Back to the Top!
Once the most successful club in French football history, St Etienne has fallen on hard times, languishing in Ligue 2.
The club has a huge fanbase, fierce rivalries (especially with Lyon), and a proud legacy—but the infrastructure and squad need modernising.
- St Etienne were once the most successful team domestically in France.
- It’s time to take them back to the top and become the top club domestically again.
Welcome to the St Etienne rebuild on FM24. St Etienne, what a history they have, and where are they now? Unfortunately, they find themselves in the second tier of French football.
The first step is to get them back in the top league and then to get competing with the top clubs.
So this blog is the start of a series where we follow the progress of our rebuild of St Etienne on FM24. This instalment will is our guide on how to set up as St Etienne and the next steps for the team.
St Etienne Objectives
The first thing we must look at when rebuilding a club on FM24 is the objectives of the club and supporters. Without following these objectives we are creating a rod for our own back, making life more difficult. The objectives give us a good idea of where this club wants to go.
So let’s start with the board objectives……..well there aren’t many anyway. The basic message he is to use the youth system to develop a team. It’s not a required objective, but it is important nonetheless.
So this is where we need to look at going forward, how do we achieve this? The first thing to do is create a top notch coaching team which are focussed on the youth. Now when facing this objective I look for coaches in different aspects who are high in working with youngsters and motivating. I also like to have coaches with international experience, but this is not essential.
Other than the focus on youth like we did with Barcelona rebuild, we need to keep an eye on the wages. Both of these objectives are hinting the club has very little money and it looking to build for the future.
The supporters are a little more interested, they are an ambitious bunch. They want to go back to Ligue 1, which is obviously one of our objectives going forward. They also want to focus on the youth, potentially we could look at creating some local heroes here.
The other objectives are centred around being competitive with our rivels, Lyon and Marseille. At this point we are some way off playing them or beating them, but this will come in time.
St Etienne first 11
So our next step to the rebuild of St Etienne on FM24 is to work out who our strongest players are. The way in which we do this is by using the assistant reports and determining them by the star rating. We try to raise the standards by saying that 3 stars is a squad player and anyone above is a key player. Under 3 stars means that they we be leaving unless they have a high potential.
Looking at the key players we can see that St Etienne have got a number of good players. You can see that we have a very strong forward line for this league with the AML, AMR and ST. This is going to help us play attacking football, only problem is that two of our best players are on loan.
Looking at the positions we have a available in the key players, 433, 343 are looking possible. These are meta formations and easy to play the normal tactical styles with.
So looking around the squad players the St Etienne squad fits nicely around a 433, or potentially a 4231. We’ve got a selection of wide players here, so will help me to decide what strategy we will take going forward.
Defensively we are a little weak, mainly in depth such as left back. This will be a focus of the recruitment team as being a title contender we need to balance our team.
St Etienne Tactics
The next step is building a tactic for this wonderful team. It’s easier than you think, but what some players do is over complicate it and get unexpected results.
The first thing we need to do is round up our assumptions from the sections above and put them into a form of tactic. We want to create an identity here for our team, but we want to be flexible too.
Let’s start from the top who is scoring our goals? How are they scoring our goals? The answer to this is using a gegenpress system we are looking to press high up the field and take advantage of turnovers. As you can see St Etienne have a gifted pressing forward, so let’s use him.
The next part is that we will use inside/inverted positions, as gegenpress is a narrow strategy, forcing the opponent to play through the middle where they can lose it or out wide where their pass completion will reduce.
We have a gone for a fairly standard balanced midfield trio with a defensive, support and attacking role. The anchor is slightly unconventional, but we want a solid defence and another to give a good option for the ball playing defenders.
Get started and rebuild today
This is one of the rebuilds that I am really looking forward to doing, taking a fallen giant in St Etienne and taking them back to the big time. The objectives give us a good start, but if we really want to go forward with this challenge we need more.
I would like to recreate the Lyon plan when Aulas took over in the last eighties. We want to get St Etienne up to the Ligue 1 and into Europe in the next four seasons. The way in which we will do that is by creating a solid infrastructure and recruiting well.
The plan is to recruit players from the teams in front of us, so for example this year we will buy players in higher positions than us. Next season we will be targeting players from midtable teams in order to increase our player standard.
The strength of this club are the players we have currently and the youth development focus. The weakness is that we don’t have the finances available that other clubs do, so we need to vigilant.
If you liked,v but wanted a rebuild from outside the top 5 leagues then check out our Ajax rebuild.
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