7.1. Ahora o Nunca (Now or Never)

 

Contents: Our Seventh and Final Season as CD Tenerife Manager?

 

🎵 Suggested Tune: Now or Never – Elvis Presley (Spanish cover) 🎵

 

With Football Manager 2020 on the horizon and the impending Beta version due any day now, it’s fair to say that this will most likely be our last season at the helm of CD Tenerife (so much so that I have already released my first FM20 Save Reveal here!). 10 real life months, 7 FM seasons, 300+ games played and 30 blog posts later we now find ourselves with one last chance to mount a serious title challenge and hopefully try to become the first non-Barcelona/Madrid team to do so for what is now 21 years as we are in 2024 in our current Tenerife save.

 

 

Summer Transfer business

 

FIrst things first – reinforcements. Our main issue last year which ultimately led to us finishing in a somewhat disappointing 4th place was that we were far too reliant on Fabio Silva to score our goals for us, illustrated clearly by the fact that he played in 37 out of 38 league games, starting 29 and coming on in 8 further matches as a substitute. An interesting statistic emerged from this – in the 14 games in which Fabio Silva scored, we never lost a game – 12 Wins and 2 Draws from games in which he found the net. The flip side of this was that all of the 7 games we lost were games where he didn’t score, along with three scoreless draws which is a pretty clear representation of the “Silva” effect.

 

	Fabio Silva scores:	Fabio Silva doesn’t score:
Wins	12	11
Draws	2	5
Losses	0	7

The Fabio Silva effect

 

 

When he wasn’t on form however, we struggled to get goals and relied on individual performances from midfielders such as Dani Olmo and Mickael Cuisance to get us through games which quite simply was not effective over the course of the season. Based on this, our first order of business is to bring in a Striker to either compliment or compete with Silva for the honour of leading the line and spearheading the Los Chicharreros attack.

 

Newgen Territory

 

I’m not sure if it’s me or not but the quality of some of the newgen Strikers this year has been ridiculous – to the point where I fear some realism is being lost due to the fact that in this current save there are 5 or 6 absolute worldies of Strikers that have developed over the past few seasons. Granted we do have a lot of cracking Strikers in real life world football in 2019, the current generation in FM has 5 or 6 Strikers who are simultaneously at Messi/Ronaldo level and for me this is slightly unrealistic in comparison to the real world.

 

Allow me to demonstrate:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Name	Age	Club	Nationality	Value
Pepe Gomez	21	Real Madrid	Spanish	€75m
Fraser Sharpe	22	Man City	Scotland	€54m
Guillaume Lefevre	22	Barcelona	French	€85m
Joe Daws	22	Chelsea	English	€68m
Cedric Serrano	22	Man Utd	French	€115m
Gennaro Nocera	22	Man City	Italian	€81m

Ridiculously good

 

 

I usually try to avoid splashing out on newgens for the same reason – I prefer the realism of signing actual real-life players rather that ones that are created in-game. However as we enter Season 7 it seems that the only way for us to compete with the likes of Barcelona and the two Madrids is to get with the times and find our own newgen superstar, and unfortunately our Youth Setup / Recruitment has not produced any at this level.. (opens chequebook) 💶

 

 

19 year old Serbian newgen Dejan Radakovic signs from Braga on a €56 million deal, much of which is funded by the sale of Lukas Klostermann who simultaneously leaves to join Arsenal for a fee of €35 million. Radakovic looks to have the potential to become an absolute worldie and hopefully he will combine well with Fabio Silva to get the goals we need in order to mount a proper title challenge.

 

 

So long, farewell

 

It’s mixed emotions in the year 2024 in Football Manager – as we say hello to hoards of newgens, wonderkids and hot prospects, we also bid farewell to several footballing legends whose time is now at an end in La Liga, in particular a few from our rivals who have repeatedly broken our hearts over the past 6 seasons:

 

 

 

Building an Army ⚔️

 

 

 

 

We definitely don’t want to get too carried away yet, but for the first time in my own FM career we have not one but both of the tipped top scorers in the league this season – our combined €111 million pairing of Fabio Silva and Dejan Radakovic are the favourites to top the La Liga scoring charts this season ahead of the likes of Barcelona duo Anthony Martial and Guillaume Lefevre as well as Moussa Dembele of Real Madrid – no mention of Antoine Griezmann who is still banging them in for Atletico but here’s hoping we can prove the bookies right and dominate the goalscoring standings this season.

 

 

And so starts the beginning of the end!! For any of you that have been following this save, thank you very much for reading and hopefully enjoying our progress as we have progressed from the depths of Secunda Division to the summit of La Liga. Hopefully this year will reward us for all the pain and suffering endured so far!! 😆 If you haven’t already please hit the Follow button below as well as on Twitter – I have also started streaming recently so feel free to do the same over on Twitch!! My next post will tell all as to whether or not we have a chance at winning the league in our final season – I will also give an update on the Mick McCarthy saga! (if you don’t know what this is about, head on back to the start now :D.

Cheers folks,

MaddFM aka Paul.