Welcome to the second part of this mini-series summarising my Football Manager 2021 beta career with Rennes. I’ve spent four seasons trying to progress Les Rouges et Noirs from Ligue 1 contenders to champions, while continuing to develop players through the youth system.
In Part 1, we looked at my first two seasons with Rennes, in which we had a few wobbles but gained some valuable learning experience. Could we now kick on in the third and fourth seasons, or would I be leaving France empty-handed?
SEASON 3 (2022/2023)
I began my third season at Rennes with a change of captain. Centre-half Damien Da Silva had been skipper since 2019, but he was now 34 years old, his legs had gone, and he was no longer good enough for Ligue 1. Da Silva was loaned out to Moreirense in Portugal to see out the final year of his contract.
Taking the armband was none other than France’s 2018 World Cup-winning captain Hugo Lloris. The 35-year-old goalkeeper had returned home on a Bosman free transfer following a decade at Tottenham, who signed Robin Olsen from us for £3.5million to replace him. I thought I’d pulled off a decent ‘swap’ there, though time would prove me wrong.
We also brought midfield workhorse Tiémoué Bakayoko back to Rennes – the club where he’d started his career – on a free from Chelsea. In another bargain deal, we took young forward Amine Gouiri off Nice for just £1.7million. Meanwhile, right-back Tin Jedvaj was sold to Real Sociedad as I welcomed in Kevin Mbabu from Wolfsburg and Almamy Touré from Eintract Frankfurt as his replacements.
The season began with a trip to China for the Trophée des Champions – the French Community Shield, basically. Serhou Guirassy gave us a half-time lead, but Paris Saint-Germain came back to win 2-1 and lift the trophy for a 10th straight year. I was determined that we would one day get our revenge and take some silverware from their hands.
That day wouldn’t come this season. Though we looked good at home, our away form was truly shocking, as we only won once on the road before Christmas (against Reims). This last-minute winner from Marseille basically summed up the state of our defending as soon as we left Brittany.
We were also very wasteful at the other end of the pitch, with M’Baye Niang especially struggling to convert chances as regularly as he used to. That meant we sat in 8th as club football paused for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which Germany won by beating Sweden in the Final. (Seriously, what is it with Sweden reaching World Cup Finals on Fuller FM?!)
We restarted the Ligue 1 campaign by thumping Bordeaux 4-1, but then lost back-to-back games at Nantes and Toulouse to drop to 12th. After Toulouse beat us again in the Coupe de France, I was about to lose my head. That meant somebody had to lose theirs – to the guillotine.
Lloris’ recent form had been awful. So awful, in fact, that I immediately stripped him of the armband, dropped him to the reserves, and put him on the transfer list. Alas, shifting Hugo was like pushing a very expensive white elephant up a staircase, as Steve Irving and the Rennes board were being ridiculously stubborn.
Luckily, that was just a game bug. Two months and one major update later, I finally managed to move Lloris on to Saudi Arabian club Al-Hilal – for a mere £2million.
Replacing Lloris was my fourth first-choice goalkeeper in three seasons – Edouard Mendy, who returned to Rennes from Chelsea on an initial loan deal that we later made permanent for £7.5million. Further upfield, I took Bayern München striker Matías Arezo on loan, and loaned out teenage forward Firas Ben Belgacem to Nice for some valuable experience.
Meanwhile, I paid St Gallen £13.5million for 20-year-old Leonidas Stergiou, partly in response to a centre-back crisis. Regular starters Jérôme Onguéné and Nikola Milenkovic kicked off after I rejected Barcelona’s offers for their services. Third-choice Nayef Aguerd also became unsettled when I refused to let him speak to Fiorentina. Mid-table Serie A side Fiorentina.
All three sulked through the end of the transfer window, but I stood my ground, and they eventually calmed down a few weeks later. Milenkovic was the first to relent, and he was rewarded with a big new contract – and the vice-captaincy, which I took off Onguéné after a dip in form from the Cameroonian.
So who was our new full-time captain? Why, it was Eduardo Camavinga, who I trusted to lead Rennes just a couple of months after he exited his teens. Putting my faith in such a young skipper paid off, as we won our next five league games consecutively – and lost only two in the remainder of the season.
Things were also going well on the continent. The Champions League group phase had been a bit of a struggle, as Liverpool lynched us 5-0 at Anfield, and we needed a final-round away draw with Atalanta to sneak through in 2nd. We then saw off Porto in the Last 16 before advancing to our first Quarter Final, where we valiantly lost to Manchester City by just a single goal.
