You Can’t Win Anything With (Someone Else’s) Kids: Part 4

Hello and welcome to part 2 of my FM21 save: You Can’t Win Anything With (Someone Else’s) Kids. The challenge is quite simple, I’ve just got to win a major trophy with Sheffield United while only being able to sign U21 players from other clubs who are transfer listed or released! You can find the rest of this series here. This post will cover our run at the 2022/23 season where we will be playing in a European competition for the first time in our history!

Transfers

With a whopping £75 million burning a hole in my pocket I was keen to try and find some pieces that would allow my shallow squad to compete in Europe this season. Unfortunately there seemed to be an absence of suitable players for me to sign and, to compound this issue something of a goalkeeping crisis had developed in pre-season. I sold second choice GK Verrips for £1 million after not making one appearance in 4 seasons before Chelsea made a £50 million bid for Ramsdale. who handed in a transfer request. Bugger. With no suitable keepers around for me to sign and no real good quality back up in my squad I had to keep hold of an unhappy Ramsdale and hope that this situation didn’t deteriorate any further.

In terms of signings I managed to make a couple of notable ones to improve the squad. After being released from Juventus, I was surprised to find that no one else was interested in signing Barrencha

Finally I managed to pull off a huge signing as we broke our transfer record! Signed for a hefty £30 million from Barcelona B I was finally able to bolster our back line at last. As good as Egan and O’Connell are they are both approaching 30 and I really needed to try and bring down the average age of my CBs.

Finally I made a deadline day swoop to boost my striking options with a £7.5 million (panic) buy from Real Madrid. although he is best suited to being a winger he should do a good job as one of the wide strikers in my formation and with some room for development.

Going into the season this gave me a starting line up looking something like this:

The only new signing to make it into my matchday squad was the late addition Vallejo as we started the season with injury problems once again. Not sure if it’s something i’m doing wrong but I guess I should look into upgrading my medical staff at least…….Berge and Toibo were out for a month while Stevens and Baldock were both out for a couple of weeks. Mousset was also missing until close to Christmas as well. Good job I added a bit of depth to my squad over the last few seasons but our depth in a few areas was beginning to get a little thin.

One area of concern was in net, especially if we lost Ramsdale to injury. Our only back up options were the 31 year old Simon Moore and youngster Marcus Dewhurst, both of which were League One standard. Concerning stuff.

Pre World Cup

For the third season in a row we had a stuttering start to our league campaign as we failed to score in our opening two games before eventually sneaking a tight win past bottom of the league Crystal Palace. We struggled to build on this win however as we only managed a draw against Brentford with the last kick of the game before destroying Leeds 5-2 out of nowhere! Unfortunately we were still inconsistent as a draw, win a defeat followed in the next three games although Vallejo did open his Blades account with a brace.

Eventually we hit form in October as we strung together consecutive wins for the first time this season. After losing to Liverpool we picked up our fourth win of the season against Fulham before beating West Ham, Newcastle and Norwich all with clean sheets as we shot up the table going from 11th to 4th in the process! Suddenly we had momentum for the first time in the season as out stuttering goal scoring looked to be moving in the right direction with Burke already in double figures again and Vallejo, Mousset and Ojo also banging in the goals! (just ignore Brewster and McBurnie who combined for one goal in 21 appearances). Just in time for this run of games it was time for the World Cup and a 47 day gap between games.

At the turn of the year there wasn’t much to shout about in terms of footballing awards in my squad although John Egan did finish third in the Irish player of the year award (behind Obafemi and Parrott) and youngster Ryan Viggars managed to win Welsh Young Player of The Year for his goal scoring spree while on loan at Derry City! Good lad!

Post World Cup

Just as we were gathering momentum in the league we were met with a months break for the winter World Cup. At least this was worth it for England……..

Fortunately we were made of sterner stuff these days and kicked off the second half of the season with two wins to cement our third place in the table! This then lead into a very packed January as we rapidly flip flopped from some thumping victories to some equally crushing defeats as squad rotation took a noticeable effect on our consistency however the rest of the league was in a similar predicament and also put in some odd performances to maintain our unlikely 3rd place!

Brewster scored his first goal of the season in the epic 4-2 win over Southampton his first in 23 games (a far cry from the 42 goals he managed over the last two seasons) as he struggled for form.

Youth Intake

This seasons crop of players was touted to be a golden generation with a lot of good wide players, however in true FM fashion the golden generation was more of a light golden shower of good players.

There were three players who have good potential according to my staff, the first of which is midfielder Armstrong who has good physicals with some decent technical and mental attributes sprinkled in.

Second, is the highest potential player who can play anywhere in midfield although he is a bit of an unusual player. Adeyemi is best on the left of midfield but looks to have attributes best fitting for a CDM. Unfortunately, we have a number of good players in this area so I’m not sure how much he will contribute.

