Well, holy crickets. Here we are. All that, and I still don’t show up as one of the fans’ favorite people at the club.
The summer before you play your first season in the top flight—is there any more thrilling or terrifying time to be the manager of a little club? On the one hand, everything starts happening at once, there’s good news everywhere you look, and you can practically see the club growing every day. At Pro Vercelli, I’m suddenly allowed to hire multiple scouts and send them anywhere in the world (oh, hello, South America; I don’t think we’ve met), both my reputation and Pro Vercelli’s reputation bump themselves up to “national,” Barcelona and Liverpool are inviting themselves to play friendlies at the Silvio Piola, the Feeder Club Committe goes out and finds us our first feeder club (Legnano, who were in Serie B with us last year), and—maybe most gratifyingly—the board finally decides it’s time to upgrade the disused rice paddy doubling as our training facility, though not without being asked:
On the other hand—this is the “terrifying” part—half my players are suddenly linked with bigger clubs (and extremely ready to listen), no one’s taking us seriously in the league, the media’s picked us to get steamrolled by everyone, we have the smallest stadium (half the size of the second-smallest), the most run-down pitch, the puniest payroll (our average player wage is one-sixth the league average), the worst training facilities, and the least-developed youth system in the league, and the bookmakers…well, see for yourself what the bookmakers think of our chances:
Two thousand to one. Look, I don’t think we’re going to win the league either…but for those odds? You might as well float a tenner on us and see what happens, right?
So the mood right now in the offices at the Silvio Piola is an amazing set of contradictory convictions, a feeling of spectacular success and optimism crossed with resounding mockery and doom. And I guess it’s up to us to determine which of those feelings eventually carries the day. Anyway, that’s the message I plan to drill into the squad once the players come back from their holidays.
In the meantime, I’m trying to strengthen the team, but the summer before you start playing in the top flight is in some ways a difficult time to look for players. You’ve suddenly got more resources, more access, and more prestige, but initially what that means is that, since you’re no longer driven by desperation to unearth every brilliant bargain and half-decent unsigned 16-year-old, there’s suddenly an endless sea of second- and third-rate players worth 2-5 million euros whom you could just about bring into the club.
If you’re not careful, it’s easy to spend your entire transfer fund—mine’s €4 million—on career reservists who project the illusion of being more legitimate than your players (he’s got 16 appearances for Parma!) but actually aren’t any better. So I’ll be going into the transfer season with my eyes narrowed, my backpack strapped on tight, and my willingness to accept a ride home from the bus station frozen at essentially zero.
The first thing I did, because you can never stop being ruthless, was to handle every pressing contract renewal within a week after we won promotion, while the players were still euphoric from the Pisa game and before they started looking at our season ticket sales and thinking about Serie A cash. This saved a lot of money and made sure that our best players were locked in for a few seasons. If all goes well, some of them won’t last that long, but I don’t want them leaving until the club is (a) ready and (b) getting paid. Especially the this-is-a-stepping-stone types like Akassou; he spent most of the season crying about a move to a bigger club, then re-signed in that little window of joy for three years at barely more than his current salary. To me, it felt almost as good as the promotion.
Then I started selling. I somehow sent Ewan Vignau to Dijon for €1 million: he always looked useful to me in theory, but he’d turned in three consecutive hugely disappointing seasons, even if he did score the goal against Portosummaga that sent us to the extra-time period that secured our promotion to Serie B. And the million euros broke the record for our highest-ever transfer fee; just too much to pass up for a player who couldn’t contribute. I sold Alessandro Baldini (weirdly, the player who scored the extra-time goal in that game against Portosummaga that put us in Serie B) to Taranto for €100k.
Lastly, tough as it was, I knew I had no choice but to offload Carlo Saba. He’d been selflessly committed to the club since before I arrived, but I needed to name a new vice-captain—the Carlo wasn’t good enough for Serie B, much less Serie A—and he had too many friends on the club for me to be able to drop him without a minor guerrilla revolt. I sent him to Cavese at a loss for €24k and named David (just 19 but so, so diamond sharp) to back up Akassou’s leadership.
At that point, the most glaring problem in the squad was depth. After losing Vignau, Baldini, and Saba, as well as four loan players from last season, we had just 15 players on the first team, and that was when I realized that the loan pipeline from Sampdoria had run dry. Oh, they’re still technically our parent club, and they’re still happy to loan us players—it’s just that now they want six-figure payouts and 100% salary coverage for them. So we’re on our own. And we need to bring in at least 3-4 players—at least—to have a chance of staying up.
