Tag Finances

Football Manager 2023 – Genoa CFC: Mister (2)

A FM Old Timer Leave a comment

Ad Maiora Semper

Ciao, and welcome back to the second half of the first season at Genoa CFC. In this piece, you’ll read about the winter transfers, see how we finished off the second half of Serie B, and the financial impact of being in Serie B alongside my transfer business.

Winter transfers

After the defeat to Frosinone, Albert Guðmundsson had the temerity to come to me and challenge me on how I spoke to the team during my team talks. I didn’t appreciate his tone, so he went straight on the transfer list, offered for sale, and put into the Under-18s for good measure. A number of teams came in for the Icelandic international, but it was Mainz that sealed his signature for £2m. As you’ll see below, this netted us a net positive financial return on his time are the club given his remaining book value, as well as a very useful £2m in cash to help support our haemorrhaging of cash.

For similar financial purposes, I looked to sell Milan Badelj. At 33-years of age, and about to turn 34 in February, I wanted to extract any value I could from him. Aware I was going to take a hit on his book value, I didn’t care, given he was on £43k/week. Selling him saved £1.2m purely in his basic wage. The fact I only receive £86k from Cruz Azul, the equivalent of just two weeks wages for Badelj, is neither here nor there – I removed an unhappy player who wasn’t playing and wasn’t going to be offered another contract to add to the one that was expiring at the end of the season. On balance, this sale made financial sense.

The other player to leave was Caleb Ekuban. He’d been back up to Yeboah, but whenever he’d been given the chance to experience some minutes in his place, he looked like he’d struggle to score in a vacated goal. His shooting was wayward, and it wasn’t like we weren’t creating the same quality of chances for him. When he came to me asking to go out on loan, this seemed a good idea for both parties. Hopefully in his time at Sturm Graz, he’s able to put together a run of form to rebuild his confidence.

Despite the aforementioned financial difficulties,  I did consider bringing in a signing as cover for Yeboah on a permanent basis, I realised that if we could continue our existing form, we were likely to achieve promotion to Serie A. As such, I didn’t want to sign someone to a permanent contract who might be a good fit now, but in six months time be left with someone lacking the necessary quality to compete in Serie A. Consequently, I decided it better to look into the loan market, and add to our loanees. The search for a target didn’t take long once I spotted the name of Ezequiel Ponce. The 25-year-old Argentinian striker was unloved at Elche, and a deal was quickly agreed to bring him to the Luigi Ferraris stadium.

This meant that the squad looked like this after our Winter transfers:

League update

In truth, we won Serie B at something of a canter – the league was wrapped up with four games to go and promotion had been obtained two games prior to that. We dominated the league, going on a twenty-four game unbeaten streak, as we barely had to rotate beyond suspensions and relatively minor injuries, except Alessandro Vogliacco who broke his ankle. Our relative goal difference tells you the story of our superiority over our peers – in only four games did we have a negative xG-xGA difference.

Player analysis

This achievement, as stated in the mid-season review, is in no small part down to the form of Kelvin Yeboah, but also Mattia Aramu, Aldo Florenzi, and Henrique Pereira – my front four (after the sale of Guðmundsson). It’s only right that we take the time to investigate just how good they performances were.

In the below player analysis, rather than just copying across the in-game graphic of his spider chart to show how good each was in Serie B, I’m going to look at how well they did relative to that of other, comparative leagues. The reason for doing this is that there could, for example, be a relatively small number of players with sufficient minutes playing as a wide forward in a single league, so utilising other leagues to make a comparison makes it somewhat more reliable. The leagues I’ve chosen are 2. Bundesliga (Germany), PKO Bank Polski Ekstraklasa (Poland), Fortuna Liga (Slovakia), Ligue 2 BKT (France) and of course Serie B. The reason behind choosing these leagues is that they are all European league, with the same calendar for their respective sessions, and who are roughly comparable with Serie B given their league rankings. All players who have had their data gathered have all completed 1,000 minutes or more to avoid any small sample size of minutes skewing the data.

