Season 3 comes to a close today as we play the final few months of the campaign, we’ve had a pretty good year and currently find ourselves outside the relegation zone which is brilliant. Hopefully we don’t bottle things too much and all being well we’ll be playing Pro League football again next season.
If you haven’t seen part 9 yet then click here to do so and if you’d like to follow the series from the start then click here to read part 1. Let’s just get straight into the results then, no time wasted!
February
Oh my word it’s all gone wrong. We lost to Sint-Truiden in in a very winnable game and I put it down to just not turning up, these things happen and especially considering we drew with Gent in the next game I wasn’t too worried. But then, we went on to lose our next 3 games and didn’t look good in any of them. I’ll be honest, I was starting to panic. What’s worse is Union and Mechelen are both teams we absolutely should be beating, I can understand the Genk game, but to lose 4 games in a month is not good enough.
We then got the infamous email saying I was reluctant to change my tactics, so I had no choice really but to switch it up. You may remember way back in season 1 I had a wing play system also training, so we switched to that and surprise surprise, we went on to win 3-0 in the next game! We did look a lot better, maybe the players just needed a change for a couple games to wake them up again. What does annoy me is that as soon as we make January signings our form just goes out the window, it happened last season I believe and it’s a problem I had on FM21 as well, it’s so frustrating.
March
I thought that changing the tactic would fix our problems, but nope. It was back to the form we were in at the start of February. 3 straight losses, and I was genuinely looking over my shoulder now at the relegation zone – somewhere I’ve not really been looking at for a while now. However we did get back to winning ways in the final game of the month against Leuven, I don’t know what happened here but we started scoring goals again and in turn played the game with confidence for the first time in a while.
Milestone
This was a nice email to receive! We’ve now managed 100 games at Rupel Boom, my first 100 games in management as well. Honestly I thought we’d managed more than this, but hopefully it’s the first of many milestones.
April
Only 2 games to play in April and surprisingly, we won them both! The most impressive of the 2 was definitely the home win against Charleroi who actually finished the season in 4th. This was the best we played in ages and arguably the best result of the season. We actually ended the season quite strongly winning our last 3 games so we can take a bit of confidence from that because after all, nobody wants to end the season on a loss do they?
Final table
We finish the season in 13th place which I am very happy with. The board only wanted us to fight bravely against relegation so this is a massive overachievement for the club. It’s difficult to think that just 3 years ago we were playing in the third division and here we are avoiding relegation in the Jupiler Pro League!
Budgets
We’ve been given a slight increase in wage budget this year but it’s nowhere near enough, in fact we’re actually maxing it out already because for this season we were massively over the budget. This summer is going to be a lot more difficult than I thought…
Youth intake
What an intake!!!
We’ve got very good youth facilities here and over the course of the save we’ve seen the benefits of that, every year we’ve had a good intake and I think this one might just be the best.
Even the top talents look pretty decent!
Vincent Heylen is probably our best player, look at all those yellow attributes! At just 15 I think he could develop into a very good goalkeeper, and I’m very much considering having him on my bench for if not next season then definitely the one after!
Outro
Well what a way to end season 3 that is! It’s been a good season and I think this intake caps it off. Looking forward to next year I’m looking for the same really, as long as we’re not in a relegation battle I think myself and the board will be satisfied. I hope to make a few more signings than we did last year, there’s a lot of deadwood that have played games this season – we need to bin them off and bring in some Pro League quality players.
So that’s it then, thank you very much for reading The Belgian Boom today, I really hope you enjoyed. This is likely to be my last blog before Christmas so if you are celebrating it then I wish you a merry Christmas, hopefully you have as good a day as possible despite the restrictions on the world right now. Hopefully there’s still time to play at least a little bit of FM! I’m rambling on again, so let’s end it there.
Hello and welcome back to The Belgian Boom, thank you very much for coming to check out this post. If you haven’t already then click here to check out part 8 where we start off season 3 and if you want to follow the save from the begining then click here to do so.
Coming up today we have another 3 months of football, the January transfer window and also a couple of job interviews! So let’s not waste any more time and get straight into the action!
November
November consisted of 4 games and, for the first time in what feels like ages, we won every single one of them! We started off with familiar opposition from previous seasons in the form of Dessel in the Croky Cup, that was a very comfortable 3-0 away win. We were able to carry that momentum into the Beerschot game just 4 days later and we managed to grind out a 1-0 victory in front of our home crowd. 3 league wins became 4 in the next game as we went away to Leuven and managed to scrape a second 1-0 win in a row, we’re not scoring as much but we’re defending well and that allowed us to hold on to the 3 points. The month ended with a visit from Kortrijk and the 2-1 victory here confirmed our 100% month.
Job interviews
As previously mentioned we had 2 interviews to deal with, one of which was Union yet again – that’s the second time in about a year they’ve enquired about me, and the second time they’ve been turned down.
Next up was Zulte Waregem, one of the few teams below us in the league table. I of course said no because I do intend on this being a one club save, I have no plans on leaving Rupel Boom anytime soon.
December
The festive period started off with a very frustrating 1-0 defeat away to Charleroi. We knew that they are a very good team and we weren’t expected to get anything from the game, but with our form over the course of November I could only dream. The fact it’s only 1-0 is frustrating but there’s nothing we can do about it now, we just have to move on.
The next game was not much better as we played host to Club Brugge in the Croky Cup 7th round and as expected they beat us with ease. That was back to back defeats for the first time in a while and with the next game being away against our rivals Antwerp, we needed a response and what a response I got. Antwerp went down to 10 men relatively early on and from that moment we really started to control the game and we were rewarded for it too, picking up 2 goals. We got our third late on in the game shortly before Antwerp pulled the deficit back to 1 goal but it was nothing more than a consolation, we had beat our rivals for the first time in the save!
We had 2 draws to end of the month including a late boxing day Christmas present where we drew 1-1 with Club Brugge! This was the first time we’d beat one of the elite teams in Belgium and for our goalkeeper to save a last minute penalty made it even more special.
January
Due to the winter break we have in Belgium we only had 2 games to play so to not lose either of them is pretty decent. We beat Waregem, the team who offered me an interview, before playing out a bore draw against Molenbeek in a game we really should have won. We also made a couple deadline day signings as we didn’t really have any cover in full back so once again I dipped into the loan market to secure a few players for the second half of the season.
