Welcome back to my Football Manager 2024 series, where I’m about to finish my first season as Millwall manager.
In the previous chapter, we began the Championship campaign with some erratic results, requiring a mid-season change of tactics. Now we’re back in form – and hoping to make a charge into the play-off places.
Today, I’ll round up our January transfer activity before going through the second half of the 2023/2024 season. Can we hit the bullseye like Aidomo Emakhu in his goal celebrations… or will we miss our play-off target? And if we do miss out, will the board send me packing?
JANUARY WINDOW & YOUTH INTAKE
Just to remind you, we went into the new year over £1.5million in debt and over our wage budget, which meant we couldn’t afford to make major changes to the squad in January. My Millwall rebuild won’t begin in earnest until the summer.
Before we could bring in any new faces, I had to free up some wages. Utility man Ryan Leonard and midfielder George Honeyman were both made available for transfer, though neither attracted any acceptable bids. However, I did offload someone…
Zian Flemming might have been Millwall’s star man under the old regime, but the Dutch attacker never really clicked with my tactics. Belgian champions Antwerp agreed to take Flemming on an initial loan deal, and they will pay us £8million to make the transfer permanent in the summer.
Zian’s departure left me scrambling for another striker, without success. My top two targets each rejected our offers to move to Germany instead – and even former West Ham striker André Ayew decided he would rather play for Alcorcón in Spain than return to London!
Luckily, I did bring in the backup left-back I wanted, signing Liam Scales on loan from Celtic with an optional £275,000 transfer fee. The 25-year-old Irishman was reliable, professional and has good technique, so he would be a handy deputy for the excellent Joe Bryan. He can also play at centre-half if needed.
Unfortunately, my efforts to loan in another Irish talent – Norwich’s left-winger Tony Springett – fell through on deadline day. Bloody fax machine.
Later in the year, I welcomed my first youth intake – and I was very excited to see a talented centre-back called Nethercott in the ranks. Stuart Nethercott played over 200 league games for Millwall between 1998 and 2003, and hopes are high that Seanan Nethercott will follow in his footsteps. Seanan is a brave and aggressive stopper (as Stuart was), but his low determination and ambition are a concern.
Alexis Dynan shows some promise as a pressing forward, but he’s a fiery character who doesn’t get on with referees. I’ll also be keeping an eye on ball-winning midfielder Eric Doidge, who’s got good passing and stamina already.
But let’s now rewind back to the start of 2024, and see how the second half of our Championship season panned out…
JANUARY TO FEBRUARY 2024: BACK ON TRACK?
2024 began with a bang, as loanee winger Ryan Longman produced some ‘unbelievable tekkerz’ to help us defeat Bristol City at Ashton Gate.
And to think, I was about to send Longman back to Hull until he finally hit form just before Christmas!
January was also a month to remember for young forward Aidomo Emakhu, who scored in three consecutive games, including the second in a brilliant comeback over Middlesbrough. He had another three-game scoring streak in February, when he gave us early leads against Sheffield Wednesday (who promptly rolled over) and Southampton (who, er, did not).
After the Boro game, we went to QPR, where fellow starlet Romain Esse opened the scoring after just 39 seconds. Rangers keeper Asmir Begović then made a load of brilliant saves – including from Kevin Nisbet‘s 89th-minute penalty – as the hosts came back to salvage a draw. Drat.
Even when Emakhu wasn’t scoring, we could now rely on Duncan Watmore to hit the net. He was our hero in a 2-0 home win over Gary Rowett’s new team Preston, which lifted us to 7th place. Also in that game…
Matija Šarkić somehow broke his collarbone while catching the ball… or was it because he got hit by the ball? Either way, I have questions.
Regardless, Matija was out for the best part of two months. While third-choice keeper Connal Trueman played well to keep a clean sheet, our usual backup Bartosz Białkowski was back between the posts for our next few games, in which his form was… inconsistent.
Oh, and I won’t dwell too much on that FA Cup game against Reading. We were awful for 80 minutes, somehow came back from 2-0 down, and then Robbie Savage’s kid scored a 96th-minute free-kick to knock us out. I always preferred Chris Sutton anyway.
A mixed bag of results in February left us in 8th place – just one point off the play-off spots. Could we now March into the top six?
MARCH 2024: BOTTLE JOBS?
Urgh, this was miserable. A frustrating month began against Watford, where Tom Bradshaw eventually fired us into the lead in the 81st minute, only for the Hornets to sting us in the 89th. (By the way, Watford had already sacked TWO managers by this point in the season. Never change, fellas.)
We drew our next two games as well. While I was delighted at holding league leaders Blackburn at Ewood Park, I wasn’t so delighted with this result against Wayne Rooney’s Birmingham City™…
Birmingham went a man down after just five minutes, when Ivan Šunjić tried to chop Longman’s ankles off. We battered them in the first half, didn’t break through until early in the second… and then our defence completely switched off. A deflected goal from captain Shaun Hutchinson at least saved us a point – but for the first time in this save, I was tempted to hit the bottle.
