Bonjour tout le monde,
It was French Noël in the save when I last left readers. Monaco were 7th in Ligue 1 and aspiring to mount a title challenge in the new year. That new year is 2008. Just a reminder, I am playing the FM 2007/08 retro database made available by TheMadScientist (themadscientistfm.wixsite.com). Huge thanks to him and his Danish fingers.
Let’s kick-off right from where we left off…
January 2008 signings ✍️
It is certainly not a ‘war chest’, but €7.5m is a modest amount of money to improve the squad with a couple of players. In fact, I went a bit further than just a couple…
Mathieu Valbuena (€2.5m from Olympique de Marseille)
In real-life, Dwarf-ish Mathieu Valbuena had a great Ligue 1 career with Marseille. Signing him for €2.5m is a great piece of business, as it not only improves us…it also weakens a geographical and sporting rival. He can play across the front line, but he featured mostly as a Shadow Striker or right Winger in my current 4231. He even scored against his old club too 😀
Bafetimbi Gomis (18 month loan deal with option to buy €3.2m from AS Saint-Etienne)
Bafe was the original Black Panther, before Marvel got their hands on the rights to make movies in his image. I’m screaming the house down with frequent “Go Miss” as my striker netted 5 times in his first eleven games. Sadly though, a knee injury forced him to call it a season in the final two months of the league campaign. The good news is that I have Gomis for one more season before making the decision to sign him permanently from ASSE.
Michel Bastos (€2.9m from LOSC Lille Métropole)
I loved Bastos in these early FMs. In real-life he went on to Lyon, but he did not win much in the end there as it coincided with PSG’s real-life dominance from 2012. But he’s quality, and he proved to be a great addition as the attacking Wing Back in my 4231 with 7 assists in 17 appearances.
Yohann Pelé (€3.5m from Le Mans Union Club 72)
Club captain Flavio Roma got one last dream move in his career as AC Milan opened their cheque book to sign our Goalkeeper for €3.5m. Looking to immediately re-invest, I could have gone big on Hugo Lloris, but Yohann Pelé was the cheaper option (he also isn’t tainted in my mind for one day moving to Tottenham either). It’s worth noting that he’s no relation to the Brazil great, but I hope he will be a solid option between the posts nevertheless.
Guillaume Hoarau (€1.2m from Le Havre, with a 6 month loan back agreed)
Jan Koller is irreplaceable, but I accepted he would leave me for Celtic at the end of the season. A similar mould of player exists in Guillaume Hoarau. 192cm tall and still only 24-years-old, he will be a decent player in the future. For that reason I loaned him back to Le Havre for the rest of the season to provide him with adequate playing time.
My approach with these signings was grounded in the real-world. I thought it best to go and get Ligue 1 established players because (1) they know French football and (2) they are already physically conditioned into the cycle of the league campaign. I needed new January signings to ‘hit the ground running’, and that’s why I went with these guys. But did they secure European football?
Season 2007/08 - Heartbreaker 💔
“Just about”, is the answer to the previous question. But it could have been so much better!
I usually have a good record of final days in Football Manager games. But this season was a heartbreaker…dropping from 4th to 7th as a result of a 2-0 defeat in the Parcs des Princes to PSG; whilst everybody else won around me. This meant no Champions League, and we relied on Olympique Lyonnais to do us a favour by winning the Coupe de France against lower league opposition (SC Bastia). Even then, Monaco will have to deal with many Euro Cup qualifiers in pre-season just to get a shot at a European campaign! For the first time in a long while I was left wondering if I was going to get the sack in FM, considering the Board wanted Champions League football.
Alas, they have decided to stick with me for a bit longer…
Target Forward - how did Jan do?
A sprain to Jan Koller’s knee ligaments meant he missed all of February and March, a period which happens to see us drop points in five of eight league games. It is probably fair to say he was essential to how we play, and this is to be expected since I built the team around his presence last time in the blog. If he could have stayed fit for the whole season then he may have topped the Ligue 1 goalscoring charts. Instead, Jan Koller makes do with 19 goals in 30 Ligue 1 games…which is 3rd highest scorer in the league behind Djibril Cissé (20 goals for OM) and Frederico Chaves Guedes (24 goals for OL).
Big Jan is also where you’d expect to see him in the Data Hub too. Decent amount of headers, with a good win rate. Hard bastard.
But I did see a dip in Jan Koller during the final two months of the season, and his four goals are evidence of that. This could be due to the injury, his upcoming move to Celtic distracting his focus, natural decline as a player in mid-30s OR a combination of all of those things put together. The beauty of FM is that we will never know but it’s meant parting ways with Jan is perhaps right for everybody: virtual him, virtual Monaco and non-virtual me.
Děkuju Jan xoxo
Nouvelle Tactique pour 2008/09 🔜
So, with big Jan leaving, the most sensible thing is to adjust the Target Forward tactic. As I alluded to earlier in this post, Guillaume Hoarau is a solid option for the physical approach upfront but I cannot expect the same results as what I was getting from Jan Koller. We will have to play slightly differently, tweaked instructions and perhaps roles/formation too. I will save that for a future post, as I fully intend to play at least one more season of this 2007/08 database in FM24.
Thank you for reading / sharing and caring.
Tony | FM Grasshopper (p.s. now on Bluesky 🦋)