Kelvin Yeboah – Capocannonieri Serie B winner

Yeboah typically played with tremendous freedom, utilising his fantastic pace to run in behind defences when they had pushed up, resulting in him having a number of one-on-ones which he calmly finished on a pretty regular basis. I’m not going to pretend that he scored every week – he did, despite his fantastic figures, have some barren spells. Yet it was so often his goals which separated us from our opposition – his speed, composure, off the ball movement, and his finishing ability saw him finish the season as Serie B’s top goalscorer.

Aldo Florenzi

As the first signing I negotiated after I took on the role of Genoa manager, it was fantastic to see Aldo Florenzi perform to the standard that he achieved over the course of the season. Playing as an advanced playmaking 10, he demonstrated the ability to play the killer pass and to hit the back of the net all in one shirt. His radars show just how brilliant he was in front of goal, taking the burden away from Yeboah, whilst also nearly topping out (5th out of 109) of the assist makers per ninety across the five chosen leagues.

Henrique Pereira – Miglior calciatore giovane winner

The other new signing at the start of the season under my stewardship, when Pereira received his chance to have a run in the side, boy did he take it. He became the creator in chief of our side, laying on multiple opportunities for Yeboah and Aramu to score. You can see from the radar on the left in the below graphics just how elite his chance creation was for our side, whilst also not being shy in shot creation too (right-hand radar). For reference, the rankings are out of a total of 182 players.

His form saw him pick up the ‘Best Young Football’ award for Serie B. It’s no surprise that when he became available to speak to on a pre-contract agreement, I leapt at the chance, and was delighted that he wanted to extend his time with us beyond his initial loan.

Mattia Aramu

If Pereira was the master creator, Aramu was the master swordsman – an incredible inside forward with an eye for goal. League-leading across Serie B, and just as good if not better than anyone else playing on either side as a wide forward, it will be a shame when his loan with us end. I looked into being able to sign him on a pre-contract, but the wages he demanded would have smashed the existing wage structure. Whilst he is definitely good enough for Serie A, I couldn’t risk financial ruin and meet his £40k+ basic weekly wage.

The below graphics combine Pereira and Aramu’s metrics together into a bar chart, and compare them against the same players across the five leagues. I’ve also added the metrics for Güven Yalçın, who played in the inverted winger role that Pereira made his own following an injury to Yalçın. This gives you some idea of the level that Pereira and Aramu were able to operate at in the same side as Yalçın.

If you wish to see further graphics on the performances of the side, you can click here for the central defenders’ metrics; here for the full backs defensive metrics and here for their attacking metrics (this is well worth a look); and here for the defensive metrics of our central midfielders, here for their creativity and here for their goal-scoring actions.

Finance analysis

With the promotion that came with the form that these players achieved, which yielded the corresponding £2.15m prize money, and some careful cost-cutting, one would be forgiven for thinking that things would see growth for the financial side at Genoa CFC too, but sadly far from it.

Despite the player trading and collecting over £8m in incoming transfer fees, the player sales (those in red) and amortisation charge of this year’s incoming transfers alone led to an annual net loss of £5,626,667 in player trading alone, before the taking into consideration the cost of amortising the remaining book value of the entire team, including those out on loan (purple in colour).

The total amortisation charge for the year is £20.3m, which will go against any potential profits from trading over the year:

Safe to say, there were no booked profits for the financial year 2022-23, of which there is further evidence in the year-end cash flow analysis below:

This graphic highlights the high level of spending on player wages, bonuses and loyalty payments as a proportion of income:

The rate of spending on players being over 80% is uncomfortable and a sign that were we not to have achieved promotion, we would have been in dire straits as a club, but it can’t be taken for granted that life in Serie A is a path paved with gold either. I will need to be careful with our spending, assessing and addressing gaps in the squad, both in terms of numbers and quality, so that we can look to improve sufficiently enough to stay up and not put into trouble with the bank. It will be a tricky tightrope to walk and find that balance between pushing to avoid relegation and also pushing the club too far into the red with a potential that any transfers don’t pay off.

