The Almerian Dream

Not sure how many people have beaten me to this but I have decided to do something a little bit different. In the past few days I have been working on the editor to change Almere City into an English club. In real life, Almere City is a Dutch football club who currently play in the Jupiler League, the second-highest division of football in the Netherlands.

In this story Almere City is a professional English football club based in Almere, Greater Manchester.

Despite being a big club with such a large fan base and a successful history, in recent years Almere City have been a club in free-fall. Costly mistakes by previous owners, such as the building of a new 20,000 capacity all-seater stadium, resulted in the club not being able to pay players' wages.

It didn't take long for the financial issues at the club to affect the players' performances on the pitch. In less than 10 seasons, Almere City has gone from being a Premier League club, to playing next season in the Blue Square North. Following last season's relegation from the Blue Square Bet Premier, City manager Ian Davies was sacked. However, with the club on the brink of entering administration, the long-suffering supporters finally had some good news to talk about.

Rob Gorksi, a multi-millionaire businessman and life-long supporter of the Citizens, completed a deal to take over the club. Gorski was tasked with bringing in a new manager to take the club back into the Premier League. Who will he choose?...

The former Citizens striker, who scored 209 goals for Almere between 1993 & 2006, has agreed a one-year rolling contract with the club.

Was not expecting such a tough pre-season, but these games do give us a chance to test ourselves against some very good teams.

[spoiler=Wes Fletcher][/spoiler]

This is the first team squad. Some very good players in there that should do well in the Blue Square North. Solomon Taiwo is arguably our best player & Matt Thornhill, Lathaniel Rowe-Turner & Anthony Cook also look promising.

This is the reserves squad. Not the biggest squad to choose from but any youth players that catch my eye will go into the reserves for a while to see if they are good enough to play for the first team.

This is the under-18 squad. We have a few very exciting prospects in here & I'm particularly excited about Ben Jefford, Lee Angol & James Sage. I'm looking forward to seeing how much I can develop these players.

Almere City 1-2 Cardiff City

Friendly

Falmer Stadium

Attendance - 6,590

Joe Mason (10)

Matt Thornhill (42)

Heidar Helguson (78)

Andrew Taylor (28)

Andrés Gurrieri (30)

Aarran Racine - 7.8/10

I basically started what I believe to be my strongest side & despite losing the game, I was very impressed with what I saw. We had plenty of chances & our build-up play was superb at times. Cardiff also seemed to play their strongest side & I think we can be very proud of the fact that we competed well against one of the better teams in the country. Both of Cardiff's goals were of the highest quality so there was nothing really we could have done differently. I will be expecting more from my strikers though as we need to put our chances away, especially against better opposition like Cardiff City.