The Backstory

Wednesday 25th April 2018. 

The last time Chivas fans had a trophy to celebrate.

The two-legged CONCACAF Champions League Final had suited away sides; after Chivas had gone to Toronto and won 2-1 a week previous, the Canadians had now come to Estadio Akron and done the same. 

A penalty shootout would decide the winner, and as Michael Bradley’s spot kick flew over the bar, the Chivas fans erupted.

Continental success isn’t too common for Chivas – this was just their second CONCACAF Champions League (now the Champions Cup) title, having won the first back in 1962. However, it was the culmination of a period of great domestic success having won a Liga MX stage, two Copa MX stages and a Supercopa MX in the two years previous to their continental triumph. 

Mexico is a country with a number of reputable sides, which makes becoming (and staying) a dominant force beyond difficult. Chivas did achieve this, once, in the 50s and 60s, with a run so dominant that the side have since been dubbed El Campeonísimo (The Champions). During their run they won seven league titles, including an unprecedented four on the bounce, plus two cups, seven Champion of Champions and of course the aforementioned CONCACAF Champions League. 

More commonly though, Mexican football goes through ebbs and flows, with titles and trophies spread between a number of clubs. Los Cuatro Grandes (The Big Four) are a group of clubs consisting of Chivas, Club América, Cruz Azul and Pumas UNAM, and all of these sides rank within the top seven of the most successful Mexican sides based on titles won. 

This isn’t a typical race for the top four though – often Chivas struggle to even break the top half. Since their 2016/17 Clausura title, they’ve had ten stage finishes of ninth or lower, including five of the first six immediately following their triumph. 

That’s where we come in. We need to steady the ship and get Chivas consistently performing as a team of their stature should, and then push on for bigger and better things.

Aims and Principles

As the save hasn’t officially begun yet, I’ll skip the save structure that I usually talk about, for now, and jump straight to what I want to get out of the save. 

Aims of the Save – Short, Medium and Long-Term Goals

The aims of any save are pretty obvious – win as much as possible. However, I do have short, medium and long-term goals in mind to monitor our progress, both on and off the pitch. 

Short Term

On the pitch, as I mentioned above, the first aim is to re-establish Chivas as a regular member of Los Cuatro Grandes. That means consistent top four finishes, as a minimum. The game doesn’t believe that’s something we’ll achieve in the first season, but I do.

I want a top four finish minimum in each of the first five seasons.

Of course I hope we can progress quicker than this, but this is the minimum expectation. I’ll also be tracking our progress in the big games by creating a Los Cuatro Grandes mini-league each season, with the aim of not finishing bottom at any time.

Off the pitch, the first priority is financial stability. At a cursory glance the situation doesn’t seem to be too bad; we will start over the wage budget but have scope in the transfer budget to cover that. What I think we can start to do straight away though, is strengthen our position by trimming the fat. 

Across four squads, there are a staggering 132 players currently at the club. That is absolutely obscene and unnecessary. Over the first few seasons, the aim is to move on anybody who isn’t going to realistically have a role to play, to keep as much wage budget as possible available for new additions and contract extensions. 

Medium Term

After getting back to the level Chivas should be at domestically, the next challenge will be on the continent. As Chivas are two time winners of the CONCACAF Champions Cup, but with nearly 60 years between triumphs, there is an obvious target to be the first manager to win the competition with Chivas twice. However, things are always nicer in threes 👀. A three-peat would be a dream, but I’m more realistically looking for three titles between seasons five and ten. 

After cutting the squad down to an acceptable size, the next move will be to establish a selling model. Selling players will coincide with our player pathways (more on this soon) but I wouldn’t say the goal is to become a ‘sell to buy’ club. I’ll obviously monitor our finances over time to establish whether keeping our biggest and best players is viable, but the truth is many will probably want to try and crack Europe and demand moves anyway. So we’ll look into a proper system to let players move on where we think we can replace them seamlessly, to keep morale high and a steady income stream coming. Within seasons five to ten, I’d expect to break the record for Chivas’ record sale – currently Chicharito to Manchester United for around £6.5million.

