In the last post we managed to qualify for the Europa Conference League after winning the Second Phase in Bulgaria. This season the aim is to finish in the top 5 in the Championship Phase, and qualify for European competition again.

Having used the last eight games of the season as a chance to test some players, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the squad, I was looking forward to the summer to start and shape the squad how I want it.

Identify Weakness

The first thing I do at a new club in Football Manager is identify where we are weakest. One thing I love to have in FM is physically dominant center backs. If we look at real life football these days very few of the top center backs are weak physically. I can’t help but flick my eyes to their Jumping Reach, Acceleration, Pace and Strength attributes. IF those are good then I move on, and check the more traditional attributes you need to defend like Positioning, Marking and Tackling.

It was clear to me that the main weakness within Botev Plovdiv was the central defenders, and as my Samba tactic uses three of them along with a high defensive line, fixing this was my top priority. The top four central defenders, according to minutes played when I arrived, are listed below.

1. Stanislav Rabotov - Is fairly decent in actual fact. Nothing stands out as great, but nothing is terrible either. His low wages, age, and homegrown status mean I will likely keep him around as a steady back up.

2. Mario Mladendovski - My Assistant lists Mario as our best defender and I would agree with that. His physicals are very good, some mentals let him down but I am confident Mario can do a job for us next season.

3. Ivan Mihov - Pace and mobility are a big concern, and at 32 these are only going to get worse. During my short time at the club he continually gave the ball away by ‘Trying Long Range Passes’ and despite having 26 starts before I arrived, I will look to replace him as soon as I can.

4. Johnathan Bijimine - Once again, pace and mobility are an issue for me here as are his Foreign status due to the league restricting me to 5 non EU players. Bijimine has played almost 3,000 minutes but I don’t feel I can play a high line with him in the side. He is also one of our top earners, so I will look to move him on during the summer.

Looking Within

Now we have identified where we want to improve it is time to find the players who can make a difference. The first place I look is within the club, very often you can find an underused player languishing in the reserves or a promising youngster in the youth team who hasn’t been promoted yet. Those of you who read my recent tactical post will be aware that my system uses a ball playing defender, a central defender and a wide center back. I would like to get a nice mix of player to allow me to continue with this shape.

When searching for players after joining a new club it is important to look within, sometimes the players you need are closer than you may first expect. As predicted, languishing in Botev Plovdiv II was this guy - a more than adequate wide center back for this level.

Jansson came from our affiliate club, Fremad Amager of Denmark, but had hardly played prior to my arrival. His low wages and EU citizenship mean I will definitely be including him in the first team squad next season.

So after fully evaluating all players at Botev Plovdiv I am happy we have at least three center backs for next season. Ideally I want to bring in another two first teamers and therefore leave myself with four or five decent options for the three places in the first team.

Recruitment

I’m still fairly old school with player recruitment, I use the player search screen and enter attributes I really want. As discussed above physical ability is a non-negotiable for center backs in my opinion and I also need them to be EU nationals to fit in with Bulgarian league registration restrictions. My club vision also includes buying players to sell on, and not buying anyone over 30. So, with all that in mind, and with the strange mix of leagues I have loaded in this save file, the players returned were quite diverse, but one grabbed my attention immediately.

Philipp Abendschein was released from the LA Galaxy academy, he is only 19 and holds a German passport meaning he does not count as ‘Foreign’ for registration purposes. The game lists him as an Inverted Wing Back but I see an outstanding center back, who could do a job in any of the three roles I use. I was amazed he agreed to join us on a wage that we could afford, and didn’t break the loose wage structure we have in place. Philipp turned out to be a great signing for us and even made the NXGN top 50 players at the end of the season, he has since changed his allegiance to Germany and has represented their Under 21s.

With Philipp on board I still wanted one more center back to compete the squad. I decided to use my scouts for this, so headed over to the scouted players section and started to go through the highest recommended players.

My scouts really liked Alex Petkov, and at 191 cm with 17 Jumping I did too. He is also pretty strong, good in the tackle, and brave. What’s not to like? My Scottish followers may remember him from his time in Scotland where he came through at Hearts and had loan spells with Clyde and Berwick.

I decided to follow the lead of some famous content creators and ask my Director of Football to do the deal, and I was pleased he managed to get Arda to part with him for 425,000 Bulgarian Lev (approx £185,000) on a wage of 72,500 Bulgaria Lev per year (approx. £31,500 per year). I’m not convinced he is a massive upgrade on Bijimine for example, but he is younger, on slightly less money, and is Bulgarian.

So going into the season my back three would be Philipp Abendschein BPD(d); Mladenovski / Petkov CB(c); and Jansson WCB(d); with young Rabotov as number one backup.

