You can read the Prologue to the series here!

Our first action is to sell Diafra Sakho, which we successfully manage to do. £24,000 is removed from the wage bill instantly and we get a small chunk of cash for him in the process.

Our season kicks off with a pre-season which is, to put it nicely, average.

Goalless draws against Chelsea and Werder Bremen are decent enough, however a draw against Bourg en Bresse 01 and defeat to Gladbach are less than ideal. The victories are convincing at least, even if they’re against pretty weak opposition.

Still, the pre-season is just about getting players adjusted to the system and the results aren’t really important, even if I do still find it annoying when I don’t win.

The squad is getting on well after the pre-season too. Da Silva is the standout Team Leader, understandable as the club captain, however the team isn’t short of Highly Influential Players. There’s some leaders in this squad.

To confirm, our competition expectations are set. We need to finish in the top half of Ligue 1, get to the Second Knockout Round of the Europa League and reach the Quarter Finals of both the Coupe de la Ligue and Coupe de France.

Sadly, our first game of the season isn’t exactly an easy one. Due to the club’s unexpected Coupe de France win last season, our opening game of the season is the major-trophy-if-we-win-it-but-definitely-just-a-glorified-friendly-if-we-lose-it, Trophée des Champions against the French League winners, PSG.

Needless to say, we’re huge underdogs going into the game. PSG have a ridiculous team which is a contender for Champions League success, while we’re predicted a mid-table finish. Some would look at this and call it getting my excuses in early and, well, you’re probably right.

Our squad we put out is pretty much the strongest we have available to us, with Niang and Mendy away on international duty with Senegal at the AFCON. PSG’s team, however, is ludicrous by comparison. Our midfield trio of Clement Grenier, Jonas Martin and 16-year-old Eduardo Camavinga is up against Marquinhos, Ander Herrera and Marco Verratti. Then there’s the attacking trio of Neymar, Mbappé and Cavani, which is going to be virtually impossible to keep out.

Miraculously, we manage to take the lead after half an hour as Adrien Hunou gets on the end of a corner. The excitement is short-lived, however, as Juan Bernat lashes a shot into top bins from the corner of the penalty area just on the stroke of half-time. We do go on to keep PSG’s front three out and take them to penalties, where Hunou turns from hero to clumsy bastard, blasting his penalty over the bar and, after Jonas Martin had already had his penalty saved, putting the nail in the coffin for us.

Still, if this was a league game we’d have got a point, which against the obvious title favourites is more than acceptable. Besides, Camavinga earns the title of Youngest Trophée des Champions Player of all time, so the moral victory is really ours in our quest to become the ultimate squad of youth development.

Who cares anyway, this is just a glorified friendly, this fixture is stupid, PSG are stupid, nobody can defeat me, I created myself.

The title odds are in and, if you fancied winning yourself maybe, just maybe, winning £35, you could put a cheeky £1 on Stade Rennais to win the title. 35-1 is actually very poor odds considering the absolute mountain we have to climb to surpass the likes of PSG, Lyon and Monaco. Is a bookie really trying to claim that the chances of Rennes, a club which has literally never won Ligue 1 in its entire history and has just sold its two best players over the summer in Ismaïla Sarr and Hatem Ben Arfa, winning the title is only 35/1?!

Our opening game of the season is another 1-1 draw, this time against Saint-Etienne, a team I will immaturely refer to as ASSE for the rest of my time during this blog because it looks a bit like ass. Niang marks his return to the team after the AFCON with an equalising goal after ASSE take the lead early on.

Despite the scoreline, we are dominant in both possession and attacking intent – with 16 shots to their 5. However, in true Football Manager fashion, every single one of their shots is on target and one of them goes in, whilst 11 of our 16 are off-target and we only manage to score one ourselves. Regardless, the possession stats are what we’re really looking at and, for only our second game of the season, the signs are promising.

Next is a game against Bordeaux, a routine 1-0 win in which the real man of the moment is our boy, my boy, my golden child, the Rennes wonderkid, Eduardo Camavinga. With 82 minutes on the clock, it’s looking desperate as we’re still at 0-0. We’re dominant in possession and we’re having the lion’s share of the attacking opportunities yet, once again, we’re wasteful in front of goal and struggling to make anything stick.

