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?​

 

[misterioBean]

June 2024
End of Season Review

Schedule and Table

Since the end of the transfer window we kept our good form throughout the rest of the season.
There were some unfortunate results, like the 1-0 defeat against Girona for the Copa del Rey and the 1-0 defeat against Las Palmas followed by the draw against Valladolid at the end of the season.

However, we had some good results like the 4-0 win against Barcelona at the Mestalla.
Won't happen many times so when it does it's always an amazing feeling.
We couldn't get pass the Madrid teams though, having lost every game against both Real and Atlético.

In the end, we kept the 3rd place and secured Champions League football for next season.
We weren't that far from Barcelona in 2nd and Real Madrid only finished with 11 more points than us so we actually did pretty good.

Next Season Preparations

After our loaned in players leave in the summer, we are left with a few spots to strenghten.
The main one will obviously be the goalkeepers.

Mamardashvili was an exceptional keeper and one of the reasons we were able to have such an amazing season.
He finished the season as the second keeper with the most clean sheets as well, only behind Courtois.

However, Liverpool are not interested in loaning him out to us again, so we will need to search for a good substitute otherwise we will be very poorly served at our goal.

Our center-backs would also suffer from a player terminating his loan, but we also have Cenk Ozkacar coming back from a spell at Valladolid.

He helped them achieve a very respectful 5th place and performed well enough for me to consider keeping him in and use him as a backup.

Enzo Barrenechea is also leaving to go back to Aston Villa and despite using him primarly as a backup for André Almeida he really stepped up when André got injured and finished the season with an impressive 7.07 average rating.

Very much like Mamardashvili though, Aston Villa are not interested in loaning him out again. So we'll have to find a good replacement for him as well.

Lastly, I would also like to bring in one or two wingers.
Rioja was good this season, but he's already 31 years old and I'm expecting him to step down and maybe be sold this next season.

We have Sergi Canós who can play on his place, but he's already 28 years old and he's not as good as Rioja.
We'll see how it goes.

Our striker position will also be left with a hole when Rafa Mir leaves, but Diego López can be used as a striker very well.
His average rating wasn't the best this season but I was using him as a winger for most of it, so I'm hoping he can deliver better results as a striker. He scored 6 goals this season playing mostly off the bench so I'm expecting good things.

However, things may not be that easy since the board only provided us 13.5m to spend this summer.
We'll have to try to find some good bargains and maybe even good players transfer listed.

Confirmed transfers

Our scouts found this youngster available on a free transfer from Sparta Prague.
He didn't have any analytic data for me to look at, so I had to go with my scouts opinion and he rated him very highly.

Like I said, when it comes to younger players we'll have to rely on our scouts instead of keeping our data driven approach.

Once again, our scouts found a young player available on a free.
This time, they don't rate him as highly but he has a lot of pros on his report, so many I can't even show them in the screenshot.

But I can show this:

This guy was playing on Bologna's U20 team.
He scored a total of 34 goals in 46 appearances and had an average rating of 7.26.

Unfortunately, the data for the U23, U21 and U19 is not shown, even though I set the game to record it.
Let's see how it goes when he joins, but I'll probably try to loan him out and see how he does on a tier 2 team.

Season Review

Even though we didn't win any trophy this season, it was a very successful year and we overachieved by a lot.
Next season won't be easy to keep playing like we did, specially with a limited budget, but let's see what we can do.​

 

[misterioBean]

1st September 2024
Minor (Unfortunate) Rebuild

With the end of a very successful firts season as manager of Valencia FC, we still had a ton of work ahead of us.
Despite finishing 3rd in the league and qualifying for the UCL, the Spanish league doesn't give clubs any money for the season.
This means that our club is still in a huge monetary deficit (I forgot to take a screenshot of this but we were a lot of millions on the red).

Unfortunately, that meant only one thing: we needed to sell someone.

But before selling anyone, I asked the board to increase our transfer revenue, which was only at 25%.
They agreed to set it to 70%, which is a good increase in my opinion.

Transfers Out

The big sale we needed came in from Saudi as Al-Nassr signed our LB José Gayà for 80m upfront.
I debated if we should have sold him or not since he was one of our best players last season, but being 30 years old I don't think we would get this much for him next season, specially if he picked up an injury and started decaying fast.
With this sale, we pretty much didn't need to sell anyone else.
But needing isn't always the option.

