Knowing he couldn't stifle his own playing career, Gio started practicing harder than ever— that way when his chance came, he'd be wheeling away in celebration with his teammates.
The team mostly wanted away from him, with the exception of the Sancho twins, James Moratti, and a few other reserves on the team, but nine of the eleven starters had all put in transfer requests. Something like this had never been seen in professional sports. While occasionally a team could turn toxic, this was on a different level of phobic.
Instead of doing the obvious and selling Giovanni Jurgen, Saleem gave them all their wishes and transfer listed them all with one game left to play. And while it was only for bragging rights to say who was better than who that year, Mr. Ancelloti wanted to end the season with a bang, but he wouldn't start the new arrival that rustled a lot of feathers within the squad.
Saleem knew he was going to be a busy man that off-season, with many players due new contracts, many players wanting away, and voids that needed to be filled by their absence.
The Chortle players were in high demand, and many of them even received an impressive offer before even the week had passed for their last game. Most of them would be playing their last game as a Turtle, and Saleem was trying to give them all the farewell they deserved as what he believed to be "excellent" players.
Ancelloti would miss Di Carlo the most. He was the only player Saleem paid over market value for at his time with the club. And he was an incredible orchestrator. He played soccer like many before him played classic music. He was an artist, and now he would be gone to never reunite with the coach he flourished under.
Saleem quickly made most of his players available to other teams, and he went ahead and tried to find their potential replacements, but the truth was that he had already built an incredible squad.
They were better than Jurgen's Giants, yet they still weren't as good of a team as Jurgen had built, especially on the Giants' budget.
The headaches of having to sell over twenty players within the year were starting to mount only a week in. He'd received an offer for all of them, but he felt he could incite a bidding war for his players, which meant bringing in better players after they were gone.
There were exactly thirty players on the Turtles, and only five of them were sure they wanted to stay. All of the focus on selling players resulted in a very bad 5-0 spanking for the Turtles, dropping them to fourth place, but they still qualified for Galaxy League, which was the board's objective for the season.
Often times, some boards were rather complacent. If the objectives were met, the team's manager usually wasn't on the hot seat for clubs with boards like this. And as it happened, the Turtles were one of the teams the most loyal to its managers.
As records went, the Turtles had the fewest head coaches of the fifty-seven teams that had been in the top flight over the last twenty-five years. Galway Callahan was the longest standing coach of the three over the last two and a half decades, but Saleem was a young manager and could see perhaps even three decades as manager before his human lifespan killed him.
The only issue with the market was that it was a sellers' market. Clubs in search of top players wouldn't so easily find them cheaply. As a sellers' market, players were sparse and expensive, so the teams selling had all the power and could vamp up the prices of even their lesser players. It was good news as far as the amount of money the Turtles would bring in for the sale of potentially twenty-five different players. But finding suitable replacements could be very tough.
The Turtles U23 and U18 teams did win the Kraken Cup, a tournament each age group would take place in across their galaxy, starting at U16. But even their impressive youth weren't ready in Salem's opinion, but they could have to be called on in dire situations should Saleem's squad get too small.
