Berlin, the capital of Germany. Home of FC Union Berlin a storied football club infamous for having never won the Bundesliga title in their 57 year history. Can they finally defy all odds and dethrone reigning champions FC Bayern München establishing Berlin as the home of German football as we start our “This is Berlin” series adventure!
Last episode: (FM23) This Is Berlin: Introduction
Preseason
Mixed results in preseason as we played three games with the outcome of one win, one draw and one defeat as that I look to use a tactic that may work well with this current squad. You see below the tactic below but if you want to see if properly then I can put it into the next blog and it’s something different to what I have used in the past on FM23. Let’s hope it works for when the season starts…
The first game was against Czech side FC Viktoria Plzeň and ended in a boring 0-0, cough how can I write this match up when we didn’t hit the target but the Czech side did three times but at least Rennow was alert the save us from defeat.
Dutch side PEC Zwolle (who in real life won 13-0 against Den Bosch yesterday), anyway back to the real world of FM and I got my first win in charge beating them 4-1 before ending preseason in defeat against Turkish side Hatayspor 2-0.
DFB-Pokal
1st Round
Hello 1st round, goodbye 1st round…
This season’s DFB-Pokal only lasted 120 minutes plus a shoot-out as we crash out of the competition at the first hurdle against TSV 1860 Munich on penalties. We had taken the lead thanks to a Becker strike from outside of the box and then we thought we were two nil up but Michel’s didn’t time his run and was caught offside. They pulled one back after the break and the match ended 1-1 after extra time. It was Siebatcheu who missed our penalty in the shoot-out. Well, I know one person who will be happy with this result THE FM ACADEMY, who’s currently doing a series with the German side and is in season 6 with them, so go check it out…
Oh, well there’s always next season for this competition and revenge too.
Transfer News
We start the season off with just under a million pound in the transfer budget and roughly £16K per week in the wage budget. That is poor for a Bundesliga side and I believe they maybe ranked 17th in the table in transfer/wages, if I am right.
However, work with what you got CoxieFM and it’s one in and one out the door at Union.
We welcome soon to be golfer and Welsh International Gareth Bale to the Stadion An der Alten Försterei. He is only here on a 6 month contract as that he has already announced that he is going to retire in Jan 2023. To be honest, I didn’t even think I’d get him. But let’s see what he can do for the iron ones during his time at the club.
The first out the door is Niko Gießelmann.
I was not going to sell anyone this season and see what we could do with the whole squad. However my hands were tied as Niko made it clear literally a week into this series that he wanted to explore his options, so I thought I would test the waters to see if anyone wanted him because well he was in his last year of his contract. Sold to Bayer Leverkusen for £3.5m, I think I got around £2.4m/£2.6m into the transfer budget out of the deal…
Final Words
I will be trying something new during this series, and doing monthly blogs instead of a season review or 2-4 blogs per season as that I don’t want to put any pressure on myself in blogging etc. It will probably take me one of two blogs to know what I want to read so bear with me but if you read down to hear then I would appreicated any feedback etc…
In the meantime, please feel free to leave a comment with any feedback and questions and don’t forget to check out all the other blogs on here and you can follow me on Twitter here.
See you next time and thank you for reading…
CoxieFM 
One thought on “(FM23) This Is Berlin: Preseason ’22”