New signings
Dylan Dassy – loan from KV Mechelen
This guy comes in as a decent back up option to Ndenbe and will actually make his debut in the next game as Ndenbe has picked up too many yellow cards so will serve a 1 match suspension.
Vincent Schippers – loan from Willem II
Despite our current right back playing well, who I brought in on loan in the summer transfer window on deadline day, I didn’t really have anyone to cover him so to get this guy in and to pay him nothing seems a no brainer to me. It’s worth noting Dassy is also costing us no money which is how we were able to sign him as we’re still 4k over our wage budget and a million pounds in debt, so that’s a problem we need to fix.
Jort Borgmans – free transfer
We did make one permanent signing and that is Jort Borgmans, we only really had 1 goalkeeper in the team so I wanted another option in case Unger got injured. Despite only being a third devision level player at the moment he does have potential to be good enough to play in the Pro League so we may well loan him out next season.
League table
We go into 2024 sitting 13th in the league, which I’m pretty happy with considering how we started the season. More importantly though we have a 12 point gap to Waregem in the relegation playoff so despite being in the lower half of the table we do have some breathing room which is nice.
Outro
So that brings us to the end of part 9, I really hope you enjoyed. We’ve turned things around massively after our poor start to the season and hopefully we can carry that on into the final 3 months of the season, which will be covered in the next part.
Hello and welcome back to the Belgian Boom, if you’re new to the series then feel free to click here to check out part 1 and if you can’t remember what happened last time out, or you haven’t seen it yet, then click here to read part 7.
First of all sorry for the lack of blogs recently, I know it’s been a while since the last one but the last few weeks have been very busy for me. However that all changes now, I’m going to have lots of time to play FM over the next few weeks therefore these updates should be coming out more frequently again. So without further ado, let’s get started!
Transfers
As you know by now we won a shock promotion last season so we had a massive summer transfer window where we had to build a squad capable of playing in the Pro League. To be honest, it’s been a disaster. I stupidly forgot that staff wages come out of the total wage budget, so once I had all my staff sorted out then I realised I left myself about 4.5k to sign…about 7 players. I told you it’s been a disaster! There’s a very good chance we’ll be in a relegation battle right up until the very final day of the season but we have to keep fighting right up to the end.
Outs
As you can see quite a few players were released, although many of them have been here from the start I knew they wouldn’t be able to make the step up to the pro league and we desperately needed the wage budget.
Ins
Logan Ndenbe – free transfer
I really felt like we needed a top quality left back and I think we have that here, for me this is one of our best signings this summer.
Emmanuel Matuta – free transfer
Another option in the midfield and I think we have a very good player on our hands, he’s just 21 years old and has the potential to be a decent Pro League player.
Oliver Urso – free transfer
Another signing I’m pretty happy with, I was desperate for an attacking midfielder (we didn’t have any at the club) and although we are paying him a lot of money, I think it’s going to be worth it.
So I actually thought we signed more than this, but clearly I didn’t. This season is going to be a real struggle, probably my hardest season on FM ever. We’re already over our wage budget so I highly doubt we’ll make any more signings and we have 18 players in our squad. This is going to be a long season…
Season Preview
Look at those odds! It’s going to be near impossible this season, we somehow need to bring more bodies into the team if we’re to even stand a chance of survival.
New kits
To mark our promotion the club has agreed a new shirt sponsorship deal with Nike, clearly we’re big time now! Nike certainly made a good decision with who they hired to design the kits as well, as they are absolutely brilliant – I love them both! Thanks a lot to Wightyyy for making these, if you’re interested in seeing some of the other kits he’s made, or potentially requesting your own, then make sure to join the FM-AP discord server where Wightyyy is ever present.
I think that’s everything I need to cover, so let’s get on with the results!
July/August
Well what a miserable start to the Pro League this has been. 0 wins, 1 point. That is not great at all. We started off with a 3-0 defeat to rivals Antwerp and it didn’t really improve from there. We almost got something from the Club Brugge game, twice coming from behind but unfortunately our defence just made too many mistakes and gave them an easy goal. We did manage to pick up a point in the following game though, Zakaria Lambo got his first goal of the season but unfortunately we couldn’t hold on. I thought this was a turning point, we’d played well our last 2 games but how wrong was I, we fell to defeat number 4 and made it 5 games without a win.
Transfer deadline day drama
So…we’ve signed 4 players on deadline day. I was convinced we’d not make any more signings, but here we are! Granted they are all on loan and they aren’t the best, but they are very cheap and add bodies to the squad which is what we needed most. I’m not going to talk too much about each player, but here they are!
Sekou Diawara – free transfer
Finally, another option up front!
Quiermo Dumay – free transfer
He’s terrible, but we’re paying no money so it doesn’t matter
Denzel Jubitana – free transfer
Another option in attacking midfield and up front
Destan Bajselmani – free transfer
This loan has worked out, he comes in as our best right back!
So we’ve finally got some decent depth up front and an additional player at right back, who actually looks pretty decent! All of a sudden I’m a little less worried about how this season might turn out…
September
Just by looking, you can tell that September has been much better. We actually started off the month with back to back wins, one of which was a league game! Picking up our first 3 points was massive as it lifted us off bottom place and most importantly, gave us some momentum for the first time all season. We then beat a non league team in the Croky Cup 5th round but that was the end of our short winning run as we went to Gent and got beat 3-2. Then KRC Genk came to take us on at the Municipal Park, and we managed to hold the 5 time Pro League champions to a 2-2 draw, which was a very good result. However what came next was not a good result at all against the team bottom of the league. Union, the team who we beat way back in season 1, destroyed us 3-0 and to make matters worse, we had 2 men sent off in the space of 6 minutes.
All in all it’s been a decent month, we’ve managed to score a few more goals and even pick up a win in the league and that’s not to mention our draw against Genk. Hopefully we can carry this forward into the month of October and start drifting ourselves away from the relegation zone.
October
Well October hasn’t been great, but I guess it’s not been the worst month we’ve had either (excusing the Anderlecht game, we expected to get battered there.) We started with another defeat but win number 2 did come in the next game against Cercle Brugge where we went away from home and won 2-1. Next up was a very frustrating 1-0 defeat where we just couldn’t create a real quality chance. To round off the month we went away to Anderlecht and as expected we were on the receiving end of a heavy defeat. For the 6th time this season we went down to 10 men but after the red card we started to come into the game a little bit, creating a few more chances and even getting a couple goals.
