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Rebuilding Schalke 04

End of the Season!
Started on 9 November 2023 by diogabreu
Latest Reply on 13 November 2023 by diogabreu
 
diogabreu's avatar Group diogabreu
1 yearEdited
The start!
So, as we all know, Schalke 04 is one of the most known clubs in Germany. But they recent past has made them drop to Bundesliga 2 for two times. Our goal here is to make them great again. Not sure which long term objective I'm gonna force myself into (Bundesliga Champions, Champions League Champions, or simple, finish top 3 for two times in a row) but I want to enjoy this journey as much as I can.
Before looking deeply into tactics, wanna make sure you know I'm not that classic OP FM Player that in 2/3 seasons will make Schalke the best team in Germany. I'm saying this so you don't expect amazing results and high scores, but a simple team trying to get the promotion at the first try. And also, sorry about my English.

Tactics and Best Players
Tactical wise I want to try the "Be More Disciplined" instruction. I want to have a solid team and I don't think our players have good enough decision attribute so we can instruct with "Be More Expressive".
Our best players are:




I want to make the team around them but also taking in mind that the other players matter so they will be key to shape our model and system. We have really good CBs and WBs (one for each side). Our Attacking Midfielders and Wingers are not that good so I think we are concluding the 5-2-3 will be our system.
Because we don´t have really fast players, we are going to build more of ball posession playstyle with a lot of support dutties. In the deffensive shape, we want to press in key areas of the pitch, not going all the way up, pressing in the opponent box. Still, we want a high defensive line to make sure there isn't much space for the opponent team to play. To go in that direction, we will play with a much higher defensive line, the triger press will be standard and the line of engagement will be mid block. Also we want to be aggressive on the ball, so we are going to trigger the “Get Stuck In” instruction. Because Terodde is really tall (192cm) and we want to take advantage of him we want to have a lot of crosses as well. Transitions wise, still have no idea how I want us to react when we win or lose the ball so for now will go on default and see at the pre-season the best way to boost our reactions.
The tactic:
diogabreu's avatar Group diogabreu
1 yearEdited

Few Heads-Up

As you know, Schalke's Academy is one of the best in Germany and we alreayd had promoted two wonderkids!





Both really tall players that fit perfect in our squad. Really looking foward to see what we can cook from here.

Weekly Schedule

This is how our standard weekly schedule is going to be. Of course, along the season some changes will be made but this is our starting point.

Calendar

So... Haven't seen it before, but basically our pre-season is going to be made out of Bundesliga 2 matches. Is not ideal but we are going to try to improve the max as we can against Leipzig and Frankfurt, and then start off with a crazy match against Hamburg away. No excuses! Looking forward to the next few weeks and se what can we deliver to our passionate fans!

Stay tune to some results and be free to comment! Really looking forward to some discussions with you!
diogabreu's avatar Group diogabreu
1 yearEdited

August Recap


So... Before showing the results, let me say we got a little disappointed with our offensive performance in few matches. The dynamic of the tactic made me change little aspects that I hope we can make it work from now one!

As you can see rough start for us. The defeat against Hamburg was kind unfair, we didn't play well enough, but still didn't deserve to lose. Against Kaiserlautern we played the worst football possible. 0.28xg at home it's horrendous (they also had 0.28xg, so the 0-0 was the only possible result). Than we got knocked out of the DFB-Pokal 1st Round against Braunschweig, team that gave us the first win of the season! 4-1 away. The red card for them was a huge benefit for us, made us score 3 goals in a row and get our first win! After that, two solid wins against Kiel and Wehen. Let's rock for the next two months hope we can keep our winning strike!

DATA

Our data is showing some interesting stuff. Defensive wise, you can see we are standing out. The much higher defensive line with a mid block pressure is not giving any space for our opponent to play and I hope we can continue like that. But offensive wise, despite the fact we are scoring slightly above the average you can see you have few shots per game (only 8.20) and only 1.09 non penalty xg. We need to boost our offensive performance. I hope the tactical changes we have done can make some difference at the end!
Also, every 10 matches we are going to take a look in some really deep analysis, to make sure we keep up and find some weaknesses that we can work on and make us a more solid and better team!

TACTICAL CHANGES
We started to see that our Inverted Wingers were occupying the same spot as our wing-backs on the attack. We had to do something so make the team more balanced in the middle so we moved them in. Then, we wanted more players in the box or finding deep spaces behind the defensive line, so Shadow Striker and Attacking Midfielder (Attack) were the roles we think can make the team more creative and aggressive at the same time. Last but not least, our RCB and LCB we made them Ball Playing Defender with the "dribble more" instruction so they run with the ball, engage a defender and then deliver the ball to one of the midfielders. Basically I think they will push up the team with the movement with the ball and that we desperately need!

Conclusion
Lets hope these recently tactical changes can make us a better team. The squad is still learning the way we work and it's been improving lately so we hope we can still keep on the track and get some good and fresh results in the next two months.
Financially we are struggling so we really need to take advantage of our academy, but I think we have a lot of potential to work on!
Looking foward for the next two months!
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diogabreu's avatar Group diogabreu
1 yearEdited

Mid Season Break as arrived!


