Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Nottingham Forest beat the Boca Juniors 4:3 in the FIFA Club World Cup in Japan and picked up the Club World Cup to become the number one team of the Club World Cup that year.
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When the competition schedule was intense, time went by quickly. Time had unknowingly crossed over the end of the year. Twain’s Nottingham Forest Football Club’s memorial calendar had changed from 2007 to 2008.
The Premier League tournament and the English FA Cup arrived in succession. Thanks to the arrangement of the training program, the Forest team did not have problems with fitness and the team’s condition remained stable.
Starting with the game on December 1st to January 3rd, Nottingham Forest achieved a seven-game winning streak. Their league ranking went from third to first place. The brilliant six-game winning streak in December allowed Twain to receive the honor of the best manager of the Premier League for that month, while Nottingham Forest was crowned the best team of the month. The best player of the month was given to Manchester United’s Cristiano Ronaldo.
And the year-end extravaganza — the worldwide and European-wide selection results was announced.
The World Cup was not taking place in 2007. Although there were the AFC Asian Cup and Copa América, they were not significant for the Eurocentric football world.
As an important reference for the awards, the performance of the UEFA Champions League team and players was the most important.
Nottingham Forest was favored as the European champion.
Nottingham Forest had been honored as the year’s best football club in the world. The team’s core player, Franck Ribéry, was named the recipient of the Ballon d’Or by France’s L’Équipe. Although Kaka did just as well and AC Milan being able to break into the final was almost due to Kaka alone, he lost in terms of collective honor.
Franck Ribéry was also awarded “Player of the Year” by England’s World Soccer.
The competition for “FIFA World Player of the Year” was fierce.
Because the selection mechanism was different from the more professional Ballon d’Or, FIFA’s best candidates were selected through votes from managers of FIFA’s various national and regional teams. However, a country’s manager was not the most professional candidate. China came to mind as an example. Many managers did not really look at a person’s performance over the past year to cast their votes, but just gave their vote to the most familiar name.
Kaka had the upper hand in that area. He had more worldwide prestige than Ribéry. The same went for Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi, who were also more well-known.
Kaka’s performance in the Champions League and Serie A spoke for itself. AC Milan was a very different team without him.
Cristiano Ronaldo helped Manchester United pick up the Premier League trophy last season after two years, and in the second half of the new season, he was in better form and was now the top scorer in the Premier League.
As for Messi, he benefited from the setting of Barcelona’s grandeur as well as the identity of “Maradona’s successor.” In fact, he could not be compared to the three in terms of performance.
The end result was that Kaka edged out Franck Ribéry by a narrow margin and was crowned FIFA World Player of the Year. Ribéry came in second and was awarded the Silver Ball, while Portugal’s Ronaldo won the Bronze Ball award.
The result was enough for Franck Ribéry to be happy for a long time. A few years ago, when he looked out at the sea by the dock and did not know where his future lay, he did not even dare to think about a scene like today. But now, the dream had become a reality. He became one of the hottest young players in the world. He was a Ballon d’Or recipient and a well-deserved new core player for the French national team. His career had reached its peak.
George Wood entered the list of twenty candidates, though he did not receive any of the honors. It was related to him being a full-time defensive player. Defense was not popular and being a defensive player meant not having a chance for major individual awards. Cannavaro’s FIFA World Player of the Year award was not so much a personal award as a reward for Italy’s entire rear defensive line. He was Italy’s captain and just a representative of the brilliant collective.
The FIFA World Player of the Year was the most important award. After it was awarded, there were some miscellaneous minor awards. Perhaps others disagreed, but in Twain’s view, they were the unimportant awards. Even when he was named the FIFA World Coach of the Year for leading Nottingham Forest to UEFA Champions League victory, he was not wild with joy.
He felt it was a matter of course, and he could not think of anyone else qualified to stand on stage and accept the award. The second reason was that he was still protesting for Ribéry. He did not resent that Kaka received the award. He just thought that Ribéry was more qualified to pick up the Golden Ball.
Therefore, his speech on the stage to receive the award seemed a little arrogant and angry.
“I’m happy to receive this award,” he said. “It shows that the path I have chosen is right: victory and constant victories; a championship title and more titles. As long as the team can win more championships, honor will not be a surprise at all… But there will also be some surprises… I would like to thank FIFA for presenting this award to me. Thank you!”
