Galician Pride

Muttley84

Muttley84

Member
Joined
Dec 23, 2015
Messages
109
Reaction score
128
Points
43
Welcome everyone to my first story on the Forum. Been playing Football Manager since 2005 now, and following on the forums for several years, but never got the time or the courage to show-off my extraordinary 30+years - CL winning career with Port Talbot, the yearly performances with favorite team Steaua Bucharest or the stories of Bury, Hansa Rostock, Scunthorpe or Real Union de Irun.
As you can tell I am a big fan of long-term careers, nothing more rewarding for me than watching a club grow from the minnows of lower leagues to the heights of Champions League. Unfortunately (or lucky for me) real life keeps me pretty busy so for the last years I have switched from the full featured version of the game, to the faster paced ones (this year called touch).
Well, enough with the long intro, let's get straight to business by presenting the manager of 2016, the one and only:


Now, who is that? The first hint is in the title, he's from Galicia (region in Spain). The other hint is that he's best known for his biggest performance is a completely other sport than football, although he played (to my knowledge at least) some matches in Segunda B also.
Now that the foundation has been set, it only remains for me to apologize for my English (not a native speaker here) and to hope that I'll have the time and readers to continue this post.

Coming up: All about the manager and his search for a team in his homeland.
 
Oscar Pereiro... Your English is more than fine, dude.
 
Good start, hoping for a long term career, will be following. Also your English is spot on. Better then mine and I've been attempting it most of my life.
 
Club Introduction

And the winner is... indeed Oscar Pereiro Sio, former Tour de France winner (well, more like a lucky looser after Landis was found with the hand to deep in the cookie jar). He always said he had a passion for football, and after retiring even played a couple of matches for a team from Galicia. It seems only natural that he wanted to follow-up on that interest, and dig his hand also in the management jar. His choice of team should be an obvious one: low budget, low expectations, low pressure... introducing:

View attachment 153705
Coruxo Fútbol Club, is a Spanish club based in the parish of Coruxo, Vigo in the autonomous community of Galicia. Founded in 1930 their best performance is represent by their current run, this being their 6th season in Segunda B (3th tier of Spanish football).
The board informs me that they want a mid-table finish, and are willing to give me for achieving that the extraordinary amount of 0 E for transfers and a payroll of 1.42 mil. E/year (all of them already spent). Oh, the joy.
Surely this must mean that the squad is filled with a mixture of experienced and recognized players and promising youngster blooming with talent. Well, not exactly.
View attachment 153704
Ok, I'll admit it now, so far things haven't been working on my favor, but I'm sure as most of the Spanish clubs we have strong facilities which will allow me to base my strategy on nurturing future prospects and train the current squad in the best conditions. Wrong again.

View attachment 153703
Just think of all those ultra fans that will fill out and sell out our monster stadium of 1500 places. You know, that almost 20 buses? This might be one for the long run, but in my career as a cyclist I have learned to never back down and fight for every single accomplishment, and that's exactly what I'm gonna do here. As i walk out the gate of the stadium O Vao, I took a look on the other side of the road. Well, at least if I'm not getting wins, money or facilities, I will sure get a nice view of the sun setting over the sea (girls tanning on the Praia de Vaio).
View attachment 153702
Let the hunger games begin! (Preferably with some tapas and a cold cerveza).
Coming up: Prea-season and (improbable) transfer activity.
 
Well, if the boot system of the forum would only let me post the update and not show me the message above it would be great. I only had 3 pictures and some text. But now we have to wait.

Post denied. New posts are limited by number of URLs it may contain and checked if it doesn't contain forbidden words.
 
Backroom changes

So the first thing I did when I got to work was to grab another cup of coffee. Guess it wasn't the smartest idea to party all night long and drink to get to know the people here and gain some community support. I ain't 20 anymore. The second thing was analyzing the current staff structure, realizing how bad they were and that I didn't even had a chief scout, and then replacing them all except for the Head of Youth Development. Now the staff room is filled with talent and stars.

View attachment 153071
 
Transfer activity

The team had no first team choice for the LB position and also lacked depth in the MC and ST department. So I had to address those problems given that I had no transfer or wage budget whatsoever. So I release a couple of guys, and concentrated on free loans (harder than you think cause the only teams affording to let players on a free to us were big clubs from La Liga and Liga Adelante, but their players refused to join us due to our small reputation). But after some work (and a trillion bids on players) I came up with this.

