"Save scumming" is a gaming term, describing when you save a game immediately before an important decision or event, in order to replay that section over and over again until you get the desired outcome. You might do it before launching your big invasion on Sid Meier's _Civilization_, for instance, just to check you've massed enough troops to overcome the pesky Babylonian Empire. No Football Manager player would ever admit to doing it, but we have all done it. That tricky transfer negotiation, that title decider, that big cup final, that "bloody game” you rage quit, “where the bastard algorithm cheated you out of a win, it was bloody 4.6 to 0.2 on xG!"
As my attention wandered during the third interminable VAR break or feigned head injury (I can't remember which) during Ipswich 0 Brentford 1, I started thinking about save scumming our 2024-25. Which game would I have replayed over and over again until we got the desired result? I settled on Brighton at home, because it came at a moment when we seemed to be building a head of steam and it might have snowballed. The other big candidate was Liverpool at home, on the grounds that winning a game that big first up would have completely transformed our transfer options (and, you know, if I replayed it enough times, we're bound to win eventually).
Once I was done with that hypothetical and still bored watching Brentford hold us at arm's length, I moved on to thinking about a different reload save. This time I picked the last moment where things seemed to be more or less on track - after Fulham away - and wondered how, with hindsight, you might have gone about keeping us in touch with the division's back markers.
Obviously, the most correct answer here is that we were fundamentally underpowered for the division and no amount of tinkering, even if one knew what was about to go wrong, would have changed that. However, [I have already written that blog,](https://bluewhitenotes.beehiiv.com/p/mission-impossible?utm_source=bluewhitenotes.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=mission-impossible&_bhlid=dcba306c85e171c4e199a16455d8f9bc9ff81d9a) so indulge me in various imaginary experiments that might have got us closer.
This is an awkward one and I'm becoming less and less convinced of my own logic over time, but here goes. By January it had become clear that Aro Muric was not consistent enough to be our number one. The goal-causing errors were too frequent and often just too weird to command the confidence of his backline. What wasn't clear yet was that Christian Walton was about to enter a similar funk to the one he'd experienced 2 years prior, where 2 shots in every 3 he faced would go in.
Alex Palmer, with neither Muric's erratic mind nor Walton's shot-stopping yips, was a good, cost-effective solution. And had you asked me prior to the Manchester United game in February, I'd have said we'd be in a better place if we'd just done that transfer on New Year’s Day. However, at Old Trafford it became clear that our sole strategy for defending set pieces was for our massive Kosovan to barrel through all obstacles and emerge safely clutching the ball high above his head every time. Still, only the set piece opener conceded to Nottingham Forest was that impactful, so I still think it would have been worth going straight to Plan C.
With Palmer it might have helped to get it done quicker, with the other three January transfers the big question is whether they should have been done at all. We can start with the obvious one here - Ben Godfrey looked like a perfect addition but has barely played and really suffered when he did. No shade Ben, but we should have left you in Bergamo eating _Casoncelli alla Bergamasca_. Ultimately Dara O'Shea was the best cover for Axel Tuanzebe.
The other two cases are less clear cut. Jaden Philogene might end up being an excellent value signing who we'd have regretted passing up our opportunity to sign. Yet, this re-loaded save is just concerned with the relegation fight and nothing else. In pursuit of that immediate goal there were surely better uses of £20m? Beyond profiting from two goalkeeping mishaps in our loss at Old Trafford, Jaden didn't contribute an awful lot before crunching his knee and you'd assume not buying him would have left a bit of money for some more immediately useful additions.
Enciso's loan, well, I think we'd proceed with that one even with a do-over. Despite being unimpressed at times by how little care he takes with possession, there's a level of elite ball-carrying and game-breaking that we just don't have elsewhere in the squad. Besides, assuming the time missed by Szmodics, Chaplin, Broadhead, Hutchinson and Burns is still in the post (such is the nature of this parallel universe), we simply need the numbers!
Here’s where it gets a bit unfair on the people running the club, because I’m doing some imaginary transfers that probably couldn’t have actually happened for reasons beyond my knowledge. Yet having nixed the Philogene and Godfrey deals, I presume there's cash to hand for transfer fees and wages. We have decided a right back won't be necessary, so what should we do instead?
Fairly obvious at this point that what we ended up with in midfield group that was not nearly enough. Kalvin Phillips never put together the run of games we hoped for. As a result, the second half of the season has been largely on the shoulders of Sam Morsy and Jens Cajuste. Morsy has given a lot, but I suspect he would have been able to give more had he not been racking up quite so many minutes. Cajuste has some lovely attributes, but effectively covering a marauding left back like Leif Davis is not one of them. He could also have done with a bit more support.