Samp did send us one semi-useful youth player, a right winger called Stefano Marchetti. So call it 2-3 players. We needed, as a bare minimum, a new starting midfielder, a backup striker, and possibly a backup left back.
Next: Who we found. What it means. And one last glimpse of the madness of Jorge Ibáñez.
Read More: Football Manager 2009, Pixel Dramas, Pro Vercelli
by Brian Phillips · March 30, 2009
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The real puzzle in this story is why Brian Phillips — a strategic and tactical genius of the first order, who has worked miracles with extraordinarily limited resources — is not being courted by Roman Abramovich, who, here in 2014, is on his fifth Chelsea manager in the past seven years. Football Manager is a very unrealistic game.
I can’t wait! Great post again Brian
5 managers in 7 years? Sounds about right for Abramovich….
I’m not saying there haven’t been rumors. Someone at Torino is very eager to tell the press I’m interested in moving there, for instance. (Though I’m not sure in what universe that could be construed as a step up.)
But since I have only one club in my veins and that club is Pro Vercelli, I can’t see the point in dwelling on a lot of speculations and untruths. At least not until I can use them as leverage with the board to get a better youth academy.
Brian, you have to be practical. If Torino wants you, then go. Sentimentality is for those who can only live in the past, you have a brilliant future!
As they said about Capello in Spain, “El Italiano nunca se casa con nadie, o si se casa, se te la pega a lo clandestino”
Who won the playoff to join you in Serie A?
Hilariously enough, it was Atalanta, the 6th-placed team in the league.
So both Treviso and Pisa are left behind. They both lost to Atalanta, Treviso 4-3 (agg.) in the semifinal and Pisa 3-2 (agg.) in the final.
Also, I forgot to mention this, but Argentina won their second consecutive World Cup. In Brazil, no less!
England lost to Iran in the group stage and didn’t advance to the knockout rounds.
Do you have any sense of the current state of Serie A relative to the rest of Europe, Brian?
Well, over the six Champions League seasons from 2008-09 to 2013-14, Italy has managed to produce one winner (Roma in 2013) and two runners-up (Milan in 2011 and Roma in 2014). That’s compared to three winners and two runners-up for Spain and two winners and two runners-up for England. So while that’s not disgraceful—and Roma’s made the final in each of the last two seasons—it’s the worst of the top three leagues.
In the UEFA Cup, Italy has produced two winners (Milan in 2009 and Inter in 2010) and one runner-up (Sampdoria in 2014). Spain has three winners and one runner-up, England has zero winners and one runner-up, and the other spots were filled by France (Monaco won in 2011, PSG finished second in 2010) and Portugal (Porto and Benfica have both finished second). So Serie A is the second most successful league here, behind La Liga.
What’s intriguing about these results is how poorly AC Milan have performed considering their absolute dominance of Serie A, which they’ve now won six straight times. If you look at club finances, Milan is easily the richest club in the world, and overall Serie A has four of the seven richest clubs on Earth:
1. Milan €816m
2. Barcelona €610m
3. Roma €535m
4. Real Madrid €513m
5. Arsenal €449m
6. Juventus €415m
7. Inter €395m
But looking at the UEFA coefficients, Serie A is seriously underperforming, with only three teams in the top 10 (Milan, Inter, and Roma, ranked 7th, 8th, and 10th respectively). There are three Spanish teams and three English teams ahead of the highest-ranked Italian team.
So in terms of recent performances, I’d say Serie A is the third-strongest league in Europe, well behind Spain and narrowly behind England. In terms of financial strength, it’s the top league in Europe, slightly above Spain and well above England.
Does Milan have a striker named Platan Mibrahimovic that everyone thinks doesn’t perform in big games?
They’ve generally managed to reach the semifinals before they lose, so I’m guessing no.
Brian–
Reading about the training facility upgrade reminded me of your problems with upgrading the Stadio Piola. Any news/resolution on this front?
No, unfortunately. I don’t think there’s anything that can be done until we have a few hundred million spare euros in the bank with which to build a new stadium, which, given my luck, the game will probably decide to call Jorge Ibáñez Park.
Roma won the Champion’s League? I was there for their 2001 scudetto, and saw the city’s reaction to it. So basically you’re saying that 2013 is the year the eternal city was burned to the ground. You could probably see that party from orbit…