#FM21 Save Reveal - Royal Antwerp "The Great Old"

Welcome to my FM21 save reveal. Having left Ruslan Chepiga behind somewhere on the shores of the Bering Strait, I will be starting a new journey in Belgium. It is hopefully obvious that I have decided to manage the oldest club in Belgium, Royal Antwerp - "The Great Old".

Before embarking on a save that I will play for around 11 months I like to make a list of things that I want to get out of it. This makes it much easier to narrow down leagues and clubs that could fulfil my needs. I have included this year's the wish-list below. We will return to this at the end and see how many things I was able to tick off.

  1. Link to current affairs

  2. European

  3. Not in one of Europe's big five leagues

  4. Prize money present in the league structure

  5. Some type of league playoff system at the end of the season

  6. No long winter break

  7. Potential for early continental competition

  8. 1st or 2nd Division

  9. Room for the club to grow

  10. A club with a rich history

Typically I start to think about a new save around May/June time each year. As a starting point, I very often take inspiration from current affairs. For example, Ruslan Chepiga was born out of the Salisbury poisonings that occurred around March 2018. I decided to create FC Pripyat after watching the HBO series, Chernobyl,  around the anniversary of the disaster in May 2019. So why have I settled on Belgium?

Why Belgium?

With everything that has happened this year, I did consider a Chinese save but, in the end, even I want an escape from all that shit.

The other news story that really grabbed my attention this year around May time, was the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by state police, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement that spread around the world. Unfortunately George Floyd was not the first black male killed by police in the US, and he will almost certainly not be the last.

George Floyd killing - Panorama

Protests took place on a nightly basis in many states in the US, and further afield. There were demonstrations in Canada, Australia, Denmark, France and the UK. As the movement gained momentum I was struck by the revisionist history that started to take hold, and how this manifested itself in the destruction/desecration of statues. In the UK we saw protestors daub graffiti on Churchill's statue, a man once voted as the "Greatest" Britain. In Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston was torn down by an angry mob and dumped into Bristol Channel in protest against his links to the African slave trade. This is despite his philanthropic work building schools, houses for the poor, hospitals, and Churches in Bristol and London.

Personally I obviously support the message within Black Lives Matter but I do have an issue with revisionist history that forces us to judge people of the past based upon what is deemed acceptable today. It is a moral quandary that I am still trying to work out if I am honest.

Anyway, while reading around about these statues I came across a news article about another statue being removed, this time in Belgium. Showing my own initial ignorance, I couldn't fathom why a statue in the heart of the European Union would cause anyone any offence.

The offending statue in this case was of King Leopold II, King of the Belgians. I hadn't realised what an important role he had played during the scramble for Africa between, 1881 and 1914. Leopold had essentially, under the guise of humanitarian work through a number of agents, managed to gain control of large swathes of land around the Congo. Surprisingly enough, to me at least, he achieved this as a personal venture and not for the Belgian state. By the time the Berlin Conference came around in 1884, Leopold was recognised by the fourteen countries in attendance as Sovereign ruler of what he later called the Congo Free State.

Leopold II statue

Berlin Conference 1884-1885

Leopold managed to extract a massive personal fortune from the land through the exploitation of Ivory, at first, and subsequently rubber. The processing of rubber required intensive labour on a massive scale, and as with anything involving Europeans, at the time, in Africa this labour was obtained through oppression and force. Slave labour was however forbidden under the agreement reached at the Berlin Conference, something Leopold, and his private army, the 'Force Publique', overtly ignored.

The atrocities carried out on the people under his rule at the time was so brutal, so horrific, that even his contemporaries were shocked and called for it to end. Remember many of his contemporaries were themselves involved in the slave trade to some extent.

In the end word of these atrocities (conservative estimates put the death toll in the millions) reached the parliaments of the other countries involved in the Berlin conference. In 1904 British diplomat Roger Casement, was commissioned to write a report on the human rights violations in the Congo Free State, that included slave labour, summary executions, and mutilation of limbs.

Casement's findings put immense pressure on the Belgian government, who eventually forced Leopold II to cede control of the Congo Free state in 1908 (Leopold was still financially compensated of course). The colony was then renamed the Belgian Congo, and was under Belgian parliamentary control until independence was granted in 1960.

King Leopold II's statue being removed in Antwerp after being set on fire the night before.

So I find myself looking at Belgium as a potential save location. The tenuous link to current affairs has been established above and wish list points 2-6 are also taken care of. It is European (2), it is not one of the five big leagues (3), there is prize money (4), the Belgian league structure is also interesting in that 18 teams play each other twice before the top four split off to play the Championship Group and play each other a further two times having halved their points, to determine the league champions and European places. Teams placed fifth to eighth enter the European Places Playoff with the team finishing fifth playing off against the fourth placed team for the final European place. So that takes care of point 5, and thankfully there is no winter break (6) I have suffered three editions of winter breaks and they now do my head in! All that remains then is to find a club to take care of the remaining points 7-10.

Why Antwerp?

King Leopold's statue was in Antwerp, and whilst doing some research into him, I remembered a link between Manchester United and Royal Antwerp. United would send young players there on loan to either gain playing experience, or help with work permit issues. This seems much more commonplace now but back then I remember it being pretty controversial. The link lasted 15 years from 1998-2013, and involved some good players actually. Frazier Campbell, Johnny Evans, Craig Cathcart, Tom Heaton, Ryan Shawcross, John O'Shea and Danny Simpson to name a few.

