Career 🇵🇹 Portugal’s WORST Club - a ‘Rebuild Rio’ Challenge

[DanEnglish]

Rebuild Rio
Portugal’s Worst Club

An extremely difficult club rebuild - almost like a ‘Goat-Lite’ challenge 😉  only for FMM23

 
Rubbish
In real life - Rio finished BOTTOM of Portugal’s 4th tier, with just 6 points in 16 games 🔻

Spoiler

 
Bankrupt
They also were DISQUALIFIED from the league after players didn’t turn up for 2 games, as they hadn’t been paid 🔻

Spoiler

  
Relegation
Their situation was even worse as the BOTTOM 6 clubs get relegated (in a 14 club league!) 🔻

Spoiler

You can see the bottom 6 get relegated!

 

 
Can YOU Rebuild Them?
With rubbish players, with bankrupt finances, and the bottom 6 getting relegated …

… can you ‘Rebuild Rio’
for them to survive + thrive?

Edited November 9 by DanEnglish

[DanEnglish]

Hard Mode
For Added Difficulty 😱

Here’s how I’ll play this on FMM23  
 

Rule 1
Reinforce with only ACADEMY players 🔥 

 - ❌ no loans in
 - ❌ no transfers in
 - ❌ no free contract signings
 - ❌ no contracts to greyed-out players
 - ✅ only existing players + academy graduates.  
 

Rule 2
Start with NO experience 🔥

 - ❌ no / unknown manager reputation
 - ❌ no manager coaching badges
 - ❌ no taking / upgrading your coaching badges
 - ✅ start with no reputation + continue throughout with no badges.  
 

Rule 3
Switch on ‘AUSTERITY’ every season

 - 🔻 select a new save with NO starting budgets 
 - 🔻 switch on the ‘austerity measures’ narrative, before the 1st competitive match EVERY season.  
 - 🔻 this significantly reduces your wage budgets, similar to the club’s real life financial situation (plus reduces morale). 
 - ☑️ if the game automatically adds the ‘asset stripping’ narrative at any point, you can quit + reload the last save game file (so I save after every match + have a weekly auto-save setup)

 
Next
A (horrifying) preview of Rio’s squad …

Edited November 9 by DanEnglish

[DanEnglish]

Preseason 1
Squad Review 

“ These players are RUBBISH! ”

 
Squad
We only have 17 players total

• Only 1 goalkeeper
• Only 1 right-back
• Only 2 center-backs

Only 1 player earns over £100 per week (Belima). He’s our star player. 

 
Star
Our star player. He’s also our only decent set piece taker. 

He would be a good winger - if we had a high-aerial striker (spoiler: we don’t).

Guess he’ll be a wide IF, wide IW or wide AP then 🤔 

Keeper
Oh dear. We only have ONE goalkeeper + he’s pretty rubbish.

1 technique. 2 stamina. Damn.

And a terrible personality (with no chance of getting a mentor)
 

First Team
Here’s where it gets interesting.

• 🆗 Decent pace through the team
• 🔻 But low stamina + low strength (we’ll need to make a LOT of subs with … oh)

• 🆗 Only 1 guy who can cross (plus maybe our FBs)
• ✅ A couple of midfielders can pass
• 🆗 Our defensive five can tackle
• … 🔻 but we can’t shoot - no one has above a 10 for shooting 

• 🆗 A little bit of creativity
• ✅ Good decision making 👍 
• 🆗 Maybe some ok movement?
• 🆗 Only our 2x DCs have decent positioning
• … 🔻 and we have horrific teamwork 🤦 an intense press may be challenging here   
   

Squad Summary
We have a terrible squad, with only one decent player. 

They are young, but all have rubbish potential (2 to 2.5 stars potential, according to the editor, on a test save beforehand).

Our only reinforcements will be our youth academy graduates.

 
Next
A mid-season 1 update 🙂 
we must survive relegation this season 🙈 

Edited November 9 by DanEnglish

[StuartM]

Good luck Dan, I know you'll make Rio sing again... the only question is how soon and how loud!

[DanEnglish]

End Season One
Survival?

 
 

1st Half Season
With a terrible squad + no reinforcements … we really struggled …

Just 6 points from our first 6 matches (inc. cup) meant we started the season in the relegation zone.

By end-Dec we were just out of the relegation zone - but our tiny squad was exhausted.

 
Youth Academy
“Reinforcements have arrived”.

We were desperate for new + better players. This is what the youth academy gave us …

Oh no! Only three players 😱  This is genuinely terrible for our squad depth.

Plus the two midfielders may have good potential, but are rubbish now:

Spoiler

 
Decision Time
⚠️ All our player contracts EXPIRE at end-season. But no budget remaining, what do we do?

• SIGN new contracts (with wage rises), making us significantly over budget - increasing my risk of being fired.
• or WAIT until end-season, increasing my risk of losing all my players on pre-contract deals with other clubs.

Decision - I chose to WAIT 🙈  
 

2nd Half Season
We dropped back into the relegation zone … 

With 7 terrible matches in Jan + Feb …

With the media complaining + horrible morale 

So then we changed things:

• agreed new contracts to most players
• micro-managed player morale (with position retraining + talking to them more)
• tweaked our tactic + set piece setup.

Our final 7 matches were much better …

Thankfully we SURVIVED (just).

We ensured survival with 1 match remaining - which was good as we got destroyed 0-3 by the league leaders 😨 

 
End Season
We survived into season two. But our squad is still pretty terrible

• Goals - our front 3 scored almost all our 25 goals 😬 
• Assists - star player Belima created a third of them - mostly from set pieces?
• Crosses - one FB provided a few assists, but the other FB didn’t 🤔 am not sure why.
• Ratings - our B2B performed poorly, and is being ‘phased out’ in favour of our academy graduate midfielder.

The bench / squad players were rubbish. The last two are the academy graduates, who were poor.  
 

Next
A season two preview.

We need a REALLY good academy intake (both quantity + quality) …

… but financially we are still destroyed.

Could I lose my job
before season two starts?!  
 

Edited November 11 by DanEnglish

[DanEnglish]

PS. I didn’t lose my job. 

Actually I’m in season 4 now, just could’ve be bothered to update 🙂 

[StuartM]

Tell us more please Dan!

I was wondering about this one (I could go on Discord, but I found it too distracting!)

I have a couple of side saves where I'm just using academy and greyed out players but I haven't made it difficult for myself 

[DanEnglish]

Season 2
Mid-Table Mediocrity

Mid-Season
After just surviving past season - this second season is a little more comfortable.

Theres no chance of being promoted, but no chance of being relegated 👍 

Spoiler

 
End-Season
Mid-table mediocrity. 

However loaning out our 1st team for the second half season (to play the youngsters instead) - really impacted our results.

Spoiler

 
Next
Season Three.
Still in 🇵🇹 Portugal’s 4th tier.  
With a better squad, will we do better?

[Emarevil]

Ohh boy... This looks more than difficult... But if there's anyone who can do it, it's you Dan...