1st February 2024
Welcome back to Japan everyone!
This will be a small transfer update since the first game of the season is still one month away.
A lot happened in the last few months and I'm happy to say that the bug I talked about in my last post was fixed with the latest update so we can finally sign free Japanese players.
Transfers Out
As you can see a lot of players left our club in January, mostly very old players who were not even close to being decent for us. We ended up freeing a lot of our wage budget.
We also didn't renew the contracts of 8 players so they ended up leaving on free transfers.
Transfers In
However, a lot of players also joined us in this transfer window and all of them for free. Also, it's worth noting that we can only play 4 non-Japanese players so I tried to sign as much Japanese players as possible.
Most of this players are basically backup players but there are a few that come to be 1st team players. There are also some players who already played for us last season and all of them are 1st team players:
The first signing we ever made in our club was Park Hyung-Jin. Despite his age, he still looks amazing for the 3rd tier and last season he managed to get a 6.93 average rating in only 6 games. He also takes 1 foreign slot in our team but I think it's totally worth it.
Another foreign player and this time for the GK position. We desperately needed a better GK and this was the best one I could find last season. He didn't have the best average rating and conceded 9 goals in 7 games last season. Hopefully this season he will be better. If not, I might need to try to find a better one.
We then signed a Brazilian CD who actually looks decent but didn't have the best of times playing for us last season. Hopefully he plays better this season.
Another foreign player who took the last foreign slot in the 1st team was the Ghanese RB Baffour who looks very good but aain, didn't have very good performances last season, but considering he only played 5 games I can't really speak out about it.
We have a new striker as well and even though his mentals are nowhere near as impressive as Ukita's, he makes up on his technicals. Let's see if he can score us enough goals.
Kentaro Oi was next in line to sign for us and even though he is 39 years old, he still looks very decent.
We needed to sign some midfielders this season and Mochizuki comes in as a free Japanese player with very decent looking stats.
Still on the midfield, the Australian Jacob Melling comes in as a backup for Park, so we will never have more than 4 foreign players on the first team.
One of the best signings we did was the 32 year old Takashima for our LW position, which was also lacking a lot, as was the RW.
With that in mind, Okino comes in for the RW and is, once again, a good looking player.
I don't feel there's any point in showing any oother player because non of them will be starters so I'll leave it here for transfers.
Squad
Our squad looks way better this season, but I'm not sure of we are capable of achieving what our board expects us to...
They still expect us to get promoted to J2 League and to finish 1st in our division to guarantee the automatic promotion. In terms of cups:
We drew Kyoto Sanga in the J. League Cup, who currently play in J1 League, 2 divisions above us, so I'm not sure if we can be competitive.
However, our Emperor's Cup fixture looks more accessible since we drew a team playing in our division.
We already played 2 friendlies and are undefeated for now. It's worth noting we beat a J2 League team and drew against a J1 League side. Could this mean we are stronger than I think?
Finances
Our finances look very good for a 3rd division side I must say. Our board injected some more money in our budgets some days after I shared the last update but we didn't use any of it for now. I feel like if I use any of it our financial state will rapidly fall so I rather not touch it for now.
Will be back soon with more updates.