The Lilywhites of Bromley

An Introduction
Welcome all! My name is Smudger and this is the story of the rise of Bromley football club - more affectionately known as the Lilywhites. I’m relatively new to the Football Manager series and this is indeed the first team that I’ve managed for more than one season. The plan (or hope, I guess), is to lead us from the Blue Square South to the heady heights of the Premier League. With three seasons completed thus far, let me fill you in... Enjoy!

The Story So Far
Before picking my team, I set out with the rough idea of a grand ‘fifteen year plan’. The goal was simple - take a team from the 6th league of English football to the 1st in fifteen years. That would mean I needed a promotion every three years. Each three year cycle would be broken down into three stages: survival, consolidation, promotion. Survival, rather obviously, would be the task of merely staying in the league. Consolidation would be the task of building upon the foundations laid in the last year, before the third season of, hopefully, achieving promotion. Rinse and repeat another four times and I should make it to the Premier League.

Now came the important bit - picking the team. I scrolled through all the teams available in both the North and South Blue Square leagues and knew as soon as I saw the Lilywhites that Bromley would be my choice. With a media prediction of just below mid table (14th out of 22, I think), they were perfect. I’m also a London lad, which meant that they were fairly local and made me feel as if I was contributing somewhat to the community (total lies, I know, but lets try and get into this, eh?). A quick glance at the team and structure of the club soon made me aware of the monumental task ahead; essentially, my team were pants and the facilities, wage budget, transfer budget and, consequently, expectations were next to nought.

I could do this though! I was confident of making it out of non-league at least in about 6 seasons and from then on, who knew? I had no set formation in mind, I was going to try and fashion what I could out of the players already at the club and achieve what I could with such limited resources. Now, what to do on my first day...

Feedback
Before I launch into the story, I'd love some constructive feedback regarding the approach to take. Having already completed three seasons with the team, the first part of the tale isn't going to be done in 'real-time' if you will. Therefore, would people rather I did a fairly brief recap or an in-depth retrospective? A brief recap would contain the major events of the first three seasons: important matches, some transfer news, final league standings - that kinda thing. An in-depth retrospective would be done as if it were real-time, as if I were playing it through day by day. I would have to use my memory and what information I had available to me in the save file to patch everything together, but I'm confident I could construct a fairly coherent and interesting story of the first three seasons. I obviously only want to put effort into writing something people are going to want to read and enjoy, so please let me know via message or chat what you think - it essentially comes down to whether you'd rather I started the story from the 1st or 4th season.

Any feedback, replies or messages will be gratefully received!

This is going to be exciting!!!! I'd like to see how you do . Maybe you could get promoted even quicker!!

I'd get Jamil Adam though never bought him myself lol but seen stories on here with people buying him and apparently he scores goals for fun.

I'd like to see a season review for each season so far before going more in-depth on your current season. However it just up to you. I am currently managing Eastwood Town in the BSN so I will be interested to see how our familiar careers play out. Hopefully you can get promoted quicker, its never a bad thing to be ambitious especially with some good signings

Season One
With the majority of my players on non-contracts, I knew I faced a serious problem. My budget was next to naught and my current wage bill was somehow pretty much maxed out already - I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow it was. Looking at the players I had at my disposal I opted to play a fairly vanilla 4-4-2 with a slightly more defensive back up tactic of 4-1-4-1 (basically a 4-5-1 where one of the midfielders is a DM). The 4-4-2 formation consisted of a standard back line where everyone’s duty was set to ‘defend’. I then had two wingers with the duty of ‘support’, a deep lying playmaker in the centre with the duty of ‘support’ and finally a centre mid with the duty of ‘automatic’. Up front I had a target man and a poacher, both with the duty of ‘attack’ - although on occasion I did change the target man’s duty to ‘support’. Our philosophy was ‘rigid’ and our strategy was ‘standard’. The 4-1-4-1 was pretty much the exact same, except the poacher was replaced by a defensive midfielder with a duty of ‘defend’ - the target man with a duty of ‘attack’ remained up front on his own.

With regards to set pieces, I left the throw ins untouched and only mildly tweaked the defensive corners and free kicks, although I did completely restructure the offensive free kicks and corners. With the corners, I kept both full backs in defence, a few midfield players to stay back if needed, one midfielder to lurk out side the box, one striker to make a late run, one striker to challenge the keeper and finally the two centre backs on the near/far posts. I opted to switch the delivery between aiming at the six yard box and far post. The free kicks were kinda the same, but with the delivery always aimed at the best header.

As for transfers, I managed to get rid of a few dead weight players before the season kicked off, but knew that the few ‘stars’ I had were on non-contracts and would be poached by a club willing to pay a salary - something I could not afford. Despite budgetary restraints I did, however, manage to make a few signings. The first was the young Scottish keeper James Gilpin on a free for about £130 per week ; I needed a solid goalie who was going to be somewhat reliable as games were gonna be tough enough with out conceding stupid goals. The second was a young midfielder by the name of Lewis Whitely who I got on a £5 per week youth contract. The third and final was a central defender by the name of Sergio Sanchez who I also managed to get on a youth contract. I maintained the same staff and also set up a fairly standard strength training program for each player - with the abysmal coaches and training facilities, I figured it wasn’t gonna make too much of a difference anyway, my assistant manager pretty much said I should focus on bringing in talent as we were incapable of developing any... which instills confidence, obviously...

With tactics, transfers and training all sorted, I had to pick the starting 11 that were to become the heroes of Bromley - or at least the guys that were gonna help us stay afloat in the league. They were as follows:

James Gilpin
Reis Boyle, Moses Swaibu, Sergio Sanchez, Ryan Adams
Albert Jarrett, Ali Fusieni, Lewis Whiteley, Michael Malcom
Pierre Joseph-Dubois

The sharp-eyed readers amongst you may notice that there are only 10 players present here - for the life of me I genuinely can’t remember the name of the other striker. I do however know he had quite possibly the worst scoring record of all time and its safer for my mental well being that his name remains forgot. I could start up a new game and check to see who was in the starting squad, but I’d really, really, really... really rather not bring up bad memories. As the season progresses I will go into a little bit more detail with each player - it will quickly become obvious who’s gonna play a vital role in the success of this team and who is holding us back like a fat kid on your back when you’re trying to swim. With pretty much everything sorted, it was time to play the friendlies and see how my rabble would perform on the green, green grass of Hayes Lane.

Great stuff!!! Going to keep watching this!!! But where's Jamil Adam