Previously on Plazas de Soberanía, AD Ceuta FC were promoted to La Liga 2.

Intro

It’s often called a ‘War Chest’ isn’t it? That lump sum of money given to a manager to go out and bullishly spend in the transfer market. AD Ceuta FC were around €1.5m in debt when La Liga 2’s TV revenue trickled south to the Spanish North African semi-exclave in July 2024. €5.7m income would not only wipe the debt clear, but also give the club some ammunition in transfer market. However, as is often the case outside of football, the cost of something expands in order to fit the budget. Or to think of it differently: it’s like how A+ PC games expand in size to fit computers’ ever-increasing storage capacities OR the length of time I give my kids in the morning to get ready for school is immaterial as I will inevitably be screaming at 0830 regardless (!). Back to the FM23 Ceuta context: better players cost more, and better players were needed if AD Ceuta were to settle long-term into our new home of La Liga 2. A transfer kitty of €370k in La Liga 2 is considerably less than it would be in the division below, but I was nevertheless delighted to have it.

This post documents the first 6 months of AD Ceuta FC’s inaugural season in La Liga 2 (and my 3rd with the club in FM23). How did I use the war chest? Is the honeymoon period over in this save? Read on amigo/amiga…

War Chest + Salary Cap

War Chest - As mentioned in the intro, my transfer budget as of July 2024 is €370k. We critically need to recruit three players: a 1st choice centre-back in order to replace the now retired Moisés, a playmaker to take over the reins whenever 34-year-old Adri Cuevas calls it a day and a striker to reduce the match load on 35-year-old Arturo Rodríguez whose powers are now on the wane. In order to meet the club culture, I will give preference towards players under the age of 23.

Salary Cap - readers of last year’s The MLS Save™ may remember how enjoyable I found playing under a salary cap. The good news is that it exists in Spain’s La Liga 2 also: with a €2.3m playing squad salary cap (per annum). Plus all registered players have to earn €77k per annum in wages, meaning that six of my squad players would have to be boosted contractually…costing the club a further €131k in salary per annum. Although there may be a loophole with me registering four of them as B Team players…what a headache we have here.

Although I am under no obligation to do so, I always like to have a self-imposed individual salary cap for a player. It is something I have often done in Football Manager over the years. During the last two seasons, in the Spanish 3rd tier, I set this at around €130/140k per player. Now that we are a level higher, I have set an arbitrary limit of around €200k annual salary per player.

Note - another thing I have to thank The MLS Save™ for is the full adoption of annual salaries. €200k per annum may sound like a hefty wage, but it’s ‘only’ just below a €4k weekly wage…meaning that this is pittance compared to some of our league rivals. Annual is also much easier to work with (and more sensible to use), and I am therefore prepared to die on this hill…so please @ me elsewhere for the impending argument.

Spanish Wonderboys Incoming 🚨

I have got to be happy with the three ‘marquee’ transfers I made. I use marquee loosely, as none are household names in Ceuta just yet…but I am confident they can develop into good players here. They were also names known to me over the process of two years of constant Recruitment Focuses. My muscle memory quickly identified them when I again looked at the RF for players aged 23 or under based in Spain at the end of the 2023/24 season.

Jorge Herrando joins for €100k from Osasuna Promesas. It’s a lot of money for the club to put into a 23-year-old centre-back, but there is a maturity about his game already. I really like his strong Anticipation and I am in love with his aerial strength. At 192cm tall, he’s straight in the match day XI as my left-sided CB to play alongside Robin Lafarge. I’ve put him on a Defensive Positioning individual focus right away to see if we can boost his Marking, Positioning and, more importantly, his Decisions.

