Season Expectations
There is not much to expect as a small club still in its early stages of development fighting against the big giants in the toughest league in f4football, but we are pretty optimistic about our future and will try our best to avoid relegation if we can. The goal is to finish at least 12th position in the league table and win the relegation play-offs, but even if we lose the play-offs there won't be any regrets, as a 12th place finish in itself will be a big achievement for us.
We do not expect to make much progress in the League Cup, and even one win in the National Trophy will be good enough at this point.
Club Finances and Stadium
We started the season with $ 77,311,729 in the bank, after making a meagre $ 1,783,433 profit last season. We spend a bit over the budget on transfers last season, but a season in the top division will only help us boost our finances this season.
Our players have improved a lot in rating and hence our wage budgets will be more than last season's and we will pay a wage bill of $ 929,501 for our players and $ 159,341 for our staff. Add to that a maintenance cost of $ 30,186 for our stadium facilities and the total wage bill per round for us will be $1,119,028.
Our sponsors will pay us $ 726,947 per round and we have fund the remaining wages from a part of our match revenue. They paid us $43,616,861 upfront upon signing the contract, but since we are not 100% sure that we will get paid the $45,797,704 bonus on finishing 12th in the league, we are not accounting that amount in our budgets.
We will first increase our stadium capacity by 5000 seats to 30K (costs $14,365,000 for 29 rounds) and then our youth academy to level 3 (costs $8,891,398 for 15 rounds). In the remaining 16 rounds of the season, we will build another 2205 seats more in the stadium which will take the capacity to 32,205 (costs $7,386,750). So the total investments planned in developing facilities this season is a whooping $30,643,148.
That would leave us with an expected profit of just around $12 million for the season, and we would involve in transfer activities only after our chances of receiving the league bonus from our sponsor is clear.
Players and Staff
As in previous seasons, we will continue to have 4 coaches, 1 physio and 1 scout in our staff roster. Since we do not have a training centre yet, the training efficiency in all skills is just below 50 with which we are happy at the moment.
In contrast to the previous seasons, we cannot use our youth players in regular matches this season since that will dent our league performances very much, but all of our 3 youth players will get every minute possible in all the 30 friendlies. And if possible, we will try to give a few minutes here and there in some regular matches too, but that will depend hugely upon the strength of our opponents.
So keeping this edition short, we will back again with a new episode at the end of the season with hopefully some good news ;)