Key player
Nathan NGoumou
The only player I’ve been happy with this season is this guy out on the right wing. He feels like the only player able to hold his own at this level, the majority of chances we create involve him and he’s managed to pick up 2 goals and 3 assists over the course of this season. Hopefully over the course of the next few weeks and months more players step up and start showing they deserve to be playing in the Pro League.
Outro
So that brings us to the end of this blog where we’ve started life in the Jupiler Pro League, I really hope you enjoyed. Next time out will cover the months of November, December and January which of course means we’ll have the transfer window, although don’t expect us to do any business unless the board give us more money.
Hello and welcome back to The Belgian Boom here with Rupel Boom, if you haven’t seen part 6 yet then click here to do so and if you want to check out the series from the start then click here.
Today’s blog is a bit of a different one because as you’ll see very soon we have a big gap without any games due to the Qatar World Cup (England won, if you’re wondering) and we then have the winter break that you get here in Belgium, so over the months of November, December and January we only play 5 games. I put a vote out on Twitter asking if people would prefer a shorter blog covering these 5 games or a longer blog going right through to the end of the season.
Longer post won, so that’s what this blog will be – we’ll go right up to the end of season, covering 6 months instead of 3! So grab a drink, sit back and relax because this could be a long one!
November/December/January
What a couple months it’s been! Yes we only played 5 games, but we didn’t lose ANY of them, which is massive considering we are newly promoted this season. We started off with a 3-1 win away to Deinze who were second in the table at the time, we followed that up with a 2-2 draw which was the only time we dropped points in these few months but we were then back to winning ways in the final game of the calendar year.
January came around and we only had 2 games to play due to the winter break, we started off with our 3rd 3-1 win of the screenshot, and I believe they all followed the same format of us going 2-0 up, then conceding before taking control of the game again. Finally, Sint-Truiden came to down and I have to say we looked very impressive in this game, we created some brilliant passages of play and Cagro scored a brilliant free kick that really summed up our performance.
I’m a huge believer that dynamics are a huge part of success in Football Manager and I know I’m not alone there, I always make an effort to maintain good dynamics and that’s no different this year.
As you can see team cohesion is very good and club atmosphere is also good, the club atmosphere will only improve as well – we currently have a few people concerned about game time so once that is sorted I’d imagine it will improve. This, is why we are having success this year and overachieving. I don’t think our players are the best in the league, but there’s a very good chance they are the happiest in the league and they are playing as a team, which is ultimately what gets you the 3 points.
Job offer
For the first time in this save we had a job offer from another club and if you’ve followed the save closely you will recognise this team well. Last season we played Union in the Croky Cup and scored a last minute winner to beat them, clearly they like what they saw! However this is a one club save as we know so I declined the job interview, although it was nice to see we were offered a job by a Pro League side.
Intake preview
On the face of things it looks like we could have a few decent players coming through, we’ve got a couple strikers and a centre back who could be promising. I guess we’ll find out in March just how good this will be!
February
I’ll be honest, I’m quite disappointed with how we’ve got on during February. We started off with a 2-0 defeat to Mouscron who were 5th in the table when we were top so that wasn’t great, especially at home. We did put things right in the next game though as Seraing were dispatched in a good performance from us, we were solid all across the pitch.
Deinze were up next, they are a team who have always been in and around the top 3 so beating them 3-1 was a huge result but then yet again we struggled against mid table/lower league opposition as Lierse beat us 2-0 away from home, they currently sit bottom of the league so quite frankly that’s an embarrassing result.
I think a big factor to why we’ve struggled this month is our star striker Zakaria Lambo hasn’t scored in 5 games so we’re having to rely on mainly our wingers for goals as I’ve never managed to get an attacking midfielder working this season. I’ve had a word with him about it and he’s agreed that he needs to pick his form up, so hopefully we’ll see an improvement over the course of March.
Zakaria Lambo, aka Zambo
League table update
Somehow we find ourselves top of the league! As I’ve said before it’s been very tight all season and the table changes every game but we’ve managed to develop a 4 point gap ahead of Deinze in second place. There is still 2 months of football to be played though so we can’t get ahead of ourselves, it’s still plenty time for everything to change so we just have to get our heads down and keep working hard.
March
We only had 3 games to play during March, and it was mostly positive. If I’m being honest though, we’ve not played well all month and we’ve had to grind out results. Up first was Waasland, who we seem to always play but we managed to come away with a 1-0 win, we made hard work of it but at the end of the day we got the job done. What came next though, was a complete and utter embarrassment. For the first time in the save we were absolutely battered and what makes it worse is the fact the team we played, Sint-Truiden, were second in the league and we are first. From the first minute we just never turned up, we were giving the ball away left right and centre. We deserved to get battered and that’s exactly what happened.
We did bounce back in the next game though returning to winning ways, Lommel SK came to the Municipal Park and they left with a 2-0 loss next to their name. We’re crumbling at the final hurdle and I’m not a fan of that…
League table
You can see from our last 5 games we are very inconsistent at the moment which is probably the worst time for it to happen but alas we are still sitting top of the league. Thankfully Sint-Truiden are also dropping points and with 4 games to go we are 8 points clear, so if my maths is correct if we win our next 2 games we win promotion and will go back to back straight into the Pro League.
New contract
Just as we were about to get into the final month of the season, I received an email from our owner offering me a new 2 year deal to stay at the club. We were currently on a 1 year year deal earning £975 so not only have we got an additional year we’re also getting a nice pay rise.
We actually managed to negotiate the contract up to £1.3k per week instead of £1.2k, what am I going to do with all this money?!
Youth intake
I’m very happy with this year’s youth intake! We’ve got a couple 5 star potential players and I’d imagine i’ll most likely sign everyone on this screenshot. Hopefully a few of these guys develop into first team candidates over the next few years.
April
Here we go then, it all comes down to this. We have 4 games left and we know as long as we don’t mess up, we will have completed the unlikeliest promotion to the Jupiler Pro League. Let’s get into the final month of the season!
Oh, how we’ve tried our best to mess this up. We started off with a 3-2 win against Seraing and it turned out to be our only win of the month. We then had another embarrassing performance, these are becoming far too regular for my liking and yes, it was an away game but to lose 4-1 considering how well we’d done this season is not good enough.
