Sloane Wanderers

Sloane Wanderers Football Club was a Candelariasian professional football club based in Sloane Town on Sloane Island, one of the Outlying Islands of the Candelarias archipelago.

The club spent two seasons in the CMSC1 during the International Era, being relegated in both XXX and XXXIV. One of four sides in the Candelariasian top-flight during this period to not hail from C&M itself; the Wanderers’ ground was the smallest by capacity to host CMSC1 football.

Having started life as an itinerant, amateur entity before being transformed following a 1960s takeover; the Wanderers’ greatest era of success came during the early days of the CMSC when they proved able to maintain a place in the first division for two seasons and lifted the CMS Cup, but subsequent years left them floundering in the semi-professional divisions until their short flurries of relative International Era success. Though their support was modest, even on Sloane Island itself, and their geographical distance from most of their opponents a constant factor; the club’s supporters were widely respected as vocal travellers, and known for enthusiastic chanting that drew regular reference to their oft-mocked, goat-centric, homeland whilst paying little obvious heed to traditional structures of rhyme and rhythm.

Of the twenty-eight clubs to play CMSC1 football during the International Era, the Wanderers would finish with the second lowest points-per-game record behind Webley Stadium; while the knock-out stages of the nineteenth Series B Champions Cup was their best run in UICA football.

History
Established as Nomadic of Mittendorf in 1929, the club were one of the first major sides on Sloane Island, attracting widespread interest as an exhibition team. The name itself was nothing new, with the island – and in particular the northern region surrounded Lake Mittendorf – noted for its community of travelling entertainers that weaved its way throughout the year between the numerous remote fishing and farming villages that pockmarked the island. Competitive sport had never been part of their repertoire, and the football side that joined the procession in the twenties took such traditions to heart, focusing on ball skills and entertainment rather than the hunt for victory, and playing numerous codes of football simultaneously.

The long-term intention of the team’s founders, a group of small businessmen from the Candelarian mainland, had been ambitious however; hoping to capture the imagination of the locals sufficiently to allow Nomadic to evolve into the island’s premier footballing side. The club’s first Chairman, John Turner, made no secret of his desire to one day embrace professionalism, though his vision for the future of football in the Candelarias was by no means in tune with the mainstream. Nomadic declined to join the National Foot-Ball League of the thirties, with Turner believing that the NFBL’s wholesale adoption of the laws of the game as practised overseas was far too restrictive.

Instead, Nomadic remained a professional side out on its own, unaffiliated to the national league and dismissive of the competition’s structures. Such an attitude could not prove productive in the long term however, with the establishment of Sloane Island FC challenging Nomadic’s status as the island’s leading side. Their new rivals, formed from the merger of several smaller community sides dotted around the island, entered the NFBL’s lower divisions, moved into a permanent home in Sloane Town itself, and soon attracted crowds dwarfing Nomadic’s own.

The elder club might easily have drifted into amateur obscurity once more, but in 1964 Nomadic underwent the most important transformation in its history following the complete takeover of its commercial ventures by a Nethertopian consortium.

The group was by no means a grand coalition, consisting of a handful of individuals hailing from the south-eastern port city of Argon, and settling on Sloane – it remains widely believed – ostensibly in order to take advantage of the island’s relatively liberal zoophilia laws of the time. In an effort to ingratiate themselves to the local community, the group led by Har Vallwijk and Zebedeüs Pieper bought the ailing club for a pound (a significant sum of money in ‘60s Sloane) and, inspired by the concurrent successes of Zapata United with the stated aim of creating the most successful side in the Outliers, the team was transformed with new players, new colours and a new name – the Wanderers, after the venerable club of Argon.

The new Wanderers’ nascent relationship with Nethertopian football, one of the earliest sporting links between the Rushmori neighbours and preceding the first movement between professional players by several decades, soon became secondary to their place in Outlien politics. By 1970, Vallwijk and Pieper’s contemporary Ijsbrandt Kouwenhoven had risen to become the post-Civil War Free Republic of Sloane Island’s Foreign Minister, and his influence saw the Wanderers pull out of the NFBL – citing their unwillingness to compete in a ‘National Foot-Ball League’ while Sloane itself remained formally outside of the Republic of Candelaria And Marquez.

Instead, the Wanderers reverted to their former amateur – and, indeed, wandering – status, playing games in both Sloane Town and Varoma during their time in the short-lived Outlien Soccer League. Upon the establishment of the modern CMSC however, a power struggle eventually saw the Nethertopian influence finally ousted and the club – though rejecting a return to their previous identity – follow both Green Island and Sloane Island FC into the competition’s lower divisions.