Then, as is Rennes tradition, we cranked through the gears and ended the league campaign very strongly. A stunning 3-0 home win over PSG and a shock comeback from three goals down to draw at Nice were the highlights as we somehow finished runners-up for a third straight year. In fact, we ended up with 76 points – two more than in each of the previous two seasons!
Though Guirassy led the scoring charts with 19 goals, Arezo netted 12 in just 18 matches during a very productive but brief stay in Brittany. Left-back Faitout Maouassa and attacking midfielder Dominik Szoboszlai had also enjoyed fine campaigns, getting 13 and 14 assists respectively. If everybody else could pull together, surely the 2023/2024 season would be one to remember…
SEASON 4 (2023/2024)
Compared to the summer of 2022, the build-up to the 2023/2024 season was fairly quiet. We had a mini-clearout, flogging Aguerd to Nice for £4million, and raising a further £9million through selling utility men Yann Gboho and James Lea Siliki. We also finally managed to get August Erlingmark and Alessandro Schöpf off the books.
Having re-signed Mendy permanently, I focussed the rest of my recruitment further upfield. Former loanee striker Eddie Nketiah‘s contract at Arsenal had expired, and after seeing the Londoner bag goals aplenty on loan at Villarreal, I brought him back on a Bosman. A second Englishman soon joined Nketiah at Rennes, on-loan Liverpool youngster Curtis Jones became Szoboszlai’s new attacking midfield understudy.
I also gave more opportunities to three of our best youth prospects. 17-year-old right-back Loïc Dany Nicolas was promoted to the first team, along with 19-year-old Lesley Ugochukwu, who’d developed into a quality box-to-box midfielder during a year-long loan at Gent.
And then there was the jewel of our youth system. Ben Belgacem had scored 10 goals in 18 games during his half-season at Nice and was now ready to establish himself as a Rennes regular. Firas set out his stall at the Trophée des Champions in the Ivory Coast, scoring the final goal of a 3-1 comeback win over PSG that earned me my first trophy with Les Rouges et Noirs! It wouldn’t be my last.
Mind you, we didn’t make the strongest start to our Ligue 1 campaign. A Szoboszlai masterclass earned us an easy opening-day win over Lens, but we twice squandered leads against Lorient before Montpellier held us at home. With just five points from our first three fixtures, I felt our jigsaw was missing a couple of pieces.
After taking France centre-back Samuel Umtiti on loan from PSG, I paid Arsenal a club-record £39million for the quality right-forward our team was sorely lacking. With his pace, flair and technique, Nicolas Pépé was a significant upgrade on Martin Terrier, who was sent to Red Bull Salzburg on loan after three years in which his form yo-yoed from terrible to terrific.
With our team complete, we were now ready to take French and European football by storm. We won all our matches in September without conceding, while a couple of 3-1 away wins over Lyon and Marseille in October made it clear that we were serious contenders.
Then, on 4 November, we did this:
Yes, we really did beat Bordeaux 9-1, thanks to a hat-trick for Ben Belgacem, who had caught fire on our left wing. Firas was our star performer in the first half of the season, scoring 13 goals in 18 games, and posting an average match rating of 7.38! His wonderkid status would soon be confirmed when he won the 2023 European Golden Boy award.
That was followed by seven consecutive clean-sheet wins in the league. At the halfway stage, we were still unbeaten on 51 points – seven ahead of PSG – and had a goal difference of +40.
Indeed, our only defeats so far had been in both Champions League group games against our now-perennial rivals Liverpool. Fortunately, we took maximum points off Barcelona and Charleroi to stay in the competition and set up a Round of 16 clash with Benfica.
Things had gone so brilliantly that I obviously didn’t want to shake up the squad too much in January. Our only new signing was yet another Arsenal boy – Swedish ‘model professional’ Jonathan Augustinsson, who would be the new backup to our ever-impressive left-back Maouassa.
Our imperious form continued through the first two months of 2024, and not even a second draw with Montpellier could derail us. Pépé scored twice to see off Marseille in the Coupe de France, before a brace from Gouiri eliminated Lille and set up a Semi Final at home to Nîmes.
Though we couldn’t breach the Nîmes defence in the first half, Nketiah struck twice early in the second before a Maouassa cross-goal finished them off. We were through to our first Coupe de France Final in five years, where we would be strong favourites to beat lowly Amiens. Before that, though, we had to get through a difficult run of matches that would either make or break our season.
