It’s come to my attention that we’re playing our home games in a swamp. Every season between three and five matches have to be postponed due to a waterlogged pitch, and our field condition seems to be rated permanently at “terrible,” giving us by far the worst playing surface in Serie B. (The two Verona teams are rated at “okay,” and everyone else is “very good.”) I can live with that for one season in the second tier because it emphasizes our dauntless underdog quality.
But as I hope I’ve made clear, we are not out to be the plucky team from nowhere valiantly holding our own against larger opposition. We’re out to be—well, you know the moment in Star Wars where the Death Star is swinging around the planet toward the little broken radiator part that’s supposed to be the rebel base? What we want is for a Pro Vercelli crest to pop up on the base, at which point Darth Vader will fall to his knees and the battle station will hurtle away in terror.
So we need a decent field to play on. AC Milan have won five consecutive championships, and they didn’t do it by double-booking the San Siro as a breeding ground for the endangered squash-bellied muskrat. So when our bank balance topped €3 million for the first time, I asked the board to relay the pitch. Their response? “The board remind you that unfortunately the club does not own the stadium and therefore they cannot relay the pitch.”
Wait—what? We don’t own the Silvio Piola? Who owns the Silvio Piola? There’s nothing about this in the stadium’s Italian Wikipedia page:
The stadium Silvio Piola, is the largest sports facility in the city of Vercelli.
History of the stadium
The stadium was built in 1932, in the heart of the city, with the name of Leonidas Robbiano, great pioneer of the Air Force.
In 1998, with a joint resolution of the stadium was dedicated to the memory of the great Silvio Piola, historian of the Newcastle United striker who from 1929 to 1934 collected 127 appearances and scored 51 goals.
At the facility had a capacity of 12,000 seats, now after several major renovations are 8000 posts. From the season 2006/2007, the A.S. Pro Vercelli Belvedere benefits of the stadium for home games of the Serie D league and Italian Cup Amateur. In 2007, due to a storm, much of the wall of the stairs collapsed, but was later rebuilt before the start of the season 2007/2008.
Okay, other than the fact that Google Translate renders “storico attaccante della Pro Vercelli” as “historian of the Newcastle United striker” (how’s that?), there’s nothing out of place here, certainly nothing to suggest that Pro Vercelli don’t own the Sil. I mean, we have our name on the seats!
Anyway, this is terrible news, because it means that (1) we can’t adjust the pitch size (I noticed I hadn’t been asked, but assumed it was because we couldn’t afford it); (2) we can’t make improvements to the pitch; (3)—and this is huge—we won’t be able to add more seats unless we build a new stadium altogether. Which we won’t be able to afford to do until we multiply our cash reserves by about a hundred, so until then, our match-day income is going to be hoping Mr. Scrooge will bring it a goose for Christmas. The big clubs can blithely sell out their 70,000-seat arenas week after week while we’re stuck admiring the ecological diversity of our federally protected 9,000-seat marshland. So the game just got a little harder.
As for the league season: We’re through the first two phases of the three-phase endgame I mapped out in the last update. The first phase was a disaster—a draw and two losses against bland mid-table teams. We only managed one goal, a 56th-minute breakaway by Jorge Ibáñez against Triestina.
On the other hand, the second phase, the merciless stretch in which we had to face the top four teams in the league in a five-game span, went brilliantly.
Two wins and three draws against the top teams in Serie B, including a club-historic 3-1 annihilation of Torino that featured a sensational goal from Jacopo Sammarco:
The net result of all this is that we’ve fallen to ninth in the league. We still have an outside shot at the playoff, but making up points on three separate teams over the last five matches is going to be tricky. Fortunately, we’re playing the bottom of the table. Unfortunately, playing weak teams is not necessarily our strong suit.
More once the fates have picked their scissors.
—
Song clip: Willie Nelson, “My Own Peculiar Way”
Read More: Football Manager 2009, Pixel Dramas, Pro Vercelli
by Brian Phillips · March 9, 2009
You are the manager of a club in a city virtually surrounded by some of Italy’s most famed rice paddies,* and you wonder why the pitch has drainage issues?
The Silvio Piola is owned by the municipality, just like virtually every other football stadium in the country.
*You’ve seen Riso Amaro, haven’t you?
The Silvio Piola is owned by the municipality, just like virtually every other football stadium in the country.
Sorry, the background here is that for FM purposes, “owning” the stadium just means having some basic degree of control over it. In real life, the San Siro is owned by the municipality, but in FM, if you start a game as Milan, you’re allowed to set the pitch dimensions and relay the field surface. It’s really rare for a team not to be allowed to do those things in the game—the only time it’s ever happened to me was with Moor Green, who were being hosted in Damson Park by Solihull Borough because their real-life ground had been destroyed by arsonists the year before.
So unless there’s some other, bigger team playing in the Silvio, I think this is a mistake in the game.
However, we won’t be daunted by it. We’ll try to turn it to our advantage, capitalizing on our familiarity with the subaqueous terrain and local wildlife to seize the initiative from our bewildered opponents.
You’ve seen Riso Amaro, haven’t you?
No, but my God, I’m going to.
There are clips on You Tube.
It’s a classic of neo-realismo. Really.
That’s a weird bug. Might it have to do with the pitch being classified as “terrible”?
Or do they have a Biellese coder?
It definitely has to do with the pitch classification, because normally the board would just spend a little money from time to time to improve the field, but we can’t because it isn’t “our” field. I’m guessing no one owns the stadium in the game, thus no one can maintain it, thus it’s steadily deteriorated since I took over.
I don’t have any of the FM editor programs that let you lift the veil to check on things like that, but maybe I’ll try to download one and find out.
There doesn’t seem to be a US DVD of Riso Amaro. Maybe I can piece the whole thing together on YouTube.
BTW, that penalty seemed even more sensational than the edge of the box strike; if one accepts Sammarco intentionally banked his first shot off the Torino keeper…
WHoever does own the stadium, having US PRO VERCELLI on the seats is really going to affect the resale value.
Best redo them a nice off-white.
Does anyone have a guess as to why Google Translate renders “Pro Vercelli” as “Newcastle United” in that sentence? If you just enter “Pro Vercelli” it outputs “Pro Vercelli,” but if you enter “storico attaccante della Pro Vercelli,” it outputs “historian of the Newcastle United striker.” I don’t care about the grammar issue, but why does it think Pro Vercelli is Newcastle in only this one context?
I tried entering a bunch of other club names in the same phrase, but it didn’t see any of them as Newcastle. Except Newcastle, of course, which it conspicuously failed to render as “Pro Vercelli.”
Apparently pitch problems at the Silvio Piola aren’t unique to the digital world:
But in real life they don’t bother canceling the game:
BONUS: With warm-ups like these, how are Montichiari not in Serie A?
How can you play on such a poor pitch? You should sort it out asap!