With a largely locally-born team, and under inspirational manager Tony Brown, the Wanderers surprised even themselves by achieving promotion to the first division as early as VI, and narrowly stay up the following season. Even more notably, the club knocked out Albrecht FC and Albrecht Turkish on their way to the CMS Cup final, their finest hour completed with a 3-0 victory over Khatib FC.

The era was not to last, with the Wanderers comfortably relegated the following season and suffering repeated failures as the years went by. Their natural lot in life soon became that of lower league mainstays, reverting to semi-professionalism and with regular derbies against Sloane Island the major highlights of any given season.

Later seasons
Their journey back to the top began anew in XXVIII, with the team now managed by young coach Jerome Kelley walking away with the final Division 3 title and announcing themselves to the country by beating Radyukevich CSC to make the CMS Cup quarter-finals. But their following term in the inaugural CMSC2 was even more startling – with modest financial support from owner and goat cheese tycoon George von Strassenberg they jumped from mid-table to third within the final two games and, without play-offs to worry about that year, sensationally achieved top-flight promotion and an SBCC berth.

Though Kelley made changes ahead of XXX, much of the first-team were still Division 3 veterans and the club were always going to be hopelessly outmatched at this level. Despite the goals of Albrecht FC product Kovac Johnson and Sloane Town native Chris Kilgore, the Wanderers won just a single game during the Apertura and a later mini-revival couldn’t stop them finishing bottom with just twenty-two points.

Kelley resigned soon after, leaving football entirely in favour of a quiet life of crab fishing, Kilgore departed for Yaforite pastures new, and the club seemed set for more years of terminal mediocrity – albeit of a more welcome standard than of their recent past. Despite an often difficult relationship between boardroom and management however, with Jesse Taylor and Lonnie Schultz coming and going over the next two seasons, the Wanderers were consistently able to challenge for further SBCC runs, though their performances in the tournaments themselves were comparatively disappointing, failing to make it out of the group stage at both SBCC2 and SBCC7.

Early in XXXIII the club hired Reuben Kennedy, the former Turkish midfielder becoming one of the youngest managers in the top two divisions, and his experienced but otherwise unremarkable side soon began to perform well above expectation, ultimately finishing fourth and entering the play-offs. The Wanderers duly ousted Abiodun North and, more surprisingly, Turks’ Club to achieve promotion. Kennedy’s side also made the SBCC knock-out stages for the first time.

Subsequently, Kennedy was successful in convincing the board to gamble on success, bringing in a relatively large quantity of new players in the desperate hope of giving the Wanderers a top-flight stay longer than a season for only the second time. Barry Adekunde, the left-back and least heralded of the trio of footballing brothers, was the star of an all-new back-line alongside Nethertopian Arie Smit, whose phobia of hooked noses made Sloane Island, a territory not congenitally at home to the aquiline, the perfect destination. Green Island squad players Justin Aldren and Lloyd Carpenter were added to the midfield behind Pasargan striker Samuka Szatmári.

A 5-3 win over fellow strugglers Albrecht Independent FC proved the highlight of an Apertura finished outside of the bottom three by two goals scored. The Clausura was worse still, the club relegated on MD33 despite a stunning 3-2 derby victory over Green Island that very nearly cost their fellow Outlien side the league title. In front of a crowd that very nearly rattled apart their venerable wooden box of a stadium, the Wanderers outplayed the elf-heavy superstars and capped off their win with teenager Zachary Loftus’ half-way line effort – before results from elsewhere condemned the club to the CMSC2 thereafter.

Under Kennedy, and later Jonathan Oliver after the former took the Turks’ Club job, the club made the CMSC2 play-offs three times over the final five seasons of Candelariasian professional football. They failed to achieve promotion, being defeated by Cathedral City in the XXXVII play-off final and by Caires Sports in extra time the following season, with fans broadly united in the view that the team was consistently centred to an unreasonable degree around the owner’s grandson Jamie von Strassenberg. In the final CMSC2 season they slumped to fifteenth, and were wound up soon after. The stadium was dismantled in 2015, and the new Fairmile Farm marks the old half-way line with a fence wisely separating goats from cabbages.

Notable CMSC1 International Era players
Goalkeepers
 * Benjamin Hall

Defenders
 * Barry Adekunde
 * Iain Anderson
 * Hugo Kiefer
 * Arie Smit
 * Reuben Ward

Midfielders
 * Justin Aldren
 * Lloyd Carpenter
 * Chris Kilgore
 * Edward King
 * Tomer Lagorio
 * Zachary Loftus
 * Andrew Wagner

Forwards
 * Kovac Johnson
 * Jonathan Oliver
 * Nic Prideaux
 * Samuka Szatmári