August 2022
To kick the season off we played in the usual useless cup competitions like the Community Shield and European Super Cup but for once we didn’t have it all our own way as Manchester City surprised us with a 3-1 defeat despite me putting out mostly a first team side, then the Super Cup caused us issues but we did manage a win after it went to a very long penalty shootout against Atletico Madrid

I didn’t really need anyone specific in this transfer window, though I fancied a right winger, so to begin with the only players joining the club were two that I had arranged last summer:

Sergey Ignatjev (10.25m) – I’ve got two right backs at the club that I really like already but this lad looks pretty solid to me and even though I thought 10m was pushing it a bit for him I decided I might as well bring him in anyway. He’ll be rotated throughout the season with my backup (Deguchi) and should develop well enough I reckon.

Yury Zhemaletdinov (3.6k) – I’ve got five centre backs at the club currently, which I think is the perfect number as that gives me two first choice and two second XI players with one more rotating to get experience. Yury was available on a free, well near enough, however and I just couldn’t turn his kind of talent down for nothing so I picked him up and it likely means Rudolph (one of my backups) will leave in January or next summer anyway

Fabrice Guichard (11m) – As I said above I fancied a new AMR to take some of the burden off Albrighton who is my only trusted rotation option at the moment and although I’ve a number of AML’s who can also play on the right wing I wanted a proper backup, what with Albrighton getting on a bit now and with Barcelona willing to let Guichard walk for 11m I thought it was a good deal

Full Transfers (In: 21m | Out: 54m )

| Trophies so far: Champions League (4) | Premier League (4) | FA Cup (2) | League Cup (4) | Community Shield (4) | European Super Cup (4) | Club World Cup (2) |

June 2022
We’ve had a great year once again both domestically and in Europe, in fact the only competition we really *bleep*ed up in was the FA Cup where as defending Champions I failed to take it seriously enough when we got Huddersfield in the 3rd round – the first game ended 1-1 and even then I sent the same youth team out to do the job in the replay only to end up crashing out in a 1-0 defeat

The Capital One Cup didn’t prove as problematic as we got a pretty simple run all the way to the Final where we came up against and then dutifully dispatched Arsenal 1-0. In the Premier League we won by the title by a decent margin, even if it was a lot less than the gap last year and we found ourselves challenged by the teams around us much more which could be a sign of things to come I guess

Our Champions League defence was an odd one, we got teams like Inter and Napoli in the Quarter and Semi Finals even though neither had been past the First Knockout Round for some years and that mean it was too easy for us to get all the way to the Final. Once there we were matched up against a Liverpool side that just 7 days from the Final and in true FM logic sacked their manager, Benitez, for underperforming in the league and then with 5 days to go gave the gig to Roberto Mancini – who then oversaw a dreadfully boring final that meant we won our second proper cup 1-0 this year.

The squad for the most part coped well with Pjanic, Valades and Vydra leaving in the summer but a minor injury crisis did cause some issues that have left me worrying about weakening the side too much in future transfer windows. The standout players for us this season would have to be Gabriel Ippolito (25 Goals | 18 Assists) who was named the Best Player in Europe and the Champions League Golden Boot winner, Will Hughes (8 Goals | 18 Assists), Victor Kippes (17 Goals | 11 Assists), Daryl Astley (14 Goals | 13 Assists), Marc Albrighton (8 Goals | 13 Assists) and Valery Moskovskiy (9 Goals | 7 Assists)

| Trophies so far: Champions League (4) | Premier League (4) | FA Cup (2) | League Cup (4) | Community Shield (4) | European Super Cup (3) | Club World Cup (2) |

January 2022
We started the season off a bit rusty this year and I think it was because of me moving on Pjanic and Vydra in the summer, it meant that when my first choice players weren’t on good form I didn’t have the best of options to replace them. However we got through it and having nearly 300k of wages free in the budget is worth the payoff I reckon and so far we’re still top of the league and although we’re not dominating like we did last year we should still have enough to be up there come the end of the season

Aston Villa 2 – 1 Dortmund
Galatasaray 1 – 6 Aston Villa
Aston Villa 1 – 0 Steaua
Steaua 0 – 6 Aston Villa
Dortmund 2 – 1 Aston Villa
Aston Villa 3 – 2 Galatasaray

The group stage of the Champions League didn’t provide much of a challenge for us and we qualified after four games and even with a weakened team out for the last two games we only really struggled with Dortmund and still ended up top of the group meaning we’ve got a game against Juventus in the First Knockout Round to look forward to