Txus Alba joins from the Barcelona’s B Team, for free! As already mentioned, Alba showed up on some previous Recruitment Focuses…however he was also a name that jumped out from the deeper statistical dive I did when rebuilding Ceuta on the onset of Season 2. His loan to Linares during the second half of 2022/23 saw him have a record of 1 in 2 goal involvements (goals + assists) and his name would appear when filtering on Open Play Key Passes Per 90. I had agreed terms for a Free transfer then, only to see Barcelona activate a one-year extension. But in 2024 he is mine! Alba will be end up being the long-term playmaker in my side, and successor to Club Captain: Adri Cuevas. He comes at a cost in wages though, right on the limit of my self-imposed salary cap of €200k per annum. Will a 21-year-old as my highest earner be worth it?

Ethyan - arrives for a club record fee of €115k from Tenerife. His real-life scoring record for Tenerife has seen him be picked up by Atlético Madrid B on loan. The in-game Diego Simeone had taken a fancy to him in 2022/23 FM23 season by subbing him on for 26 first team Atléti matches in La Liga. If he’s good enough for El Cholo, he’s good enough for me. The reason I have gone all out for 22-year-old Ethyan is that he’s a bridge between a 433 and a two-striker system I may end up going for in future seasons (more on this later). For 2024/25, I intend to play Ethyan alongside Arturo Rodríguez as an attacking Inside Forward on the left. In my opinion, he fits this role quite well…and getting a natural striker in this role is my way of trying to get the IF-A to ‘work’ in my tactic. The longer term thinking here is that whenever Arturo does leave Ceuta, I already have a No.9 ready-and-waiting to take centre-stage.

Tactical Consistency: 433

To recap, I used a 442 in Season 1 and a 433 last season (and sometimes 4231). I see myself going back to a two-striker system with Ceuta at some point in this save, but for Season 3 I plan to keep with the 433. Why? Well, the security of a DM may help achieve the new additional club culture added in this year by the board: to play defensively solid football. Admittedly this scares me, being in a higher league and all, but I should not forget that my side had a ridiculous amount of clean sheets last year (23). So, let’s summon the same energy in La Liga 2 and play 433.

As mentioned above, all three new signings can slot right into this shape with no trouble at all. Below is the 433 that I will be using (slight adjustment is that I now use a Ball Playing Defender) and my squad depth screen:

If you hated yourself enough to count the number of players in that squad depth chart above, you would have noted it being quite short in numbers (total of 18 players). I had hoped to bring in a couple more experienced utility players on loan in the lead up to the season, but I think our small reputation limited our attractiveness. Players either listed for transfer or for loan within LaLiga 2 did not want to come to presumably relegation fodder such as AD Ceuta FC.

Season 2024/25

July - December 2024

With only the 18 core players, AD Ceuta FC walk into LaLiga 2 with a salary bill of €2m - by far the lowest in the league… although I’m unsure how some clubs get round the rules, isn’t there meant to be salary a cap ffs?! Never mind, I would say this makes this season a true underdog story in the making…perhaps on par with Israel FC’s 1-0 away win VS Philistines back in 1000BC if we were to do it. But…can we do it?

Perhaps it was a stupid decision to use a sizeable chunk of the war chest on just a handful of young players. As you can expect, my Ceuta boys are regularly outclassed on a consistent basis, I even celebrated the 0-0s Vs Badajoz and Tenerife like victories 😂. Those last two months of football in November and December have been especially horrific, just the one goal scored over 630 minutes of football 🤮 Strikers Ethyan and Arturo sit on 4 goals each, who unsurprisingly are also underperforming in their Expected Goals metric (Ethyan -0.78 and Arturo -0.39) with the former converting only 9% of his shots. Ouch. The only glimmer of hope has been a couple of nice Txus Alba goals, which I’ll link below. Unfortunately he has faded somewhat as the season has gone on, in line with the rest of the squad:

WTF now?

My next step is to head back to the Scouting Centre again to find a/some/any player(s) willing to come and steady the ship here on the North African coast. Two desirable qualities will be: (1) experience and/or (2) ability to score goals. It can’t be that hard, can it?

Thanks for reading/sharing & caring about my journey as I either slide back down to the Spanish third tier OR mount a daring last stand in 2025.

Wish me luck.

Tony / FM Grasshopper