Yet all that, and our first games in Serie A will have to wait until next time. Will Yeboah make the step-up to the big time? Will Henrique Pereira continue to turn provider, or will that fall to some other new, as yet unknown signing? And just who will Genoa CFC bring in to replace the previous RB Leipzig loanee goalkeeper, Josep Martínez?

For that, and more, tune in next time, but until then – arrivederci!

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Football Manager 2023 – Genoa CFC

A FM Old Timer Leave a comment

Coming to decide upon a Football Manager save is typically never an easy process, especially given the amount of teams that are available to manage straight ‘out of the box’. Though, I guess that should really be straight from download these days…. However, for me, this year wasn’t that much of a challenge at all. I had been missing the calcio life I’d had in my AC Milan save back in Football Manager 2020, and so I took a quick look around Serie A and B and soon realised that it was Genoa CFC that was the standout option for me.

Why? Well during the Summer months, I can be found on Saturdays playing cricket for my local team, so the cricketing history of the club appealed to me. Equally, the club was relegated last season to Serie B, so there’s something of a rebuild to be done. It also has an impending financial disaster coming its way – Serie B prize money is only available for those that are promoted to Serie A, and even then it’s only £2.15m. The TV prize money is also similarly meagre. Combine this with still paying some players Serie A-level wages (and Serie A wages towards the top of the league at that), there’s a need to carefully monitor finances throughout this save even if I do achieve a swift promotion back to Serie A. For the record, the media make us 1/10 on, so no pressure there then. The club also have £45.5m of debt to repay, up until 2039, at the rate of £215k/month, some £2.58m/year. There goes that prize money and more for achieving any promotion.

To help me track the financial progress, I’ll be utilising the same Football Manager Finance Spreadsheet (FMFS™), I created and wrote about for Football Manager 2022 (see the below graphic (click the image for an enlarged view)). Fingers crossed, using this to determine whether I should be looking to move players on using their amortisation values based upon their remaining book values against any incoming transfer bids, and spotting those players who are not earning their keep with exorbitant contracts, I’ll be able to first minimalise the damage, and then seek to use it to inform my decision-making over how much I can actually afford to spend, irrespective of the transfer budget I’m given by the club board.

Southampton FC Finances 2027-28

Speaking of the club board, the owners of Genoa CFC are 777 Partners, a US investment firm. This has a strong echo of the reason I chose to take up the aforementioned AC Milan save, who until fairly recently were owned by Elliott Management, before bought by RedBird. 777 Partners, alongside full ownership of Genoa, have a minor stake in Sevilla, have full control over Paris-based Red Star FC (a Championnat National side), Standard Liège in Belgium, and a 70% stake in Vasco de Gama in Brazil. Genoa were the latest club to be added to the ranks, bought in September 2021, but given its relegation last season, it’s fair to say that things hadn’t gone as planned for 777 Partners. I’ll be looking to utilise the connections between the clubs – Standard Liège are already affiliated, with the ability for Genoa’s players to head out on loan there. The other clubs aren’t currently directly linked through affiliation, so I’ll look to agree deals with these teams if at all possible during the ownership of 777 Partners. If 777 Partners leave and there’s a takeover that isn’t a board takeover, I’ll likely look to terminate these agreements. However, being able to agree any more affiliations could be a little tricky as the club already has more than forty affiliates (yes, you did read that right).

The club board also expects a swift return to Serie A, though they only expect promotion rather than winning Serie B. The other board objectives include signing players to sell for a profit, signing young players to develop and sell for a profit, and to work within the wage budget. All excellent objectives. For the fans, they demand high-pressing and defensively solid football. Again, a good fit for my management style, though I may look to dial up the possession a little more given our supposed dominance in Serie B. Having only won four games and scored only twenty-seven goals all season in their relegation year, there will need to be a change in mentality and approach.