View attachment 153070
The only problem with our team is that most of the key-players are expiring at the end of the current season, and i cannot afford to resign them now. Hopefully after a good league run (we are not in the cup this year) I can readjust the budgets a bit to sign them
 
Prea-season

So with confidence we go to the pre-season.

View attachment 153069
It isnt the best run of results, but we can have some positives from it also. We filled out the stadium in the matches with teams from the 1st league of France and Germany (some much needed money there). And we did manage to win a game.
Coming up: the 4th coffee of the day for me, and the first part of the season for Coruxo.
 
First part of the season

After a careful screening of the League I've realized that other than Racing which are a former first division side side there aren't many monsters in our series, so confident that we can make a push for the upper part of the table, and maybe with some luck even reach the first 4 spots that go to the promotion playoff. Let's see how we did.

View attachment 152809
Not bad at all. A good run of results, with only one away defeat and a big surprise at Racing. So where does that leaves us in the table?

View attachment 152808
Top of the League baby! Things are looking good on the sunny side of Galicia. Let's just hope we can keep this up and continue the good run of form in the second part of the season.
 
A moment in time

During the winter holidays I realized that things worked out so good for us so far, but I still think that we need some extra help in order to achieve our promotion dreams. So, I thought to myself, who can help us? I had no choice but to try and convince the biggest hotshot I knew for some indulgence. So, I have took my donkey out of the garage and on we go on the Camino de Santiago.

View attachment 152769
Camino de Santiago is the name given to any pilgrimage rout to one of the most famous places in all of the Galicia - Santiago de Compostela. Here, at the shrine of the apostle St. James the Great millions of people come to pray and receive a certificate for completing the trip (called a compostela). This will be the final end of my trip, the place where I would pray for the promotion of Coruxo. As I arrived at the feet of the Cathedral a though crossed my mind.

View attachment 152768
If this really is a blessed city, why is their team sitting 6 points and 2 places bellow us?
 
THis is brilliant to read, and has had me chuckling a few times already, good blend of football and humour!
 
Second part of the season

Although some of my readers here seem to be enjoying funny stuff, it seems pretty obvious to me that funny won't help me do it on a cold rainy night in Stoke, nor in Coruxo (honestly, i've looked it up, it only rains 806 mm/year in Stoke but a healthy 1918 mm in Coruxo, though its a bit warmer on the Galician seaside - annual 13.7C compared to only 9.3C in Stoke).
Our team was filled with the holy spirit I brought back in small cans from Santiago de Compostela so we had a good second part of the season.

View attachment 152578

Its only natural that our good run of results allowed us to clinch one of the playoff spots, as you can see bellow. On the other side of things, we did not record a single full stadium for the entire season (although we were only 1 spectator away from it in the home match against Racing).

View attachment 152577

So in the decisive match for promotion we will be facing another league winner, but even if we lose that one we still get a second chance entering in matches with the other teams. Lets just hope that we are somehow lucky in the draw.

View attachment 152576

Well, that isn't to bad as long as they don't sent any of their first team players to the match. If they do, then we are pretty much screwed. Boy, would I need a Bendtner right now.
 
End of season

We entered the play-off matches with a lot of confidence playing against the second team of Valencia. Since the first match was played home we aimed at not receiving a goal, and we managed to do just that. In the second leg we were beaten with two goals scored by a young and promising prospect of them (errr) - Alvaro Negredo. So we entered the next round where we faced the catalan side Reus, and in the final round beaten a team from our series - Logrones.

View attachment 152320
That means we managed to secure promotion to the second tier of the Spanish league system - Liga Adelante. A massive achievement for our small club and we hope that we will not make a fool out of us to many times in the next season. Hey, at least we will travel the entire Spain and see a lot more of the beautiful landscapes.
Of course that the end of the season also means the Awards period (attached below) but you sure do have my enormous respect (and maybe we even play a friendly match with your name on the shirts as a sponsor) if you recognize any of the players. Heck, I am their coach and barely know their names.

