HISTORY
CD Mafra is a Portuguese club that’s currently competing in the second division in Portugal. Clube Desportivo Mafra, which is the club’s full name, was founded in 1965, 56 years ago. The club predominantly played in Portugal’s regional amateur leagues where they gradually worked their way up. That is until they won the Associacao de Futebol de Lisboa Division 1 (district of Lisbon region) title in 1991/92 and so got promoted to the national leagues.
The club’s squad is mostly filled with Portuguese and Brazilian players. In total, 37 Brazilian players have played for CD Mafra in their entire history. Next is China with 13, Cape Verde with 8 and Guinea-Bissau with 7.
Now onto the main part of this Create a Club idea, which is based on Real Madrid star Marcelo buying this football club. Since 2017, Marcelo has been investing in clubs. He already owns Azuriz in Brazil, which is a team in the second division of Brazil, and they are currently third in the league.
Marcelo explained his club investments to TNT, a news company: “I always had a very clear vision of how I would like to expand my brand as an athlete and acquiring clubs was a clear investment opportunity. It all started in 2017 with the acquisition of Azuriz, the first club to bear my name on the board. The objective from the beginning was to make them a benchmark in the training of athletes and that is what we did.”
Marcelo also further explains his reasoning behind buying Mafra: “We see Mafra as a potential connection between the European and Brazilian markets. Many teams from the second European league have difficulties accessing the Brazilian market and Mafra, being from the same group as Azuriz, forms a perfect link. It was a good business, even with its small structure, Mafra was well organized financially and without a debt.”
STORY IDEA
So in FIFA22 Career Mode, you will have to recreate the club via the Create a Club feature and put them in Liga Portugal, Portugal’s first division. Unfortunately there isn’t a second division of Portugal in the game, so you will have to pretend they have been promoted to the first division.
As Marcelo already mentioned, the club is great to get a good connection between the European and Brazilian markets. Most of your squad should so
CREATE A CLUB
Now onto the part of trying to recreate this club into FIFA22 Create a Club Career Mode. I would recommend to fill in the club info like this:
Desportivo means sporty, so I imagined having Sporting as the nickname is most suited for CD Mafra!
I would recommend to then replace either FC Arouca, FC Vizela or CD Tondela from the Portuguese league with your created CD Mafra. These are the teams with the lowest average rating in FIFA22, so it’s best to replace one of these teams with CD Mafra.
When it comes to picking a rival, you can pick any you want. It might be fun to pick Sporting CP, as they also have Sporting in their name, or you can pick a club like Famalicão who are a relatively new and ambitious club in the Portuguese league.
Regarding the kits of CD Mafra, I would recommend to pick the following as the home and away kit:
Now onto the logo, which I would suggest recreating like this, which is the closest you can make to the real logo:
Onto the stadium now, where I chose to use Town Park as the generic stadium as it looks the most like the club’s stadium in real life:
- Stadium colour: Yellow
- Seat colour: Green
- Pitch Grass Pattern: Turf No Lines
- Pitch Grass Colour: Light Green
- You can pick your own Goal Song, Crowd Chant and Walkout Anthem. Pick ones you would like to hear in the Career Mode!
Now onto the squad details. As the club would be the lowest rated team in Liga Portugal, I would suggest for you to pick a 1 star or 1,5 star team. Set the squad age to Balanced and the Transfer Budget to £5,000,000 (Marcelo gave the club some money to spend on Brazilian players ;)). Put the Board Expectations on Youth Focused, as the club will have to focus on getting young Portuguese and Brazilian players.
And finally, the career settings I set for myself (you can change the match difficulty and half length to your own liking). I would suggest to keep the Negotiation Strictness on Loose, to make it easier for you to get Brazilian league players.
RULES
As Marcelo already mentioned, the club is great to get a good connection between the European and Brazilian markets. Most of your squad (90%) should be either Portuguese or Brazilian. You can decide whether you only want to sign Brazilian players from the Brazilian league in Career Mode, or also want to sign Brazilian players from the MLS or Argentinian league for example. As the Brazilian league doesn’t have licensed players in FIFA22, you might be put off by only buying Brazilians from the Brazilian league. Do check in on the league every season though, as real players will still join the club by the CPU doing automatic transfers!
If possible, try and get Marcelo to play for the club as well. He starts off in a new save at 33 years of age, so you should try and sell some players in order to sign him. He’s valued at £9.5M pounds at the start of a new save.
Try and win the Portuguese league by developing younger Brazilian players into high-quality players. Make sure to regularly sell these players if an offer from a big team comes in, as that is what the goal of Marcelo was when buying this club: to develop young Brazilian players and ease them in into European football.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this Create a Club idea and will try this in FIFA22 Career Mode. Don’t forget to follow our CareerModeTips account on Twitter and Instagram to never miss another post on our website!
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