Mid Season Break has arrived and I want to share some stuff with you so you can keep up our Schalke Rebuild!

Results


League Table

Don´t get tricky by our spot on the League. We are a defeat away to get dropped to like 7th or 6th, which is not that good. It has been a pretty balanced league besides Paderborn that are standing out, invincibles so far (hope we can finish that soon). Our 5 defeats were against Dusseldorf (A), Paderborn (A), Hamburg (A), Karlsruhe (A) and Hertha (H). As you can see, four of them were against top 5 and three were away so I think those are pretty fair games to lose and we weren't smashed at all, it was pretty close tbh. Lets see if we can step up in those matches at home so we can boost ourselfs up on the League.


XPTs wise, we have been the best team. We are not overperforming while some other teams are. Time to turn the table around and overperform as well. To make it happen, we need to score more than our XG and Terodde isn't being that striker. We will keep on with him, try to get as much as possible from him as we are not in conditions to buy any other player!

DATA

Pretty similar data to the one before. We are shooting a little bit more, defensive wise we are still conceding few XG against us and our Non Penalty Expected Goals / 90 improved 0.25 which is quite nice but we need to keep finding solutions to the different amount of game styles we've been facing. Sometimes against a defense of 5 we need to overload the wings, against a 4-4-2 maybe overload the middle, like I said we are trying to find differente spaces in the same playstyle (ball possession) and system (5-2-3).

Squad Performance




Fresh wonderkids from the academy







We needed some fresh ambition and mentality on the team. We had 3 defeats in a row, players were underperforming, complaining, bad morale, disappointed, so we started to look to new players that could give us the energy and the ambition that Schalke needs. Also, as we don't have any money and our academy is top tier, we had to look inside. Also, thise move will alow us to sell some players and balance the finances, specially on the salarey budget as we are living on the edge!

Winter Plans
We need money as I said, so we are looking to find clubs to 6 players. Those players are Tomas Kalas, Paul Seguin, Tobias Mohr, Blendi Idrizi, Sebastian Polter and Pierre-Michael Lasogga. These players combine are earning 355k per month. We don't care for how much we sell them, how we sell them, we just don't want to keep paying to players that are not playing at all.
Games wise, we will play our next match in a month, so during the next month we want to face some teams with 5 atb and 4 atb so we can see how can we change some players roles and take more advantage of opponent spaces. In the last two weeks of the break our goal will be to schedule a lot of easy games so we can boost our morale at the max and be ready to Hamburg (what an upcoming match)!
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End of the Season!

Crazy weekend I had, with few time to play and even less time to write it here, so got to stick to FM and hoping I could come over here later on with a good storie to you...
And I had!

LEAGUE CHAMPIONS



We are the champions!!! Crazy second half of the league season with 0 defeats (as you can see on the calendar), 6 draws and 11 wins. We completely over performed (like I asked the team to it) with more 11 pts comparing our expected points. We still were the best team, but more heart than head in certain matches gave us some really trick performances but still some crazy wins and draws. You may think the tactic was good, but for me it wasn't, so doens't make much sense sharing it with you as we are goint to restart to the next season.

SQUAD PERFORMANCE

As you can see, not many players stood out from the season. Ouedraogo was our best player but only with a 7.10, good but you expect as Champions to have some 7.2/7.3 on key players and we didn't. Our LB (Ouwejan) as another player that was key for us (he's ending his contract so maybe it's time to go for the renewal) with a good amount of goals and assists. To finish this off, Murkin, Muller and Kozuki were players that in certain matches showed up and were very important for us. Gonna take a deep reflection into the squad to check some options with the board as our finances aren't that good!

SQUAD REPORT

Ouedraogo is by far our best player and the rest I think it's pretty mid.. A lot of 3.5 stars players for sure, but don't expect many of them to keep it up as Bundesliga is another level and we really need 3/4 key players surrounded by 3/3.5 stars players to have a good line up. We are going deep on the scout and see if we can find a good striker, a good winger, a good CB and a good FB. At CMs I really think we are ok so not that important position to fill up! Expect a patient market in the next few weeks!

FINANCES

5M it is going to be our budget. Expect around 5-10M in sales, but with only 10% being available I think we will only look to build our salary budget so we can find some really good deals with players arriving for free. We have our positions sorted out, really looking forward to build a good squad and still, keep on tracking the finances, expecting we can improve it so next here we can start to chase some dreams!

Ouedraogo
Our key player, our baby! Fans love him, I love him and he loves Schalke. It's a good love story and we want to take it to next level next year with some really outstanding peformances! Going to build the next tactic around him, around our future unknown stiker and unknown winger! Looking foward to see what can he deliver on Bundesliga as a Mezzala (At)! Let's go Schalke, let's go Ouedraogo!

Going to start the market! Stay tune for the upcoming reply with the next tactic, key players and pre-season!
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