A few days before the Cup Semi, we went to Paris to try and stop Thomas Tuchel’s megastars from chipping at our lead. Firas had gone off the boil lately, but the young superstar roared back to life and made all the difference at the Parc des Princes. His 11th-minute goal was the only one as we pulled even further clear!
We then ground out four more points by drawing at home to Marseille and winning at Lyon, before Firas completed a 5-2 aggregate win over Benfica in the Champions League. That sent us through to a Quarter Final against Pep Guardiola’s Inter, whom we battled past with a couple of single-goal wins to reach the Semis.
When some might have expected us to crumble under the pressure of a possible treble-winning season (and an unbeaten domestic campaign), we only grew stronger. We swept through April with eight wins straight, including a classy 3-0 victory over Amiens at the Stade de France to lift the Coupe.
Immediately after that was an epic home leg in our Champions League Semi Final against the only team to have bested us this season. Yep, we had yet again been pitted with Liverpool… but we brushed aside any painful memories from our Group Stage defeats to win by the odd goal in five.
Before the second leg at Anfield, focus switched back to Ligue 1. Leading PSG by 11 points with just four league games to play, we only needed to beat Angers at home to bring a first league championship to Roazhon Park. Surely we’d blow it and lose our unbeaten record, right?
No chance. Onguéné and Szoboszlai got the second-half goals that beat Angers 2-0 and confirmed Rennes as champions of France. Naturally, the board were delirious with delight:
Chairman Irving was probably a bit more excited after our next game. We went to Liverpool, staved off virtually everything Jürgen Klopp’s men threw at us, and came away with a 2-1 win to go through 5-3 on aggregate! Unbelievably, Rennes were in the Champions League Final!
We would soon be back on English soil for a Wembley showdown with Real Madrid, but now we had the chance to seal our immortality – and complete a French league campaign without losing a single game.
For our 36th match, we went to mid-table Nîmes. This was more of a struggle than I was expecting, and after 73 minutes, a home corner deflected into our net off an unfortunate Dany Nicolas. It was the first time we’d fallen behind in a league game this season.
It looked like we’d thrown away our shot at history. Then came the 91st minute. Cue Dominik Szoboszlai. Cue Firas Ben Belgacem. Cue Celine Dion (okay, maybe not…).
That goal might have only got us a 1-1 draw, but it felt like a match-winner! From that moment when Ben Belgacem – now a 19-year-old senior France international – stroked Szoboszlai’s centre in from close range, I knew that we were going to pull it off!
Sure enough, we cruised through our final two matches, putting four goals apiece past Toulouse and Lens to achieve the impossible.
In 22 years of playing Championship and Football Manager, I have NEVER had an unbeaten league season… until now!
Just one match remained. If we could defeat 13-time winners Real Madrid at Wembley in the Champions League Final, we would become just the second French team to lift the European Cup (and the first to do it WITHOUT fixing our league matches beforehand).
Alas, not all fairytales have the perfect ending. Vinícius Júnior was clinical for Real in the first half; we were wasteful in the second. After 40 consecutive matches unbeaten in all competitions, we had nothing left to give… but it had still been a sensational season.
Ben Belgacem and Szoboszlai had been our two outstanding performers throughout the campaign, each hitting double figures on both goals and assists. Firas finished his first full season as a regular starter on a highly-impressive 25 goals, with Pépé (17), Nketiah (15) and Guirassy (13) also chipping in pretty regularly.
The impact of our midfielders couldn’t be ignored. Camavinga and Bakayoko kept us ticking over with some impressive passing, while Ugochukwu blossomed to the point where he would soon be ready to start regularly. Even Benjamin Bourigeaud was still doing a fine job at 30, despite having broken his leg a couple of years earlier.
But of course, our attacking endeavours would’ve meant nothing had our defence been made of Roquefort cheese. Maouassa enjoyed another productive campaign at left-back, and Mendy was almost spotless in his first full season back between the Rennes posts. And in their third season together, Onguéné and Milenkovic had established an impenetrable central partnership that Barcelona could only dream of acquiring.
What a team. What a season. What a career.
And that’s a summary of my FM21 career with Rennes. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.
I’ve written one more post for this mini-series, which will go live on Monday. I’ll be going into more detail about the players – and the tactics – that helped us to complete an unbeaten league campaign.
Fuller FM 
You must be logged in to post a comment.