We went into the penultimate game of the season knowing a win was all we needed, and in typical FM fashion the game finished 1-0. Great. So we went to the final game of the season, at this point we only needed 1 point to to win the league. Early on we conceded a penalty which Deinze managed to convert so that was a massive setback, especially considering the game stayed 1-0 right up until the 90th minute, and then, the magic happened.
Super-sub Luca Polizzi steps up right when we needed him most, we’re on the counter attack and he plays an outstanding ball right across the penalty box and who’s there on the end of it? Zakaria Lambo!!! In the 90th minute, our top goalscorer this season comes in clutch one final time and wins us the league title and sends us into the Pro League. The scenes in my house when I played the game were so good, I forgot to switch the camera into 3D so I didn’t get to see us lift the title, therefore there’s no screenshot. This will have to do…
Weeee are the Champions, my friend…I’ve always said I’m a professional
Straight off the back of this I got this email asking me if I’d like to turn professional which of course I agreed to. Considering we were one of only 2 semi professional teams this season I dread what would happen as a semi pro team in the top flight.
Budgets
Oh my God look at all this money!!!
We’ve been given an actual transfer budget of about 20k, and our wage budget has doubled. Hopefully we can put that to use and bring some real, top quality players into the club ahead of season 3.
Final table
What a glorious site that is. We should have won it more comfortably but our second half of the season performance almost cost us the title. If I’m being honest, I think we might have got promoted a season too early. We’ve now gone back to back, yes we have the money to bring players in but the club reputation is only 2 and a half stars. I’m expecting to come straight back down, but we’ve got to enjoy it while it lasts and do everything we can to stay in the league.
Key players
Our star player has to be this man, he came in during the summer and took the role of first team striker in his stride, ever since his debut goal he’s not really stopped. He’s had a few inconsistent spells don’t get me wrong but he is still young and whenever I’ve had a word with him about it he’s responded with a goal in the next game. He finished the season with 13 goals and 3 assists in all competitions.
Another summer signing but this guy has been an absolute rock at the back this season. He’s played 22 games (I had to rotate him a lot due to other players complaining about game time) and has chipped in with 3 goals as well over the course of the campaign. Having a 6″3 CB has helped a lot!
Finally, I want to give a mention to Unger, our new long term goalkeeper. He came in this summer and has rotated with Saussez for the number 1 on his back over the course of the season but he’s played 14 games and conceded 17 goals, which I think is pretty decent. With decent potential, I’d imagine next season he will transition to our full time number 1 as Saussez is out of contract and doesn’t want to sign a new one. I’m confident that he’ll do a solid job in the Pro League and hopefully with a full season of football as No.1 he will only develop further.
Outro
Well, what a season it’s been. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, but ultimately in our first season in the league we’ve won it, and that’s very impressive. Despite only being here 2 years I’ve also made club history, as next season will be Rupel Boom’s first ever campaign in the Jupiler Pro League! I’m very much looking forward to it, but I’ll be the first to tell you this is probably going to be the hardest season of the save.
Thank you very much for reading today’s mamouth of a blog, I really hope you’ve enjoyed. It’s been a brilliant season but the hard work starts now, this time next season I want to be telling you about how we’ve secured survival in the Pro League.
I’m going to leave you with this graphic that I spent far too long making but I think it looks very nice personally. Hopefully by the end of the save we’ll have won most if not all of these trophies, maybe some of them multiple times! Shoutout to FMU on twitter as it was his graphic that gave me the inspiration.
The trophy cabinet
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time for the start of season 3!
Here we go then, season 2 is now upon us and if you haven’t seen part 5 yet then I recommend you do so because *SPOILERS* we won the league title last season meaning we start life in the second tier today. Also, if you want to check out the series from the start then you can click here to do so and get get caught up with how season 1 went, even though I’ve kind of spoiled it already. Moving on…
I’m also going to be writing these blogs in a new style, instead of coming back every 2 months I’m going to come back every 3 months for this season to see how it goes. I don’t want people being overwhelmed with the amount of content coming out so having 3-4 posts each season makes it more manageable to follow along with I think. Anyway, let’s get into the summer signings!
Outs
So we actually didn’t release as many people as I thought, I wasn’t confident I’d be able to sign as many people as I did so we ended up giving quite a few new contracts out.
At fist it looks like we’ve let a lot of players go, but many of them are reserve players and I doubt you’ll recognise any of the names, maybe with the exception of Kanu who is now a first team player at São Paulo – I thought he was good, but not that good.
Ins
Jonathan Vervoort – free transfer
Considering there’s so many new players I’m not going to talk about them too much, if at all but I wanted a new centre back and we’ve got that here, hopefully he does a solid job for the next year or so.
Keelan Lebon – free transfer
Another quality option on the left wing to support Polizzi.
Eric Bocat – free transfer
Bocat comes in as a second choice left back considering we were weak in that department last season.
Welat Cagro – free transfer
Cagro comes in to add more quality in the midfield and I think he does just that, he looks a decent all round midfielder.
Bernhard Unger – free transfer
Squad registration says we need to have 3 goalkeepers registered and I needed a backup goalie so Unger comes in as a younger player than Saussez and with some nice potential as well.
Niels Verburgh – free transfer
I wanted another option as a ball winning midfielder to partner our DLP, and Niels also gives us cover at centre back and DM if we ever choose to use one.
Zakaria Jr. Lambo – free transfer
Meet our new striker!
Some might say I signed this guy because his name is Lambo, some may say it’s because he’s a good young striker with lots of potential. To be honest it’s a bit of both! He’s started off with a goal on his debut which is always a good sign when you sign a new striker.
Moïse Adilehou – free transfer
This guy comes in as our best centre back and in my opinion, he looks very very solid.
Nathan NGoumou – free transfer
Another option on the wing
Marius Könkkölä – loan from KRC Genk
We made use of our affiliation with Genk for the first time and brought in this boy from Finland, he’s probably the closest we’ll have to a wonderkid for quite a while.
Tarik Radi – loan from KRC Genk
The second loanee from our parent club, and the only reason I’ve brought him in is because we are paying him nothing, although to be fair to him he should over decent cover all over the attacking options.
And that’s it! Now we’ve met the abundance of new players, why not go over the tactic we will be running for this season?