Even though the season hasn’t been going long we’ve picked up a few competitions wins by winning the worlds worst treble once again thanks to victories over Manchester City in the Community Shield, Inter Milan and our old favourite Yassine Benzia in the European Super Cup and then Atletico Mineiro in the Club World Cup which was a nice bit of revenge considering they beat us in the CWC Final last year and very nearly did it again this time

Despite all those competition wins it is the personal awards for my players that I’m most proud of as Will Hughes became my first ever Ballon d’Or winner on this FM – prompting 45m bids for him from Madrid, Gabriel Ippolito being named World Player of the Year and even Victor Kippes bringing home the European Golden Boy award

| Trophies so far: Champions League (3) | Premier League (3) | FA Cup (2) | League Cup (3) | Community Shield (4) | European Super Cup (3) | Club World Cup (2) |

August 2021
This summer transfer window took a lot of deliberating on my part when it came to which players I wanted to offload and where I wanted to strengthen, we’re quite well off as a club but I wanted to reduce some of the higher wages a bit by shipping out some of the older players and in the end I let Vydra (30m), Pjanic (2.2m) and Valades (23.5m) leave to make room for some younger players to come through

The lads I brought in I’m pretty pleased with even if none of them are ready to step into the first XI just yet:

Luiz (4.2m) – With Luna getting on a bit I’m going to need a new back up left back in a few years time so I lined this deal up last summer to complete when Luiz turned 18, I think he’ll be a decent back up player for us even if he never does quite make as first choice

Andreas Chrysafis (2m) – I find it hard to turn down central midfielders when I find them and with Valades and Pjanic leaving this summer I could do with some more depth in that position. He is very young but should develop well enough to provide some first team competition over the next 5 years or so and considering how much he cost I don’t think I can go wrong with him

Ivo Aveiro (5.25m) – So I’ve little or no idea what I’m going to do with Ivo, he’s very unlikely to make it as a striker considering the other options we have and so for now he will become my 3rd/4th choice left winger understudied to Astley in the hope that he develops well enough as an Inside Forward

Angelo Santos (725k) – Yeah as I was saying a bit further up I just can’t turn down talented central midfielders, now Angelo is certainly talented but he will need retraining to CM before I can do much else with him and at 15 he’s a bit of a gamble because there’s every chance he might not live up to his potential. For the sake of 725k though, I might as well find out

Harold Limon (5m) – I have two brilliant strikers at the club and I have a great youth prospect looking to challenge them in the future, not to mention the wingers I have that can also play up there so the last thing I really need is yet another striker but something about Limon really stood out for me and I just had to bring him in

Full Transfers (In: 17m | Out: 56m )

| Trophies so far: Champions League (3) | Premier League (3) | FA Cup (2) | League Cup (3) | Community Shield (3) | European Super Cup (2) | Club World Cup (1) |

June 2021
So the league we absolutely stormed this season and right up until 5 games from the end I thought we had a shot at an unbeaten season, right up until Reading put an end to that dream, still a Premier League win isn’t something to sniff at and coupled with the Capital One Cup and FA Cup final victories it really has been a great season for us. We also featured in our 4th Champions League Final in 4 years after a decent run to the Final and I’m very pleased to saw we didn’t end up with a 50% record in Champions League Finals as we blew Manchester United away to end up with a comfortable 3-0 victory.

The real standout players for us this season would be the likes of Gabriel Ippolito (34 Goals | 14 Assists) our stunning striker who even nailed the Premier League Golden Boot award, Will Hughes (6 Goals | 15 Assists) who was fantastic right up until he was ruled out for the rest of the season forcing young Danny Zorniger (6 Goals | 4 Assists) to take his place in the first team. Victor Kippes (23 Goals | 12 Assists), Andre a keeper who was initially signed as a stop gap player but just brought home theLeague Golden Glove, Daryl Astley (18 Goals | 11 Assists) who bagged a brace in the Champions League Final and even one of our Centre Backs Yevteshenko who was named as the PFA Young Player of the Year and the Champions League Best Player

I want to reconfigure this squad a bit in the summer by getting rid of some players who have become fringe players like Vydra (already agreed a 30m move to Madrid), Valades and perhaps the likes of Bender and Pjanic who are both on rather big wages for their age.

| Trophies so far: Champions League (3) | Premier League (3) | FA Cup (2) | League Cup (3) | Community Shield (3) | European Super Cup (2) | Club World Cup (1) |