What we really needed here was another midfielder with good defensive instincts to sub in for Morsy or Cajuste where necessary, preferably one with a lot of top-flight experience. Bit of height for set pieces would also be handy. Now, it would be nice here to just list any random midfielder I think would improve us. I’m sure Kieran McKenna and his team would have loved to add Phillip Billing to our midfield, but Napoli are a bit above our pay grade and we could not have had a third intra-Premier League loan.
Brighton off-loaded Jakub Moder permanently to Feyenoord for £1.2m in January and you wonder if that’s one who might have improved us. He certainly fit the bill in terms of being a big unit who makes a fair few tackles. Beyond Moder, there weren’t really any outgoing Premier League transfers we might conceivably have hijacked, unless we’d been willing recipients of the disgraced Mario Lemina from Wolves.
Finding midfield cover would almost certainly have involved stepping out of our comfort zone and looking overseas. I understand why we couldn’t. Not just that we don’t have the recruitment expertise, but also that we don’t have the networks, the contacts amongst clubs and agents, the brand name with players. We might have liked the look of Fotis Ioannidis in the Summer and even be prepared to pay the €30m fee, but he was barely a year old the last time an Ipswich striker was banging in Premier League goals. Who are we to these players? Just how persuasive is Kieran McKenna in Greek?
That’s players on the way up though. I do wonder though whether we might have turned some older heads. Players aged 28 or over in the other big European leagues have little future resale value, so you are probably competing only with their (much less rich) current employers. Take La Liga for instance. In 2023-24, ten of the twenty teams in La Liga recorded revenues less than £100m. Some very decent teams operate at a fraction of a Premier League budget. We’re not going to get any of their excellent youngsters, obviously. I enjoyed watching Las Palmas’ Alberto Moleiro recently, but overheard the commentator mention an upcoming move to Barcelona. Perhaps though there was a top tier Massimo Luongo amongst the Rayo Vallecanos and Osasunas of the world, just waiting for one big pay day?
Take Oscar Valentin, 30 years old, over 100 games in La Liga. He’s the most combative cog in an industrious mid-table team, making the most tackles in the division last season and in the top five for the same metric this year. Is that the kind of experienced pro we could have persuaded (with a big pay day) to come shore up our midfield? You would imagine the Philogene £20m would also have stretched to a right-winger of a similar genre, to add a bit more nous and composure to our rather callow front line.
This feels rather counter-intuitive, given how short we have generally been in terms of quality, but I do wonder if we might have nursed the energy of our players a little more by using the bench more and earlier. Of course, part of the issue here is a vicious cycle. We get injuries, so we don’t have strong options for rotation or substitution, so we flog the players who are left and get more injuries. These injuries have particularly affected our attacking players and we have usually been chasing games (losing), so McKenna has understandably been loath to make substitutions that weaken us offensively.
That said, in February and March, Leif Davis completed more or less the full 90 minutes in every game he was available for. Liam Delap was rarely substituted much before the 80th minute, despite there being no appreciable drop off from him to George Hirst. Omari Hutchinson generally played full nineties, even if we had another attacking midfielder on the bench and weren’t making any attacking headway. Would more minutes for George Hirst, Jack Clarke and Conor Townsend really have weakened us that much? I do wonder if sometimes we might have prioritised energy over quality, made our substitutions a little earlier and avoided some of the injuries we have accumulated.
Though really, even I’m feeling the weakness of that last one.
In truth, it’s all pretty thin stuff. Our form with Alex Palmer has been poor anyway, Ben Godfrey played in only two games and only one was really winnable. There’s probably a reason why Premier League clubs don’t recruit older players from La Liga. Really, I’m just hoping that with a bit more combativeness in midfield the fact we have two very good centre forwards and a couple of very neat attacking midfielders might have carried us over a few more lines.
Some might wonder where “play style” is in this list. Personally, I am sceptical that “pragmatism” (whatever we understand by that term) is a cheat code for consistently beating teams with much better players. I broadly buy Kieran McKenna’s explanation that the quality of the individuals on opposing teams has been the greatest obstacle for survival and that if there were one style solution we would have adopted it.
Perhaps only the sudden application of another £150m, PSR be damned, would have changed anything at all. I am open to suggestions though – how might you rescue our season with a save scum?