Nottingham Forest’s offensive core player, Ribéry, did not complete the grand slam and take the Ballon d’Or, Player of the Year, and FIFA World Player of the Year awards, which was the only blemish. Other than that, the Forest team’s year was almost flawless.
A year full of honors had passed, and the new year with its endless challenges had arrived. All glory would soon pass, and they would not help the Forest team in the new year.
In the first round of the league tournament in the new year, the Forest team achieved a victory and raised their winning streak to seven games. In the English FA Cup, Twain deployed the Second Team to play and they encountered Roy Keane’s Sunderland team.
Due to the different situations of the two teams, the amount of importance placed on the game was different. Twain set out to train the players while Keane hoped to break through the FA Cup so that they could get out of the team’s current predicament — 21 rounds had passed and his Sunderland team only accumulated seventeen points. They ranked third from the bottom of the league and were in the relegation zone.
To stay in the league was important, but Keane would prefer a win to boost the team’s morale, even if it were just a FA Cup. As long as they could beat the powerful Nottingham Forest team, he had a way of leading the team out of the woods again.
Twain would not throw a game just because the opponent was Roy Keane. While all the players he sent were from the Second Team, the Second Team players were scarier to Keane. For the Nottingham Forest’s main players, the FA Cup could not lift their fighting spirit, but it was the Second Team players’ great opportunity to perform in front of Twain. No one wanted the chance to be the only one, and nobody wanted to cause the team to lose because of their own performance. As a result, the game was very dangerous for Sunderland. The only thing Keane could rely on was to send the strongest squad and fight it out with the opponent at home.
He won.
After ninety minutes of extremely intense competition, Sunderland edged out Nottingham Forest with a score of 3:2 and smoothly advanced to the next round of the FA Cup.
Since he lost the last chance to train his young players, Twain began to seriously consider putting some of the promising players, who were fated not to have a chance to play in the current Forest team, out on loan on his return to Nottingham from Sunderland.
The youth team’s Adriano Moke, who had been on loan at Sunderland since the start of the season, was now Sunderland’s First Team regular player. While he was not yet guaranteed to play as the main force, he was not a fringe player sitting on the bench. He was in the starting lineup and played the entire game in the FA Cup match against the Forest team. He performed pretty well and Twain watched Moke’s performance at all times during the game. He was a little independent, but young players still had time to correct their faults. Cristiano Ronaldo was nothing like when he first arrived at Manchester United.
He wanted to loan out some of the youth team players, even to teams in the English Football League Championship. They would not improve much if they just trained at Wilford and played in the Youth FA Cup. If they wanted to move to the next level, they would have to go out to compete and play in real matches.
He had to settle the matter when he returned to Nottingham. In addition, with the window opening for the winter transfer, did Nottingham Forest have any players that needed to be bought or sold?
At present, Nottingham Forest’s rotation system was more mature. Every position was filled by a capable player. Ribéry returned to the team after recovering from his injury and Pepe’s injury also progressed in a better direction. He thought about it and it seemed like there was no particular urgency to bring in new players.
He decided to focus on the type of young player who could be purchased and loaned out for development.
There were many conditions to be met, so it was not easy to locate player. First of all, they had to be young enough to have time to wait for opportunities. Secondly, they had to have enough talent to move Twain. Average players were not worth cultivating and waiting for a few years. Next, they had to still be unknown and not aim too high. Twain did not want a player who wanted to be the leader right away. Lastly, it would be best if their price was cheap. The Forest team’s new stadium had broken ground and started construction. The club’s available funds were woefully low. Twain would not and could not bid tens of millions of euros for a young genius.
Restricted by those conditions, most well-known young geniuses would be struck off the list. For example, Giovani dos Santos and Bojan Krkić from Barcelona’s La Masia training academy, Carlos Vela, who was out on loan from Arsenal, Jack Wilshere, who recently found big success on Arsenal’s youth team, the young French talents, Karim Benzema and Samir Nasri, Italy national youth team’s most precious asset, Giuseppe Rossi, Alexandre Pato, who had been snapped up by AC Milan, and so on. Twain would not be able to grab these players, as he did not have the financial resources.
He did not have to worry too much about finding good talent. Nottingham Forest could afford to hire soccer scouts all over the world. In addition, they had a collaboration with SI. The company had a host of amateur and professional scouts. In addition to their FM production, they followed the original agreement to create another version of the player database which was slightly different from the more game-oriented FM database. The database was more rigorous and had more reference value.
With the start of the winter transfer period, Twain needed to speed up his efforts.