Newcastle United came in for Fran Pérez with a 30m offer which I rejected.
He was our best winger last season and at only 22 years old it was in my best interest to keep the Spanish in our team.
However, they paid his 50m release clause, which I didn't know about before and Fran Pérez refused to renew his contract with us.
After he left, that was two of our best players already out of the club for the next season.

But of course, as we say in Portugal, there's not two without three.
Thierry Rendall Correia, our RB, was sold to Juventus for 40m which can rise to 47m after he completes 50 games.
Again, I didn't want to sell him, but he has been forcing a transfer out of the club since January and entered the last year of his contract with no interest to sign a new one.
His value was between 25m and 27m so I think, considering everything, we still got a good deal for the 26 year old.

We also sold other players for smaller fees.
We got rid of some deadwood like Germán Valera, César Tárrega and Stole Dimitrievski and also capitalized on the 31 year old winger Luís Rioja.
We also loaned out a bunch of youngsters and Hugo Guillamón, who lost space in our lineup.
In total, we made 180m€ in the summer.

Transfers In

With so many players leaving the club, we needed to bring in some fresh blood.
And that we did.

The first player to come into our team was the Portuguese midfielder Tomás Handel from Vitória SC.
If you followed my Vitória save you are probably familiar with the name.
As you can see he had a very good season in Portugal, providing assists and even scoring some goals, he specializes in progressive passes and controlling possession, but is not shy when it comes to win it back.
Even though he is a fantastic player, he only cost us 750k, which is a steal for a player of his calibre.

We kept working together with our scouts to find some good youngsters and Kick Eerhard was available on a free transfer.
Despite not playing much for his former club, he played very well when he had the opportunity and at only 17 years of age he comes in with some potential.

We then splashed some cash in the 21 year old Alberto Moleiro from Las Palmas, 45m to be exact.
I know this may not be a very "moneyball" signing at first since we spent so much, but I'm expecting his value to increase sponentially because he is a tremendous player and there was no other winger who caught my eye out.

Next we signed another midfielder.
Morten Frendrup had an average season in Genoa, nothing amazing but he showed a lot of work rate when his team didn't have the ball and I felt like we needed someone in our midfield with that defensive mentality.
He cost us 11.5m to bring in so it wasn't a huge transfer by any means.

With Mamardashvilli leaving to Liverpool we had to make a signing to cover this loss.
When I saved the player list, Niklas Hedl showed some very good performances in goal. Unfortunately, it seems like the Austrian league finishes earlier because when I took the screeshot all the data from last season was already gone.

For 8m€, there was not any other goalkeeper who looked as good and had such good stats as him, so we brought him in hoping he can deliver some good performances in Spain.

After finding a replacement for our goalkeeper, we needed someone to cover the space left by Gayà.
Vasilis Zagaritis had some good performances over in the Netherlands, with very good stats both offensively and defensively.
He could be better when it comes to passing the ball, but when I saw this pizza chart I was blown away with what I was seeing and for a fee of 6.75m there wasn't many more options with this kind of performances.

Another youngster suggested by our scouts as the 18 year old CB joins our club from Bayern Muchen for 350k.
We were able to ****** him up from the likes of Tottenham, Manchester United and Liverpool, so the guy has to have some potential in him.

After signing Hedl I started worrying about UCL registration and after selling Dimitrievski we also needed a replacement.
Joan García's contract with Espanyol had just ran out so he was available on a free so I signed him as a backup for Hedl.

The last signing we made was a replacement for Rendall Correia.
Believe me when I say there were literally no players with good stats on the RB position.
I ended up signing Iván Fresneda from Sporting for \5m upfront and another 7m in installments.

Preseason and Start of Season

Our preseason was small with only 4 games played but we I think it was a very good preseason considering the teams we faced.

Our start to the season was also very good, racking up wins against Cádiz, a surprising 2-0 win against Barcelona and a 5-1 against Eibar. Unfortunately, when I rotated the squad to give the starters some rest we were obliterated at Getafe as they put 6 goals past our keeper.

Maybe our second eleven is slightly weaker than last season, but with the amount of signings we made it's normal for our players to still need some time to adapt.

We were also delivered our UCL fixture list and this will be a tough challenge to overcome.
Man. City, Liverpool and Milan will probably give us a huge headache but every other team can also surprise us and deliver some blows.

Other Stuff

With the club's finances being in a way better place now, we asked the board for some improvements, which they accepted.

We left the club with around 140m in the bank and kept 60m available on the transfer budget if we need to sign anyone in January.