View attachment 152319
No surprises in Liga BBVA with the top three being Barcelona, Atletico and Real, with Sevilla clinching the 4th spot and Valencia, Bilbao and Betis qualifying for Europa League. Both Galician sides in the first league (Celta and Deportivo) stay up.
In Liga Andelante Oviedo, Cordoba and the surprise Numancia gained promotion, being replaced by relegate Las Palmas, Gijon and Eibar. Prepare yourself for the mighty Galician Derby to be played next year between the powerhouses Coruxo and Lugo.

View attachment 152318
On the other side, great news from the board as they announced a stadium expansion plan by no less than 6000 seats for a duration of only 7 months. The downside is that the costs of over 9 mil. are covered by a bank loan which may be a drag for us on the long run. I had a small hope that for the duration we will move on the next-door Balaidoz stadium, home of Celta Vigo, but it seems that won't happen and we'll take the bus daily for the 50 km trip to Pontevedra.
So the season ends with a big fiesta down the beach, where the song below was played on heavy-rotation:

[video=youtube;oEsMhxDVVOk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEsMhxDVVOk[/video]​
 
Preparation for Liga Adelanta

It was a busy summer here in Coruxo. We sat down with the boardroom and discussed our options, and we found a common objective in the attempt to avoid relegation. I was given a transfer budget of 0 E, but a healthy 2.2 mil. payroll budget (still the smallest in the league, maybe that's why the media prediction sees us finishing dead last).
With such much money on my hands I entered a shopping (or is it called stealing if you don't pay a single cent for it?) rampage, with no less than 17 players joining our team during the transfer window, and 9 leaving. I am pretty satisfied of what we got, a mixture of players from the La Liga big teams on loans and players with a lot of experience in the lower leagues.

View attachment 152198
I would have liked to post a printscreen with the youth intake, but that turned out to be a single player with a 2* potential. And off he goes! Our friendlies were all against weaker teams. This is because I am trying to raise a bit team morale in the preparation of all the whooping and kicking our assess gonna suffer when the seasons begins. Maybe that's why I've also hired a team of comedians for our training sessions, at least we should have some fun from this season (although I'm am quite confident that we can achieve a mid-table position in the end).

View attachment 152197
 
Season two

So our first presence in Liga Adelante was a mixture of bad, awful and extraordinary awful matches. We did managed to win a couple of them and draw a large number, so we are sitting in a comfortable position above the relagation area.

View attachment 151627
Christmas in Spain is not as postcard-like or american-cottage-children-looking-at-snow-singing-carols. So as i decorated the Christmas tree, i was thinking what I would want Santa to bring me. Red convertable car seemed to cliche. I was full with blonde supermodels from my cycling days. My bank account is still respectable. Seems like the single thing I could ask for, is a good string of results.
And then, after the winter break, this happened.

View attachment 151626
As Kant once said in his famous paper Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals: WTF?

View attachment 151625
 
Loving the story so far mate! To only lose 5 times as a newly promoted side is a good achievement, but with a winning streak like that maybe the play-offs are within reach?
 
End of season 2

As you noticed, the good string of results couldn't be without results in our league position. I still can't believe that we managed to get such results against clearly better teams with lots and lots more of money. I am starting to believe there is a God of football after all.

View attachment 150766
But what do those results mean? It mean that we clinched 2nd spot in the league and we manged to promote for the second year in a row. Following us to La Liga are Osasuna Pamplona and Las Palmas. To justly realize how crazy the league was this season, it was won by the reserve team of Valencia! (the ones that beat us on the promotion-playoffs last year).

View attachment 150765
Not much changes from last year in the team of the season, with pretty much the same guys doing all the hard work. In other news, the board decided to expand the stadium again (this time with 9000 seats) though thy constantly refuse to upgrade youth and training facilities. Must be that these stadium expansions are just made to fulfill league requirements. So finally we will play for 9 months in Balaidos, my dream does come true!

View attachment 150764
What happened last season in La Liga? Not much in the top three positions, a qualification for Celta Vigo in Europa League and Deportivo not relegating (thus meaning three Galician teams next year in La Liga), and another important aspect for us... the three teams that relegated are exactly the ones promoted last season. The first league in Spain is extremely though and one of the best leagues in the world (as you can see currently with their 5 teams in Champions League following Sevilla's EL win). Madre mia, que va a ser duro!

View attachment 150763
 
Valencia Mestalla won Liga Adelante?! Who's on that team? I've never seen a "B" team in Football Manager not get relegated the season after they get promoted...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

FMBase

Beta

Resources

Top