Roy de los Rovers
While on holiday in Gran Canaria in January 2019 and experiencing a full week away from both my laptop and from Football Manager, I had two sudden realisations – (1) wouldn’t it be great to simply live here and play FM all day and (2) I wonder what it would be like to play/manage here in real life and actually earn a living in football on the Canary Islands. Knowing that I (obviously) will never be able to achieve either of the above IRL, I then got to thinking – why not do a save based here, which at the very least will facilitate the dream of living here and also present a really good challenge in terms of (an attempt at) taking a lower level team to the highest tier of Spanish football.
My initial idea was to take over UD Las Palmas (seeing as I was only down the road from there), and somehow convince the missus to accompany me to the stadium for a few photos or a tour if it existed – however I quickly realised that this might mean spending the rest of my holiday (and life) alone so I did a double check and started bouncing ideas around my head while enjoying the hardship of lying on a beach all day.
I started to recall on the Championship Manager days from the mid to late 90s, particularly CM2 (which I nicked off a mate in exchange for Sensible World of Soccer 95/96) and CM3 which I remember buying with my confirmation money back in 1999, the first of a long line of CM/FM games that I have since purchased every single year to date.
I found myself reminiscing on the some of the classic La Liga players and teams of the late 90s and early 00s, such as the Diego Tristan’s and Djalminha’s of the Deportivo glory days and the Alfonso’s and Denilson’s of Real Betis notoriety – and it was then I remembered a true CM legend who I vividly remember scoring goal after goal against me no matter what club he was at…that man was Dutch Striker Roy Makaay, who was prolific both in the game and in real life where he scored over 150 goals at Deportivo La Coruna and Bayern Munich across 7 seasons.
More importantly and as is the main focus of this FM19 blog & my newest Football Manager career venture, it was at Club Deportivo Tenerife that he began to shine on the European Stage following a high profile move from Vitesse Arnhem (whereby he allegedly didn’t even know they were based on an island after turning down a move to Ajax to join them), and it is this that has inspired me to start this new save at CD Tenerife in the Secunda División in Spain, thus providing the inspiration for the title of this blog and career save:
“Roy de los Rovers“