Tactic
As you probably expected, it’s no different from last season, we are still running with our straight-out-the box control possession. If it’s not broken, why fix it?
Club vision
All the board want me to do this season is fight bravely against relegation, which to me means even if we get relegated I won’t be sacked unless we completely embarrass ourselves. You can see they still want me to sign players based in Spain, I have now got Spain loaded but I haven’t signed anyone from the country yet. I did have a few in on trial but they weren’t quite up to my standards.
Pre-season/August
All in all pre season has went pretty well. We won all but 1 of our games and that game where we lost was the only game that we conceded in. We finished off with a confidence boosting game against a lower league Belgian team and as you’d expect it was easy, we came away 9-0 winners and now, I felt ready to start the season.
Season preview
Going into the league season we are predicted second bottom of the league which I’m happy with to be fair, I expected us to be favourites to go straight back down to the third tier.
Clearly our confidence boosting final pre season game has worked, because we went and won our first game of the season 2-0 away against the team the media predict to finish second!
Unfortunately it wouldn’t be 2 wins from 2 as in our first home game we ended up on the losing side of a 2-0 game, but I’m not too worried about that as the team we played are favourites to win the league! Talk about a difficult start…
September
5 games to cover, let’s get into it!
We started the month off with a Croky Cup 5th round tie and the opponent? Well who else would it be! Our biggest rivals from last season, Knokke would be coming to town once again and they’d leave again empty handed, a 3-0 win sends us through to the 6th round with relative ease.
However that would be the end of the wins for September as we went on to play 4 games in a row without a victory. To be fair we did only lose one of them, but that was a very disappointing defeat as Seraing are the team predicted to finish bottom of the league so in theory it would be one of the easier games we’ll play this season. You can see most of the games have been quite low scoring so far, we seem to have a bit of a problem scoring goals although we have looked
Croky Cup 6th round
In the next round of the cup we will be hosting Pro League side Charleroi, I believe this was the round we played and beat Pro League team Union SG last season, so we can dream – who knows what’s going to happen!
October
All in all, you have to say October has been better, we managed to pick up 11 points from 21, which is pretty decent. We started off with back to back wins for the first time all season which was pleasing and it meant we went into the Charleroi game in a bit of confidence. However as you can see we just didn’t have enough, for the second time in the series we’ve taken a Pro League side all the way to extra time and we went one better this time round, taking the game all the way to penalties where we all know it’s a lottery who goes through and unfortunately for us we will be exiting the competition at the 6th round.
I’m not too disheartened by it though, taking them all the way to penalties is very impressive and it means we can now concentrate on the league, the board only wanted us to reach the 6th round so we’re fine in that regard.
Cagro scored an absolute screamer in this game!
We did struggle in the next few games though, they all came in quick concession and we didn’t win any of the next 3. However it was back to winning ways to end off the month though as we beat Seraing 1-0 in what was a massive game as they beat us last time and currently find themselves bottom of the league.
After 12 games we find ourselves up in 3rd place, I did not expect us to be doing this well considering we’re the newly promoted team! We can’t let it get to our heads though as it’s a really small league so it’s always tight, just a couple defeats in quick concession and we’re back in a relegation battle.
Outro
So that brings us to the end of today’s blog, I really hope you’ve enjoyed. Let me know what you think of the new format where I bring you 3 months of action per post instead of 2, if it’s something people prefer then I’m more than happy to continue it going forward.
Make sure you are following me on Twitter so you never miss a future blog, I’m very close to 400 followers over there so it would be brilliant to hit that milestone by the time part 7 is out – in fact I’m just 1 follower away at the time of writing!
As ever, thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.
Here we go then, it’s time for the season 1 finale of The Belgian Boom, we know from part 4 that we’ve already qualified for the playoffs and that will be coming up later today. If you haven’t seen part 4 yet then click here to do so and if you want to follow the series from the start then you can click here to read part 1. So without further ado, let’s get into things!
March/final league game
Well what a way to end the season, 5 games, 5 wins and only 1 goal conceded – that’s the form of champions.
The month started with back to back 2-0 wins against Heist and Thes Sport but we went one better in the next game beating Winkel Sport 3-0. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the club names in Belgium are just brilliant. Olympic Club Chareroi were up next and they were dispatched 3-1 in our final home game of the season before finishing the job off against Mandel United in the final league game.
As expected based on the season we’ve had we end the season top of the league, a massive 13 points clear of Knokke in second place.
New contract
At some point during March the board finally got round to offering me a new deal as we only had 3 years left on our current contract and of course we’ve signed up for another year of football at the Municipal Stadium and we managed to negotiate the deal up to bag ourselves a £50 wage increase as well.
Youth Intake
Before we get into the playoffs we have one more thing to cover and that is our youth intake.
On the face of things it looks like a brilliant intake, but we can’t make too much of it because my staff aren’t particularly good, but hopefully we will see some of these guys making first team appearances in the coming years.
The playoffs
For those of you who don’t know, and I’d imagine that’s most of you that are reading this, the playoffs work a little bit different to what we know. They split into 2 groups of 4, the promotion playoffs and the relegation playoffs, we of course are in the promotion playoff. We also lose 50% of our final points tally which is a rule I’ve never really understood, my guess is that it’s to make the playoffs more competitive because if we’re 13 points clear when we only play 6 games, it’s a pretty pointless playoff.
Well we tried our absolute hardest to bottle this, didn’t we? We actually started the playoffs with 2 wins in a row which left us needing 1 point from the final 4 games, and oh did we make it difficult. We went on to lose 1-0 to Dender and then lose in the return game against Heist and at this point I was panicking. However it was all done and dusted in the game against Knokke, we had most of our key players back after we rested them due to tiredness, we did draw the final game against Dender but who really cares, by that point it was all over.
Champions!
At the first time of asking, we had managed to win promotion to the second tier of Belgian football which is a very good season considering the expectation of mid table and as you’d expect the board were delighted with me.
It was a bit weird winning the league but not winning promotion straight away but all that matters is that at the end of the day we have picked up the title, I would have been devastated if we won the league by a landslide but lost out on promotion in the playoffs.
Budgets
Our budgets have arrived for this summer and I have to say I’m pretty happy with these, no transfer budget as expected but a 6k increase in the wage budget is going to be very helpful, and with almost all the squad leaving on frees at the end of the season we’ll have loads of wage budget to bring in new signings.
