First Day In The Office

If you want to be successful in Europe you are going to need to spend about £10 million pounds very wisely, so how does an Irish League side get that sort of money in the bank? Well you could continuously sell all your best players although you still might not get that sort of money in return. Or alternatively you could qualify for the group stages in the Champions League; qualifying for the first group stage will give you about £3 million and obviously the longer you can stay in the competition the more money you will make. However if you don’t make it through to the second stage then the following year, providing you have spent your £3 million wisely, you should qualify for the first group stage again, therefore ensuring another £3 million in the bank (to spend wisely so you should end up with £6 million pounds worth of talent!!).

So the first goal is to reach the first group stage – how do you do that?

Well obviously you are going to have to win the Irish League; a bit trickier than that is the fact you are going to have to have to win that all important third round qualifying match which unless you are very lucky can be against some pretty tough opposition (the first one I won was against a Leeds side who were unbeaten in the Premiership!!). So how do you beat a team like that?

For the first couple of seasons you are going to have to be ruthless.

You start your new job and the first thing should be to release/give away all the crap in your team – if you can get a price for them all the better but if they are never going to play for you don’t bother having them sit in the reserves sucking needed resources from you in the hope someone will someday be foolish enough to offer you something for them, just give them away for free.

If you have a star player or players which could fetch a couple of hundred thousand each then SELL them – in my first season with Linfield I had sold or released most of the players, the good and the bad. Show no sentiment – your star striker, no matter how good, has a price on his head and if you get offered a good price then sell him as you will easily be able to replace him and others with the money you receive. 

Now go into your back room staff and sack all the shit in there – if your coaching staff have not got the majority of stats above 14 then you have a problem (at the very start though you could have a few with the odd stat lower than 14 just to get you started but you should be on the look out for replacements).

Once you have reached the Group Stages in Europe the money will start rolling in which will allow you to keep the players you want to keep instead of flogging them for cash. However if a player ever requests to leave then stick him on the transfer list and if somebody offers you a decent fee for him then let him go - there is no point in trying to keep players who don't want to play for you. Doing so will only piss them off, they won't play to their ability and to top it all off they could upset other players. If players don't want to stay then I just try to get the best price for them, particularly when several clubs are in the bidding, that way I can play them off each other.

Where there are a lot of clubs bidding for one of your players increase the first bid by about the same again, the next bidders to come in should be new bidders offering you the new price, increase this fee again by about the same amount. When the original bidders come back their bid will now be lower and non-negotiable so you will have to reject it. If they want the player they will come back with a new bid which again you can increase just like before. By doing this you can increase the transfer fee for a player by quite considerable amounts, depending just how good and desirable the players is.  Increasing the fee too much too soon will only scare everyone off and you will find yourself having to reduce the fee, taking them off the transfer list and then putting them back on it again to get people interested once more.