The final cherry on the metaphorical cake was that one of Genoa CFC’s managers in their early existence was a fellow North-West Englishman – William Garbutt. He immigrated to Genoa in search of work as a dockworker, after being forced to retire from his playing career due to injury. He brought about revolutionary training schemes, worked on player fitness, and concentrated on tactics, resulting in Genoa transitioning from a semi-amateur side into an all-conquering side, winning three championships in fifteen years. The clincher is that Garbutt is died in Warwick, not too far away from where I live, to not much heraldry. He was the original Mister for the Genoese, the father of football to Italy, and a man who believed that training with the ball was a necessity to improve players, according to the book “Mister: The Men Who Gave the World the Game”, by Rory Smith. I hope to become the latest Mister and join the pantheon of these figures by applying my own style, whilst staying true to past masters, including in modern methods of training.

William Thomas Garbutt, “Mister Pipetta”

I would like to be able to do justice to this history and put the side back into Serie A, before establishing them as a top-ten side. This could be a little different to more recent saves, despite the parallels, thanks in part to the new recruitment model within Football Manager 2023. For the most part, my intention is to set up/adjust the recruitment strategies/foci, and then leave my scouts alone. There’s an expectation to sign players from the lower leagues, which tends not to fit with my model of player acquisitions because, well, they’re normally rubbish. What I expect is the reality here is that they want to continue with the ludicrous number of players that are in the youth teams. Equally, there’s an expectation to sign high profile players – a clash of objectives if ever I heard one. So much for working inside the wage budget.

The additional benefit of choosing Genoa is that my good Football Manager amico, FM Stag, has chosen Sampdoria as his team for his main save. As such, at the end of each in-game year, we’ll be playing our own Derby della Lanterna against one another to build an extra bit of interest into our saves. It’s certainly made me think carefully about how to go about player recruitment and retention. Given the quality in our respective squads, I expect to lose heavily until I am able to make Genoa a force in Serie A. That said, I’ll be giving up some ground to Stag if he’s able to work his magic and achieve European football early on into his save with the financial power that this will unlock. I just hope that Stag doesn’t go the same way that Sampdoria are going in real life.

I trust that you enjoyed this introduction to my return to calcio – and until next time, arrivederci!

Finances & Football Manager

A FM Old Timer 7 Comments

Those readers who follow me on Twitter (@afmoldtimer) will possibly already know that I’ve been keeping a record of the finances in my Southampton save. As someone with a background in finance and a degree in Economics, it’s probably no surprise to anyone that I have focussed on and enjoyed writing about player/team data within Football Manager, and now finances.

The Twitter threads that I posted for 2022-23, 2023-24, 2024-25, 2025-26 are here on the excellent Thread Reader app site. The latter thread is particularly detailed, as evidenced by some of the charts below, where I went into a deeper dive across a five-year timeframe to compare, essentially how it started and how it’s going. If you are interested in how to collate this data, keep reading:

You might be wondering why I’ve gone to this level of trouble taking note of all this data. Well, have you ever wondered just how much your club is spending on its youth academy to generate its (so-called) talent? If each and every one of the youth intake for a number of years isn’t good enough for your first team, using a data-driven approach to support this might be indicative that you may need to encourage the board to spend more on youth coaching or youth facilities to improve the quality of youngsters you can attract and their current/potential abilities. Or, more likely, you need to sack your Head of Youth Development and replace them with a better candidate.

Perhaps you’re curious as to just how much cash you’ve generated in net transfer spend by signing wonderkids and selling them for a profit? Many of us take this approach when playing the game, taking on a smaller team to sign talents before developing them and selling them on. Just how good at this are you? And how much extra are you able to generate in gate receipts, season ticket sales, merchandising, and match day income as the crowds flock to see your side play?

Convinced? I thought so.

