Football Italia: Season 3 – Broken Records

Season 3: Broken records and the excitement of promotion

I’m finding that I can write less and less postseason because my mid-season writing tells enough of those tales. My work on player development projects (see Owusu, Lucenti, Bellino, Merola, Ibrahimovic and Ruggeri) has been, in my eyes, a huge success. I’ve got a core of young players who won their division of the U18 league and, whilst the breadth of the intake wasn’t as strong, I’ve had another star in come through in Mario Moraga. The young Spaniard has a great technical base to work from and I hope to see him in the first team in the coming years.

The ending to the season very much mirrored the rest of it: unstoppable. With just one game where we dropped points, against second placed Crotone, we have taken the game to our opponents and ended with more than my prediction of goals for and less conceded, beating the records set last year by over twenty goals. Furthermore, it’s the first time we have ever reached triple figures and our gap of twenty points back to second placed Crotone is also a record at this level. Our overall stats just show the level of control that we’ve had. Furthermore, a win over Padova and a win in the Serie C Super Cup (against Girone A and B winners Mantova and Cesena) show that we are ready for the step up, finishing some forty-seven points ahead of playoff winners Juve Stabia, who will – almost certainly – head into next season as the whipping boys!

As a squad, we have been simply super, with high quality performances all over the pitch.

Starting at the back, where the central defenders scored twelve goals and had a had in twenty, showing that the original worries about having three non-attackers was not really an issue after all. I do need to bring in some more quality here, in all honesty, as the team overall are quite poor aerially (although I have made a conscious effort to counter than with my midfield height). I also need to make decisions about whether Mussolini is actually a centre back or a wing back, particularly as that is an area I will head into the new season with no cover in.

At wing back – particularly on the left – I have been very lucky to have twelve goal involvements from my first choice and then Giovagnoli, my backup, also able to provide six from under 1,000 minutes of game time. On the right, Veratti has been great but SPAL will not sanction another loan so I will be left to look elsewhere.

The centre of the park is where I’ve had my most success with Bellini (sixteen goal contributions) and Lucenti (sixteen goal contributions) but, overall, is where most of my wasted players are. We have six players who can fill the two roles and that includes Ruggeri, who is a specialist in that he can be utilised far better as a DM(s) rather than a DLP(s) and is useful for sitting on leads, hence his high use off the bench following a really successful conversion from a centre back this season – so much so that the game now rates his best position as where I’ve moved him to. You can see the benefit of having two tall 6s in there and my next job is to ensure I can use that threat offensively, too.

The 8s, 10s and strikers have also been fantastic with a total of twenty-six contributions for the old-school number 10, Clemenza, who will be going up another level next year following a nice climb from Serie D, where I found him. Despite Merola and Ibrahimovic being very one-dimensional, both have been strong performers for me, with Merola netting over twenty times; though a significant amount of stat-padding has happened here, given that he likes to score in bunches, including his back-to-back hattricks before going off the boil for a while. That being said, at just twenty, the foundations are there to build upon. Owusu has twenty-plus for the second season in a row and it’ll be interesting to see how he handles the step up to a higher level. His game, overall, is strong but, at just over ten passes per game, he’s very often isolated and, if we’re doing significantly more defending next year, will need to adapt for fear of being completely lost.

Even with promotion, finances are tight. This season, we’ve made significantly more money but also paid out a lot more – both thanks to our great cup runs. I’ve ran threadbare coaching teams, probably at the detriment of some extra player development, and barely saved in that area. With that, I need to be extremely careful of how I build my squad for next season; therefore, I like to look at player costs per minute. Below, the chart shows the most accurate (I cannot get data for clean sheets for defenders, nor unused substitute fees and have worked out the total cost of wages as just fifty-two lots of their base wage, obviously not taking into account those who have renewed deals across the season) calculation of that and the graph excludes the outliers: those with over €100 cost per minute and those with less than 1,000 first team minutes this season:

Groovj McAnthony, one of the few remaining players from when I took over, sits as the most expensive of my players per minute – largely because he was tied down to an expensive deal and just has been usurped by better players. The same can be said for Frisenna, who, despite being integral in my first season, has fallen behind three or four other midfielders. It has been pleasing to see that two project players – Ruggeri and Ibrahimovic have come into the club and, despite agreeing new deals fairly early on, moving away from their €150 per week youth contracts – haven’t cost an extortionate amount whilst learning their trade with us. Looking at the more expensive players – would I class Mussolini, Tripaldelli and Clemenza as my ‘key players?’ – yes, I probably would. All three of these are what I’d consider peak players and, as such, will naturally command a higher wage than the youngsters within the squad. That goes to show the quality of the deals that I was able to draw on for Marchetti and Esposito – which is great work from my recruitment team.

As I move into next year, I will end up taking control of the contract negotiations, leaving my recruitment team to only make offers for the shortlists I create. This means I can pull pretty much every handle – top division wage rises for those who will likely only see a couple of seasons, relegation release clauses for those who will surely not be happy if we are struggle next year and manager release clauses for the experienced heads that I’m sure I’ll need to recruit to sit alongside my young, hungry team.

A season after promotion is always one that fills me with fear – what if we can’t recruit better players? What if the demands of my current crop push us even further into this financial black hole? What if tactically we just fall apart against better teams? Well, I guess we’re going to find these things out!

Forza Biancoscudati!