Difficult Second Season — Scandi Domination FM24

With a reduced wage budget, and no money to spend, it was always going to be a difficult off-season.

Our backup AM, Jamie Hopcutt left to Wrexham for £40k. Robin Sid, who played off the left wing and added seven goals and six assists, left on a free. He wanted to stay, but we couldn’t offer him a new contract.

Five players retired. Another three who played significant minutes followed, plus Buster Blosse, Filip Trpcevski, Ludvig Svanberg and Diego Gutierrez all returning to their parent clubs, we had some holes to fill and no money to do it.

LOOOOOAAAAANNNNSSS

You all know the song — thanks Zealand — so off to the loan market we went.

N.E.C in the Netherlands let us take Soufian Sayeb to play as our AMC. Love his passing, technique and agility.

Julian Gonstad arrives from Viking in Norway. Someone who can lead our attack, with pace, finishing and good movement. He can also play as the AMC, because…

We’ve got Hesket, Jaden Heskey. Coming on loan from Man City. He’s quick, good on and off the ball. Should be a great upgrade.

On the left, to replace Sid is Noa Williams from Fredrikstad. He may not look outstanding, but the physicals are there, plus he can dribble.

Quite possibly the best arrival was our new left back.

Tromso have loaned us, El Hadji Malick Diouf, and he looks an outstanding upgrade in the defence. Especially given licence to bomb forward and attack.

TACTIC

No major changes. Dumped the IFB for now, hoping a more basic role gives us some more stability.

At AMC, we’ve used APs, SS, AMa, settling on the APs as he drops a bit deeper to get on the ball.

In the centre, the two DMs play similar, but the left side is asked to hold position and the right allowed to push on.

Preseason prediction put us in sixth, an improvement on last season. With the upgrades and new signings, the hopes in the club were high…

Twenty games gone. We’re in the mud.

You have to finish sixth to get in the top half. Four points behind Ekenas, it was looking unlikely.

Perhaps we changed too much. Maybe too many tweaks.

This run was quite demoralising. Tweaks were made, tantrums had. We were not happy.

It looked like we had turned a corner, sticking 11 past Larne in the UEFA Europa Conference League. What a way to kick off our first European appearance.

However, the league form was dreadful. One win from nine was masked due to the above win, but defeat to Mainz in the second qualifying round (7–1) highlighted just how far away we were.

The 4–2 defeat away at FC Lahti sealed our spot in the bottom six. A terrible terrrible performance for the season.

Williams had nine goals and five assists. Veteli added 7g/5a from midfield and Diouf supplied eight assists from left-back. However, just six goals from Gonstad and City recalling Heskey hurt us bad.

Not going to lie, at this point, my head was turned. I started looking at the Job Centre.

It felt difficult to see a path guiding Mariehamn towards the title. Morale was down, so…

Yup, I jumped.

Helsingborgs were sitting in 12th, down in the bottom half of the Swedish second tier. I felt, perhaps, a good performance with them would maybe lead to either promotion, or a top-flight job.

Then after a good run we could perhaps one day go back to Finland.

It was refreshing to see the staff suggesting our best player was goalkeeper Kalle Joelsson, so why were they struggling?

Then I saw him!

My 6 foot 3, Iraqi centre forward, a 3.5 star Target Forward. LET’s GO

Which led to this…

Using a IWB to bulk up the midfield — inspired by watching Stinger’s streams — allowing the two wide players to create. Birkfeldt allowed to advance down the left, looking to get the balls into the big man.

Sigh.

The switch from a CMd to DLP seemed to work some magic, big Muhsin bagged nine goals in eight games and fired us big towards the mid-table spots.

A win against Kalmar could have seen us climb as high as eighth, but six goals in the first half saw the game end level and we finished in 10th.

Which after a woeful start, we’ll take.

A transfer budget, and wage budget with 12k spare. It was going to be a strong summer in Sweden, right?

Wrong. I made the mistake of looking at the Job Centre again.