Cash is king…

I made a decision at the end of the first year of my save to record the cash inflows and outflows of the club on a spreadsheet so I could track the impacts of the player trading and the side effects of any improvements in onfield developments. I then played ahead for another year and did the same at the end of the next season. I purposefully recorded this at the end of the season, when the finance period ended, so that I had a direct comparison between full financial years, comparing like-for-like. This happens in Football Manager when the inbox comes up with the new sponsorship deals, best shirt sales, etc.

At this point, should you wish to do the same, you need to record the cash inflows and outflows of the now previous season as the game will have ticked over into the new financial year.

This is rather simple – if you use a dual-screen setup, simply type across the inflows/outflows into the cash inflow/outflow list under the relevant title/year. Should you, like me, use a laptop, you’ll need to tab in and out of Football Manager to your spreadsheet.

To make this easier for you, I’ve created a base template using Google Sheets that is free to use. Click here for the Google Sheet, click ‘File’, ‘Download’ and then select the option to download it as a ‘Microsoft Excel’ file, where you will be able to edit it (once enabling this option in Excel). Should you prefer to work in Google Sheets, you’ll need to download as per the above and then re-upload the Excel sheet into Google Sheets.

The first thing you will need to do at the very start of your save (or if you so choose, at the end of a financial year in a save you’ve already started) is to record the opening bank balance that you find in the Finances tab. Put this into the Opening Balance. It’s imperative that you do this to record the amount of the cash that your club started with at the end of the season. Miss this – everything else won’t work. If you do choose to use this part way through your save, only record the Opening Balance at the start of the new financial year and wait another twelve months to record all the inflows and outflows that have happened over that time in the same column in the relevant constituent part.

It’s worth noting that the various different elements of cash inflows and outflows vary across league systems. I know for a fact that Germany’s finance page differs from that of the Premier League. Therefore, you will need to adjust the titles of the various elements of the cash flow to reflect what’s relevant to your team/league. For reference, the provided Google Sheet is set up for the Premier League.

The spreadsheet is set up to automatically calculate the percentage change for the first two years and the changes in the actual sums for the first two years. However, you’ll need to adjust those formulae in those columns as the years progress to show the change year on year.

The same isn’t true of the far end of this tab – this section calculates the percentage of the specific cash inflow/outflow relative to that of the total cash inflows/outflows. This is a good tool to see how reliant your club is on player sales for cash generation, or how much you’re spending on player acquisitions relative to your other inflows.

Another automated part of the spreadsheet is the net transfer spend for each of the first five years, along with cumulate net transfer spend for the first five years too. This is set up to read the relevant information from the right cells, so there should be nothing to do here but enter the raw data into the cash inflow and outflows. I’ve also popped in another automated calculation for player spending as a proportion of total income – I’ve taken player wages, bonuses, and loyalty bonuses. This is useful to track to ensure that you have a balance between wage expenditure and income to ensure that you don’t end up like Bournemouth, Leicester, and QPR who have all been clubs with wage expenditure greater than income. To give you some idea of what to look out for, UEFA recommends a ratio of no more than 70% wages/income.

If you do decide to download the Google Sheet and use it as an Excel spreadsheet, after at least two years of data collection, you could create a PivotChart (Inset, PivotChart, Enter) (note that a PivotTable option isn’t available in Google Sheets, although PivotCharts are). The set-up you’d need to have to make the PivotChart work is shown below:

You can use the provided filter to select the area that you want to directly highlight, as shown by the graphs I provided above to show the youth setup and merchandising.

Player Amortisation

You’ll also notice that there’s an additional set of tabs available for you, one of which says ‘Amortisation’.

This tab enables you to calculate the player amortisation for any player acquisitions you make on your save, or indeed of the squad you’ve inherited. If you want to stick to a realistic approach as to how football finance actually works, then this is the tab for you.

Amortisation is an accounting term that is how assets are written down over time, similar to depreciation. In the case of player acquisitions (i.e. buying a player), the cost is (typically) broken down over the duration of a player’s contract.

