Toulouse – Naldo goes mental

A very, very brief update tonight to confess that I have, in fact, descended into insanity.

Despite usually being an incredibly frugal manager who shies away from splashing the cash and prefers to develop a team from well planned cheap signings, hence being presumptuous enough to write an article on Financial Prudence in FM, I have quite clearly lost the plot.

Why? Well, here’s why:

 

That’s right. £42m. Forty-two million pounds sterling.

Once you see him, though, you might understand…

Anunda

Our first signing, that of the wonderfully named Alfredo Anunda, is much more like my typical signing. A promising newgen that has been deemed surplus to requirements at another club, Anunda is exactly the sort of player I love to sign. He’s got potential and some standout attributes, primarily his dribbling ability.

He’s been labelled the next Frank Ribery and with just a few tweaks here and there I think he’ll fill our new right wing position very well in a few years time.

But you don’t want to know about the boring sub-million pound signing.

Instead, here is the man, or rather the boy, that I’ve splashed the quite ludicrous sum of £42m on.

 

He’s going to be phenomenal.

I spotted him some years ago but kept getting put off by the ridiculous prices that Lens were quoting me. I’ve finally decided that enough is enough and, this being my last FM12 save, I felt that I deserved to have a little bit of fun with my cash for once.

The deal is £20m up front with £22m over 4 years and a quite unnecessary 20% future profit clause.

Aside from his ludicrous ability, I was convinced to sign him because the striker role was the only position where I didn’t have a French option. The only other domestic players that I would have considered up top were Loic Rémy and Alexandre Lacazette, neither of whom are likely to have any interest in joining me.

Not only can young Monsieur Dussaut fill the striker’s role, he can also drop back and perform ably in the trequarista position when needed; as evidenced by his second appearance for the club where he laid on the 3rd goal for Steven Fletcher. His debut, interestingly enough, saw him score after just 3 minutes.

The last factor which convinced me to make the move is simply that I cannot foresee the club needing to sign anyone else anytime soon. With the majority of the team under 27, we have years and years of development left in the side and a promising set of youth players that are ready to step up. Not only that, we also have any number of sellable assets that could be used in the event of a crisis.

Yes, £42m is a ludicrous sum of money to pay for any player and I can say with absolutely no doubt that I wouldn’t have sanctioned the move during any other game. But I’ve only got a few weeks of FM12 left… time to have a bit of fun I say.