Finally, we come to Terry Cahill. Although the previous player is tipped to become the best player from this crop I seriously like the look of Cahill. Just look at those mental attributes for a 16 year old! Although a little on the short side for a full back I feel he might become the best player from this intake!

Closing Months

As fixtures began to pile up a little so did the injuries as O’Connell, Bogle and Stevens would be missing for the rest of the season while Mousset and Ojo would be missing for a good chunk of the next few months! We were down to the bare bones at full back and up front.

Fortunately however, our form from January carried into February as we only dropped 5 points from 6 games with youngster Mikey Dolan scoring his first career goal in a 2-1 win over Norwich while Norwood finished February off with a rare goal to beat Aston Villa 1-0. This left us with 11 league games to hang onto a top four spot!

Then our injury worries hit home in a very short space of time. My patched up batch of strikers suddenly hit a dry spell as we lost three straight games and only scored one goal in the process as we lost to Liverpool, Chelsea and the mighty Burnley to drop us down to 5th in the league. We managed to finish the season with some crazily inconsistent results as we suffered some terrible defeats to average sides mixed in with some stunning wins.

This epic game away at Bournemouth pretty much summed this part of the season up in 90 minutes as we we were terrible for 85 minutes before pulling off a stunning and unlikely comeback!

So what did this do for our league position? Well, with our drop off in form over the last few months of the season we slowly fell away from the top four places in the league to eventually finish 5th our best league position since way back in 1962 and to give us our second ever season of European football. Liverpool very nearly bottled the league title over the last two games of the season but hung on to win by a single point.

Around the squad we had a number of records broken as Oli Burke had a second season of spectacular goal scoring form to finish 3rd in the league golden boot race with 20 goals while Ryan Gravenberch had a great season to pick up 12 assists, the second most in the league. Finally, Ramsdale broke the club record for most clean sheets as he managed to get 13 in one season while also breaking the highest average rating over a season at the club!

Domestic Cups

So far in the FA Cup and Carabao Cup we have reached three semi finals in two seasons and I hoped we could get close to finally going a step further.

Narrator: They didn’t.

Chelsea were just too good in the League Cup however in the FA Cup we drew Championship Nottingham Forest who were battling relegation. I rested a number of my players only for my reserves to put in a poor performance which saw us dumped out of the competition in the third round.

Europa League

This leaves us with just one competition to cover this season and it was our debut in Europe! With this being our first season at this level we were seeded fourth and were rewarded with a punishing group consisting of Napoli, Feyenoord and Nice……..nice.

We started with a whimper in the group as we lost to Nice 1-0 before picking up our first ever win on the continent as we hammered Feyenoord 5-1 with Vallejo scoring our first ever goal at this level! Good man. Youngster Jebbison also notched his first career goal at the end of this hammering as well. After being hammered in Naples we recovered extremely well and only dropped two points in the last half of the matches to sneak into second ahead of Napoli! What a recovery.

After our brutal group stage draw we were much more fortunate in our knockout opponents as we drew a very mediocre Real Sociedad who were dispatched thanks to a goal from youngster Ojo. We were next drawn against Feyenoord from our group and we continued our run against them with an easy 2-0 win to go through to the Quarter finals where we would be playing Lazio.

These latter stages were over two legs as we got into the big boy rounds at last. Despite our more illustrious opponents I didn’t have much to be worried about as we once again triumphed 4-1 on aggregate with a masterclass of counter attacking football.

Incredibly we were into the semi finals of the Europa League on our debut! Unfortunately the draw wasn’t find to us this time as we played Barcelona over two legs while the other semi final consisted of Celtic and Atalanta. Predictably, and for the fourth time in the this save already we tamely bowed out at the semi finals of a cup competition. Ok the standard of opponent was higher this time but it was getting a little frustrating! We did give a great account of ourselves in the first leg, only losing 2-1 at the Nou Camp but were easily beaten 2-0 at home in the second leg.

New Player Ratings

• Jean-Clair Todibo (B) – Our record signing had a very slow start to the season as it was littered with injuries and bad performances. Once O’Connell went down with injury however he came into his own and became a key player in our European run.
• Hugo Vallejo (A) – To say I thought I overspent on Hugo he very much surprised me. Having never played a senior first team game before playing for us he chipped in with 14 goals in all competitions and was a steady source of goals all season.
• Davide Bettella (B) – With Todibo’s troubles at the start of the season he filled in pretty well before fading away in the closing months of a tough year. Might get more game time as Egan goes into his 30’s
• Mikey Dolan (A) – Last seasons star intake player, Dolan was brought into the first team to provide cover for an aging Norwood. Once he had a few games under his belt he was putting in such good performances however that I just couldn’t drop him! A fantastic surprise and at 17 he will become one hell of a player.

Thanks again for reading! I’m happy we’re starting to build the team up a little and hopefully with a solid back line we can continue to push onto those Champions League places or even make a cup final at last! oh…….

Damn.

Alex