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Twain informed his scout team that he needed a list of potential players between the ages of fourteen and sixteen from around the world, and an organized report appeared on his desk two days later.
Instead of studying the report during training time, he took it home to study it with Dunn.
Twain first set his sights within the United Kingdom. He could benefit from the geographical proximity, and it could play a role in weakening his opponents. Following that, he looked at the European Union region, the Americas, Africa, and finally Asia.
After he read all the reports with Dunn, it was already past midnight. Although he was tired to the point of dizziness and his eyesight was blurry, they identified a number of candidates, their names circled in red pencil. The next day, they would hand the list over to the youth team manager. Then, after confirmation, the Forest club would apply to purchase from the clubs the players were located at, or go to the players to sign contracts to become a member of the Forest team. There was no need for observation as some of these players were under observation by the Forest Team scouting system for a long time.
Two days later, the Forest team launched a worldwide initiative for the foreign acquisitions. How many of the names would eventually come to Nottingham as Twain wished? He did not know. It was like casting out a wide net. No one knew how the harvest would go until it was fished up.
In London, Crystal Palace’s genius, John Bostock, who had just turned sixteen, faced the first choice in his life: sign up with his own Crystal Palace team and become a full member of the club’s youth team, or sign up with Nottingham Forest and join the European champion team?
In Glasgow, Scotland, sixteen-year-old John Fleck met a man who identified himself as a Nottingham Forest scout. He brought a contract from Nottingham Forest to the main player of the Scottish national team U16.
In Mexico City, the father of Cruz Azul’s fifteen-year-old midfielder, Martín Galván, received a call from the UK. The man, who identified himself over the phone as a scout from Nottingham Forest, was very interested in his son.
In southern Brazil, in the port city of Porto Alegre, the famous Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense received a fax from Nottingham, England, hoping to have a serious discussion about the future of the sixteen-year-old center back, Gerson Vieira, from the Grêmio youth team.
The same fax was placed on the desk of the Colo-Colo manager in Santiago, Chile. But the player’s name on the fax was Nicolás Millán, who was Colo-Colo U16’s number 10.
Many more young players around the world received similar notices.
How many of these players would end up like Fàbregas, George Wood, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Kaka?
Twain did not know. Even if they currently had impressive talent, the path to becoming a superstar player was still long. Just talent and strength did not guarantee success. Sometimes a little luck was needed, but more importantly, the effort that they gave on the journey from now to becoming a superstar player was required.
That was why Twain wanted to cast the net worldwide. He could not guarantee that every kid in the scouts’ reports described as “the second Maradona,””the second Zidane,””the second Ronaldinho,” or “the second Ronaldo” could really get what they wanted. The scope of the search was large and the numbers were many. Even if the elimination rate was eventually high, it could still guarantee to produce one or two stars.
Arsène Wenger’s keen eye for talent was not anything new in the international football circle, but he could not guarantee that all the players at Arsenal’s youth camp would become superstar players. The ones who ultimately succeeded were not many compared to the young players that Wenger gave up part way.
Twain once thought about if he had transmigrated a few years earlier, whether or not he would have used the advantage of the knowledge to sign on Messi, who still had no money to treat pituitary dwarfism in Argentina, Kaka who almost gave up football when he hurt his spine during a diving accident in Brazil, or an extremely tender Wayne Rooney at Everton, Cristiano Ronaldo, Francesc Fàbregas, Jack Wilshere, Carlos Vela, Bojan Krkić, or other wonderkids, geniuses, bosses, and prodigies in one fell swoop.
That was something almost all of the FM-ers dreamt of: to be able to gather all the star players to be their men and play for them. Even just the thought of it was exciting.
But it was only a thought.
The current situation was also good, because there were more possibilities in the future. A future that had gradually become unfamiliar to him would give birth to the geniuses he had not yet heard of. It was just like a treasure hunt. He would excavate the treasure once he knew its location. If he did not know where the treasure was, he would search all over the world.
Twain believed that the latter had a greater sense of accomplishment.
George Wood was the first gem he had dug up under unknown circumstances. The first and nth times held completely different meanings, so he did not intend to let go of George Wood.
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These excavations would not come to fruition so quickly. The team had other work that needed to proceed as usual, in addition to waiting for further feedback.
The youth team’s center-back, Aaron Mitchell, who was more than two meters tall, was on loan to the English Football League Championship team, West Bromwich Albion. The eighteen-year-old right back, Gavin Kavanagh was on loan to Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, who was also in the English Football League Championship. Another eighteen-year-old midfielder, Lewis McGugan, was on loan to Stoke City. Mark Byrne went to Watford.
