Valencia - A Moneyball Experience

[misterioBean]

Hello everyone!

It's time for a new challenge in FM24 since we won't be getting a new version until at least March 2025.
I've been struggling to find something that would make me want to come back to it ever since I stopped my European Journeyman challenge, which I didn't complete because, once again, I lost the save file. I've learned that sending the file over and over again from one computer to another will eventually mess things up so I won't be doing it this time.

Anyway, I found this one challenge that, at first I was sceptical about, but after some consideration I ended up thinking it may bring the spark back.
I'm talking about the Moneyball Approach.

What is the Moneyball approach?
If you don't quite know what the Moneyball approach really is, it basically changes everything about how you play this game.
To keep it very simple, it favours analytic data over attributes. This means that when I'm buying players for my team, I won't be looking to their attributes to make my opinion about their quality, but to how they perform when they are actually playing.

I will show you later on what I mean. For now, let's introduce the team we will be playing as.

Valencia Club de Fútbol

Valencia CF is a club founded in 1919 and throughout their history they have accomplished a lot of success domestically.

In fact, they have won the LaLiga title in 6 different occasions, but you have to go back 20 years to 2004 to relive the last season they lifted the trophy.
They also lifted the Copa del Rey 8 times, the last one being as recent as 2019. Domestically, they also have a Supercopa de Espana.

On an international level, they've won the UEFA Europa League 3 times, the last one also in 2004 alongside their last LaLiga win, and 2 UEFA Super Cups.

We play our home games at the Mestalla, a stadium with capacity to bring in 49430 people and one of the biggest in the country.
Our training and youth facilities are also very good, which is always a good sign for the club's future.

However, the club finances are not so good.
In fact, ever since the owner, Peter Lim, took charge, Valencia has always been very insecure and there were a lot of stuff happening in the background that ultimetaly led the club to how they are nowadays, currently sitting at the bottom of the league table with only 7 points in 11 games.

Our job here is to make sure that doesn't happen with us and try to bring Valencia back to their prime, maybe even surpassing that and win a UCL.

In-game, our finances are not that bad though. We have around 40m in the bank which is very decent.
There's no transfer budget though because I decided to disable the first transfer window. I'll explain it later.
With no transfer budget and little room to work with on the wage budget, we'll try to survive until January with the team we were left with.

Quick Disclaimer

Even though I used the Sas skin to show this screenshots, that's not the skin I'm going with for this save.
I will be using the Mustermann Iconic skin, which replaces the way the player's ability is shown to us. More on that later.

The reason I disabled the transfer window is simple: since we will only be signing players regarding their performances, there won't be any data available to us to use on the first few months to judge properly.

Also, even though we won't be looking for the player's attributes, our scouts opinion of the player will be very important and will also influence my judgement regarding recruiting players.

Let's Meet the Squad

This is the squad we will have for the first half of the season.
It's not much and there are definitely areas that instantly called my attention.

I will use the same 4-3-3 DM tactic I've used in multiple other saves because I know that's a tactic I can rely on both offensively and defensively.
​

Deep Analysis:

GK - We have 3 goalkeepers in our squad. Mamardashvili will be our starter for the season, but he is only on loan from Liverpool so next season he won't be around. The 2 backups we have are the 30 year old Dimitrivieski and the 33 year old Domènech but I'm not sure if any of them is good enough for the level I want.

DC - Center back wise, we have 5 available to us. Diakhaby and Mosquera will be our starting duo and I'll keep the youngster Gasiorowski and the loanee Caufriez as their backups. We also have César Tárrega, but I think we will try to get rid of him in January because he's not good enough.

RB - On the right side of our defense, we have the 25 year old Rendall Correia and Foulquier, who will be his backup (Spoiler alert, he got injured in September for 9 months and decided to retire in December). We will be looking for a new RB in January...

LB - On the other side, we have the star of the team José Gayá and Jesús Vásquez as his backup.

DM - We are well served here as Pepelu and Guillamón are both quality players and are also pretty young. We'll see how they perform this season.

CM - Here's where problems start to emerge. After securing our DM positions, we only have 3 more midfielders. Javi Guerra is a very good young player who can play all over the midfield, so he will be our B2B while André Almeida (former Vitória SC player btw) and the loanee Barrenechea are better playmakers.

Wingers - We are actually well served on the wing department with 5 wingers. Sadly, our best one, Luís Rioja, is also the oldest of them all so I'm hoping Fran Pérez and Diego López can develop well, as they are our future.

Strikers - We also have good depth on the striker position with 3 good strikers on our hands. Unfortunately, we only own 1 of them. Rafa Mir and Dani Gómez are both loaned in players.

La Academia

Valencia's youth system is a well recognized name in Spain. Known as La Academia, there were a bunch of players coming out of the Valencia youth department such as Raúl Albiol, David Silva, Isco, Jordi Alba, Carlos Soler and Ferran Torres.

With that in mind, we'll keep an eye for good youth prospects already in our youth teams and look for some promising young players around the world as well.

