Moving on...I got one job offer and one news item suggesting some interest. I didn't want to wait to see about the second offer so I bit the hand of the Aberdeen chairman off when the offer came in.
I'd wanted to manage in Scotland and I wanted to dominate it. Aberdeen seemed like a good club to do it with. They had past glories but they were way....waaaay in the past. But they had the infrastructure, support and stadium to make this potentially a great place to build from.
The problem here was that they had just been relegated.
I didn't mind, it just meant domination would take a little longer. It also meant my wage budget wasn't going to be the greatest for bit either. When I joined the club were already over the budget by a few grand. Then when the season reset and the new budget came in it got lowered even further so we were about 5k over the budget.
So my first job was to bring that down. Luckily we had a big squad, and we have a few players on wage reduction clauses in the case of relegation. I put my DoF to work and we managed to get rid of enough people to bring us about 3k a week under the budget. That's right, we slashed about 8k off the weekly wage bill.
I soon started adding to it. The team looked quite good, and balanced, so I thought that only a few recruits would be needed.
The board want me to develop youth. I'm happy to do that. Rather than panic about sorting out left and right back's I put the academy, or former academy, players in there. One is actually a WBL so should be perfectly suited to it.
I also had the awesomely named Bruce Bruce from the academy in midfield. And one or two others. They all looked good enough for this level.
The one area we looked weak on was up front. We didn't have many out and out strikers and when you have a formation with just the one forward in you need someone who can finish. So I brought in the following - Comrie and Byrne.
Comrie came from divisional rivals Falkirk and cost about 120k over a couple of years. He's young, decent, highly rated and Scottish.
Byrne was a real coup I think and cost nothing. Shamrock just wanted rid of him and I was happy to oblige. He doesn't quite look cut out for the Treq role but his finishing and physical stats should mean that he provides goals. The other players will just have to provide him with service rather than the other way around. The scouts already consider him to be a SPL level player.
I also brought in Guz' on a free.
Bit of a gamble but the scouts thought highly of him and I think if I can work on his quickness he could be a good impact sub.
With the forwards sorted I brought in two more players. I didn't really need them but again the scouts raved about them, and as they were free I felt at the very worst I could make some money off them - Pisa de Monterosa and Toubakaris.
Pisa looks solid at the back. He's rated as being SPL quality. Toubakaris is flexible and can cover a lot of the key positions in my formation, and the scouts reckon he'll be a leading SPL player eventually.
So onwards with the season. There's only one promotion place and the board think it should be ours. I have to agree really. Anything less than promotion would be failure I think. There are some other strong sides in the division (Falkirk & Livingston) but in the long run we should be able to out pace them in the title race.
There's also the challenge cup to look forward to :D
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