Then, it comes.

The moment.

Like Messi’s first goal for Barcelona, it is a moment which will come to define the career of one of the game’s greatest ever players.

The Congolese Zinedine Zidane steps up. As the ball is played into him at the edge of the area, he’s got a split-second decision to make. Does he play a through-ball to Niang, who is running into the box ahead of him? Does he square it to Bourigeaud who is directly to his left?

No.

He gets his head down like a world-class footballer does. He thinks, “I’m ‘aving this, pal”, like the very best players in the game do on a regular basis. He’s watched enough compilations of Kevin De Bruyne long shots, played enough FIFA, played enough Football Manager, to know that if you simply put your weight behind it and smash your laces through the middle of the ball, there’s a good chance that the keeper is going to inexplicably let the shot go in despite the fact that he’s stood virtually right where the ball is going.

And he doesn’t disappoint.

He hits it from roughly 20 yards and the ball thunders into the inside of the side-netting. The keeper is rooted, he’s got no chance. The stadium erupts. I drop to my knees, screaming with joy as if it was my own child. In fact, what do I mean “as if”? He is my child. Eduardo Camavinga is mine.

Anyway, it’s three points. Two games into the season and we’re unbeaten. Is this the beginning of an unprecedented title charge for Stade Rennais? Are we going to do the unthinkable? Are we the French Leicester? Will we-

Maybe not.

Okay, so we’re brought crashing back down to reality with a bang. Mid-table beckons.

An August which is, as far as the league is concerned, as average as it comes is not over yet. There’s still the small matter of the transfer window and we have two players incoming, sticking with our promise of only signing French players who are 18 years old or younger.





First to come in is Leny Payraudeu, a 16 year old from Angers who will slot straight into our U19 squad. Potential is high, Passing is high, Technique is high, Acceleration and Natural Fitness are high, it’s mostly the mental side of his game which needs work. Definitely one to watch.





The next, and last of this transfer window, is Evann Guessand, a striker we poach from Nice. He looks like game time is the main thing he’s really missing – his stats are mostly pretty decent, though his Off The Ball movement could do with some real work and, as a player with 8 Work Rate, he’s not got the most endeavour. He wants an immediate loan move, so I stick him on the loan list and try to drum up some interest.

Elsewhere, inside the Death Star, UEFA hold the Europa League and Champions League group stage draw.

It’s not an easy group, by any means. Sporting will be our toughest opponents, however PAOK and AZ, as well as looking like somebody jumbled up the alphabet, will not be pushovers.

The transfer window closes with our two pieces of business done and dusted. We offered Guessand out on loan and nobody fancied taking an 18 year old who’s just signed for his new club a week after he signed for them. No matter, I thought, this won’t be a problem.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Guessand immediately demands to see me and wants to know why I didn’t get him the loan move he wanted. I tell him that I offered him out on loan and that nobody was interested, mostly because I did offer him out on loan and nobody was interested. This isn’t good enough, apparently, and Guessand decides that the only course of action is to demand that I sell him, literally a week after I’ve bought him.

Obviously the answer is no and one of our two signings already hates me. Great start.

Lastly, our monthly performance review is a C+, which is probably to be expected considering we’ve had four whole games, one of which was a meaningless glorified friendly which I’m definitely not permanently scarred by.

Our Tactics get a B, our transfers get a B-. The only two things that are really properly possible to critique have come back with good results. We’re on the right track.

After the international break we’re immediately back in action against Angers. After the Lyon result and, as Angers should be a team we’re capable of beating, I go with the more attack-minded 4-2-3-1 formation. The 4-3-3 has yielded inconsistent results so far so, this early in the season, there’s no harm in mixing things up.

The switch of formation goes down a treat as we come out 2-1 winners against both Angers and Brest, with our CAM, Rafik Guitane, getting on the scoresheet both times and earning himself two MOTM performances. Have we found a winning tactic? Have we found ourselves a wonderkid waiting in the wings?