January 2021
Finally got a chance to get back on this save over the last few days and so far the season is going very well as heading into the second half of the season we’ve suffered just the one defeat. Annoyingly that defeat was in the Club World Cup Final where I stuck out a very youthful team and paid the price for it, perhaps I should have taken it more seriously but I honestly thought they were good enough to win it

Benfica 1 – 1 Aston Villa
Aston Villa 1 – 0 Kobenhavn
Aston Villa 2 – 0 Juventus
Juventus 1 – 1 Aston Villa
Aston Villa 2 – 0 Benfica
Kobenhavn 0 – 2 Aston Villa

We weren’t at our best in the Champions League but apart from the Juve games I’d rotated my best squad out so we could keep up the pace in the league anyway so any kind of win is all we were after really and we got that to go through top of the group. For once we’re not playing PSG in the First Knockout Round which is great and instead we get to go up against Atletico Madrid so that should be fun

The Capital One Cup is going well too and we’ve got Man City in the Semi Finals coming up soon and so I’m aiming to add that to our Community Shield win against Manchester United (just wish we’d done it in normal time) and the European Super Cup win over Napoli which just like the United game went to penalties but at least our debutant Carlos set a new record for being the youngest goalscorer in the competition

Without doubt the best thing about this season so far is our form in the Premier League where we’ve managed to open up a 10pt lead on City in second place while still holding a game in hand over them, I’m not counting out an epic collapse from us in the second half of the season mind and I need to make sure I don’t rotate too much in the Premier League if I can help it, Oh my young striker Malval did break the record for the youngest goalscorer in the league

| Trophies so far: Champions League (2) | Premier League (2) | FA Cup (1) | League Cup (2) | Community Shield (3) | European Super Cup (2) | Club World Cup (1) |

August 2020
The main thing I concentrated on this summer was moving on some players who were getting a bit unhappy at the club and also because their wages and age were both starting to get a little bit high for my liking. So Nathan Baker (9m) and Matthew Lowton (7.5m) ended up leaving early on in the summer window, most of the other outgoings were loan signings but I also offloaded Meyer late on for (12m) which gave us a profit of 6m in the 6 months we had him and seems as he was nothing more than emergency cover then I’m happy with that

So it was shaping up to be a bit of a quiet transfer window this summer with there not being too many targets I really fancied and not really needing to strengthen anywhere in particular and so I didn’t do much business, until I did

• Valery Moskovskiy (Free) – This deal I set up last January when I saw the lads contract was expiring and figured that bringing him in for free couldn’t really do any harm, My plan is to play him primarily on the left but his ability to cover on the right should also come in handy

• Luiz (4.2m) – This deal won’t go through till next summer and I’m okay with that, I would like him now but I have two great left backs as is so he can wait a year before understudying

• Marius Eckel (4.5m) – So I’ve done it again and signed yet another defensive midfielder, this makes 6 now at the club and gives me a few problems but I couldn’t turn down the chance to sign him

• Carlos (8.25m) – After the issues we had last season with injuries in central midfield I though it would be a decent move to bring in some more options to develop there and at 16 Carlos has bags of talent that should make him into a great midfielder over the next few years

So that was a rather low key and cheap transfer window, job done, then I spotted one more player I wanted and just couldn’t stop myself from bringing him in at any cost:

• Danny Zorniger (25m) – As soon as I got his second scout report from my best scout I knew I was going to pay utterly stupid money for this lad, and that’s exactly what I went and did. He cost a lot in part because he came from Bayern Munich and there’s just no haggling those guys down on a deal really, I mean we got them down from 42m originally but we were never going to get him for around 5 or 10m which would have been ideal. So yeah it’s a lot more than I wanted to spend but on the bright side – the last guy I paid 25m for scored a hat-trick in the Champions League Final.

So yeah, in the end I spent a lot more than I’d planned and certainly a lot more than I needed to but screw it, I off set a fair chunk of it with player sales and my original budget was nearly 60m with our bank balance topping 100m for the first time so we can afford to take the hit

Full Transfers

June 2020
The season started off pretty well for us when we beat Liverpool in the Community Shield 4-1 and I’m sure they were pretty sick of the sight of us by the time we beat them 4-1 in the Capital One Cup Final too. We crashed out of the FA Cup for the second season in a row, this time to Stoke in the 5th round which was a well deserved defeat but also a very disappointing one. Our form in the league maintained pretty well in the second half of the season and although we did end up dropping a fair few points it didn’t really matter as no one challenged us as we won the title for the second time, with a lower points score than last years runners up iirc