Key players
I was considering showing you the season review that we get in our inbox but to be honest, I just don’t think anyone cares, so instead I’m going to show you a couple of the best players from this season.
Joren Geudens
Geudens won player of the year for the league and had the highest average rating at the club over the course of the season. Looking at his attributes he doesn’t look anything special but he’s been very consistent and managed to pick up 4 goals and an assist for his troubles as well.
Endy Opoku Bernadina
However for me our player of the season is this guy, I mentioned him in an earlier post but he really has been crucial to our title win this season, and he’s one of the players I have offered a new contract to as he picked up 21 goals and 6 assists in the league.
Adrien Saussez
For me Saussez has been so underrated this season between the sticks. We only lost 4 games all season and he was a big reason as to why we lost so little, he kept 18 clean sheets and only conceded 19 goals. That is very impressive no matter the level of football.
Luca Polizzi
There’s quite a few players I could have mentioned as a key player but in order to keep it short Polizzi will be the final one. I mentioned him previously in the series and there’s a reason I’m talking about him again now. He has had games where he doesn’t do anything and gets subbed but when he’s on his game he is almost un stoppable. He’s helped lightening the workload for our striker this season by picking up 11 goals and 13 assists, finishing as the joint second top goalscorer.
Outro
So that brings us to the end of what’s been a fantastic first season the save, we managed to win promotion at the first time of asking. I didn’t expect us to win the league in season 1 when I started this save but after the start to the campaign we had I knew we had a real good chance. Long may it continue!
Next season is going to be a totally different story though, we’ll have tons of new players and will more than likely be in a relegation battle but I’m up for it, hopefully we can have a good summer window and bring in some great new additions. If you haven’t already make sure you’re following me on Twitter so you never miss a future blog and I’ll see you for the start of season 2 with a whole load of new signings, very soon.
Hello and welcome to yet another instalment of The Belgian Boom, I’m absolutely loving this save at the moment and that is reflected by the amount of blogs I’m getting out for you all! If you haven’t read part 3 yet then I recommend you go and do so before I go any further and if you’re new here then feel free to click here and follow the series from the start. Anyway, no messing around today I’m going to get straight into the save, starting with a transfer!
New signing
Ibrahim El Ansri – free transfer
Somehow we managed to get away with spending another £300 a week on a new player, taking us to £1.67k over the wage budget but my thinking is as long as I’m getting results on the pitch the board aren’t going to care too much. Hopefully.
You can see why I brought him in as well, he comes in as the best RB at the club but also gives cover at centre back, centre mid and gives us the flexibility to play with a holding midfielder or right wing back if we chose to, he’s got some solid attributes all across the board so I’m hoping he does a good job. He got a 6.2 average rating on his debut, hopefully not a sign of things to come!
Senior affiliate
We managed to pick up KRC Genk, 4 time Pro League champions, as a senior affiliate although so far it’s been pretty useless as in January I couldn’t get any loans in for free, most they wanted me to pay a percentage of the wages or just wouldn’t let me have them at all.
Club vision update
You may remember from a previous post, I think part 2 but I may well be wrong, I mentioned this weird club vision we had where the board wanted me to sign players based in Spain, of which I signed none. Well thanks to Emperor FM on Twitter he pointed out to me Rupel Boom recently had a Spanish takeover in real life, so that makes a lot more sense now. If you’d like to, you can click here to read the article about it.
New kits
A huge thank you to the legend that is wightyyy for making these brilliant Rupel Boom kits for me over in the FM-AP discord server, I absolutely love them! I really can’t make my mind up on what one is my favourite, the amount of detail in both of them is outstanding. It’s taken this save to a whole new level!
January
In all honesty, January has been pretty poor and I don’t think it’s harsh of me to say that at all. We only played 3 games but to only win one of them considering the form we’ve been in this season is disappointing. What’s even more frustrating is that we were 3-0 up against Dessel at half time and ended up going on to draw the game 3-3. I really hope it’s not the return to a problem I had on FM21 where if I make a January signing form just goes out the window for the rest of the season.
A nice way to end this blog is with the news that we have qualified for the playoffs, the first team to do so in the league and we’ve been top of the league since game week 5 so to be honest we’ve known it was coming.
League table
As previously mentioned we are still top of the league with 5 games to go but that means nothing in the Belgian third tier as whoever is top of the league at the end of the season doesn’t automatically get promoted, the top 4 teams go into their own playoff group with each other where we will play the other 3 teams twice, home and away. It’s only then that if we win that playoff group we will be promoted to the second division. It’s worth noting our points total gets halved when we go into the playoffs.
Outro
So that brings us to the end of another blog here in the Belgian Boom, I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did then make sure to follow me over on Twitter so you don’t miss the release of future blogs, including part 5 coming soon which will be the season 1 finale, you’re not going to want to miss it! As ever thank you very much for reading and I’ll see you next time.
Hello and welcome back to The Belgian Boom, the series where we try and take Rupel Boom from the third tier of Belgian football all the way to European dominance. If you have’t read part 2 yet then click here to do so and if you want to follow the series from the start then click here to read part 1. That’s all the boring stuff out the way so lets get cracking with it!
November
That will do!
Straight into the action today and we kick things off with a perfect month! Also, check out some of these club names in Belgium, Winkel Sport is nothing short of a fantastic name. We kicked things off by responding to winning ways after our defeat in the last game with a 2-1 win over Thes Sport and followed that up with a massive win at home against Mandel United where we came out 6-0 winners. The previously mentioned Winkel Sport then played host to Rupel Boom but once again this season we came away with the 3 points, picking up a 2-0 win. To round off the month we visited Olympic Club Charleroi and it was a close one to be fair to them, we did come away with a 1-0 win but credit where credit is due they made it tough for us.
Youth intake preview
It’s that time of the year already, we’ve hit mid December which means it’s intake preview time!
On the face of things it looks promising, the report is telling us we’ve got a good attacking midfielder coming through and there could be a decent winger, full back and defensive midfielder as well. However we have to take this with a pinch of salt because my staff aren’t the greatest, but I guess all will be revealed in March.
Croky Cup draw
As you know from last time out we beat Jupiler Pro League team Union SG in dramatic fashion and have somehow found ourselves in the 7th round amongst some of Belgium’s elite sides. But we know we were good value for being here, we had earned our place in the draw and were good value for it.