For example, Liverpool signed Kostas Tsimikas from Olympiakos for a reported £11m. That £11m fee will have been amortised over his five-year contract – effectively, the cost of the transfer fee will be divided by five since that’s how many years he could be expected to be at Liverpool. Liverpool will book the amortisation charge of £2.2m each year in their accounts either until his contract expires (at which point his book value would be £0), he’s sold (where they will take the value of the sale and minus this from his remaining book value (literally the accounting value to the club that’s left)), or when he signs a new deal (more on how this works below).

If at any stage, a new contract were to be agreed upon, the amortisation charge needs to be adjusted to reflect the length of the new deal. This is taken care of by some calculations in some hidden columns, and by entering in the details of the year in which the new contract was agreed and the number of years that the new contract is to span over. Thanks to Ben Philip on Twitter for helping me solve an issue I had with this.

To give you an idea of what a completed Amortisation tab should look like, I’ve provided a completed version below for my Southampton save:

Profit is prince…

In the next part, working out the remaining book value of the squad is also taken care of for you in the next tab ‘Squad Book Value’. This takes the data you’ve entered into the Amortisation tab and brings across the player’s name and remaining book value. The reason this is important is that this helps you to calculate the true accounting profit/loss of your player trading. This is what team clubs really care about, not net transfer spending. The reason they care about this is that this helps drive the available transfer funds that a club can offer its manager to spend in the market, helping to explain why Everton could only afford to bring in one player on a fee last year in real life (Demarai Gray – ~£1.8m) – they had to take huge player amortisation charges, and also write-downs (where an asset is declared less valuable than it was previously recorded as, usually because of an issue with that asset, which in Everton’s case was that their players weren’t as good as they had originally thought they were).

When a club amortises, this is reflected in its balance sheet. At this point, I’d love to be able to show you how balance sheets work in Football Manager, but I’m afraid there are huge gaps of knowledge, e.g. in terms of values of fixed assets and equity to be able to put one together, so this is not possible to replicate.

However, tracking the remaining squad book value is useful, especially when considering who to sell to help balance the books with regard to FFP (or Profit and Sustainability rules in real life). This is because if you sell a player for more than his remaining book value, that will be the profit that will go into the club’s accounts. Sell a player for less than their remaining book value and you’ll be recording a loss on your profit and loss account (again, not possible to show in Football Manager).

If your club is set to fail FFP, it’s important to know which player could be sold to tip the balance to avoid fines/being banned from European football. This is why I’ve created this final tab. You will need to have the remaining book value of each of the players in your squad (including any youth players). Any players that have come through your youth intake will have a book value of £0 (or equivalent currency) as they have directly cost your club nothing in player transfer fees. This is why for ‘Man UFC’, both Marcus Rashford and Scott McTominay have a £0 book value – not because they’re worthless to the club, but because they have a £0 acquisition value.

Once you’ve inputted the players in your squad into the Amortisation tab, it will then automatically populate the remaining book values into the second column. To calculate the potential profit for the club, you will need to input the bid that’s been made for your player into the third column which will then see the fourth column automatically populate the book profit for your club. The bottom of this column will then self-populate the total profit from player sales. Note – this is not the profit from player trading – after all, it does not take into account the player acquisition costs.

Instead, I’ve added an extra column in the Amortisation tab for you to identify the new signings you have made for your club within the financial year. A simple Y in that column will suffice, which triggers a sum of all base transfer fees that you have spent on players in that year and then deducts the booked profit that you have made from selling players. This is the true reflection of profits from player trading.

Again, to give you an idea of what this will look like once you’ve inputted your player data, here is my Southampton save again:

After that financial year has ended, record the profit/loss from player trading (by all means create another tab for this), and then go back to the Amortisation tab to delete any players that you’ve since sold, so that you can reset your spreadsheet, and update any new contracts as you go along. This will have the spreadsheet ready to go for the next financial year when you can start adding in new players that you’ve acquired.

If you have any questions about any of the above – and I suspect quite a few will – feel free to contact me on Twitter – @afmoldtimer – or leave a comment on this post.