I resisted… for the time being.
A couple of narrow defeats later, we found ourselves back down in 11th place – five points adrift of where we wanted to be. It seemed that opposing teams were now getting wise to our 4-4-2, and that we had to try some alternative tactics.
APRIL TO MAY 2024: THE RUN-IN
The run-in began with back-to-back trips to Yorkshire. We switched to a low-block 3-4-3 at Rotherham, soaking up their attacks before Esse scored twice on the counter. Our six-game winless run was over, and I was confident of taking more precious points five days later at Huddersfield.
And then our right-back Brooke Norton-Cuffy – in tandem with our returning keeper Šarkić – produced this.
I couldn’t take it any longer.
After their first experience of the Fuller water bottle treatment, the Millwall players roared back like Lions. A three-goal, second-half blitz blew away promotion-chasing Leicester, before another triple saw off our play-off rivals Cardiff. With just three games remaining, we had once again pulled us tantalisingly close to the top six..
…and then we slipped away again. Having fallen 2-0 behind at Sunderland after just nine minutes, we fought back to salvage a 2-2 draw, but a home stalemate against Plymouth effectively ended our play-off hopes.
We still had a mathematical chance of qualification on the final day – but we had to beat Swansea, and then hope that Stoke couldn’t beat Bristol City, Cardiff lost to relegated Rotherham, AND Birmingham lost heavily to Norwich. Simples.
Of course, we couldn’t even get that first bit right. The Lions defence went off on another early holiday, requiring another two-goal comeback to return home with a single point. Even a win wouldn’t have been enough, though, as Cardiff and Stoke each won their matches with ease.
To be honest, we didn’t throw the play-offs away in those final games, as Millwall usually do. We threw it away with those winless runs in October and March. If you want to challenge for promotion, you need to be consistently resilient throughout the whole season – not just for a few weeks at a time.
2023/2024 SEASON REVIEW
This has been a strange first season at The Den. We weren’t great, we weren’t terrible. We were just… Meh-wall.
To illustrate my point, we only had one player get an average rating above 7.00. That was Šarkić, who kept 11 clean sheets and was generally a fine shot-stopper, though his decision-making wasn’t always great. I’ll look to bring in a more experienced goalkeeper to give him competition next season, especially as Białkowski is going back home to Poland.
The rest of the defence was pretty efficient. Only Leeds and Leicester conceded fewer goals than us, and we limited our opponents to scoring just 10% of their shots – the lowest in the division.
Though we faced more shots than we took, we were pretty clinical going forward on the counter-attack – outscoring our xG by over 10 goals, and having a 16% shot conversion rate. Emakhu led the way with 17 goals (15 in the league), while Bradshaw got 13, and Watmore kicked on in the second half of the season to finish with 9. Don’t ask about Nisbet.
Finishing isn’t really a problem, but creating is. Though teenage winger Esse showed flashes of brilliance in his breakthrough season, our crossing wasn’t great. One of my aims for this summer window is to bring in some higher-quality wide players.
We’ll need at least one new right-back, maybe even two. Danny McNamara has been kicking up a fuss about wanting a new contract pretty much all season, and our relationship has got so bad that he’ll now be “exploring his options” as he enters the final year of his current deal. In FM terms, that means we either sell Danny now… or watch him rise up and leave on a free transfer next summer. (If you understand that reference, I’ll give you a warm Embrace.)
I’ll also want to get more out of Billy Mitchell, who could develop into a leading Championship playmaker with a little more help from his team-mates. A dynamic box-to-box midfielder is also on my wishlist, with Allan Campbell heading back to Luton after a fairly underwhelming loan spell.
It’s going to be a busy summer at Millwall. Long-time Fuller FM readers will know the pitfalls of changing too much too quickly, so I’ll try to rebuild sensibly rather than just ripping out half the team. And I’m sure the board will support me on that, right?
Ah… yeah… they’re angry because we didn’t make it to the play-offs, aren’t they? At least the Millwall fans are happy because we’re now an ‘established’ Championship team (though I’m pretty sure we were already established). In fact, their support is probably the only reason why I haven’t even been given a vote of confidence, let alone the sack!
Funnily enough, I’ve been here before. In the first season of my last big Millwall save on Football Manager 2017, we finished 11th (in League One) and my job was insecure. In the second season, we were promoted as champions.
Seven FMs later, maybe history will repeat itself…
And so my first year at Millwall comes to a disappointing end. While we might have missed out on the play-offs this time, I will give myself two more seasons to lead the Lions into the Premier League.
‘Millwall Firewall’ returns next week, as I unveil a host of new signings at The Den – and bring you the opening stages of the 2024/2025 Championship season!
Fuller FM 
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