We were drawn at home for the tie so I was now hoping for a small team we might be able beat, if we were drawn away I would have wanted a money maker tie, but you can’t get everything you want in life so we’ll take it, at least we’ll be in front of our home crowd. The next team out the hat and the team we would be playing is…
Brilliant. We will be welcoming Belgium’s most successful to the Municipal Park in the form of Anderlecht, who have 34 Jupiler Pro League titles, 9 Croky Cups, 2 Cup Winners’ Cups and a Europa League title to their name. Easy, right?
To be fair I’m actually really looking forward to the game, I was quite pleased when I saw they came out of the hat and would be visiting us. We get to test ourselves against the best team in the history of Belgian Football, and at our home ground where we’ve already beat one Pro League team, anything can happen.
December
There was actually only 2 league games to play in December, presumably the team go on holiday for a winter break which is becoming more and more common across Europe. Anyway we won both games although not as comfortably as I’d have liked, picking up a 2-1 win on the road against La Louvière Centre which was followed up a week later against Patro Eisden where we emerged 1-0 winners.
However, it wasn’t the only competition we’d play in this month as we also had the Croky Cup game at home against Anderlecht!
As you can see we did lose the game 3-1, but for the second game in a row against top flight opposition we took them right to the end of extra time, something we can be very proud of.
We had a goal disallowed in the 54th minute but we actually took the lead with 10 minutes to go and I was going mental, somehow we were beating arguably the most famous club in Belgium. We deserved our lead as well, although the stats don’t show it as they turned it on towards the end of the game, but Anderlecht created very little and we had defended well for the whole game. Sadly our goal ended up being nothing more than a wake up call for our opposition because Joshua Zirkzee went right up the other end and tied things up again. We took them to extra time but we just started to run out of energy, they are a professional club and it showed as in the 114th minute they took the lead for the first time all night and just 2 minutes later they would seal the deal with their third.
I don’t think we deserved to lose 3-1, however we can walk away with our heads held high knowing we gave it our all and we can be very proud of what has been a fantastic cup run, especially for a third division side.
League table
We currently sit top of the league 6 points clear of second place and more importantly 18 points clear of the 4th placed Heist so we are looking good for a place in the playoffs with 12 games to go.
Key players
Before you go I wanted to highlight some of my standout performers this season as you’ve not really got to see much of the players yet, so I figured now would be as good a time as ever to do so.
Kanu
Our best player this season has without a doubt been Kanu, the Brazilian 7 goals in 5 assists in all competitions, including a couple delightful free kicks from the former Anderlecht man.
Luca Polizzi
Polizzi is arguably our best player on paper and he’s been having a very good season so far, picking up 7 goals and 7 assists in 18 games. He’s in his third year at the club now which is quite rare in this team as the majority came in over the summer and I’d imagine come the end of the season he’s someone I’ll be offering an extended deal to.
Endy Opoku Bernadina
I know it’s another attacker but they are the easiest to determine how good a season they are having, and what a good campaign our Dutch striker is having. He’s got a difficult job being the lone striker and there was a lot of pressure on him at the start of the season to deliver the goals and that’s exactly what he’s done. So far he’s picked up 9 goals and 2 assists in all competitions, including 7 goals and 2 assists in the league. Hopefully he continues this form for the remainder of the season, as it is quite a small squad we have here.
Outro
So that brings to the end of today’s blog, feel free to let me know how you’re feeling about the lengths of the blogs as I know some readers prefer the blogs to be short, and some prefer a longer read. I tried to include an extra section today about the key players this season but that’s a feature, if it becomes a regular thing, then I’m more than happy for people to skip past it.
I think I’ll highlight the key players maybe 2-3 times a season because things aren’t going to change that often and if I did it every post. As I said, let me know what you think – I’m always trying to improve what I do making it as enjoyable a read as possible.
Anyways, I’m rambling on far too much at the moment which is something I have a bit of a habit of doing, so I’ll leave it there. I promise!
Hello and welcome to part 2 of The Belgian Boom and what is the first proper part of the series as coming up for you today we’ve got the absolute mess that was the transfer window and also the first 2 months of football here at the… *checks notes* Municipal Park Stadium. I also plan on briefly going over the tactic i’ll be starting off with and also a crazy club vision rule! If you haven’t checked it out yet then click here to read part 1 of the series and learn about the club’s link with Romelu Lukaku. Let’s not waste anymore time and get straight into the action!
The place we call home
Tactic
I think I’ve mentioned it before in the beta save but I have very little interest in tactics. I tend to pick a preset, tweak it as and when I see fit and stick with it until it stops working – and even then I’ll probably keep using it until I either get sacked or it starts working again.
So for this series I’m going to be playing a control possession as I did in the beta, at the moment we’re using it straight out the box but I am considering adding on play for set pieces because from what I’ve seen so far we are making good use of any corners and free kicks we are getting.
Transfers
When I arrived at the club there was only 17 players, all under contract until the end of the season so I’ve not moved anybody on as of yet but that may well be a good thing considering we only had £200 spare to spend on wages, so I’m currently £1.3k over my budgets. Oh, and we’ve got a very strange club culture which I still can’t understand…
What?!
If any of you have any idea as to why a club in the third division of Belgian football have a club culture of sign players based in Spain then I’m all ears, I just can’t work it out. It’s especially annoying that I don’t have Spain loaded so I couldn’t find any Spanish based players that I could bring in. Honestly just writing this is making me puzzled! Yeah, answers on a postcard.
Ins
We didn’t have much room in the wage budget but we did manage to make a couple additions to my very small squad, so let’s meet them now!
Kevin Moihedja – free transfer
When I arrived at the club there was no left backs, so that was my number 1 priority. We managed to bring in Moihedja who I think is a good signing, he’s good defensively and looks decent going forward as well which is useful because I’ve noticed playing with width and getting crosses in seems quite effective in FM22. We’ve also called up a LB from the U21s to act as cover at left back.
Jordan Kerstenne– free transfer
To be honest we were pretty light all over the defence when I arrived so with the limited amount of wage budget left I wanted to bring someone in who could play right back but also cover at centre back, and that’s exactly what we have in Kerstenne. You can see he has some decent attributes for this level and 19 determination really stands out, he’s definitely a potential captain in the future.
