-4-2 and direct football. Call it Brexit Ball, Dyche football or whatever, the truth is, this is the Highland League, the fifth tier of Scottish Football, Scottish players are not the most technically gifted and certainly not those plying their trade in the fifth division, so we're going to focus on getting good balls into the box, a target man and an advanced forward.​

• Sort out the finances - There's £4,253 in the bank and the club are spending £4,620 per week on player wages. Simply, the club is haemorraghing money and it can't go on. If we want to progress and invest in facilities and grow as a club, we can't be losing money in this way. We're going to save £305 per week on wages, terminating the loans of Liam Strachan (£50 p/w), Matty Wright (£180 p/w) and Jamie Richardson (£75 p/w) so that's something but won't make us rich anytime soon. ​

• Be a selling club - The finances aren't good, so we need to look at how we address that and one way is to be a selling club. We're going to look at young players, giving them an opportunity and hopefully sell on for a fee. Scotland's biggest clubs, Rangers, Celtic, Aberdeen, Hearts, Hibs etc have their own goals and youth development may not be that high for those clubs, however, we can give these players a chance and hopefully if they do well, we sell on and if they're doing well, the team should in theory be doing well, so it's a win-win.

• Be "up for the Cup" - There's a lot of cup football to play in Scotland. The Scottish Cup, Viaplay Cup, Scottish Challenge Cup and Highland League Cup are all competitions that we'll be in and with that, there's prize money and the prospect in the Scottish Cup and Viaplay Cup's of playing Scotland's biggest teams and taking our share of ticket sales from those games. Given the finances are poor, these games are equally as important as the league and offer decent financial remuneration, so we must do well in these games.

 

[The chosen wrong]

Really looking forward to seeing where this one goes.

I’m considering starting in the lower leagues of Scotland or maybe Northern Ireland now that FM25 isn’t coming out