Leeds United F.C. - After the relegation

I took quite a long break from FM23, but since the summer and the TheNotoriouspr0's data update are here, I wanted to start a new save and take control of a club for 5 years or so.

I wanted to select one of the relegated teams from the Premier League, so the options were Leicester City, Leeds United and Southampton. I feel Leicester will be an extremely popular choice for return to glory type of series come FM24, so I didn't want to play with them. I don't have any feelings towards Southampton, so I opted to play with Leeds United, who are a club in turmoil in more ways than one.

In real life there are strong rumours of Leeds changing ownership and they are currently without a head coach and sporting director as Victor Orta departed to Sevilla.

I don't have any specific rules for the series other than I plan to go around 5 years, use players I haven't used so far, try to be somewhat realistic, with tactics, transfers etc. and have a bit of fun as well!

I have already finished the 1st season and will write a report on that and my tactics shortly.

Oh yeah, and I want to play with the 3-2-4-1 system as well, as I feel it was the biggest tactical story during the latest football season. I'm not trying to emulate Guardiola's or even Klopp's tactics, but use them as a source of inspiration.

Leeds United Season 2022/23 - Return to the Championship

After the TheNotoriouspr0's data update our journey starts from the Championship with Leicester, Southampton and others. However, we still had a squad of a Premier League team as we had quite a few players on high wages.

I didn't feel particularly loyal towards the squad as they had failed to keep the club at the Premier League, so I planned to sell as many players as possible and build a young and exciting squad which isn't only capable of winning the Championship in year one, but can also grow into a European side when we eventually return to Premier League. However, as this is technically year one, the game doesn't allow me to sell recently joined players such as Roca, Adams, Sinisterra etc. despite their high wages.

Transfers

I was able to sell quite a few others, though...

Departed players included:
- Liam Cooper to West Ham for £9,5m
- Patrick Bamford to Everton for £20m
- Stuart Dallas to Milan for £15m
- Rodrigo to Brighton for £22,5m
- Diego Llorente to Brentford for £6m
- Junior Firpo to Everton for £6,5m
- Jack Harrison to Aston Villa for £19,5m
- In addition Jamie Shackleton joined Rapid Wien and Daniel James RB Salzburg on loan with a buy options, which could bring combined £25m for the club as well.

In January I sold Summerville to Brentford for £17,5m and Koch to Luton Town for £20m.

The departed players had to be replaced, so I bought the following players:



Luke Thomas was a luxury signing and sort of a plan B if my initial tactic would have failed, so he might be sold after the first season.

Tactics

Speaking of tactics I played 95% of the games with the following 3-2-4-1 tactic.

After few tweaks here and there and a little bit of growing pains at the beginning, it really worked wonders.



Most of the time our man advantage in midfield and strong foundation at the back allowed us to keep the posession. Our attacking centre mids were really effective at causing chaos in front of the oppositions defensive line and wingers made runs that allowed us to score plenty of goals.



Player stats are on the spoiler below:


Its a sea of green as all but two regulars had an avg rating above 7.00. Wöber and Jeong were the top performes followed by Ruttier, who started the season as a back up AMR and ended up as a first choice striker after scoring 28 times in his 31 Championship starts. He made a mockering of his Finishing rating of 11 and was he started scoring even his composure of 12 and decisions of 10 couldn't held him back. I would have sold Ruttier at the beginning if I could have, but luckily this wasn't an option.

Leeds United Season 2022/23 - Results

As you can guess from the stats from the previous message, we did quite a well in the league.



We won the league and gathered a point tally of 111, which is 5 points more than the League's previous record by Reading from 05/06 season and 10 points more than what Burnley had in the past season in real life.

Leicester was also a strong team as you can imagine and they equalised the Readings previous point record by collecting 106 points. They ran almost excatly the same squad than what they had in PL on the past season and only sold James Maddison half way through the season to Newcastle for £50m, which may well be his next address in IRL as well. They even managed to loan Hakim Ziyech from Chelsea in January to replace Maddison, so its fair to say their team was quite strong.

The future

The 1st goal of the series has been achieved as we have won promotion and the Championship. Next season will be much tougher test for us but I'd imagine we'd finish around mid-table.

I'm not sure how the 3-2-4-1 tactic will work in the games in which we are the underdogs, but I can imagine us getting battered a few times during the next season, but I won't change the formation no matter what.

A great first season. Hopefully you get given the funds to compete in the Premier League.

What a first season! That tactic looks mad, does the lack of players out wide not effect you too much at the back then, no? Can only imagine that having so many players centrally helps to nullify that but would think you would get bombarded out wide!