A few of the most promising players in Nottingham Forest’s youth team had been out on loan. It was their own business to learn what they could in those teams. Twain did not look at the process, he only looked at the results. Those who made something of themselves could stay, and those who did not would be sold.
The young players who left Wilford were equally clear headed. From then on, they were no longer rookies waiting for opportunities in the youth team. They were full fledglings that needed to fly out and make their chances. Their feet determined what the future would hold. As for how many players could eventually come back and stay, that was still a mystery.
The league tournament was still in progress.
The Forest team that lost the English FA Cup seemed to be ensnared by bad luck. They first faced Derby County in an away game and had the upper hand during the entire game. They pressed on the opponent and bombarded their goal, only to accept the result of a 2:2 draw with the opponent. It annoyed Twain that they could not get three points from the underdog team, but what made him even more annoyed was the performance of the opposing home fans after the game.
Due to the historical feud between the two teams, Nottingham Forest and Derby County, the Derby County fans were joyous when they saw Nottingham Forest eventually be forced to a draw by the newly promoted Derby County. So in contrast, Twain’s face looked grim.
Before this game, the Forest team returned to the top of the league with seven straight wins and fifty points, and surpassed Arsenal with its forty-nine points and Manchester United with its forty-eight points in one shot.
But with the draw, it was immediately overtaken by Manchester United, which won a game. Both teams had fifty-one points, but Manchester United was number one because they had scored more goals.
In the next round, the Forest team lost to Everton at home again and was overtaken by Manchester United and Arsenal, who both had victories. They were back in third place in the league.
There were some ups and downs in the team’s form and Twain found the problem — the rotation system.
The rotation system was designed to give the team plenty of stamina while it competed in multiple tournaments, while it also ensured that most players had games to play and stayed in shape. But if the rotation was too frequent, it would leave the players at a bit at a loss. The lineup in the previous game played well, but the manager changed the lineup and tactics in the next game. How could they guarantee the overall continuity and stability of the team?
After Christmas, the team’s schedule was not intense. They had already been eliminated in the English FA Cup and the Champions League knockout stage had not yet begun. They only had the league games once a week, and thus, did not really have to use the rotation system.
Therefore, after they lost the game to Everton, Twain temporarily gave up the rotation system, or at least, the large-scale rotation.
Things got better. Nottingham Forest defeated Middlesbrough by 2:0 in the final game of January.
In the meantime, there was also a steady stream of good news with regards to the plans to invest in the future.
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John Bostock accepted the Forest team’s contract and chose to go to Nottingham Forest, where he could receive a better deal once he reached the age of sixteen. The Forest team’s recent string of honors was the reason for his decision.
While Martín Galván was in Mexico’s famously strong team, Cruz Azul, Nottingham Forest and Europe’s top football standards were clearly more attractive. He agreed to join Nottingham Forest. But there was some trouble: Mexico ruled that players under the age of eighteen were not be allowed to play abroad. Martín was only fifteen years old, so he would have to wait at least three years. Was Nottingham Forest willing to wait? Twain agreed to wait.
The Forest team and Cruz Azul reached an agreement that Martín’s permanent ownership belonged to Nottingham Forest, but before he reached the age of eighteen, he would play for, train in and compete for Cruz Azul. Not only was his salary paid for the Forest team, but the Forest team would also pay an additional amount each year to Cruz Azul as a “training fee.”
Chile did not have such a rule, so Nottingham Forest spent 500,000 pounds to bring Nicolás Millán to England and place him in Nottingham Forest U16 youth team for specific observation.
Even having cast such a wide net, only those three players were signed at the end. However, Twain was satisfied. The development of the youth team and the excavation and purchase of young talents were normal. It required long term persistence, so the result of the three players that time was very good. Rome was not built in a day. A youth training academy that enjoyed prestige in Europe and internationally would not be able to rise up in a day.
Nicolás Millán and John Bostock came to Nottingham Forest. Twain went to pick them up, met them, and introduced himself. Then, he handed them over to the youth-development manager. But everyone knew he would pay close attention to the performance of the new young players.
It had to be done. In the next few years, as long as the Forest team’s new stadium was not complete, Twain had to tighten his belt. It was much more cost-effective to search for young geniuses and cultivate them than to spend large amounts to buy the famous stars.
