2020-21 Season Recap -
Preseason: Manager and Team Status, Yearly Budgets, Board and Media Expectations
The big news with moving to a professional club means I actually earn a living wage, as I'm being paid £1600 per week to manage the Shrimps on a one-year contract. My reputation has grown considerably over the past 12 months and I'm up to a "Nominal" rating now. Most of my other statistics have increased as well, with the only noticeable decline in "Loyalty to Players", which isn't much of a surprise considering how much I had to turn the roster over last year after a promotion.
The Shrimps have a "Decent" reputation as a club, currently ranked 82nd in England and have 698 season ticket holders, about twice as many as we had at Queen's Park. The most notable column here is our financial status - we're "Insecure" right now and if you can belive it, we have a cash balance of -£350,000 at the moment...yes, that's a considerable minus! The club is valued at £869,000, which ranks us last in League One and 85th in England.
So it's a big change going from the massive Hampden Park to cozy Globe Arena but I'm happy to see this is a new stadium (built in 2010) and hope we can eventually fill our ~6500 seats in the coming seasons. We could definitely use some better youth and training facilities but we have no money to do that here at the moment.
The pundits think we're doomed and predict a last place finish in 2020/21. My board ask me to fight bravely against relegation and I agree, which gives me the following transfer and wage kitty:
2020/21 TRANSFER BUDGET - £0 (Last year: £?)
2020/21 WAGE BUDGET - £21,868/week (Last year: £?/week)
Our current roster already has a wage total of ~£21,500 so I basically have no room to add players as things currently stand. We'll definitely need to do some purging of the roster, where possible, to bring in some capable players for the League One level and to put my own imprint on the playing squad.