Having satisfactorily addressed the most pressing weakness in the side it is time to look at our strengths and make sure we are set up to use them effectively.

Identify Strength

I always like to look at my best players and see what I can tweak in my playing style and system to make sure I get the most out of them. My 5-2-1-2 has served me well so far, but is there anymore that can be done?

By going through the squad, and identifying your strongest players, you can perhaps tweak your playing style to ensure you are getting the very best out of your top players. Upon my arrival at Botev Plovdiv I pinpointed the following four players as key to any success we were going to have.

1. Olakunle Olusegun (aka the Nigerian Gunman) - Olakunle had made very few starts prior to my arrival and seemed to be used largely as an impact sub on the wings. With his impressive pace I can see why. I was firmly of the opinion he could do a job for me as an Advanced Forward, his finishing is average but he has high composure which would hopefully mean he can take one of the many chances that I hope come his way.

2. Tochukwu Nadi - I really liked the look of Nadi, he would be a great fit at central midfield on support. He has everything I want from my more defensive central midfielder, he is brave, good in the tackle, works hard but also has the technical ability to pick a pass and advance the side up the pitch when in possession. He is still only 20 so I am very keen to see how he develops.

3. Antoine Baroan - The team’s top scorer when I arrived at the club albeit from a wide position. Having already earmarked Olusegun for the advanced forward berth I was left wondering what to do with Baroan. Initial thoughts are to keep faith with a deep lying forward and hope his vision and passing of 12 are good enough, or maybe tweak the second striker role, could we go double advanced forwards? I think a pressing forward would work in this system but neither Olusegun or Baroan really have the mentality to do that.

4. Todor Nedelev - Nedelev is listed as a club legend on the info screen having spent virtually his entire career at the club. He is easily the best player we have and he fits my number 10 role to perfection. At Portland I had Nathan attack the box, and my deep lying forward dropping deep, perhaps here at Plovdiv I could keep Nedelev deep, and let Olusegun and Baroan push the opposition defence back.

Best Laid Plans

Unfortunately, the Devil Fools with the best laid plans, and the decisions I was pondering above mattered little. Throughout the summer I had been rejecting derisory bids for Antoine Baroan, we’ve all had them right? Everyday a new one is in the inbox click “reject” move on (Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat). Until one afternoon, right on the eve of the season, I went to click reject and couldn’t. The board had accepted a bid of 4 million BGN (£1.75m) from CSKA-Sofia as it was too good to turn down. I was proper raging!

I’m not one to resign (on purpose or otherwise) so I set about finding a suitable replacement. In some ways it allowed me to get exactly the right type of player to compliment the rapid pace of the Nigerian Gunman. As before I entered some desirable attributes but this time I also added in the player trait of “comes deep to get the ball”. Far and away the best player returned was Pedro Enrique Perotti who was currently transfer listed by his club, Chapecoense who found themselves in Série C, Brazil. A paltry offer of 1.9 million BGN (£850,000) was enough to secure his services for Botev, he would become our highest earner, but I was fine with that.

Samba Soccer had arrived in Bulgaria.

Season Four Review

Now that we had our squad in place, how did we actually do in our first full season in charge of Plovdiv. We were fighting on three fronts, the Efbet League, the Kupa na Bulgariya, and the UEFA Europa Conference League. I felt the board expectations of a top 5 finish, a quarter final of the Kupa, and the 4th Qualifying round of the Conference League were more than achievable, in fact I was aiming for more.

Europa Conference League

We managed meet the board expectations and qualify for the 4th Qualifying Round with a big win over Connah’s Quay of Wales, and a tighter match against MRT of Portugal in which we were actually the underdogs. I did hope to make the group stage and earn the club some much needed cash but It wasn’t to be. We crashed out to Leeds United 4-1 on aggregate, the damage all being done during the first leg in England.

Efbet League

We managed to win the league as we carried over our form from the end of last season right the way throughout this league campaign. The margin of victory was a surprise as both Ludogorets and CSKA-Sofia fell away as the season wore on. The Nigerian Gunman took home the golden boot scoring 22 league goals in 25 games (from an xG of 17.95). His pace in behind defences caused havoc all season and once he got alongside a defender there was no catching him. During the season I managed to get him to learn two helpful traits, ‘knocks ball past opponent’ to make use of his 19 pace, and ‘places shots’ he has high composure and reasonable technical ability and I believe this trait really helped his finishing during the second half of the season.

So many of his goals reminded me of the winter nights shouting “Yimmi Chará"! on stream.

