This is post five of a wider series. A series for FM22.
“Don’t be alarmed by the presence of a real human face.”
The Invincibles!
I’ll jump straight into it. Our second season has broken Hungarian football.
Honvéd are the champions of Hungary for the second time in a row. The 2022/2023 season was a very different beast to the year before, however. The league table will show you why.
We scored 12 more goals than the previous season but the biggest difference was down to conceding 28 fewer! 28 fewer goals in just 33 games. Ridiculous.
I knew I had to change the personnel at the back after last season’s astonishing 53 goals against, despite winning the title. So I did.
The team and system
In came a new goalkeeper, plus replacements for three of the back four. All for free. The Nani / Amiot centre-back pairing was rock solid this year. They also allowed us to play out from the back a lot more than the previous Batik / Baráth partnership. Both of whom spent most of the season out on loan.
We played a flat 4-4-2, with a focus on getting the ball quickly into the tall and strong strike pair, which was always a combination of new signing Lucas Di Yorio, giant Denis Laptev or last season’s hero Martin Eppel.
I have a new found appreciation for ‘Wide Midfielder’ as a role. Lukic and Romarinho still got forward with regularity like they would if they were wingers, but they contributed more in the build-up play with shorter passing, and often looked up and hit early lofted balls towards the front two during counter-attacks. Romarinho showcased his dribbling ability and Lukic chipped in with an impressive number of goals.
Having won every single league game, there’s not a huge amount to analyse beyond the tactical system and the key contributions of certain players.
So what happened in the other competitions?
Not the league
Bu virtue of winning the league in season one, we kicked off this campaign with a Champions Path First Qualifying Round matchup in the UEFA Champions League against Norwegians Molde.
Before we get to the game(s) though, the financial impact of this affiliation with the Champions League gave us a serious financial boost.
This in turn over the course over the next number of months allowed us to heavily invest in our infrastructure. Something I’ll come back to later when we add some series goals.
Anyway, back to European competition. In short, we were dumped out at the very first hurdle. We managed a credible 2-2 home draw, but Molde had already easily dispatched us 2-0 at their patch. We would be going no further in the Champions League.
This then dropped us into the UEFA Europa Conference League, a level perhaps more befitting our own. To get to the group stage, we had to play three further qualification rounds which we won on aggregate each time. Tre Penne (22-1, genuinely), KF Teuta (10-2) and HJK (7-4).
The ironic twist? After Molde moved past us in the Champions League, they stumbled at a later qualifying stage against Olympiacos, and dropped right into our Conference League group. Of course they did.
Fast forward six group games and we had got our own back. A slim 3-2 win over the Norwegians in Budapest and we were through to the next round as winners of Group A, knocking them out in the process. Finishing ahead of Spartak Moscow albeit only on head-to-head results, was no mean feat.
Unfortunately a 3-2 defeat against Slavia Prague in the one-off Second Knockout Round sadly called an end to our European (fm)adventure for the season.
In the domestic cup, we again reached the Semi-Final stage, and again we were dumped out by Ferencvaros.
What’s next?
I honestly didn’t expect to dominate the Hungarian top division to this extent so early in the save. Winning 33 from 33 league games doesn’t leave any room for improvement. Instead only disappointment when I inevitably draw or lose at some point.
That said, of course the natural targets have to be to keep up the league dominance while going a few steps further in Europe and managing to win the domestic cup.
There has to be more to it though, to keep us fully engaged.
Firstly, although Ferencvaros might be behind Honvéd in the league, they are easily (still) the most reputable club in Hungary. We are currently third behind Fehérvár.
Their spending power far outstrips ours, and although we’ve won two titles in a row, work still needs to done in order to eclipse the Ferencvaros name as synonymous with Hungarian football.
Secondly, although I half-joked about it earlier in the series, now that our youth facilities, recruitment and junior coaching are able to be improved upon, maybe we can create the next big hope of Hungarian football, the next Ferenc Puskás.
This is the highest quality newgen that has come through the ranks so far. Don’t be alarmed by the presence of a real human face, I use a hybrid solution of real faces and a python script that applies them to newgens (both solutions created by people far more clever than me at these things).
Incredibly, our beloved Glenn Árnason also made it into the Icelandic Hall of Fame! Moving up through this is a nice new objective for the series. We are 9th in the Icelandic nationality charts, but nowhere near the ‘managing in Hungary’ charts just yet. Let’s keep an eye on these, going forward.
End of 2022/2023 (season two) review
The future
We must continue to dominate the OTP Bank Liga, but complement that with a domestic cup win and further progress in Europe. We also want to focus on creating at least one newgen who hits the heights of being internationally capped and perhaps sold to a club in one of Europe’s elite divisions. We also need manager Glenn Árnason to rise on the Icelandic nationality Hall of Fame while trying to get into the (managing in) Hungary one.
Oh, and I’m going to tear up the direct 4-4-2 tactic and try something completely different. Because why not?
Let’s try and ruin Hungarian football even further. In a good way!
Wish me luck.
Thanks for reading.
FM Stag