Starting Strategy for Older GW - Season 1

Season 1 – Getting a foothold

Initial Squad Selection

I opted for an old, experienced team for my initial squad selection, picking a starting 11 on key attributes and filling out the rest of the squad with minimum wage players with tiny acquisition fees. My wages were a lowly £55,000 and I had money in the bank from my initial £500,000.

Your income is relative to your wage for clubs under 3 star reputation as long as your total wages remain under £100,000. This meant that I only made marginally more profit by going for a lower wage squad. However, by keeping my initial wages low, this meant that when I expanded my squad I still remained under the 100k wage limit before I started eating into profits.

Transfers

You can only win matches by scoring, so I quickly spent a large chunk of my remaining cash on Brazilian striker Dinei. I then added to this by signing players such as Walter Garcia (DC), Sercan Kurtulus (MC) and Edson (DR/MR) for very small fees (lower than AF) in transfer auctions. This enabled me to build a competitive squad for only a small amount of money.

Later on I signed a quality goalkeeper, Tobias Sippel, for £600,000 spread over 4 weeks, and I sold Dinei for £250,000 before signing a better, younger replacement in Ari for £350,000.

Tactics & Matches

With my best player a striker, I opted to play 4-4-1-1, with Dinei (and then Ari) upfront and initial squad signing Sergey Krivets as my midfield playmaker sitting just behind. I played defensive football, setting myself up as hard to beat and generally played on the counter.

The difference between gaining 1 point or all 3 points is often a set piece so I had made sure I had a good corner taker (16+), a good free-kick taker (16+) and someone good in the air (Jumping, Heading, Strength all 17+) in my initial squad selection. This combined with the occasional magic from Krivets or Dinei made my side very strong compared to other new joiners.

I joined a New User league set up by the Beta moderators for the influx of new teams. This pitted me against clubs of my own ability only, and I steadfastly refused to play against teams of far greater ability. The result of this was that my world ranking (I reached the top 10 in the world and generally didn’t fall out of the top 50), and FA ranking was impressive. I ended up winning New User League 2 with a couple of games to spare.

Stadium

One of the biggest decisions to make is over when and how to expand your stadium. I opted against improving one of the existing stands, as I felt it was a short-term and short-sighted investment.

One of the biggest money earners in the game are corporate fans, or ‘Corps’. I knew there was no point in catering to corporate fans at this point, because the demand wasn’t there for my club, but I decided to give myself the option by building a stand with corporate provision.

A 2-Tier stand is a good choice to start off with, because you can reap the rewards relatively quickly. A 3-Tier stand takes upwards of 20 days to build and the seats take up to 15 days more, so it can be a season before you reap increased income.

I therefore opted for a 2-Tier Azindale Type 2 stand. It offers a decent number of seating blocks, combined with space for one Corp box and advertising provision. I initially included a few blocks of Disagio seats and 1 block of Di Lusso seats, along with electronic advertising boards, resulted in a modest jump in projected earnings.


Summary

- Experienced initial starting squad, low wage, filled out with very cheap players
- Made sure I bought in a quality striker to bang in the goals
- Expanded the squad in numbers and quality, cheaply, through transfer auctions, rather than the much higher private transfer fees.
- Reached 2 star team rep.
- Started expanding my stadium with future proofing in mind – 2 Tier Azindale stand.