PES Chronicles

I had 30 players in my squad going into pre-season negotiations. Before doing anything else I had to get rid of 5 players. My House Rules dictate that my squad cannot be larger than 25 players.

The easiest and least expensive way to do this was simply not to renew some contracts. Around 10 of my Default players were up for renewal. It was against every instinct of my ML life. I have always renewed every player contract, pending future trade-in/transfer activity.

I allowed these players to vanish into the void:

Iouga
Ximelez
Fouque
Hamsun
Dodo

At a stroke my squad was down to 25 players.

I still had to make room for new players who would be coming straight to me from the Unbelonging list or the Youth list. So I also failed to renew these players’ contracts:

Stremer
Dodo
Ceciu

Ouch. I don’t rate any of the Default players, not even the best of them, but it still hurt. It just seemed so wasteful.

I also received an offer of 3000-odd points for Castolo. I decided to sell him. I haven’t rated Castolo for the past three instalments of PES. He’s had his purple patches for me this time around. But 3000-odd points was a fair price for a decidedly below-average player.

All of which meant that, along with all the PES points that Elcherino raked in for me last season, I was rich indeed. I had something like 21,000 points in the bank. My salary bill would be about 10,000 points.

I could afford to go a bit wild on the transfer market. Yes, it did occur to me that I was taking advantage of an imbalance in the game. Elcherino, as a monstrously overpowered Classic Player, was responsible for most of my excess bank balance. He scored 40+ goals for me last season, single-handedly winning most of the games he played in. Surely, after ditching Elcherino, I should also ditch – somehow – the riches he had brought? I gave it long and careful thought…

Nah, I thought. Let’s go shopping.

KMOLO (CF, 25)
LAGUTZ (CF, 26)
AKINFEEV (GK, 21)
GATTI (DMF, 25)
BALE (SB, 18)
MATUZALEM (CMF, 27)
MORFEO (SS, 27)
RECOBA (SS, 31)

These players came from a mixture of the Unbelonging list, the Youth (Rookie) list, and trade-ins with other clubs. I didn’t make a note of each one as I went along. I also had to release a couple more players to keep the total squad size at a nice round 25.

Getting Recoba was a surprise. He isn’t a top-drawer player, but he’s still a good player to have. In my last ML I couldn’t tempt any established players to Coventry City for at least a couple of seasons. Perhaps my strong second half of the season last year helped (although my team ranking is still only D).

Recoba is hardly the transfer scoop of all time. He’s one of the slowest forwards in the game. If he’s anything like his PES5 forebear, he’ll hardly ever be fit – and he won’t last more than 60 minutes even when he is fit.

As for Elcherino, I traded him in for Matuzalem. Cheekily, Matuzalem’s club refused to accept my initial bid of Elcherino alone. I’d figured that Elcherino alone was worth four times what their guy was worth. But no, they wouldn’t have it. I had to bump a second offer up to Elcherino+1000 points before I got Matuzalem. I hope he’s worth it.

—————–

There was one more piece of business to do in the pre-season. I hated the kits I chose for Singers FC’s first season – the dayglo-red home kit, and the fluorescent yellow away kit. What was I thinking back then? I think I wanted to make a clean break from the Coventry City career with an all-new team and all-new kits, but I just never got used to the new ones. These were those new kits:

Ugh. I hated playing with them. I made sure to go into the Edit Team option during this close season and change the kits to something more appealing:

Now that’s more like it.

After all this activity, the next thing to do is to choose a First XI and then actually play some games.