The Run of Play is a blog about
the wonder and terror of soccer.
We left the window open during a match in October 2007 and a strange wind blew into the room.
Now we walk the forgotten byways of football with a lonely tread, searching for the beautiful, the bewildering, the haunting, and the absurd.
Congratulations!
I was looking at the UEFA Fair Play rules, and it seems that Italy has never won an extra spot. Has Italian football calmed somewhat since 2009?
Also, I noticed that while Man City got pretty far, losing in the quarters this year, no other team has even got to the semis. Way to go!
wow, the animation was even more spectacular than the game. congrats on both fronts… do you do these yourself? and, who is singing?
Sorry—the song is The Intelligence’s cover of “Pony People” by Wounded Lion (which is not intended as a commentary on Pro Vercelli’s chances of defending their title next year).
As for the animations: just some lovely things I found. Glad you like them.
Huzzah! And you got your shootout!
A glorious victory! Your passing on that first goal reminded me of Barca — or should I say that Barca reminds me of Pro Vercelli . . . ?
Congrats! I was about to scold you regarding the song, but someone beat me to it.
The animation was amazing; such a beautiful video. I seriously feel really happy right now. I also really want to drop some acid, but that’s another story.
Alan—my thoughts exactly! I feel like Barcelona are your Real World spiritual brothers…I also love the poetry of the final coming down to something that was essentially beyond your external control (outside of course the order of takers). The clicking of the algorithms switching one way or another, life. Beautiful. I want to order a Pro Vercelli shirt now…
What kind of butterflies are being represented?
Congratulations are in order!
Now that you’ve spent a year schooling the Italy and Europe, what’s next on your agenda?
I’m sure you’ll not tell us before you sit down to tea with Riccardo Nastro, but presumably with the new stadium and the trophies comes a considerable pot of money to spend, at least in relative terms. So… will there be much squad strengthening, is Senad realising that he can have it all at Pro Vercelli, and will there be any tickets left over at the New Silvio Piola next year?
The butterflies could they be … Yucatan Gladius??
Did everyone catch that that first goal came before Roma had even touched the ball? It only took 21 seconds. If only we could have done it again in the next 7179 seconds before the match went to penalties.
Mark — Actually, our financial condition at the moment isn’t as good as you might expect. We actually lost money by winning Serie A, as the prize money is only €1.3 million and we paid out €2.8 million in squad bonuses to mark the moment.
We did make around €7 million from the Europa League, but I’m not exactly sure what effect the new stadium will have at this point. It’ll be nice to double our matchday revenue, but we had to take on a €31 million debt to finance construction. We’re only paying back about €4 million a year, but 20,000 seats doesn’t generate wild amounts of cash, either, so I’m guessing profits from the stadium will be relatively modest until we can expand it (and I hope we can expand it).
The bottom line is that we have about €25 million in the bank right now, and I don’t want to go below that number. We’ll get some summer income in the form of sponsor payments and season tickets, but the real question is whether to sell Ibrahimovic, who would probably fetch €30 million by himself. That’s the step I’ll probably have to take if I want to make any major moves in the summer (though it’s not at all obvious that we need to make any major moves).
I’m genuinely torn about this. He’s an amazing player, we won a title with him, and he’ll probably be more content now that he’s playing for a championship team. On the other hand, he’s genuinely annoying to have around—I don’t know what his personality stats are like, but he has both me and the club listed as favorites, and yet at the moment he’s still transfer listed by request. And if I could get €30-35 million for him, I might be able to replicate, say, 80% of his production with another player, improve the squad in another area, and leave the club in better financial shape.
I’m reluctant to tinker with a team that just won a double, but there’s a part of me that just wants to get rid of him. Any thoughts?
Brian-
Ibra is just a moody character. You are an affable fellow who gets along with most people, so don’t let Ibra’s antisocial personality disorder force you to undersell him (for either a low price or while he’s still young). Once you stop trying to reach him and just let him be his moody self, you will be much happier and he will either be productive and play or not.
Just don’t rest on your laurels – the competition gets better every offseason, and so much PV. Do you feel you have a creative winger to come off the bench and bag a goal if the need arises? Or a holding mid that can lock down the last 15 minutes of a game?
congrats!
I’d boot his ass…if you feel the price is right, of course. If you don’t mind me making an American football comparison…he sounds like Terrell Owens. A wonderful talent who instantly makes a team better…on the field. Off the field, the drama, regardless of the instigator, is a liability. I’ll say this…as a fan, I love T.O. I could care less about the drama that surrounds him because he performs on the field. As a manager, I would take an entirely different approach though. I want to see a hunger…that even at the pinnacle of his play…he still approaches every game with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove.
