Védelem! - 7 - Return of the King

This is post seven of a wider series. A series for FM22.

“It’s obscene.”

Season 2024/2025

In my final blog post of FM21, I used the phrase “If I was having another child, I’d name them Tomáš Chorý.”

Fast forward seven months of real life time, out of FM21 and into FM22 and an entirely different save and the same truth still applies. In fact, I may even name my existing child Tomáš Chorý. She might not like it, but I’m sure it will work out just fine.

FM Rensie is disgusted by this image. Sorry Ondřej.

Just deadly, despite the glaring gaps in his skillset.

I had a wonderful time managing the six foot six Czech hitman at Panathinaikos last year, but in this Honvéd journey, he may be set to surpass his own achievements.

The thing is, he is simply dominant in the air. He beats 99% of centre backs to the ball. As well as being a physical unit, he is aggressive and brave, so he simply does not accept coming off second best.

Throw in being no slouch (his acceleration and pace aren’t prohibitively low) as well as decent movement, work rate and a solid finish and it doesn’t really matter how you fire the ball in his direction, he’ll usually take ownership of it and put it in the net.

Let’s take a look at the numbers in his first season in Hungary.

He’s not just a statistical anomaly in comparison to his own attacking team-mates, he’s a footballing unicorn.

So the greatest striker in football history aside, how did the rest of the team perform?

The team and performances

Arciero, Nani, Baráth and Laptev left the club during the season, but this is how 24/25 started.
Eppel (49 goals in 81 league appearances but now 33 years old) and Batik (115 appearances in 7 years) are soon to go (with our blessing) when their contracts expire in summer 2025.

We stuck to the Juego de Posición-influenced 4-3-3 and it evidently worked well again. Adding a couple of key players to an already successful team clearly did the trick.

First up, the OTP Bank Liga. Could we make it four league titles in a row?

Yes! What’s more we did it unbeaten. Again. That’s over three seasons without losing a league game. As it stands, we have played 116 league matches in a row without losing. It’s obscene.

What about the Magyar Kupa?

The UEFA Champions League?

Another year, another group stage, another exit.

Getting this far each year is not to be sniffed at as a club from Hungary. This time we managed to dispatch Lokomotivi Tbilisi, Midtjylland, Qarabağ and Partizan Belgrade to get into the group stage. Fingers crossed our coefficient in Hungary increases at some point, so we don’t need 237 qualifying rounds to get to the groups.

Heading into the final group game, we had beaten Valencia 3-2 at home, managed a 1-1 home draw against Liverpool and a 2-2 draw away at Porto, while losing 3-1 in both of the other games. Before kick off, Liverpool were expected to beat Porto and if Honvéd could just nick the three points at Valencia, we’d be through to the knockout round. If we drew, we’d at least get third and drop into the UEFA Europa League.

After 12 minutes when Valencia had a man sent off, I had real optimism that it was going to be our night.

It wasn’t to be.

We were strangely off the boil and went down 1-0 to a Gonçalo Guedes penalty.

No more European football for the Hungarians after Christmas 2024.

Analysis

The Data Hub summary I normally leave in the review gallery. Click to open up in a size you can actually read.

I just wanted to highlight a particular factor from the above analysis that helps explain our success somewhat. In the Defensive Actions visualisation, we complete our highest proportion of defensive actions just inside our own half. Only 52% of our defensive actions (blocks, interceptions, clearances, tackles) happened in our defensive third. Although we won the league in our first season, we were a lot less convincing and in fact the percentage of our defensive actions completed in our final third was 63% in the 21/22 campaign. That’s quite an improvement.

We finished on top on seemingly all of the other metrics, other than dribbles per 90, since we play such a short passing system. I just felt that the defensive action location analysis was worthy of mention. Take danger further away from your own goal by winning the ball back in more advanced positions, and you will concede a hell of a lot less. In theory, at least.

I completed my usual performance statistics analysis on the players, offensively and defensively.

