Won Vanarama National League South with my hungry chickens! Pre-season almost over, have introduced a lot of new faces. A few things I thought was interesting...
Key players last year on contracts have been renewed. They were 'star players', in our new contract negotiations they suggested to play as 'fringe' player with a non-contract. The very few that did not offer that, suggested their salaries to be decreased. Not sure why this has happened but I am loving it.
I have so far sold 38 season tickets, the goal is 100. I am slightly concerned that my squad has so few friends and family members willing to purchase season tickets. My economy is not great. We have been forced to rent a new stadium because ours were too small for the regulations. We were never anywhere close to fill our stadium (2000 seats, averaged about 300-400). The economy was completely dependent on money from cups. So a bit nervous about forthcoming year if we can avoid going bankrupt.
All my facilities are as bad as they can be, I even snuck a peak behind the scenes and could see that they were all at 1 of 20. My pitch was waterlogged kind of all the time, opponents complained every time about playing on this pig farm. My physio had like a three, can't remember, and so on. Everything was set up for crazy amount of injuries. See the results below.
I have NEVER had so little injuries, and no, I did not rotate. My squad was small so everyone pretty much played 50 games. Kite who missed the most was a loanee for free to cover for potential injuries that never came. On a somewhat different note, I had hoped that those that played would improve over the year but no one even improved a little bit. I suppose it's the consequence of the facilities and being semi-professional.
I have signed Michael Essien. How cool isn't that?!
It's weird. I have tracked so many for a year and they refused to come even on loan. Then their contracts expired. Still refused. A few weeks go, then they come and accept a role as 'fringe player' with a fairly low salary. Weird.