With nothing else to share at the moment, I'll be back once we hit the start of the new year.​

 

[FancyPantsCam]

Never been brave enough to leave my beloved attributes behind. Also, I blame you and your statistical analysis for making me watch Moneyball again.

 

[misterioBean]

January 2025
Keeping Up the Pace

It has been quite a while since my last post. Unfortunately work schedules haven't been allowingme to play much at all and whenever I actually do it takes a while to load everything because of the level of detail this challenge requires from the game.
Anyway, I finally reached January, so let's see how things are going over at the Mestalla.

Schedule

As you can see things in the LaLiga are going very well once again.
We had some slips here and there, specially against some teams we should be beating but sometimes it just isn't our day.
We did beat Real Madrid at the Bernabéu and even demolished Atlético Madrid and Athletic Club 5-0 so we are definitely capable of facing off the best teams in the league.

League Table

With only one game left to officially reach mid season, we were able to keep the 2nd place jointed points with Barcelona.
Real Madrid are 8 points ahead of us but we are also 8 points clear of the 4th place.
Being able to compete against Real Madrid and Barcelona this early is a very good sign for us since it means our last season wasn't a fluke.

UEFA Champions League

When it comes to the UCL, we are not doing too bad.
3 wins, 2 draws and only one loss against Man. City for now is not the worse that could happen.
Our last two fixtures are Liverpool and Frankfurt and will both be played this upcoming month.

Transfer Business

The first signing we confirmed in January was the 18 year old Mihajlo Cvetkovic from Cukaricki Stankom over in Serbia.
He joins the club for 1.5m and stayed at his club until the end of the season.

He's playing mostly off the bench there and scored 4 goals in 530 minutes played which is not too bad.
Statistic wise he's doing a very good job and has a lot of potential so he's one for the future.

The second and last player we signed so far was Andrija Maksimovic from Crvena zvezda also from Serbia.
We paid 2.2m for the young midfielder and for this one we trusted our scouts since he didn't play any minute for the first team.

Team Data Analyzis

As you can see, our team is playing well above average, which is amazing.
We have are shooting a lot, averaging 16 shots per game an dalso scoring close to 3 goals per game.
We are also conceding less goals per game than the average LaLiga side.

However, not everything is great.
Our Tackles Won Ratio and Pass Completion Ratio are only slightly over the average and our Shots on Target Ratio is actually 0.38 fewer than the league's average so there could be something we can do to change that but since we attack so much it's normal to get some shots off target.

Our offensive data is also very pleasant to look at, specially due to the shots and goals per game.
Our Dribbles per game looks quite weird since we have some good dribblers in our team like Moleiro.
When I looked at our players the reason for this became quite clear: only our wingers are averaging a lot of dribbles per game.

Our midfield has been very well structured and they very rarely attempt to dribble the ball, preferring to send it to the more advanced players. Our strikers also average quite below the league's average so that decreases our team's analytics.

I was very surprised to see our wing backs don't dribble quite us much as I would imagine them to.
Maybe I can tweak some of their instructions to make them get further up the pitch.

Defensively we've also been outstanding this season and the only parameter where we could actually improve would be when it comes to make our defensive decisions faster.

Our Opposition Passes per Defensive Action, which is a bit over the average, tells me our players wait for the right moment to get their foot into the opposition and it doesn't really pay out sometimes due to our Tackling Win Ratio being only slightly over the average.

When it comes to individual stats, there are some players we need to point out.

Firts of all, it's amazing to see how good our wingers are at creating chances for our team.
In fact, the only player above of Roger Fernandes so far is Barcelona's Raphinha which is very encouraging.

Another amazing statistic is our midfielder's passing ability.
As you can see, all of our midfielders, startes and backups, have been tremendous at providing the team with playmaking abilities.

The new signing Tomás Handel outshined everyone else when it comes to delivering passes but having all of them on the green square means our passing ability is off the charts.

When it comes to shooting only Hugo Duro stands out and once again is only outshined by Lewandowski, Mbappé and Vinícius Júnior, which says a lot about or main striker, who's already on 18 goals this season.

Defensively it is very 50/50.

On the one hand all of our CB's are very reliable when they have the ball in their feet, not allowing anyone to get near them.
On the other hand, all our WB's are losing the ball most times they try to dribble, even if that's not that often, so maybe we need to rethink if we really want them to dribble more.

For now this is everything I was able to do but I will try to get to the end of the season as fast as I can.​