Puedo sentir que el ritmo se acelera!
In my younger days, I had my fair share of travelling around Europe via Interrail but Spain was one of the few European countries that I didn´t visit those days and haven´t visited even up today.
There have been organized trips from my home country Finland to the Canary Island for over 60 years. It has been the most popular holiday destination for us Finns for many years and in the islands, there is a strong community of Finns escaping the cold winter here in the outer banks of northern Europe.
Recently we were discussing where we should plan our next family holiday and quite easily we came to the solution that the Canary Islands would be the best option at the moment for our family. So this, of course, brought an idea to my head that relates to the game we all love: what is the football situation in the Canary Island?
I already knew two of the biggest club, Las Palmas and Teneriffe but I didn´t want to take on a big club. So I kept searching and searching until I found the right club for the save. The small island of La Palma, an island that suffered from the 2021 volcanic eruption of Cumbre Vieja which made huge damage to the island, has a club that is the oldest club on the island of La Palma, dating back to the year of 1922. Let me present to you the pride of Santa Cruz de Palma, a club on its 100-year birthday, Sociedad Deportiva Tenisca.
SD Tenisca has a long and wild history, surviving battles on the island trough out history and mainly due to its location in the Atlantic Ocean, far away from the mainland, putting a lot of pressure on the club to survive. Yet, they are still here. The club has never played above the 4th tier. They have a fierce rivalry with the other club from the city CD Mensajerois. In 1983, they played a derby game that has been described as one of the most violent in the history of Spanish football. The club has the nickname Plumas Blancas, meaning the white feathers. Might not be from that game.
The club plays its home games in Estadio Virgen de Las Nieves, meaning the Our Lady of the Snows. The ground has a capacity of 6000. One of the most stunning grounds I have ever seen.
After I had found the club the task was to find out at which level they play football. In FM23 version, they play in the Interinsular Preferente de Tenerife Group 1, which is the 6 tier in the cryptic Spanish Football pyramid. As you can probably guess from the name of the league, there are only teams that play on the Islands. This was a mind-blow for me. Then again, there are over 2 million people living in the Canary Islands.
I did not have a clue where I had gotten myself into. The first day I looked at my squad it had 5 eligible players and our wage budget was -£300. I did make a request about a senior affiliate but the board said "nah", so I hired the best Director of Sports I could find and delegated the incoming transfers to him so we could get at least a squad for the opening day.
As he was mainly trying to hire 15-16-year-old free agents to the squad, I dipped my toes into the loan market and tried to find some bodies to fill out the holes in the squad. We managed to do good and the roster was coming up. We played friendlies against the two big clubs Las Palmas and Teneriffe. We were leading 1-0 against Las Palmas at halftime but eventually lost the game 1-3 in the second half. I thought: If we play this well against Las Palmas, we are going to be a force in our division.
On the tactical side, we went 4-4-2. I am an Everton fan and now with new manager Sean Dyche, I was looking for something simple and have been a fan of proper 4-4-2 for a while now. On the same day as I was loading up the save, RDF Tactics loaded up this beautiful tactic that I hope will do us good
So the goals for this save:
1) Get the club promoted to the 3rd tier, Primera Federación, first time in the history of the club
This will be a task as the football pyramid in Spain is difficult. We are looking at gaining three promotions.
2) Sing players only from the Canary Island clubs.
The main objective is to look for loans from the big clubs and also try to snatch young players that are released and mould them into our system. Players don´t need to be born in the Islands but they must have played for one of the teams in the region.
3) Only foreign players signed outside the Canary Islands: Finns
I want to pay my respect to the long history of Finns travelling to the sunny islands away from the cold and snow. I want to be a platform club for young Finnish football players. They also just might be doing what this man is doing.
I have a feeling this could be a fun save. Let's find out!
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