So I started to dig around Antwerp's history and that was when I stumbled upon the fact they are the oldest club in Belgium, having been formed in 1880 by some English students. This is further highlighted on the club's badge as they have a great big number one on the bottom recognising them as Belgium's first club, and their nickname "the Great Old". Another nice touch is the crown on the badge, anything royal gets a thumbs up from me. For further context the club was formed four years before Leopold was granted sovereign status of the Congo Free State.

The club has spent many years in the recent past in the second division of Belgium and was last promoted in 2017, after a thirteen year stint in the second tier. This is a club on the up and this was never highlighted more than during August 2020 when they managed to overcome Club Brugge 1-0 to win the Belgian Cup, for only the third time in their long history, and the first time since 1991/92. They have four league titles to their name, but the last triumph was in 1956/57, the year my father was born.

I decided to have a look through their current squad and noticed they already had four players from the DR Congo on the books. The most recognisable, to me at least was, Dieumerci Mbokani who had a short spell in the premier league with Norwich in 2015/16 and again with Hull in 2016/17. In my mind a #narrative was aligning nicely, and a FM save idea was crystallising in my head.

With the old United link still at the forefront of my mind I started to think about possible novel transfer strategies to make things a little more interesting; or not.  I mentioned in my "It's (probably not) coming home episode five with FMSamo" that his blog was one of the very first I ever read. One of my own particular favourite saves of Samo's at that time was a rather short one where he recreated the idea of the Glenn Hoddle Academy, but with Tenerife.

FMSamo - A home abroad

The main premise of the Hoddle academy was to give young players, released from academies, in England's top two tiers a further chance to 'make it', by signing with his academy, playing regular football, and receiving top level coaching before reigniting their careers at the top level. Sam Clucas of Stoke City, and Scottish International Ikechi Anya are probably the most notable graduates.

What if I could implement something similar at Antwerp?

My plan will be to only sign players who have already been released from their club, and are under the age of 23. We will develop them, give them minutes on the pitch, before selling them on for profit after two years in our 'academy', without exception. However, instead of signing English players, I will sign players from the European Union only, an EU wide second chance academy if you will. Playing in Belgium, so often at the heart of the European Union, it just seemed the right thing to do. Each year, as players leave I will make a note of them and follow their subsequent career after leaving Royal Antwerp.

What then of the DR Congo link?

Alongside signing released EU players I plan to sign at least one Congolese youth player per season*, they will be developed alongside our own youth players with a view to selling them on with as many future clauses as I can get my hands on. I may employ a specialist scout with knowledge of DR Congo to oversee this for me, but I will wait and see. (*edit hotfix dependent)

I am going to disable the first transfer window so this will allow me to concentrate on a system of play and assess what areas of the side need improved when the first batch of players get released at the end of the first season. In my next post I will look at the squad we have inherited and discuss how I intend to actually go about recruiting players.

The overall aim of this model will be to make Royal Antwerp financially stable off the pitch while still being, relatively, successful on it.

So do Royal Antwerp tick off anymore of my wish list? 

Items 1-6 have already been taken care of by playing in the Belgian league.

  1. Link to current affairs

  2. European

  3. Not in one of Europe's big five leagues

  4. Prize money present in the league structure

  5. Some type of league playoff system at the end of the season

  6. No long winter break

  7. Potential for early continental competition

  8. 1st or 2nd Division

  9. Room for the club to grow

  10. A club with a rich history

By winning the Belgian Cup Antwerp will enter the Europa League group stages this season, which is probably sooner than I would have liked ideally, but there you go (7).

Royal Antwerp play in the top division of Belgium (8).

The club has just moved into a new stadium in real life and are establishing themselves as a top division club, but there is still a lot of work to do after 13 years of stagnation the second tier. I hope to be able to develop the club into one of the best sides in Belgium both on and off the field (9).

Facilities image

The club clearly has a long history, and a nice backstory, so I am satisfied we have crossed number 10 off the list.

My Manager

I always have a back story of some kind in my head for my manager. This year I don't intend to write too much about him, and he certainly won't be leading an Army or trying to assassinate other FM player's imaginary managers. Nevertheless, I thought by introducing him now it would bring this post full circle and round off things off rather nicely.

A statue has been in the local news here, for a more positive reason, in Northern Ireland just recently. Belfast City Council have agreed to erect a statue of former slave and famous abolitionist Fredrick Douglass (above) who visited Belfast in 1845 as part of a lecturing tour of Ireland.

Belfast City Council approve statue to Fredrick Douglass

I am not going to extend this post any further by giving you a whole run down on his life, you can do that on Wikipedia if you so wish. Safe to say that Fredrick Douglass is widely regarded as one of the most influential African Americans of the 19th Century. Having fallen in love with a free black woman from Baltimore he escaped slavery by dressing as a naval man onboard a steam ship that traversed a number of states by river. He then fled to New York where he set up home with his loves money before sending for her. They were married within 11 days and initially assumed new identities to evade recapture. He taught himself to read using the Bible and became a rather famous orator, which ended up with him travelling to Britain to give a series of lectures on abolitionism and equal rights.

I shall leave you with an excerpt from his journal during his visit to Ireland.

Eleven days and a half gone and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the slave becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab—I am seated beside white people—I reach the hotel—I enter the same door—I am shown into the same parlour—I dine at the same table—and no one is offended ... I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip.

Thanks once again for making this far and reading through my ramblings. I am aware this may not be every Football Manager player's cup of tea but I enjoy reading and researching new things and this allows me to fill that need while playing my favourite game.

If you like to talk FM to like minded people might I suggest you consider joining the Football Manager Slack. Many of your favourite bloggers are already in there with their own channels discussing their saves in depth.

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