We’ll have to wait to find out, as our first game in the Europa League is coming up and we’re away to AZ Alkmaar, who are thankfully not being managed by @FormerFMPodcast, and for some reason I have a superstition, rightly or wrongly, that a 4-3-3 is always the best formation for European competition. I apparently have some kind of prejudiced view that the Europeans, who brought the 4-3-3 to our shores, can’t handle playing against that very formation for some reason.

Regardless of how Brexity my opinion may be, it turns out that it’s absolutely the correct Brexity opinion. The travelling Rennes faithful are rewarded for their journey as we beat AZ 2-0 courtesy of a Niang penalty and a second goal from Jonas Martin. Our life in the Europa League gets off to a good start and we’re immediately in the driving seat for the group as Sporting, our rivals for the top spot in the group, suffer a shock defeat to PAOK in the other fixture.

Sadly this is not the only mid-week game we have, as over the next seven days we have games against both Marseille and Lille, bringing two defeats along with them. Both are games in which we just about edge the possession stats and go relatively toe-to-toe with them in terms of shots, however it’s our lack of clinical finishing which lets us down. There’s a lot of shouting and abuse hurled at the forward players in the dressing room after each defeat which vaguely resembles Mike Bassett.





I’m quickly realising that we have basically no depth in the forward areas. Our back-up to Hunou is Siebatcheu, who looks nowhere close to scoring a goal whenever I try to mix things up and bring him onto the pitch. Niang and Raphinha are both so obviously better than the depth we have behind them that, even if they’re playing a 6.5 game, it doesn’t feel worthwhile bringing them off because Del Castillo probably isn’t good enough to do anything in his place.

There’s only one solution – buy a centre-back.

Benoît Badiashile is a player who has always been highly rated and this is the perfect excuse to make him a part of the team. Word gets out that Monaco haven’t registered him for their first team squad and this is our moment to pounce. With him being somebody who will immediately drop into our first team, it’s worth spending a little bit of extra money on him.





Our final game of the month is against Dijon, a team we should really be beating. Thanks to a solitary goal from Adrien Hunou, we do just that in a game which is, to put it politely, very boring.

And so that’s September complete and it’s not been too bad. Three Ligue 1 victories along with a good start to our Europa League campaign is nothing to be turning our noses up at.

As it’s the end of the month, we’ve got our Monthly Manager Performance Review.

I’ve got a C+ which is fairly average. Nothing more to really be expected at this stage of the season, it’s the individual breakdown of the various factors which interests me more.

Club Vision earns a C because it’s far too early in the season to tell where we’ll end up. Matches is basically the same, though I think our Europa League win is what has earned us a C+.

On the transfers front, the board have given me a C+ despite one of the pieces of criticism from the board being the amount of money we spent on Leny Payraudeau. The fans are happier (presumably because they don’t care about finances, giving us a B-.

Tactics is where we’re most successful, earning a B+ with our attacking football. Tiki-Taka is earning us high praise indeed from the board.

Squad harmony is at a B-, as everybody seems to be getting on well and the wins in the month have got everybody’s spirits up.

Whilst pretty irrelevant at this stage of the season, we sit in 7th place with 8 games played. Of course, we’re two bad results away from potentially dropping as far down as 14th, as is the nature of these early fixtures, but we’re looking on track to meet the target that the board has set with almost a quarter of the season played. The obvious concern is that Lyon are bound to bounce above us eventually, however looking at the likes of Nimes, Nantes and Strasbourg, you have to be thinking that this purple patch won’t last forever.

Just checking in on the U19s, there’s been some good growth from almost all of the players. The progressions are all on a positive trajectory and it’s great to see a visual representation of the growth, rather than having to rely on going into individual player summaries.

Eduardo Camavinga, my boy, is growing steadily in the early stages of the season. His determination has seen a rise, which is odd for a youngster already getting first team games. Typically once I throw a young player into the first team his determination immediately starts to plummet, though it’s good to see that things are different this time around.

Now we’ve got the transfers and the first couple of months out of the way, it’s time to get accelerating with this blog. Follow me on Twitter here and join us next time where we get stuck into the remainder of the first half of the season to see how the league campaign shapes up for us.

You can read Part Two here!