Hello! Once again, I am participating in the social media challenge - but also combining it with an update on my Rabona journey - and what a journey it has been! Let's dive in, as I've had a good, albeit way too stressful season and I'm going into a new one full of.. excitement, titillation, but also a little bit of worry whether I will be able to keep up the steady upwards climb.

Managing Finances

Truth be told, the management of my finances as a new player is not easy. With barely any fans, as well as being fairly time-gated for the expansion of my facilities, any attempt at progress in results has to come at a financial loss. This is something that I had already accounted for and have decided to accept. Thiis means that I am currently losing RBN with every game, even accounting for TV and advertising contracts - possibly even considering the tiny bit of HIVE if I place well at the end of the season.

Being in League 2, it is necessary to at least have a 65-ish average OS to be competitive and not simply relegate. This means that I need to choose out of two decisions:

• Scouting like crazy, hoping I somehow hit the right players within the first 300-400 attempts. This involves a lot of luck and likely has me settling for less than expected, especially considering that I am still at a relatively low level of Youth Academy. The biggest upside of this move is the ability to save up afterwards, as each player's salary would be a mere 400RBN per game - meaning I'd pay around the same amount for one player per SEASON that I currently pay my best ones per game. That said, the upfront cost of finding a strong team through this way would likely be around 8-10M RBN, so the savings would be likely inexistent due to this.
• Second option is to check the Sign and Market tabs over and over again in search of good deals on players. This is the road I chose. The upfront cost can be fairly high (I have paid around 2M total for my players) if you end up buying from the market, but still way lower than Scouting. On top of that, you get to handpick the stats of your players (well, within the group you can afford, anyway) which allowed me to focus on buying those with high skills in the formations I am interested in, as well as with good Teamplay ability.

I have allowed myself to, for now, pay up to 100k RBN per game for salaries. This means playing at a big loss, but not big enough that I need to purchase more RBN with HIVE. It works, because eventually I will amass more fans and build a bigger stadium, which will let me spend more on players. Currently, my stadium is nearly upgraded to level 8 - meaning I will have a capacity of 3.2k fans. I currently have just under 20k fans and they fill out the current 1.5k seats at a price of 28RBN. I am pretty sure it will take me a long time to fill this stadium, but the cost of having it upgraded isn't high enough to worry about the short-term.

This is the income from my most recent home game. Parking Lot and Hotel will soon increase by another 500 RBN, as the buildings are nearly upgraded, so that will help a tiny bit. The Stadium will be ready before the end of the season, as will be Catering, with the Shop upgrading to level 2 in just a few days.

As you can see here, I am playing at a large loss even during home games - but luckily that's all part of my plan and does not bother me in the slightest. Most of the operating costs are pretty easy to ignore, barring the Training Center. It always pains me to upgrade this one, but the extra home advantage is really important to me if I want to stay relevant in League 2 - and I really do not want to go back down to League 3! Due to this, I will be upgrading this one further, even if looking that that big number scares me a little.

When it comes to players, the 82k per game are largely through 3 of my best players, who altogether get paid just under 44k - they are all in the mid 70s of OS, however, with good TP and formation stats and I can't imagine staying afloat without them.

The plan includes playing at a loss for about 4-5 more seasons, until I can start filling a bigger stadium of 6000 or even 10000 fans. Once that is in place, I can likely have a full team of players with salaries of 5 digits, while not losing money - slowly making my way towards League 1 and then League of Champions!

Last Season - Nerve-wrecking Happy End

So that was the Social Media Challenge part - let's move on to the shorter one, where I update my progress. Last season, as is obvious from the rest of the post, I had managed to win League 3 and succeed to promote to League 2. While I have been in the lead for the large part of the season, it got very messy at the end, with a lot of things having to go right in order for me to actually secure the promotion. Here's the standings after the last game:

As you can see, I was only 2 points ahead of the runner-up and 3 in front of the 3rd place. Actually, I was not even in the lead 2 fixtures ahead of the end - luckily, that was when team Troiki played against Elhartz and lost, while I beat Buxtehude to secure the first place, with a free win in the last fixture coming up for the entire top 3. However, just take a look at this awful streak - no idea how this happened, but my players clearly don't work well under pressure.

4 of the wins are walkovers, meaning that in the last 5 real games of the season, I went 1-2-2. 5 points in 5 games isn't exactly promotion-worthy and it got way closer than it should. Luckily, my opponents seemed to also want to avoid promotion. It seems I was the blind to lead the blind that season.

The upcoming season, with its already 6 games played has not started perfectly, but I am not looking for perfect. My goal is to scrap enough points to avoid relegation. With one team failing to field players, it means 3 out of 15 will relegate and all I care about is making sure I don't do that. So far it isn't all candy and rainbows, but I managed to score some points, so I hope I'll be able to continue amassing whatever I can.

I will certainly need some good luck to stay safe, as my team is definitely closer to the bottom of the league than the top when it comes to strength. Except for a few good players, I am mostly looking at an OS of around 60 with varying degrees of actually useful stats. My strength comes from the fact that I am usually playing with a formation that counters the opposing teams (4-2-3-1 vs 4-3-3) and try to adjust it if I see someone stray away from the default.

My 8 points definitely doesn't qualify as a great start, but managing to score a whole 4 points in away games does give me some hope for the future. The upcoming two games are against 2 teams below mine in the standings and scoring at least 4 points in them will put some relief in my soul before I have to face the top of the standings. Hopefully, I'll manage to build up an advantage to be able to play the last stages of the season with a lighter heart.

Player Shopping

Quick paragraph about shopping! Who doesn't like to get new shiny stuff? Well, in my case, it's Rabona football players. I have managed to acquire 3 players from other clubs, who are now the best in my team. This includes two midfielders and a striker: Vito Sorrentino, Jose Reuter and Dylan Oort. All of them contribute very well to the team, with Oort managing to score in nearly every game, regardless of the result.

I touched on it previously in this post, but here's the reason I enjoy the shopping - while the upfront cost is fairly large, it is still lower than having to constantly Scout - unless you get truly lucky. On top of that, the salaries of the players are usually lower than those in Sign. Sure, I like to look at both tabs, and most of my players are still from the Sign tab, but I really enjoylooking at both tabs.

On top of all this, the ability to look for bargains is awesome and simply fun. I get to pick which stats I want or need - personally I look at Passing and the non-OS stats the most (HB, TP, Formations), because these do not affect the OS but do change the outcome of actions during a game.

Closing Words

I'm so happy to have started playing Rabona as it actually is so much fun to follow the game! I try to get involved in things and explore every side of it and you should too! Right now, I am switching to using the Rabona V2 interface, so the next post will include screenshots with that already - and it looks really good and feels smooth!

Since it's a gaming-related post, here is a bunch of referral links of mine - if you're not playing any of the games I've written about, give them a try! I wouldn't write about bad games.. well, not without saying they're bad anyway. So, here they are:

RABONA - Join the football management game through my referral link to receive a big RBN bonus!

RISING STAR - Here's the referral link to Rising Star. Start your way to mega stardom now!

SPLINTERLANDS - Splinterlands is the poster child of the HIVE blockchain. Join now through my referral link to get a few cards from me!