My assistant manager quit. I have no idea why. He just stood there in the doorway, gingerly holding his resignation letter, muttering something about becoming the coach of Sorrento.
“Why, Roberto Colapietro!” I exclaimed, using his real name for emphasis. “You’re going to be a manager, and you didn’t tell me? Congratulations! Don’t act so sheepish about it; only a nonentity would want to spend his entire life as an underling.”
“No, no, you misunderstand me, signore,” Roberto hemmed. “I’m going to be a coach at Sorrento. One of six, beneath the manager. That is…a trainer.”
I wrinkled my nose, simultaneously like and unlike Meg Ryan in one of her romantic comedies. “You’re leaving a job as the assistant manager of the best team in the world in order to take a worse job at a mid-table Serie C1/B club? Why would you do that? What are you thinking?”
But he just shifted his weight from foot to foot and didn’t say anything.
“Are you unhappy here? Are we not paying you enough? We could talk about a new contract, Roberto. You’re a valued part of the team, kind of.”
He looked at me with his big, sad eyes and said no, it wasn’t about the money, in fact he was taking an enormous pay cut.
I looked up Sorrento in the database and saw that they’d recently been bought by a Taiwanese conglomerate. I gave Roberto a concerned look and asked him if Chairman Fu Yuming had something on him—”because there are steps, Roberto; we have resources here, you know.” But Roberto clearly wasn’t going to explain, no matter what I said.
So, for the moment, I’m blundering through without an ass. man. (hee). That’s less of a problem than you might think; I’ve never had one whose tactical advice was worth the ambiguous gray substance it was printed on, I ritually ignore their thoughts on transfers, and I schedule my own friendlies. Where they’re useful is in keeping me attuned to the mood in the locker room: telling me which players are angry about their playing time, which players are feeling the pressure, which players are looking complacent, etc. That’s something I’ll have to make do without for the time being. I have an ad in the Italian Football Post; hopefully some good candidates will wash up on the Naming Rights doorstep soon.
Incidentally, and this has nothing to do with anything, but while I was doing a quick assistant manager search on my own, I noticed that Vito Scialpi, the manager of A.C. Milan, is paid €450,000 per week. That’s almost eight times what I’m making (€58,000/week) and almost two and a half times as much as the highest-paid player in the world (Barcelona’s Sergio, €186,000/week). Hope those zero trophies you’ve won since 2018 are helping you enjoy the fruits of your success, Vito.
Transfers. There was arguably no need to tear up a team that had won the UEFA Super Cup, the Club World Cup, the Coppa Italia, Serie A, and the Champions League the season before (sorry, I’m just listing these to irk Vito), but I still had a couple of priorities, namely bringing in a left back to cover for Michael Dogan and buying a striker to replace Teixeira. Oh, right, and selling Teixeira. Why did I decide to sell Teixeira?
Because the kid was 22 and in the full-blown midst of losing it. His abilities were declining, his production had fallen off more sharply than the quality of Gaius Baltar subplots on Battlestar Galactica (nosebleed-inducingly, that is; face-meltingly), and his diva-ish/temperamental/”thoroughbred” personality had meant that he was hated by roughly half the players on the team. He’d given us two otherworldly seasons (22 goals in 39 starts in 2017-18, 18 goals in 29 starts the next year), but last year could only manage five goals in 29 appearances. Maybe it was just a fluke, and if I sold him now (now, while he was still worth something) I’d regret it. But that wasn’t the way I was gambling.
Still, I hedged my bets. Instead of taking €35 million up front from A.C. Milan (who, remember, had offered me €60 million for him two seasons ago), I sent him to Atlético Madrid for €30 million spread out over two years. This way, if he does recapture the glory months of his late teens, I won’t have to watch it in Serie A every week.
To replace Teixeira, I wanted value for money: a guy who could be an effective backup for Dmitry Kozlov, but not someone who was going to cost crazy bailout/Ponzi-scheme money (you know, Vito Scialpi money). I settled on Andreas Andersson, Barcelona’s overlooked Swedish international. He’s 29, zippy, and flairful, and he’s played well everywhere he’s been given a chance. I wish he had a left foot, but he only cost €7.75 million. At this level, that’s practically free.
(Compare with Teixeira at four times the price:
.)