I don’t know how deep FM goes, but it seems as though a player like Ibra would pose more of a threat to shake your youthful side than a group of cagy veterans.
Just out of curiousity, when will this dream end? Did you set an end date (2030?) at the outset, saying that you’d walk away if you didn’t achieve your goals by that time? Or did you make a grocery list of accomplishments (Champions League 3-peat?) to achieve before you hung up the clipboard? Or is it when virtual-Phillips feels like it? Or…what?
See, I feel like this season was the beginning of the game, not a sign of the end of it. Now we’ve officially arrived and we can start aiming for big goals—surpassing Inter’s scudetto total, establishing ourselves as the top club in Piedmont, making Pro Vercelli the biggest and wealthiest club in the world.
We have one Serie A title on hand but we’re a long way from establishing any kind of long-term dominance over the league, especially with Milan and their billion-euro bank account and their recent eight-peat lurking right behind us. I want to make Pro Vercelli the center of Serie A, not a tiny outsider that went on one loopy run to a championship. And there’s still the small matter of making a mark on the Champions League.
As long as you guys keep enjoying the story and I keep enjoying the game, in other words, I can’t see any reason to retire before FM2010 comes out.
Milan just won the Champions League title, for instance, their second European Cup in four years. This looks like the game of the season: Milan were once again playing Liverpool in the final, whose manager sensationally left Milan for Liverpool in the middle of Milan’s string of championships (and has now lost twice to them in Champions League finals as a reward). The game went to extra time after a 1-1 draw, and looked bound for penalties until the 35-year-old Francismar, by now on the Pele/Maradona level of unimaginable legendariness, scored a goal in the 120th minute to give Milan the win.
The fact that those kinds of things are happening to our rivals makes me want to stay at Pro Vercelli forever.
Brian what a tremendous achievement, not only have you enthralled dozens of us with your own particular tributary of nerdish obsession, but you have created straight-faced debate about the character flaws of a fictional, computer generated defender from the future. I don’t know whether to shake my head or delight.
As a FM outsider and relatively new to this blog (genius, btw), can I ask you lot, do you have to wait the few days between games like it appears Brian does, or could you sit down on the couch with your bong and knock out a full season in a week or something?
From this blog alone, I am contemplating getting an Xbox when FM 2010 comes out. And then my grades will suck even harder I’m sure.
couch and bong works. Brian just likes to string us along (or he just doesn’t like to write as much and as often as i like to read his writings).
Brian – I’m guessing you’ve probably made your call on this, but I suppose there are two ways of looking at it.
1) Will he ever be happy? Given you might be able to command €30m for him, he’ll probably never be worth more, and the financial freedom that money could give you might be priceless. After all, you’ve probably not spent that amount so far in your time at Vercelli – so imagine what you could do with it if you had it.
2) Yes, he’s unhappy, but does it matter? The rationale here being that it doesn’t seem to have affected either the team, judging on your double, or the player, judging on his role in the double. If he’s tied to contract, and not causing schisms, then just accept it as a quirk of the game and keep him on.
—
On the stadium front, I think I remember reading many years ago that there was an inbuilt limiter in the game as to how big clubs could grow. The likes of Stevenage, for example, even if they won the Premiership and Champions League ten years running, could never get much bigger than, say a 25,000 seater stadium, because the game judged that they’d never be able to command a big enough fan base given their location, their history and so forth. I always thought that was a bit dubious – yes, Manchester United could descend into mediocrity and still be well followed, but a ‘small’ or ‘regional’ club should surely be able to build its stature almost infinitely, if gradually. To that end, do you know if there are ceiling values in place for Pro Vercelli’s support, stadiums, stature?
If regional clubs could grow without limit, then why didn’t Valencia explode in the early 2000′s? I would like to think that a provincial club could grow without a limit, but everything is relative and history matters.
For example. while Newcastle went down this year, I anticipate in five years they will be back in the EPL and there for a long time, while Hull will be in the coca cola whateverever. Why? History, fanbase, resources, prestige.
That is why the Leeds meltdown is so exceptional – history and fanbase and a certain “marketability” affect so many things, and the established clubs have an edge over the upstarts.
Elliott – I don’t mean without limit as such. Blackburn won a Premier League and were a big fish for 4/5 seasons and are subsequently a lot more mid-to-lower table now – the fan numbers have not (correct me if wrong) changed a great deal since they were a Premiership side.
However, there comes a point when that has to change, surely? If you have the best players winning title after title, beating the cream of European football, building several Championship winning sides, then you are building a history that people will come to support and love, and that in turn should lead to expansion.
