The St. Gallen Save: Introduction

When pressed to come up with a catchy title "The St. Gallen Save" was the best I could muster from the depths of my imagination, which doesn't really bode well for the creative direction of this journey. But, in my defence, it does accurately present the premise of the save. Drumroll, please...

We're playing as St. Gallen!

A quick glance at their Wikipedia page tells me that St. Gallen - twice winners of the Swiss top flight title - are the oldest Swiss club still in existence and are therefore a member of the exclusive Club of Pioneers, a network of the oldest clubs from their respective country that promotes grassroots football and the values of the game: Integrity, Respect and Community.

They won their only Swiss Cup in 1969 and play at Kybunpark, a stadium with a capacity just shy of 20,000. They have no real European pedigree to speak of, although they did once knock a Chelsea side featuring Roberto Di Matteo, Frank Leboeuf, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink & Gianfranco Zola out of the UEFA Cup, which is no mean feat.

With that potted history taken care of, I wanted to quickly cover my "plans" for the save. Essentially, I want St. Gallen to be run in line with what I would like to see from my own club in real life, and I want to use this save to get better at parts of the game I previously haven't use as much/ignored completely.

1. Play "good" football. A subjective term, I know, but I hope to cover this a bit more in future posts.

2. Regularly produce players through our academy. I'd like to get to a stage where there is always an academy graduate in our match-day squad.

3. Good proportion of National Team squad coming from our club. Pretty self-explanatory, and hopefully a by-product of a successful academy.

4. Smart (and varied) recruitment. A sign of success of a recruitment strategy is moving players onto the 'Top 5' Leagues, and I like to see players of different nationalities passing through.

5. Pay more attention to training. I've recently dabbled in training after largely ignoring it previously, and would like to learn more to get the most out of the game.

So there we have it. Hardly revolutionary, ground-breaking stuff but the direction of the save will be creating a distinct style of football which I can hone over time. The intention will be to pump resources into the development of the club infrastructure to facilitate the production & development of our own talent through the academy system, and to optimise this as I learn and improve training methods. This will be supplemented by a smart recruitment strategy, in which we aim to bring in players from a variety of sources with a view to moving them onto England, France, Germany, Italy or Spain for a tidy profit.

And the man charged with the above tasks? Meet St. Gallens new Head Coach, Francisco Javier 'Fran' Ortiz. (Image generated following instructions from this link)

Ortiz was chosen by St. Gallen as they believe him to fit the profile of a training ground coach who can help them implement an attractive, possession-based style at the club.

It has also been suggested that the Spaniard was chosen because of his meticulous approach to training, and that the club believe his high standards and demands will help them create a culture of development at Die Espen.

I'm looking forward to getting started with this, and in the next piece I'll be discussing a rough tactical direction, trying to get an understanding of player attributes, assessing my group of players and other Day One tasks.