
Originally Posted by
Dan
First things first for Betis though, gotta go find a manager. The board want attacking football & a focus on young players, so I've had a look at some available coaches & also put an advert out. There are a couple of interesting names that could be towards the top of my list though...
Hit the midpoint of the 27/28 season with Betis, so it's update time.
The first job was to hire a manager who fit with the club vision to play attacking football & focus on younger players, so after putting some feelers out there we settled on Cesc Fabregas, who narrowly edged out Frank Lampard because I felt the squad suited a 4231 more than a 433.
The next job was transfers. We had £70m to spend, plus £400k p/w in available wages, which is way more than I had at Bordeaux, and more than enough to put together a good side:
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We've reunited with Marcos Leonardo, who will rotate up top with Max Moerstedt, and I'm expecting Eyüp Aydın to run games in midfield, but we've mostly just scooped up talented young players who haven't broken through at bigger clubs & are now going cheap. I'm hoping we can find a few who will push on & become long term squad players, then we can flip the rest for a bit of profit.
We obviously shouldn't be in the second division, and we're just way too financially dominant compared to everyone else - after digging into the warchest our annual salaries are almost double the size of the next highest team in the league. We were the odds on favourites to go up, despite the club only asking for playoffs, so you can probably guess how the first half of the season has gone...
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It's gone exactly as it should have, at least until we fell on our faces in the last game before the break & lost our first game of the season to Andorra, but I don't think it's going to do too much to derail our title charge. Should be pretty straightforward down the home stretch, but it would be nice to see us tidy a few things up because we're actually underpeforming both xG for & xG against.
We're still beating our xPts though, which is one of the targets I'd set for the season, so that's good enough I guess.
We're on track for basically every target I've set - the only ones that could be close are the targets around homegrown at club players as we're reliant on one or two players for the bulk of the HGC minutes, but even if we fall short there we should tick everything else off the club vision, so we should have everything in place behind the scenes to allow us to build for on pitch success.
Quick update on Bordeaux while I'm here. I'd set Fabio Cannavaro as their actual manager once I left, with him having led them to the CL in their first season back in Ligue 1 last season. This year has not gone quite so well for him though.