Season 5 was the first full season for the Motherwell Eagles in Spark 90 and I’ve learned a lot over the last 6 weeks. In this article we’ll take a look at how things went on the field and off before we take a look at what lessons we can learn for season 6 and beyond.

Before we get into how it’s gone for the Motherwell Eagles, I want to quickly discuss my experience on MFL as a whole. I’ve had a blast playing MFL this season. Managing the Eagles to some upsets victories has been real rewarding to see. But seeing my players progress has been the highlight for me so far, I’m already itching for next season to start to get the players back in training!

It’s also been great to join the MFL community on Discord and Twitter. I’ve really enjoyed writing some articles on the tactics testing I’ve been working through during the season. The response to articles has also been great, it’s great to see there is some interest in the community for written articles.

If you fancy giving MFL a go sign up using this link and we’ll both earn a free common card when you spend $25 in the pack Store.

The League

I was targeting 7th place going into the season, hoping we could get the better of Husqvarna Gunsmiths. However, we could only manage 8th ahead of the 4 sides with worse squads than us. In fairness, Husqvarna improved a bit since I set my targets for the season so I’m not too concerned with the final position.

In fact, the league most played out according to the strength ratings on MFL Manager. Only the team between 3rd and 5th aren’t don’t match the overall ratings. Unreal Madrid are the under performers of the season, they should have been 3rd according to the projections, but too many losses see them well adrift of Wings of Fury.

For the Eagles, it was a very mixed bag of results. We underperformed at times, taking just 1 point from our two games against bottom of the table Reiskocher Akademie. However, we did over perform in some games as well managing wins against Golden Bay MFC and Unreal Madrid MFC and a draw against MSC Leonding.

Overall, I’m happy with where we finished the season. I’d like to think I can get the team to overperform in future seasons, but meeting expectations is definitely a good start. I would like to see us be a bit more consistent against the weaker teams in future seasons!

The IMFF Cup

The plan going into the competition was to prioritise the cup games and make it into the knockout rounds. It’s a disappointment not to achieve that, especially with us having control of our fate going into the final game. With the Cup drawing groups with similar overalls, it perhaps isn’t a huge surprise to go it – all things being equal you would expect to qualify 50% of the time.

We at least picked up 2 wins which earned us a total of 100 MFL.

Progression

I’m really happy with how progression has gone this season, the squad have totalled 19 separate overall increases spread across 14 players in the squad. Those increase included 3 tier breaks from common to limited. On top of that there were also stat increases for Franz Schumacher, Ivan Zanetti and Hans Eichhorn.

Karlheinz Stangl was the pick of the bunch going up 3 overall this season. He has picked up some stat increases since his last overall change so he’s got at least one more point of potential available. Stangl has been best purchase on MFL progression-wise, I picked him up off the market as a brand new 56 rated player before the Redemption Cup last year. He turns 28 next year so hopefully he can avoid relegation for a few more years and continue to progress nicely.

The rest of the starters progressed well for the most part, with Martin Beck and Timmy Cooper also recording multiple overall increases. Perhaps to be expected given those players have earned the most match experience in the squad. Claudio Lombardo and Henrik Ohman were the two outliers among the starters in not gaining any overall increases, but at 22 and 23 there’s still some hope of progression to come.

Finally, it’s great to see 17 year-old Shane Garcia has already progressed by one point overall. I got Garcia from the mid-season pack drop and he’s managed 9 games since joining the club. Hopefully, this is a sign of more to come over the next couple of seasons!

Early Thoughts on Season 6

If we want to get promoted anytime soon, there is going to need to be significant investment into the Eagles’ squad. Strength of players seems to be the biggest factor in Even a two or three more seasons of the progression we got this year would only make us competitive for a playoff spot. Expecting these players to not have their development slow down would probably be naive.

I could look to loan the players needed in, but if we went up we’d then need to loan even more in to try and stay in Ice. It would likely cost me a pretty big percentage of my MFL and would mean I wouldn’t see the long term benefits of progression, which has been really fun to track over the season. So that would leave a pretty significant investment in players to go up and a similar or greater investment the following season to stay up.

For now, I am leaning more towards a second club rather than trying to fund a promotion push. I think I’ve got plenty to learn still tactically and I’d like to have a place to try and develop the lower overall players in my Agency. It would also be a nice source of extra MFL to help add new players through reward packs. For now, I’m holding fire for now, but I’m tempted by the licence plus starter pack promotion.

Regardless of what I end up doing, we need to tighten up defensively. We conceded in all but 3 of our 28 games this season which is obviously terrible. The goals conceded number is really high as well, although it’s exaggerated a little bit by some huge losses against the top sides when I rotated heavily to target the Cup. This is going to be the main focus of my testing heading into the new season, a more solid defensive foundation preferably without impact us going forward too much.

If you fancy giving MFL a go sign up using this link and we’ll both earn a free common card when you spend $25 in the pack Store.