Sanaa Altama – free transfer
The Chadian international comes in as an older head than the rest of the boys but to be honest I just had to take what I could get and afford. I doubt we’ll extend his contract for next season but he should do a job as the ball winning midfielder for season 1 of the save.
Adrien Saussez – free transfer
the final addition to my squad is the man who will be playing between the sticks this season, he’s not the main target I was going for in goals but he’s by no means the worst goalkeeper I could have brought in. Again another older player but I don’t mind that when it comes to the goalies, although signing these older players is a bit of a problem because in the league I have to start each game with at least 2 U21 players, which is something I cannot do at the moment so we have to have a short bench with only 5 substitutes as our punishment but it’s something I will be trying to fix next summer, I want to bring a lot more youth into the squad.
Now, finally, it’s time to get on with the results!
August/September
We started the campaign off with the Croky Cup, the main cup competition in Belgium. We made it through the first few rounds with relative ease, the third and fourth round were against lower league opposition and in the fifth round we beat a team newly promoted to our league.
The season preview has us predicted to finish mid table, so I’m pretty happy with that first month of league football. We kicked things off with a 1-0 defeat to Dessel which I wasn’t happy with, I normally like to start the season with a win but we managed to put things right by winning the next 3 games against Patro Eisden, Francs Borains and FCV Dender, conceding only 1 goal in the process. Side note, typing these Belgian names out is going to be a problem!
October
Our good run of form continued as we rose to the top of the league, winning the first 5 league games of the month and again only conceding a single goal. I’ve been impressed with our defence so far!
Next up was our sixth round tie in the Croky Cup and for the first time in the series we will be playing a Jupiler Pro League team in the form of Union SG. However, we encountered a major problem going into the game as our only left back at the club picked up an injury, so we were forced to give a debut to a 16 year old left back from the under 21’s! He did take a while to get into the game and you could argue that he was at fault for their goal but he absolutely made up for it as with 2 minutes to go, he takes the ball from a throw in and moves into the space ahead. Then, he delivers a Kevin De Bruyne like cross to the back post where the substitute striker rose higher than the Union defenders and sent a bullet header flying into the back of the net! We’d done it! We had beaten a top flight team already!
With just 2 minutes until a penalty shootout our 16 year old debutant put a beautiful cross into the box and I’ve not enjoyed a single moment as much as this one in FM in a long time, beating a Pro League side when we are still in the third tier is the first of hopefully many special moments in the save. We did lose the next league game but as it was just 3 days later and our whole team were exhausted, I think it can be forgiven.
League table
We currently sit top of the league after 10 games just one point ahead of Knokke, don’t expect us to stay here long but I’d hope come the end of the season we are around and about the playoffs.
Outro
So that brings us to the end of part 2 of The Belgian Boom, it’s been a long one but that’s to be expected in the first blogs of the season when we’ve got transfers to cover as well. It’s been a much better start to the season than I was expecting and long may it continue! Make sure you are following me on Twitter so you don’t miss out on part 3 which should be coming out in the coming days.
I’m currently writing this at 8:14 on Monday the 18th November 2021, the full version of FM22 has just been released and I’m only just getting round to writing this first post. Guess I better get on with it then…
So welcome then, to the Belgian Boom, my long term series on Football Manager 22. We’ll be starting with Rupel Boom, in the third division of Belgian football. Before we get any further, let me tell you a bit about the club very very quickly.
So they are a relatively new club having only been founded in 1998. They currently find themselves 12th out of 15 teams in the third tier after 8 games and are only 3 points off the relegation zone. They have managed to get to the second devision but no higher than that ever, they have never played in the Jupiler Pro League – I guess that’s mission 1 then!
The Lukaku link
Perhaps the only interesting thing about this relatively new club is the affiliation Lukaku has to the club. The now Chelsea striker joined his local club Rupel Boom, where he played for 4 years before being scouted by Pro League side Lierse SK. His father, Roger Lukaku, played for the old club K Boom FC – but who are they?
Back in the day…
K. Boom F.C were a club based in a place called Boom, near Antwerp in 1908. It wasn’t long before a name change was put into place though as just 5 years later they changed to Boom Football club. Personally I think Boom is a fantastic name for a football club, but back to the story.
Sadly the club went through some financial issues as well as problems with their home ground so in 1998 the club merged with neighbours S.K. Rupel to form the club Rupel Boom, and that brings us up to the present day.
Despite Rupel Boom not having anything particular to shout about in terms of trophies, K. Boom FC picked up 2 Belgian second division titles both in 1938 and 1977, they also went up to the top flight in 1992 though not as champions. If you want to find out about the club a little bit more then feel free to check out their wikipedia page by here.
So that’s us all up to date, let’s get onto the FM stuff. The game has been out for an hour and a half and all I’ve done is put my real name fix in!
Meet the boss
So this is the manager that will hopefully be leading the club to glory, I always have my manager having an outfit to match the clubs colours, although I may change this one up a little bit. Some say it looks stupid, I say it’s a great way to show my commitment to the club. It’s worth noting I’ve also given my manager Belgian as a second nationality as I’d quite like that job later on in the save.
The save
I don’t normally set targets as such for my saves, although there is a couple things I’d like to try and achieve in The Belgian Boom – some more realistic than others.
Win the Jupiler Pro League
Win the Belgian equivalent of the FA Cup
Win the Champions League
Now for a few more that aren’t as important and I may not get complete:
Top the Belgian hall of fame
Have a player from the academy play for Belgium
Top the worldwide hall of fame
I doubt we’ll get the last one done but thought I may as well throw it in there anyway, there’s probably a few other things I’ve forgot so we may come back to this list later on in the save.
The deal is done
Boom!
signing the dotted lines
The deal is finally done! Get ready to hear the word boom mentioned in the majority of sentences I say until it starts to annoy me as well! I’ve set my manager up with details to match the club, so a Continental A licence and as a professional footballer at local level.
Outro
So that brings us to the end of part 1 of The Belgian Boom, I really hope you’ve enjoyed learning a bit about the club and particularly our links with Romelu Lukaku – I know I definitely have!
Make sure you’re following me on Twitter so you know when each part of the series goes live and if you want to follow the save in a little bit more detail then feel free to join the FM-AP discord server, I often post screenshots that don’t make the blog in there . He’s definitely one of the good guys in the community and runs in my opinion the best FM server around, so come and get involved!
Right, now I can finally get cracking on the save! Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!
BoxToBox FM 