Yes, this means both of our strikers are F.C. Barcelona castoffs. But at this point, I’m just trying to keep the seat warm until our young stars (Michele Proietti, Luca Leone, et. al.—yes, we have a promising 18-year-old named Leone, as if destiny didn’t already have a sense of humor) are ready to take over. And I think we owe Barcelona the commerce after the bath they took on the Antônio purchase back in 2019.
So you’re a famous old football club from Piedmont, newly resurgent, rich as a lord, and in the market for a backup left back. What do you do? You play it cool and look for a solid bargain, right, a player who’ll contribute meaningful minutes (“contribute” being the kind of language you’ll invoke to describe his, er, contribution) but not require lethal icebergs of cash (you know, Vito Scialpi money). Right? Well, I was sitting on a transfer budget of I think €98 million, and I went the opposite direction.
Basically, I kept getting my head turned. I upsold myself. If I’m paying €11 million for decent, why not pay €17 million for good? And if I’m already paying €17 million, why not let the salesman with the astonishing pompadour tack on the thermal undercoating and Venutian GPS (you never know, he says) while we’re at it? In the end I was apprised of the plight of one Tim Hauk, a German international and best-left-back-on-earth candidate, who had recently accepted a €30 million transfer to Manchester United after which they immediately and inscrutably switched to a 3-5-2 with a flat midfield and no fullbacks. Languishing in a formation that had no use for him, this astoundingly talented 24-year-old was desperate to escape and available for the not-exactly-discount-but-not-exactly-not price of €29 million. I took it.
It’s going to require some rewiring. He’s clearly too talented to sit on the bench, but it’s also not just a matter of making him the starter and Dogan the backup; Dogan has to start as near to every game as possible, because when Dogan isn’t out there working his captainy magicks we tend to play like a sponge that’s wet in the middle (and I don’t even know what that means). Fortunately, Dogan is versatile and tends to play well even in positions for which he’s nominally unsuited, so the plan is to rotate him around the park depending on who needs rest, while letting Hauk take the bulk of games at left back.
One other purchase to report: Erdem Ak, a Turkish teenager for whom I parted with €8 million because he’s two-footed, promising, and nifty for his age:
The preseason with this group was a mixed bag. We took a gentlemanly second in the Silvio Piola Cup, beating Barcelona in a 4-3 thriller in the first round before succumbing 0-1 to Man Utd in the final. Then we played the Supercoppa Italiana, where Roma utterly obliterated all facets of our game and won 4-0 (a bad omen?). Then we won the UEFA Super Cup (third year running) against Sporting, in an insane game that went to penalties, then went 14 penalties deep before we won it 9-8 (both goalkeepers scored, Paolo Martini scored the winner).
We start the season against Parma and Salernitana before playing Milan at the San Siro in the third game of the year. We’re rested and ready to go, and the team’s sanguine of mind now that Teixeira’s ego is no longer perched like a tarantula on the locker room wall.
But can we play without the striker I genuinely believed would be a 15-year talisman for the club? Can we stay motivated after running the table in every conceivable way last season? Can we cope with the transition as some of our established over-30 stars (Ibrahimovic, I am looking in your direction) start to make way for the players who will one day replace them (I am whistling your tune, Riccardo Caprioli)? Can I continue to drink coffee at a biologically sustainable pace without an assistant manager to fetch it for me? Stay tuned.
Read More: Football Manager 2009, Pixel Dramas, Pro Vercelli
by Brian Phillips · July 27, 2009
Baltar subplots on BSG seemed to be more about finding more extravagant ways to get him laid than anything else. He’d already slept with virtually every female character of note on the show, so the only way to top it was to give him a harem.
Yeah, I’m guessing they misread all the letters reading “please, just get him off.”
I was seriously jonesing for some PV reporting, Mr. Phillips, so thanks for that. I do wonder, though: are you at all concerned about TIm Hauk’s lack of “natural fitness” or blazing pace? How much of a difference does the fitness make, do you find?
The lack of natural fitness doesn’t worry me at all, since he’ll be playing regularly. I’ve never understood exactly what natural fitness does, but as far as I can tell it just determines how long a player keeps his fitness between matches and how quickly he regains match fitness after losing it.
His pace could be more of a problem, but I’m not too worried because: 1) pace >15 is generally less crucial in Italy, 2) he’s such a smart player (Decisions 20!) that I think he’ll know how to compensate, and 3) playing with a dedicated holding midfielder tends to slow down attacks, break up counters, and take a lot of pressure off the back four. So I’m hoping he won’t have to spend much time in a desperation sprint.