Long Term

In my Plans for FM26 post I outlined the overarching goal of this save – to win the FIFA Club World Cup with a side outside of Europe. This is something that I’ve wanted to achieve in Football Manager for a long time, but have never really put myself in a position to be able to achieve. 

My most successful ever save outside of Europe was with Defensor Sporting of Uruguay on Football Manager 2021, but I set myself a stipulation that when we reached a Copa Libertadores final that would be my final match at the club, so my goal of a Club World Cup title was unattainable. Without that restriction this time around, I believe we can crown a Mexican club the best side in the world. 

As the Club World Cup is now every four years, we’ll need something interesting to keep things ticking over in between. Competition wise, the goal will be to become the most successful side in CONCACAF Champions Cup history – currently a tie between our compatriots Club América and Cruz Azul with seven titles each. 

Another minor goal, which feels like it would be the culmination of both on and off pitch success, would be to field an entire academy graduate starting eleven in at least one competitive fixture based on merit.

Save Principles

I generally don’t set restrictions in my saves, I just tend to play as realistically as I can while still enjoying the game. I obviously have the Mexican only rule in force for this save, which will add an extra aspect, but there are other things I’ll be looking to implement – expect a full post on each of these in the future. 

Tactical Pragmatism

I’ve described myself as a pragmatic manager for years now, but in truth my approach to that is fairly superficial. I struggle to rotate once I settle on a favoured eleven, and tend to make reactive tactical changes after poor results, rather than proactive changes to counter upcoming threats. With the advancements in Football Manager’s tactical options, I want to take a true pragmatic approach, tweaking roles and systems based on personnel that work well together and opposition threats. 

Squad Management

Although one of my biggest self-reflections is that I very often run with bloated squads in Football Manager to pre-emptively manage injury crises that may never happen, the situation at Chivas is unfathomable, as I’ve already mentioned. I’m not sure if it’s just the done thing in Mexican football, or if the previous regime had a hoarding problem, but the squad needs a lot of work. But beyond that, it’s about picking and choosing moments to weaken or strengthen the squad. We essentially get two chances to win a league title every season, so if we’ve won the Apertura and get a club record bid during the Clausura maybe we need to consider whether we can run light for a few months and re-invest down the road? 

Squad management goes beyond selling and buying though; I want to be proactive in re-training squad players who may seem limited minutes, but have a skill-set that can make them valuable ‘finishers’ from the bench. I also want to focus on ‘minute management’ – ensuring that players get the minutes they deserve, and crucially get them at the right times. I’ve been endlessly inspired by Ponta de Lança’s work in this area, and in general, and would highly recommend dropping a follow on X and Substack. I’m looking to put my spin on what is a fantastic concept and execution. 

Two-Pronged Recruitment

It may seem odd to call out recruitment as an area of interest in a save where our options are massively limited, but the caveat of allowing Mexican as a second nationality gives me an opportunity to do some interesting things. 

Mexican clubs have signed some really high profile players in recent years; Sergio Ramos, Allan Saint-Maximin, Anthony Martial… the list goes on. We obviously can’t match them in terms of picking up anybody looking to wind down their careers, but we can try to pick up some high profile Mexican national team players who are getting on! 

At the same time though, there’s smart recruitment to be had. We can pick players off from rivals in our division, and as we can start to expand our scouting range, we can look to pick players up from the likes of Spain and the USA.

Youth Development and Player Pathways

I can’t exactly field a full side of academy graduates without developing some young players now, can I? This bit is fairly obvious – we all love developing academy players, and giving them a pathway to the first team is a crucial step to get right to make that happen. 

I don’t necessarily expect to achieve all of these, particularly the tangible performance targets, but I’m going to have a good old go!