Blackburn Rovers' bizarre summer transfer window predicted - including J-League striker and Atalanta coup

As a Blackburn Rovers fan, I’d be lying if I said I was looking forward to the new season which, for those teams languishing in the lower tiers, gets underway this weekend. Since a brush with relegation from the Championship last season, averted only on the final day thanks to the excellence of Sammie Szmodics, there has been precious little to cheer about. Most of us who wear blue and white halves on a Saturday have limited expectations.

There isn’t much money to spend, and although a little over £1.5m was spent on new strikers that was essentially just the cash earned from the sale of Sam Gallagher to Stoke City. A couple of unknown qualities added to the squad doesn’t really relieve the sense of dread caused by a combination of an impending court case in India which could prevent the owners from investing their money in the club, or the lingering assumption that Szmodics won’t be around by the start of September. Besides, it’s not like we’re looking at small tweaks to a team that was already good. They were in that relegation scrap for a reason.

Anyway, it’s at times like this when one spends less time thinking about an impending Friday night match against Derby County and more time disappearing into the realms of fantasy – and Rovers’ activity on a recent game of Football Manager, which was acting more as self-medication than anything else, caught my eye. And not necessarily in a particularly good way.

Billed as the most realistic management simulation available, long-time devotees of the series know that for all the many accuracies in its database and its ability to predict the future, it remains rather hit-or-miss. But either as a result of genuinely superb programming or by pure chance, Rovers’ 2024 summer transfer window looked rather like the one they’re having in real life. So how did that work out for them? Does this tell us anything whatsoever about the upcoming season? Probably not, no, but at least there’s a chance to test out just how accurate or inaccurate the hideously addictive game is…

The unheralded Japanese striker

Blackburn didn’t splash around £1.5m on the towering Senegalese striker Makhtar Gueye in the game – in fact, they spent barely more than £250,000 in total, which is probably about what the fanbase expected in real life – but they did spend most of that six-figure sum on a little-known Japanese forward in the form of Ryo Germain, who had impressed with his goalscoring exploits in the J-League.

In actuality, a near-identical sum of money was spent on Sanfrecce striker Yuki Ohashi, a year younger than Germain but with a similar scoring record and attributes. So how did the virtual equivalent pan out? Zero starts, 17 sub appearances, zero goals. Let’s hope Ohashi does slightly better at the actual Ewood Park than Germain did in the digital one.

The experienced centre-half

The Real Rovers have re-signed veteran defender Kyle McFadzean, the virtual version of which opted to retire instead of having to go through another campaign in East Lancashire. The Fake Rovers instead opted to sign a comparative spring chicken in the form of 35-year-old José Luis Palomino of Atalanta, also on a free.

Similarly experienced, similarly physically substantial and similarly more of a ‘mental attributes’ guy than a ‘pace and acceleration’ type, Palomino played all of 13 games, doing not all that much of note really. Eventually, we will arrive at a better omen.

The slew of youngsters

Blackburn are heavily reliant on their impressive youth academy, which has produced David Raya and Adam Wharton among others, but also work the loan market hard, maxing out on the number of short-term signings they can make and acting as a cold, northern creche for various Premier League teams’ rising stars. In the game, youth was the order of the day too.

In a clear break with real life, Rovers didn’t sign a single loanee in the game. They haven’t got any on the books at actual Ewood yet, either, but that will almost certainly change before the end of August. Instead, Blackburn signed a slew of teenagers from across the country and continent – all of whom look pretty hopeless. Frankie Beckles from Shrewsbury Town, anyone? Hermann Daha from Fleetwood, a player with more number ones on his stats screen that The Beatles have had in the charts? Not exactly the second coming of Harvey Elliott.

Jonny Howson (for some reason)

The Middlesbrough midfielder is 36 at this point but that didn’t stop the virtual club snapping him up on a free to replace Sondre Tronstad, the Norwegian midfielder who was one of Rovers’ better players last season but whose computerised counterpart has been binned off on loan to Plymouth Argyle despite starting most matches in the 2023/24 campaign. The AI works in mysterious ways, sometimes.

Howson has barely played and isn’t particularly good at this point – as a man of about the same age, I don’t blame him for that, I’m hopeless these days – but apparently Virtual Venky’s have restricted expenditure to cheap and ageing veterans only. In fairness, Howson was still pretty handy for Boro last year, so this wouldn’t have been an especially bad move once you got past the Tronstad bit.

The good news

There is some good news, however – apparently, in this fantasy land, Sammie Szmodics, by far the best player at the club and probably the best in the entire division, actually stayed at Ewood Park. Ipswich Town have been sniffing around and making lowball offers in the real world, but here the free-scoring former Peterborough man decides to stay put. Perhaps the local tattoo parlour had a good offer on.

Admittedly, this ersatz version of Szmodics is nowhere near as good as the genuine article, and only bagged eight goals all year – but still, added to some handy contributions from Tyrhys Dolan, that was enough for Blackburn to finish 18th, which is several places higher than I’m anticipating that they’ll manage in the real-life 2024/25 season. Let’s just say that I’d take another year of Sammie and survival in a heartbeat. This could be a long one…