Now that Sligo are easily the best team in Ireland I am trying to make more of an attempt to improve the Irish league as a whole.
For a while I have been bringing a lot of youth players to Sligo. They have mainly been from the under 18 teams of big clubs in England when their contracts expire and it has always been my intention to either loan or sell these players to other Irish clubs.
Here’s a list of all of the players that were on loan last season.
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I have offered nearly all of these players to opposing clubs for £0 but for some reason Irish clubs are not interested. It’s particularly annoying baring in mind a 2 and a half star player means they are a top-level player for the Irish league.
So, at the start of the 2023 season (the season that has just passed) I saw that Cobh Ramblers was the only managerial job available. They had just finished bottom of the Airtricity First Division.
So I decided to make them my little project by adding a new manager to the game to take charge of them.
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Long story short, I basically did all the things the AI is rubbish at (like employing good staff and making good transfers/loans) and downloaded an overpowered tactic before holidaying the entire season with them.
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Cobh Ramblers were predicted to finish bottom of the league in 2023. This is how the table ended up…
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They will be playing in the Airtricity Premier League next season!
The idea originally was to loan or effectively give Sligo players to Cobh for free, however I made the mistake of not taking into account that no Sligo player would agree to join them because their reputation was so low.
Then, about a month ago, the Dundalk job became available.
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So yeah, I added a manager to Dundalk as well!
They have massively underperformed in the save and I want the other Irish teams to do well in Europe so I am hoping I can just give a lot of the talented young players I have stockpiled at Sligo to Dundalk.
One thing I’ve noticed with Dundalk is the amount of players at the club who are on £200-£300 a week but are nowhere near good enough.
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So many players are just eating up the wage budget, which again is down to the AI. So those players are getting released and I’m going to try and get as many good players and staff to the club as possible before holidaying the entire season like I did with Cobh Ramblers.
Dundalk finished third in 2023 so will be in the Europa League next season.
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I’m not going to go into much detail about Cobh and Dundalk for the rest of the save as this is more of an experiment just to see what happens. However, it will be interesting to see how well they both do next year.
Hopefully we can create two teams that do well in Europe and also eventually give us a challenge in the domestic competitions too!
It’d be interesting to know your thoughts about this, whether you think it’s a good idea or whether you think it ruins the authenticity of the save etc.