Building a better USMNT together: We crushed the MLS offseason

Welcome back to “Building a better USMNT together,” a series where I play Football Manager 20 to build the USMNT of our dreams with your help. If you’re new, start from the beginning here.

Last week, we finished Season 1 with a respectable playoff appearance, and a well-developing core of young players. This week, I went through the offseason and made some dramatic changes in pursuit of our current goal: build a strong FC Dallas team around young Americans and get them ready for the USMNT.

Reader, we’ve gone nuts.

Say goodbye to 10 players, many of them key contributors from last season. Thankfully, we’ve been able to ship out a number of foreign stars — who were also our highest wage earners — for a profit. Shoutout to Zhengzhou-based Henan Jianye FC, who paid big transfer fees for Thiago Santos and Franco Jara.

If there’s one transfer that didn’t go well, it was the departure of goalkeeper Jesse Gonzalez. We should have been able to fetch a decent fee for him, but the most anyone would offer was $40,000. In other leagues, I’d have been patient and waited for a better offer, but because MLS has a salary cap and squad size limit, I had to get rid of him quickly if I wanted to replace him with a better player.

We locked down six new signings before the window opened, including four Americans. Say hello to long-coveted center back Davy Parsons, goalkeeper Brady Scott, and two players USMNT fans should be familiar with: wingers Konrad de la Fuente and Lynden Gooch.

Ygor and Zain Westbrooke are internationals, but they address shortcomings that I couldn’t fill with Americans. Ygor gives us a big upgrade at goalkeeper, while Westbrooke is an attack-minded central midfielder.

A couple of extremely talented young Americans have arrived on two-year loan deals, and slot into the starting lineup instantly. Jara will be replaced by English-American striker Folarin Balogun, who comes from Arsenal’s youth academy. We’re going to try to sway him to the USMNT, where he’d be a superstar.

Reto Ziegler has been replaced at left back by Chris Gloster, a player I rate extremely high in real life. PSV Eindhoven was kind enough to lend us his services.

We also appear to have done very well in the MLS SuperDraft, adding a couple of good backups. There’s center back Ryan Ambrose:

And left back Frank Martin:

But as good as these 10 acquisitions have been, there are two more who are on another level.

Folks, we’ve taken advantage of some FM Cheese™. Seattle screwed up their cap management and made a bunch of their high wage players available. We were swimming in general allocation money after making $17 million in sales, so we snapped up Jordan Morris and bought down his salary cap impact to fit him into our team. He’ll be starting at right winger.

Even after all of these moves, we still had some assets available to make a big trade. I made offers for a lot of young American attacking midfielders, getting rejected over and over, until ...

YES.

Mexican-American attacking midfielder Efrain Alvarez — who is playing for El Tri in real life, but for the USMNT youth team in this save file — is going to be a superstar. Gianluca Busio is the teenage No. 10 who I have playing in the senior team at the moment, but Efra might have the higher ceiling. His attributes are already nuts.

As a result of Efra’s acquisition, I’ve had to develop a 4-2-3-1 tactic to go along with the 4-3-3 we played all of last season. Here’s what the team looks like with the second unit in. This will be our primary tactic eventually, because Alvarez is that good.

As you might be able to tell by the ease with which I’ve acquired Morris, Alvarez and James Sands, MLS play in Football Manager 20 is kind of bugged. I’ve heard that it only gets worse as the seasons go on, and you get to a point where some MLS teams do not even have full 18-man squads of real players due to the AI’s poor salary cap management. We also ran into the disabled list bug last episode.

So, a question for y’all: What do I do once it becomes clear that MLS is not playable? My current thinking is to continue the save as USMNT manager, but move to a club in the Netherlands, Portugal, or Germany and try to recruit Americans. I might also be able to play in England, depending on what type of Brexit happens in the game. The foreign player rules in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, France, Italy, Spain, and Russia make those leagues poor options for what we’re trying to do.

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter what club you’d like to see me turn into the USMNT development center if we have to leave Dallas.

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