Unique insights beyond the obvious (Chory, Ramos Silva, Dabila) – Zvekanov is a much better choice of DLP at DM than Antonio. Although it’s ok that Maksimovic doesn’t contribute defensively (he’s a CM-A), contributing less than average in an attacking sense is a surprise.
Attacking Contribution is a combination of key passes, chances created, successful dribbles, assists, shots on target, goals and xG per 90 plus xG per shot plus an adjusted average match rating.
Defensive Performance is a combination of interceptions, tackles and headers won per 90, plus an adjusted average match rating. I’d love to include blocks and clearances, but FM doesn’t give us columns for these despite them being calculated by the game.

The Czech is head and shoulders above his peers. Not just because he’s six foot six.

I also completed the necessary financial analysis to figure out salary cost per minute played. I find this a key tool in identifying expensive fringe players or underpaid key first teamers.

Insights from the above are – Eppel is an outlier as he is leaving this summer. Balogh is an expensive fringe player. Botka provides incredible value for money. Ramos Silva and Mueanta are the only two players we still owe more than £1m in wages to between now and the end of their deals, but that is entirely fine as they are both crucial cogs in the Honvéd machine.

Lastly the age review.

Our weighted (by minutes played) squad age is 27, which is right in their prime. This is ideal for a team who although wish to develop youth, have domestic pressure to maintain title wins. The only pop out insight to me is that the average age of our full-backs is 30. This is five years more than the suggested peak age of full-backs of 25. May be worth some investment in younger talent in the wide defensive roles. Strikers and centre-backs older than ideal too, but the pending departure of Batik, 31 and Eppel, 33, will bring this down.

Transfers

As well as the aforementioned TC9 (we can call him that, right?), we signed four other players for the first team heading into this 24/25 season. This is them.

Enjoy looking at them by clicking the picture below and using your eyes.

Excellent, solid, bit-part and fuss-free, respectively. Their performances, not their nicknames.

Moving into the 2025/26 season we have six new players arriving, but I’ll write more on them in the next blog post.

Although technically a January transfer from last season, I want to highlight one young player.

Oberdan Ramos Silva is a gifted central midfielder. Blessed with incredible technique, vision, first touch and passing range while being hard-working and determined is a rare combination.

Truth be told, although I saw he had potential, when he arrived on a free transfer after being released by Palmeiras in his native Brazil at 18, I saw him as not much more than a hot prospect for the future.

That is until I gave him a run in the team. 20 assists and 12 goals from 25 starts and 15 sub appearances shows just how pivotal he quickly became to Honvéd’s brand of total football. He topped the OTP Bank Liga tables for key passes too.

Incredible progress while still a teenager.

There was suddenly a problem, however.

A few (*cough*) teams around Europe started to notice our boy, and the vultures began to circle. Especially when it emerged that despite frantic contract renegotiation six months after his arrival, his agent had demanded the inclusion of a maximum £3.3million release clause in the young playmaker’s contract.

Here’s a short story in three parts.

If it’s not apparent from the above, we tried to renew young Oberdan’s contract of course removing or at least massively increasing his release clause. His bastard of an agent refused, so the clever young Brazilian got rid of him! Fast forward a couple of days and he signed a new four-year deal to remain with us…with no minimum fee release clause in place!

I have a feeling that we won’t keep him forever. With his level of quality at 19, he may outgrow us very quickly (in fact Barcelona have now joined the clubs above in showing an interest), but at least we won’t be scalped for pennies in the process.

In the meantime, Oberdan Ramos Silva is ours, and we want to keep it that way.

Facilities

Two years of UEFA Champions League inclusion money allowed us to heavily invest in the facilities at the club, and incredibly by February 2025, we are “maxed out” and can do no more to improve our infrastructure. Fingers crossed this leads to excellent youth intakes in future.

On that note, this year we had another four supposedly “Elite Talents” in the intake. That’s eight in two years. Nobody is setting the world alight just yet, but Zsolt Csikós, Barnabás Bobál and Marcel Vesely are prospects I can hopefully circle back to in a couple of years. “Remember the name(s),” I guess.