Quick Look at How the Skin Looks

This is how the player profiles look.
As you can see there's a big emphasis on the performing data and no attributes to look for.

The attributes have been replaced with colorful circles that indicate how good a player is at certain aspects of the game.
You can argue it's still fairly suggestive but the range for the bigger yellow circles is 16+, so you never know if a player has 16 or 19 finishing for instance. You just know that there's a big strong to his game.

This is how it looks like when you scroll down a bit. Yes, the skin uses a scroll system, kinda weird but it didn't really affect the me as much as I though it would.

Final Disclaimer

I started this save 3 days ago and have been playing the first few months of the season already.
I'm currently about to end December so I'll post the first update as soon as we reach January.

I hope you all enjoy the ride!​

 

[misterioBean]

January 2024
Not What We Were Expecting

Things over in Valencia have been way better than I expected.
We started the season with a good streak of 6 wins and pretty much kept some dominance over smaller teams.
We couldn't beat either Real or Barcelona though and Real Madrid actually beat us 6-0 at the Bernabeu.

I did use our backup team against them because I already expected a loss and I wanted to rest our best players, but I didn't think we would lose by that much.

Losses against Girona and Real Valladolid weren't very well taken though.

We are currently 3rd only behind Barcelina and Real Madrid but Athletic are only one point away and are also one game behind schedule over us so we could eventually drop to 4th if they win.

Crazy to see Atlético so far behind in 14th though.

Analyzis

This type of challenge allows me to use a feature I never use in FM: The Data Hub.

Overall, our analysts think our team is performing way above average and what we were expected to, which is amazing.

Our analysts pointed out that all of our defensive players win the ball frequently and all of our 3 CB's make few mistakes when they have the ball. Our RB's lose the possession a bit more but that's to be expected as they are more on the attck.

All of our midfielders make a lot of passes and create a lot of chances and also that everyone's keeping their pass completion percentage over 85%/90 minutes.

Hugo Duro and Rafa Mir are also scoting above average, specially Hugo Duro but it seems like he's scoring a lot of his goals from the penalty spot.

Transfer Window Plans

My plan is simple: bring in a new right back to be Rendall's backup and maybe bring in a new midfielder for the B2B role.

It can change bery quickly though because Rendall Correia has interest from PSG and Juventus and Diakhaby is also being hunted by Liverpool.

Ideally I want to keep them both but if we have to sell them I'll have to find more suitable players in the market.

The board gave us a good amount of money to work with in January so let's see what we can do.​

 

[misterioBean]

February 2024
Good Outcome

The winter transfer market is officially closed and I have to say I'm happy with the transfers we made.

First of all, we sent Dani Gómez back to Levante since he only played 2 games for us coming of the bench.

After we got that done, we started going after players to fill the empty spots we had. The first role I wanted to fill was the RB position.

I was looking for a right back who was good defensively but also getting the ball forward.
Lorenz Assignon does fit in that description and one of the main stats that conviced me to sign him was his attempted crosses per game. It's not shown on the graph but it was pretty high.

There's one concern about this signing though: he only played 508 minutes and most of the games he played were coming off the bench so the stats may not be the most accurate, but he's coming as a backup as well so I'm hoping he does well.

He joined the club for 12m and was our highest trasnfer this window.

The second position I wanted to strenghten was the midfield, specifically the B2B role.
For this one, I was looking for another player who was equally good at defending and attacking.

Himad Abdelli shoed up on the list with good stats across the board.
He's obviously more of a playmaker but he can play as B2B effectivelly so it should be fine.

We paid 6.75m for his services.

With that signing, we were pretty much done with transfers... until this happened:

Liverpool came with an offer we couldn't really refuse.
They paid 36m, eventually going up to 45m, for our best CB Diakhaby.
Why couldn't we refuse it you may ask? Well, even though he was performing well, he's already 28 years old, which means he'***** his peak and we may not get this type of offer again.

With that in mind, I accepted the offer and looked for a proper replacement.

That replacement was the 23 year old Mees Hilgers, who's playing at Twente and, as you can see by the stats, he's having an amazing season. Very good defending and also an aerial threat, which was exactly what I wanted.

After buying Hilgers for 9m, I finally gave my transfer business a rest and stopped looking avidly for players.
If you know how this kind of saves work you know it takes a lot of time to look for players since you have to export the list and get it into a spreadsheet.

However, something called my attention on deadline day:

Roger Fernandes, a 19 year old Portuguese winger playing at Braga, was looking to move clubs.
He was available for 2m€ and despite only playing 359 minutes, he played well when he had the chance.

Since we would have to look for a winger pretty soon, I decided to sign him.

Despite some big clubs showing interest in Rendall Correia, we were able to keep him, so the only departure was Diakhaby and some young players going out on loan.

January was a very good month in terms of results. We only lost points against Valladolid and also won 3 cup games this month.

This good run sees us keeping the 3rd place in the league, which is way over what was expected.
But can we keep this run going?​