Stadium upgrade, season expectations, media prediction, temptations of players...
Hi all! This post will be about start of preparation to my 6th season in Football Manager 2008. It will be the 4th season of Southampton in Premier League. During the last season we were pretending on UEFA cup place, at least during winter period. Therefore I decided to set serious goal of getting to UEFA cup for my club, just because I think that Southampton players are enough good to achieve this.
What's interesting: we got perceptibly less amount of money for transfers than before the last season. I associate this fact with stadium expansion plans of my board. In 6 months I will get +40% of stadium capacity!
Southampton overview info
The next screen shot prepared for you is the overview information about my Southampton. I want to single out some interesting parts of it. Lets go from the top to the bottom of the list!
Favoured Personnel. Yes, Marius Niculae appeared among the most prominent footballers and coaches of The Saints. He deserved that certainly!
Pitch Dimensions. Width and height of the pitch are set up with minimal values. Why? Just because of Southampton tactics where short passing style is used. So we will have some advantage during home matches due to this minimal pitch dimensions.
Training Facilities. Top! Important for having growth of player attributes during trainings.
Media prediction. This is it. They predict only the 12th position for us. As far as this prediction is based on the squad strength you can estimate that the most of Premier League clubs have higher amount of better players. Anyway UEFA cup target is set up, and I will follow it or be sacked :)
How to tempt a player in Football Manager 2008?
Yes, how? Your players can be tempted and have ruined morale very easily if you manage such club as Southampton.
The first example is Miralem Pjanic. I have already lost him:
Stupid chairman! I was linking real hopes with this undoubtedly gifted player...
The second example is our best perform of the last season - Georginio Winajldum. There is a really big run on him after he got the best Premier League assister and Best Young Player awards. Chelsea, Juventus, Manchester United, Inter, Milan want to pay $25M for Dutch talent while he costs $13.5M and I set price of $50M! :) We will see how epopee finishes. Wijnaldum is upset that he is not allowed to leave Southampton for bigger football club. His morale is down. So it seems like I have to sell my leader :(
Another problem is with other team leader - Marius Niculae. No, there are no tempting suggestions to buy him. Just because this wonderful forward is 31 years old now. And this is pity because his physical attributes became lower. Speed is rather poor now - only 12. Acceleration is even worse than Pace - 9.
As a result I should start thinking about very, very good transfers for attacking positions (allocated by Wijnaldum and Niculae now) to strengthen our team and be able of achieving UEFA cup place!
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The Author

Hull
Vitaley, you know you can cancel these by the board accepted offers right?
Vincent,how can you cancel them???thanx
Vitaliy,if you are searching for young forward to replace Niculae then try these two-Victor Moses or Andy Caroll or both :) and good luck for your upcoming season
Great post Vitaliy. Will be interesting to see who you get to replace the 2 players leaving. Especially the striker position. I would recommend Stancu for obvious reasons. You have big pressure this season so hope you make it into Europe.
Daniel you can cancel the transfers by going to your tactic button, press it and then somewhere left there will be a link to your transfers, click this button and then go to the button transfer centre, click the players name and then somewhere right theres a buttong cancel or something in that trend. If you cant find it I'll upload a screen that shows it.
Vincent,yes better upload that screen coz it´s a bit hard to understand your instructions :)
It's going to be interesting how you perform in a time of so much changing for the Saints both economicaly and in terms of players, as you are certainly losing your 2 top stars in near future! Keep up the good work on this save Vitaley! ;)
-Transfers in the breadcrumb menu (sideways arrows)
-Player who is being sold (Georginio Winajldum)
-Should be a cancel and another button (not sure, maybe called transfer, at University can't tell)
-Click cancel
@vincent,thanks for your info and i'll wait for the screen u'll upload
http://img70.imageshack.us/my.php?image=123ei4.jpg
thats the link to the screens that explains how to cancel the tranfers, just follow step 1, 2 and 3 and voila, no outgoing transfer you did not accept.
I just lost Daniele Cacia at Everton because the board took over... It seems the cancel button only works sometimes. Might be a fault in the game, it doesn't make sense to me otherwise.
Cancelling a transfer the board arranged didnt work for me either
i think a good player to replace niculae on the cheap would definitely be aaritalo. if you had a little more money you could spend it on bendtner or carroll. both have worked wonders!
i got the same problem with my man utd game, i signed marcelo for 5.5million straight away then the following summer valencia put an offer in of 25million, that the chairman accepted it saying it was to good to refuse, but i offered him a new contract and it cancaled negiotiations
does aanybody have any solutions for my problem, i upgrade man utds stadium to 92212, but the following week in the game it goes back down to 76212, can anybody help me?
hi vitaliy,it looks like it´s time to the next post of your story...
Daniel,
I'm working on it. The delay was caused by my wedding and honeymoon.
Next post about Southampton will appear on Monday or Tuesday
vitaliy, in witch season did you buy wijnaldum, cause i have tried to sign him in my first two seasons but he doesnt come?
cheers
If the board accepted a bid for a player, try to offer him a new contract to hold him. For example, by raising his wage and his role.
And if a player wants to move to another club, just ignore him. Sure, the morale is down. But in the following season, there's a possibility that he will be happy to play at club again.
BTW, nice blog
Anonymous,
I bought Wijnaldum before the 3rd season. Here is the link to the post with transfers