Saving Everton – A Football Manager 24 Story – Part 2 What Points Deduction?

Saving Everton, an Everton Football Manager 24 Story. Join us as we battle against a points deduction, no transfer budget and a depleted squad to save this giant of a club.

Check out Part 1 of the Story

So, we find ourselves post transfer window now, and it has been some start to the season. We struggled to shift many players on, and struggled even more to bring anyone in. However, the tactic has worked and we on a roll.

Pre-season – A Sign of Things to Come?

I’m well aware that you can’t read too much into pre-season, however, this is the exact start we needed to inspire some confidence into the squad. Calvert-Lewin was key early, but an injury derailed his pre-season. But Beto stepped up and provided the goals as we prepared for our first game. Early signs were that Danjuma was going to have a good season on the left wing for us, though we needed to get cover for him at some point.

The ins and outs
As we mentioned in Part 1, the squad, at least for our formation, needed work. But with no money to spend, it left us in a bad spot.

Sold
Ben Godfrey – £8.5m

We had to get someone gone, and while I was ideally looking to move Keane on, Godfrey was the only one that had any interest. It wasn’t a lot of cash, but it did give us something to play with.

Youngsters – £500k

We moved on a couple of youth players who looked off the pace, we got a few 100k for each but managed to put 40% sell-on clauses in each just in case any of them come good.

Signings
Julio Enciso – Loan

I’m not sure why Brighton have him available for loan, but I’m not going to complain. While he isn’t naturally an AM, that’s where we’ll be using him for the season. Brighton insisted on a £100m option to buy… but I don’t think we’ll be taking them up on it.

Matty Longstaff – Free

We signed Matty the day the window slammed shut when we failed to sign five of our deadline day targets. Matty is still recovering from a nasty injury, but he’s better than us not having anyone spare at AM.

Maxim Dekker – £6.5m

I think our scouts have found a little gem here. He’s a good understudy to Branthwaite, and could turn out to be a real bargain. At the very least, we might need him to replace Branthwaite with top clubs already registering an interest him.

Linus Gechter – £1.5m (rising to £7)

Another CB added to the squad, though this time we decided to loan him back to the club that sold him to us. We could have kept him at the club, but we signed him so late in the window and there was no sign that we’d sell Keane. Gechter is another one for the future, and hopefully, he gets some gametime at Hertha during the season.

Opening Fixtures

So, I was expecting our formation to do well, but I wasn’t expecting us to have wiped out our -10 point deduction five games into the season. The Fulham result is mostly due to Tarkowski picking up a red card in the 10th minute, other than that, it’s been some season. There isn’t much else to say. We’re five games into the season, on zero points and in 19th place in the league. We’ll check back after the January window in Part 3.

David has written for games media outlets for the last ten years. With his first major esports role being with Esports News UK covering mostly UK League of Legends. David is also a member of the British Esports Association and is an advisor to them on World of Warcraft Esports. More recently David has worked for Esports Insider and Red Bull as an esports journalist.
David later became Editor at ESTNN and now leads the current team.