You join us back in south central Finland, 390km NNE of Helsinki in the city of Kuopio where I'm with KuPS, preparing for my second full season in charge.
The journey so far...
2018 - started unemployed (Sunday League experience, no badges) before getting the job at Nosaby IF in the Swedish Second Division East on 3 August 2018. Took over with 9 games to go and secured a 9th placed finish.
2019 - finished runners up in the league, enough to make the playoffs which we went on to win to secure promotion to the Swedish First Division South. May MOTM Award winner
2020 - stormed the league and won the title against all odds to win automatic promotion to the Swedish First Division Elite. 2020 MOTY Award winner
2021 - after a terrible start and a struggle to sign the players needed, I resigned my post. Took the job at KuPS in the Finnish Premier League on 25 July 2021. Finished 7th in the league and reached Second Qualifying around of Europa League. They also won the Finnish Cup before I took over
2022 - Finnish Cup Winners for the second consecutive season, a comfortable 3rd place in the Finnish Premier League and a departure at the group stages of the Europa League, the furthest we've been to date. May MOTM Award winner.
2023 (present day) - media predicts a 2nd place finish in the league, while the board expects us to finish around the top of the league and reach the final of the Finnish Cup (the Europa League expectations will be set later in the year). I've set myself the ambitious target of pushing for the league and cup double this year, along with another run to the Europa League groups for good measure.
Close Season
Fresh off our relative success last year, we entered the close-season with renewed optimism. The foundations were in place, we could start building a legacy. I was confident of our chances to do well in the Finnish Cup again, and keen to build on our success in the league and push HJK for the title.
With that in mind, i set about assessing the squad, and in doing so, also had a look at my tactics. We'd been playing a fairly basic 4-4-2 which had worked ok, but we hadn't set the world on fire. I wanted to try and improve this somehow, especially since as yet, i hadn't found a striker pairing that worked. I thought an AMC sat behind a lone striker might yield more goals and assists between them, especially as I'd had some success with this on previous versions of the game.
The man i identified for the position was Deom from Belgium who was available on a free and was perfectly suited to plays as an Advanced Playmaker behind our star striker Frederico Lancini.
Elsewhere, we were in desperate need of a solid centre back to cover for the departing Cipriano, and we also needed some strength in depth if we were to fare better with the busy schedule this time around. In came Alessandro Confente (GK), Aldin Adzovic (MC) and Bruno Dita (DL) as cover for the first XI.
Meanwhile, the board gave me an enormous transfer kitty of £3M, most of which came from the Europa League prize money. Since i'd already made most of the additions needed for the squad, i didn't want to get carried away spending needlessly. We still needed a centre back and my scouts identified the Frenchman Jean-Clair Todibo as a perfect candidate. He cost me £575k but i think he's a great investment for the future too at just 23 years old.
Jean-Clair Todibo
Since legacy was what I had in mind, i wanted to start building a decent reserve side of hot prospects that might push for first team places later in the season. I also hoped to use this system to train some foreign talent so they could reach Homegrown status and help out with the Premier League requirements - finding Finnish talent is proving very hard.
KuPS 2023 - Transfers In
The first thing to do was establish KuPS 2, an official reserve team that would play competitive matches. I used some of the transfer budget to hire in the extra staff needed and started bringing in the hot prospects that were available on frees. I signed a player for each position, and then supplemented the squad with my best U20 players and any unused first teamers. Another Belgian looked a great prospect as Oliver Bertrand would undoubtedly be a star of the future.
I still had a little shy of £2M for transfers and so opted to use a lot of it to bump up my Scouting budget. As we were now able to scout all over the World I thought could make the most of it in the hope of uncovering some hidden gems.
Preseason
Unlike last year, i wouldn't make the same mistake as leaving my assistant to schedule all our friendlies after the Finnish Cup had started. I still had the last Europa League game to play, despite already being knocked out and so i scheduled 3 more friendlies around this fixture so the boys could start building up their match fitness.
Unsurprisingly, we were battered by SC Freiburg, but were very comfortable against our lesser foes. In fact, stepping out of chronological order, i can reveal we were unbeaten in all our preseason friendlies this year, including the ones we played in between the Cup and League fixtures.
KuPS 2023 - Preseason friendlies
Finnish Cup
We entered the tournament having won the cup for the last two years running and so i was confident we had the ability to make it three from three. We navigated the qualifying group stage, with relative ease, bar a wobble against much lesser ranked TPS, and a poor draw against SJK.
The second round drew us against Futura from the First Division, but they proved to be a worthy opponent and we scraped through 1-0. Next up were fellow Premier League side RoPS in the Quarter Final who again battled hard against us and we were lucky to win. I'd been so sure we'd breeze through these stages, now my resolve was beginning to waiver.
The Semi Final drew us against FC Lahti who won the league back in 2019 and so far had outplayed us in a few of our previous encounters. I ploughed ahead with the new tactic and instead of a solid win, i got a solid lesson as they dispatched us comfortably 2-1 - our goal a mere consolation in the 90th minute. Were were out of the cup and i was devastated. FC Lahti would go on to win the cup so at least we went out to the champions, but it didn't make defeat any easier to swallow.
KuPS 2023 - Finnish Cups results
Premier League
Meanwhile, the Premier League fixtures had gotten underway after the Quarter Final and things had not gone well there either. A lacklustre performance in the second half against FC Inter saw us give away a two goal lead to draw at home. Up next were HIFK, another side we should be comfortably beating and yet we found ourselves on the end of a shock 1-0 loss.
The next two games had us up against our opponents from the Cup Quarter and Semi Finals - FC Lahti and RoPS. Both games took place before the cup fixtures and we were comfortable winners, taking both games 3-1.
I thought things were improving, but then we went away to recently promoted Ilves and managed a pathetic 0-0 draw. We hosted TPS at home in the next game and ran out 3-0 winners, that was just before the Finnish Cup semi-final defeat which proved to be the last straw for me.
After 6 games in the league, we were joint 2nd on 11 points, already 7 adrift of HJK who had a perfect record so far. Needless to say, this is not a bad record and the team were playing ok, but i think that was my issue. I wanted to dominate, not scrape by, and I'd allowed us to get carried away with the previous seasons success in thinking this would be a walk in the park.
I'll save the tactical epiphany that i had for another blog, and instead will skip to the part where i developed a system I was happy with. I changed from a 4-4-1-1 to a 4-1-4-1 with two wide inside forwards, and set my midfield three up to win back the ball in front of the back four and quickly recycle possession to the attacking three.
In the next 5 games we lost 3, drew two. 0 Goals scored and 7 conceded, but two of the games were 0-0's and i was pleased with the clean sheets. Some would call this failure but in fact the team were brilliant, we dominated possession, had plenty of shots and most on target, we'd just been unlucky. The goals conceded were good goals and i was confident with a tactical tweak or two we could perfect our system.
In our 6th game with the new tactic we lined up away to FC Inter and we hit gold! A penalty and a well taken second for our Finnish frontman Mikko Tuominen saw us win comfortably and from here on out, we fared much better.
We were 20 points adrift of top spot by now, and languishing in mid-table so we had our work cut out to recover. Having been knocked out of the cup, we had to finish 3rd or higher in order to qualify for Europe next year.
In fact we would go on to win 11 of the next 21 games, drawing 7 and losing 3. This was enough to see us climb the table and had we been more clinical in goal, we'd have finished 2nd. Instead we settled for 3rd place which i can't complain about given we switched gears mid-way through the season.