Week 4: Why Swansea City?

I love sports.  But lately I’ve gotten a bit tired of American sports.  American sports don’t really usually have anything to play for.  Yes, they play to win the championship each year, but that’s it.  They compete and that’s it.  If an American professional sports club loses every single game in a season, there’s really no consequences for them.  They come back the next year and play in the same league again against the same teams that beat the hell out of them before.  What fun is that?

This brings me to English league football.  In the English leagues, if you have a really bad season you can face “relegation”.  This means your team is bumped down to a lower league to play lower league teams.  Teams that do well each year are bumped up into higher leagues.  So each year you have teams moving up and down and you really have something to play for!  The teams in the highest English league want to be in the top spots because they can qualify for “European play” where they play the best clubs in the world in tournaments!  This all sounds much more exciting to me!

This now brings me to an English football club called “Swansea City”.  I look at Swansea right now because one of their current managers is American.  Or at least he was a manager.  They “sacked” him which means he was fired.  Apparently he sucked.  And besides sucking, the English fans weren’t very fond of him because he would use American terms when speaking to the press and they didn’t like that at all!  It might have been acceptable if Swansea City were winning, but they were losing, and losing badly.  This has to be all Manager Bob Bradley's fault, doesn’t it?  It can’t just be the circumstances he was put in.  I mean anyone off the street can manage a club in the English Premiere league, right?  Hell, I’ll bet I could do a better job and I’m American!

Ok, since I’ve written that it’s now time to put my money where my mouth is.  I have a video game called Football Manager 2017 that simulates being a football club manager.  (Soccer, for those of you who don’t understand.)  This thing takes everything into account including where players are from, agents, who’s happy and who isn’t, who’s in shape, and on, and on, and on.  But I should be able to easily handle this!  So let’s play!

So I started a new game which will start me as the Swansea City manager at the start of this season.  I’m certain I can come up with a better record than the real club.  Right now they have 5 wins, 3 draws, and 14 losses.  I can get more than 5 wins by this time of year.  They’re a club with a bit of money, so all it should take is me making a few key transfers and we’ll be off and winning in no time!

So now it’s time for me to look over my new club.  This Bob will do much better than the other Bob!  Or at least that’s what I hope!  Looking over my club the best player I seem to have is Gylfi Sigurdsson.  And…that’s about it.  No other real superstars.  I’ll just have to build my club around Gylfi. 

Looking things over, I have a few problems at Swansea City at the moment.  Looking at what the game says are the club's weak spots, my players are bad decision makers, they have a weak work rate, they lack strength, there are really no leaders at the club, and my coaching and scouting are the worst in the league.  This isn’t me judging, it’s what the game is identifying as weak points to me!  Well damn, should I bring in new coaching staff?  I look that over and there are literally thousands of people to look through!  I have no idea who is really good and who isn’t?  This might turn out to be harder than I at first thought!

I decide to forget the staff and play on with who I have for the moment.  If I just hit the transfer market and bring in a few team leaders, maybe I can start getting things straightened out that way.  I send a couple of my horrible scouts out to look for some players.  Now keep in mind I haven’t even advanced the game one day yet!  All this is still on day one at Swansea City for me!

Looking through the “Under 23” group that I have at the club I find a guy who doesn’t look too bad.  I transfer him to the senior squad.  He’s 28 years old.  How is a 28 year old on the Under 23 squad in the first place?  Now I’m a bit confused, but that doesn’t matter, I’m pressing on!

A scout emails me a few transfers I might be interested in!  Hell yes, these guys look good!  I decide to make an offer for one of them.  He should only cost me something like 2.3 million to bring in with some negotiation.  No problem!  … … … Ok, problem.  I can’t make an offer for the guy because he’s not trained by an English club.  The game is telling me that I have to have at least 8 players on my club that have been trained by an English club and the guy I want is some foreign player!  What the hell?  Realism is getting in the way of my winning now!  I check my senior roster and only have 3 English guys and one guy from Scotland.  The Scottish guy counts though, right?  I sure hope so!  So now I’m going to have to search for some English players, I guess!  Why is my squad loaded with foreign guys!  Even Glyfi is from Iceland!  DAMN!  How many of my players speak English?  What the hell am I doing?  Welcome to Premiere English League Football, I guess.

Now I’m going to have to do more research into things.  I’ll have to try and find some English players and maybe transfer list a few of the foreign players?  But then the game tells me that if I transfer out too many players everyone will be unhappy because they will all be afraid they’ll be the next to go!  And they damned well might be, too! 

This is honestly some people’s career!  This is not going to be as easy as I thought it was.  *sigh*  Ok, I’m going to end the blog and try and figure out what to do before moving on to day two in my game.  I have a match scheduled between my senior squad and the under 23 team so I can “take a look” at everyone.

You really do seem to need to be a hard core football fan to play this game.  So off I go to see what I can do.  Keep good thoughts for both me and Swansea City.  And keep asking why!