Once more we were pretty strong in the Champions League where we built most of our knockout wins on scoring a lot in the first leg and then just about doing enough in the second leg. First off we met PSG yet again in the First knockout round and we thoroughly outclassed them in the first leg and yet somehow only came away with a3-2 win after conceding a few cheap goals, we made up for that in the second leg however when we stuck 5 past them to win it 5-2 and advance to the Quarter Final

Thankfully we didn’t get drawn against an English club for once at this stage, we did however end up against the team that beat us in the Final last year. It was a game very much won in the first leg when Juve came to Villa park and found themselves on the end of a 3-0 defeat before we then went on to secure it late on in the away trip to Turin where we won 2-1. Next up was Barcelona and this one was a tighter affair, the first leg at home gave us a chance to put up a decent lead and we did that with a 3-1 win thanks to a rather late goal from Vydra which at the time was great but really turned out to be the goal that effectively won the tie after our trip to the Nou Camp turned out to be a very nervy 1-1 draw which had we conceded just one more goal would have seen us heading out of the competition

I was pleased to go up against Ligue 1 runners up Monaco in the Final, they have a rather nice team with Hernandez and Aguero but neither are quite the same players that they once were. In the end despite two stupid goals conceded late on we had the tie wrapped up thanks to a stunning hat-trick from Gabriel Ippolito, the game wasn’t as comfortable as it quite looks due to the fact it took us sometime to get that first goal but once Gabriel started scoring he just couldn’t stop until we ran out 4-2 winners.

We had a lot of good players and good performances this season, Jakobsen, Yevteshenko, Paulo, Kippes and Kavlak have all stepped up from the B’ team to take first XI places this year and they’ve been great but it was the front three and Will Hughes who made it all possible as you’ll see here:

Daryl Astley (17 Goals | 3 Assists) Gabriel Ippolito (19 Goals | 15 Assists) Victor Kippes (14 Goals | 16 Assists) Will Hughes (17 Goals | 15 Assists – CL Best Player)

| Trophies so far: Champions League (2) | Premier League (2) | FA Cup (1) | League Cup (2) | Community Shield (2) | European Super Cup (1) | Club World Cup (1) |

February 2020 mini update

Normally I wouldn’t do an update here but I’ve actually done business in January this season, mainly because I had to as 4 of my 5 central midfielders are ruled out through injury, the worst is a 2-3 month injury and the others are all 2-6 weeks so I’ve gone and grabbed a couple of emergency signings with Mike Studtrucker joiningon a free loan from Schalke and Max Meyer being picked up for 5m off the transfer list so they should offer some nice depth and cover

I let Benzia go after another unproductive 6 months for us and I’m now wishing I’d taken the 15m offer in the summer for him but he was alright cover and we still got 12m for him as we shipped him out to Inter Milan. I didn’t sell Astley in the end after he continued to put in some good performances for us and I’m sure benji1122won’t enjoy the two games he did that in (Capital One Cup Semi Final First Leg and Second Leg ) and this made me laugh afterwards:

The rest of the January window would have been quiet had tons of AI clubs not constantly tried to sign my players to the extent that it was listed 4 times! in the transfer window round up

| Trophies so far: Champions League (1) | Premier League (1) | FA Cup (1) | League Cup (1) | Community Shield (1) | European Super Cup (1) | Club World Cup (1) |

January 2020
It’s been a great season so far and on early evidence we’re somewhat running away with the league, I’m worried the bottom will fall out of our season sooner or later though and we’ll end up on a catastrophic losing streak but so far so good. We’re through to the Semi Final of the Capital One Cup also and my only issue so far is receiving a 40m bid from PSG for my left winger which has left me torn about what to do

Leverkusen 2 – 1 Aston Villa
Aston Villa 3 – 1 Bordeaux
Atletico Madrid 0 – 2 Aston Villa
Aston Villa 3 – 0 Atletico Madrid
Aston Villa 2 – 0 Leverkusen
Bordeaux 1 – 1 Aston Villa

The Champions League was fairly easy for us in the Group Stages and we ended up topping the group before the final game, Our reward for that? Playing PSG in the knockout rounds again This is the third year we’ve drawn PSG and I just hope we can make it past them again

I didn’t have any plans to sign anyone in January but if Astley goes to PSG in this 40m bid then I will need a new AML before the end of the window, Really not sure what to do with him because he doesn’t look a 40m player to me and yet here we are with an offer from PSG just before he went and won the European Golden Boy award – So any opinions on that will be appreciated

| Trophies so far: Champions League (1) | Premier League (1) | FA Cup (1) | League Cup (1) | Community Shield (1) | European Super Cup (1) | Club World Cup (1) |