Kupa na Bulgariya

Our relatively early exit from the Europa Conference League meant it was fairly easy to manage the squad through the rest of the season meaning we could field our strongest teams in the Kupa na Bulgariya.

Efbet League sides enter the competition in the first round proper and we drew Vtora Liga side Dobrudzha, I was able to rotate the squad for this one as we won 2-0 relatively easily. It would be Efbet League sides the rest of the way for us, as we overcame relegation threatened Tsarko selo 3-1 with new signing Perotti getting two of the goals. It took us until the 111th minute to find the winning goal against Levski in the quarter final thanks to substitute Serbian striker Felip Stuparevic. With four months between the quarter final and semi final I was able to concentrate on the league, and once that was wrapped up we would be able to play fully concentrate on the remaining cup matches. Cherno more were our opposition in the two legged semi final and this is when the Gunman wrote his name into the Botev Plovdiv history books. A second leg hat-trick helped us complete a memorable 6-3 aggregate victory.

We now faced rivals CSKA-Sofia in the final at the Burgas Arena (in an amazing, unintentional, bit of foreshadowing this is where Chepiga left Stoichkov docked.) We were at full strength and I fancied us to win.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice a few changes to my Samba tactic since I last wrote about at Portland. I no longer use a Ball Playing Defender, we don’t have anyone in the backline that I would trust to carry the ball out of defence or play more risky passes. I also changed the Center Defender on Cover duty to Stopper duty, the reason behind this lies in the physical limitations of Biser Bonev in center midfield. You may remember at Portland I used Paulinho as a box to box midfielder, he had the ability to get up and down effectively for the full 90 minutes and his partner was Cristan Paredas who was also physically imposing. While Bonev is technically good and I’ve been very happy with his contribution going forward he can not operate as a box to box midfielder in the same way Paulinho could. The knock on effect of this was we very often had a large gap between my backline and the center midfielders that many teams were starting to take advantage of by having a striker drop into the space or use a player in the AM strata (sorry Stag). To combat this I decided to use Petrov as a central defender on Stopper Duty in the hope he could be more proactive when balls were played into this area. Petkov ended the season as the players’ player of the season, and we had the best defensive record in the division, so I feel it worked pretty well.

The final itself was a great game. CSKA-Sofia lined up in their usual 4-4-2, their manager Yanko Dinov prefers a direct approach and both their strikers are physically imposing. We have already discussed Baroan, and Caicedo is not to be sniffed at either, he is on my shortlist. To combat their anticipated direct play I lowered our defensive line and I would also instruct my defenders to tackle Baroan harder.

The day before kick off I got some great news, Caicedo would miss the game through injury having twisted his knee in training for the third time this season. I was expecting Caicedo to play as a target forward but had little insight as to who would replace him. The teams were announced and Giorgi Arabidze was interestingly selected as a Treq. This posed a different challenge for us but initially I was confident we wouldn’t need to make any further adjustments.

We took the lead early on through some Samba soccer in 14th Zone finished by Perotti. I had already noted CSKA-Sofia had been able to relive pressure on their backline a few times by finding Arabidze in space behind our wing backs. This culminated in us fouling him on 10 minutes and he duly stepped up and fired the free-kick in the top corner for 1-1. We did go into half time 2-1 up thanks to a lovely cross from Eto’o that fell perfectly into the Gunman’s path who slotted it home.

At half time I decided that CSKA-Sofia’s best chance back into the game was to continue to find Arabidze wondering into the space left by my wing backs, especially on the right hand side. To combat this I decided to drop our right wing back, Eto’o, down to support and instructed our defenders to mark Arabizde tightly, we also shut down CSKA’s Argentinian deep lying playmaker Fede Varela by tackling him harder and pressing him.

The second half progressed well for us, plenty of dangerous attacks and chances came and went. Then, the usual FM sting in the tail, CSKA score a scrappy equaliser after 70 minutes (2-2), unable to find a winner we moved into Extra-Time!

Finally our dominance began to tell as we took the lead for a third time on the night after 92 minutes with a second goal from Samba Soccer Star, Perotti. There was to be no comeback this time as the Gunman from Ilorn, Nigeria scored twice to complete his second hat trick in as many Kupa na Bulgaryia games.

A league and cup double for Chepiga, takes his trophy haul to seven in this edition of the game, and a crack at the Champions League awaits next season!

As ever thanks for making it this far. I am really enjoying this little spin off element of the save in Eastern Europe. The Botev Plovdiv squad is full of potential and still quite young so I am looking forward to next season and watching the side develop and hopefully progress through some qualifying rounds of the Champions League.

In the meantime

Over and Out

FMEadster!