If (for instance), Brian’s Pro Vercelli side win a dozen major trophies in the next ten years, that’s surely a generation of kids who’ll grow up supporting them, and the numbers who come to watch the game will surely exceed 23,000 (at least if the stadium gets bigger). I know there are thresholds for this thing, but can a team not change their stars (fortunes not players, of course…)?
This is actually close to the concept I was trying to track when I made up the Southgate Parallel last season: the collective sense of a team’s “real level” that develops over time. Newcastle are terrible at the moment and will play in the second tier next season, but in terms of their aura and the importance we grant them, they clearly still “belong” in the Premier League. Ten seasons of lower-league futility and that sense of belonging would probably dissipate.
It’s probably not much of a stretch to connect a club’s potential level of fan support to its position relative to the Southgate Parallel. The more prestige and “belonging” it has, the more fans it will attract (though there are obviously other significant factors, such as the size of the city the club plays in). The huge challenge facing smaller clubs is that because their Southgate ranking changes much more slowly than their immediate league position, one glorious run to a title, or a few seasons of elite play, won’t be enough to give them big-club status. To make that change, they’d have to put together a sustained run of success—essentially creating the history and tradition that would give them legitimacy in the eyes of fans—without the resources almost any club would need to do it. So it almost never happens, but it can’t be impossible; just look at the change in Chelsea’s global fanbase in the last 10 years.
In the world of FM, though…I’m not sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a hard limit placed on a club’s potential for fan support, at least as it affects attendance at games (marketing may be more fluid). It’s a stretch to imagine Pro Vercelli, a club in a town of 40,000 people, playing in an 80,000-seat stadium. I just hope the limit is closer to 50,000 than to the 20,000 we have now.
Did the new training schedules work out as hoped? Also, how many homegrown players are cracking the Starting XI?
Good point Brian – other examples that come to mind are Valencia and Villareal. Valencia has won two La Liga titles this decade and reached a Champions League final, yet finds itself in financial ruin and is about to have a major exodus of players.
Villareal has had moderate success by comparison, but their 2006 golden year did not usher in a new wave of high profile signings.
Also, right now a lot of players at Milan and Juventus could be playing for higher wages at midlevel English clubs, yet not everyone has followed Robinho to the isles. Why? In terms of player recruitment, a history of success is a major factor.
On another sidenote concerning Football Manager and previous posts. Someone had pingbacked your post on the Times’ Masal Bugduv ordeal, and I took a quick glance at the list again. It reads like a whos-who of FM starlets, which of course on some level is to be expected.
But I am wondering how much this game may be influencing peoples thoughts about real players. I follow a couple of team boards, and when some 15 old kids talk about who Barca or Madrid should sign, often I hear about some South American FM prodigy.
Not too relevant, but another tangent on the relationship of FM to the real world that had crossed my mind.
It’s a huge topic, gvb. You know Everton are using their database, right?
Everton have been using it for years, that’s why they signed Ibrahima Bakayoko.
Brian, is that link serious??!
I mean I understand using SimCity to teach middleschoolers city government, but this! Do you know how Sports Interactive compiles the database? Do they actually use scout reports or something. I had always just assumed they had just divided up the world, listed all the players, and put some superficial stats based on the past couple of seasons.
Surely no one could take seriously some of the 16 year old Brazilian no names that become elite over the course of a game.
well i reread the article, it says that 1000 scouts do the research. wow. maybe it is serious.
They actually have a pretty good track record of identifying talent. (If I remember correctly, I first heard of Sergio Agüero from an FM game.) Every year there are some ridiculous projections, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their results compared favorably to those of professional scouts.
I doubt they have a lot of expert veteran scouts going to matches, but just having so many volunteers means they can take advantage of a lot of really specific local knowledge—fans who might not know everything about the sport, but actually do know more about the youth system at Arsenal di Sarandi than most mid-table Premier League clubs do.
I don’t know; you wouldn’t want to base your whole scouting program on it, but for a club like Everton, I can see that it would be a good way to tap into that local knowledge to find prospects that they could then send their own scouts to look at.
I cant help to think how very Roman that red card really was…congrats on the win and the GREAT video!
Fantastic font choice, Brian. Just as I was thinking, watching the Semi, that as much as I like your standard choice, it was time for an update.
This one should be a one off, of course, as I’m sure you intend. But, it perfectly capture the nearly superfluous whimsy of a UEFA Cup final following your historic Scudetto.
The butterflies, though? As appropriate as they may be, haven’t you hinted a bit too much towards Vandal-prone’s true identity?
It’s true. Vandal-prone is Davide Rubino.