I have to think that “Natural Fitness” has much more of an influence on the time it takes a player to recover from injuries than anything else. Or maybe it influences how quickly they gain other physical stats?
I’ve heard the theory about injury recovery time, but I haven’t noticed any connection myself. Mark Linnane, who has a natural fitness score of 14, has had multiple multi-month injuries in his career, whereas Fabio, who has a score of 8, has never been injured longer than two weeks. That may be a fluke, obviously. If I’m not mistaken there’s also a hidden stat called “injury proneness” that may relate to this.
I’ve also heard theories that natural fitness affects how quickly players recover condition, how quickly they lose condition, and even at what age their abilities will start to fall off. Basically nobody knows what it does. It’s one of the stats I worry least about.
that Roberto Colapietro move is bizarre. it seems like the game is just trying to throw things at you now, even if they don’t make sense.
Maybe he wants to help another team make it to the top of the italian league? Although I’m not sure he was even there with you all the way, and doubt that football manager has people with those sort of goals.
But then why take a job as a coach? There are only a handful of staff members in the game with a “world class” reputation (even I am only at “continental”) and he’s one of them. He could have had his pick of clubs to manage.
It’s especially bizarre given that no one else on the Sorrento staff has a reputation higher than “local.” It’s like if Carlos Queiroz took a job giving massages at Methyr Tydfil.
My working theory is that he couldn’t handle the stress any more. He’s also a coach for the English national team (defending World Cup champions, remember), and between that and Pro Vercelli he was probably just ready to move to a resort town where he wouldn’t have to work very hard or cope with pressure or spend any time with the youth team.
This is an old CM bug. I play CM 01 and there will often be times where the manager of a national team (no coaches for national teams back then) will take a job as the coach of a non-league team.
The other one that often happens is that the game will, for some reason, stick a lot of retired legends on the coaching staffs of one or two teams in very strange places. So there was one saved game I had where the Moldovan second division had five or six teams with the most legendary coaching staffs on the history of the planet. My favorite was one combination that had no manager, Frank De Boer as the assistant manager, and Alexi Lalas, Tony Meola, Cesc Fabregas, Patrick Kluivert, and Arjen Robben as coaches.
I assume Alexi Lalas was the de facto manager of that club.
I dont know why your reputation isn’t world class.. I managed to get world class on my save and I dont think I have achieved what you have..
The view from the top is always less interesting than the journey getting there. Now its basically a question of whether Pro is the best club in the the entirety of existence, or merely the known universe. Its almost a foregone conclusion at this stage that you’ll win every trophy on the planet (“And the winners of the Bundesliga are…Pro Vercelli?”). How does it feel to be the club everyone hates?
Brian-
I checked PV, and your “shady nebulous mafia connection” score is only 7/20.
I really think you need to hire some bodyguards and arrange some nice private dinners with local businessmen, even if just to keep up appearances – I am worried about your kneecaps.
JRobinson — No managers in my game are world class. Even the ones who are making Vito Scialpi money.
I always saw it more as rotating-heads-of-state. Like the EU Presidency, or the Red Bulls job.
450,000 euros a week?!?
Sorry, that’s a mental gap I can’t quite get over.
I make 425,000 GBP/week @ Man C, but I can’t for the life of me find out of there is someone making more than me. I was offered the job at AC Milan for 225,000 GBP/week about six years back, so I’m sure that whoever coaches at Milan will be making a large sum of money. I will be getting a new contract shortly as well, so it will be going up significantly. My manager score is more than twice Sir Alex’s score now, and after this summer (3rd world cup!) will be closer to three times his score.
The salary in this game is meaningless, and I’ll probably be quitting Man C once I’ve made around 200 million total and going to a small little Italian team and taking them to top flight by the year 2050 ^___^. I normally quit after a few years of FM and this is the longest I’ve played (2022)
I genuinly do not see the need for a salary in FM. Aside from paying off FA fines for mouthing off at the referees, what else is it for?
I took Sutton Utd(my real world local club) from Blue Sq. South to winning the Prem in 17 years (FM 08) aquiring silly amounts of wages, but never really doing anything with it.
As a Celtic fan, I have an alternative save game where I have a watertight contract at Rangers, where it would cost ludicrous amounts to sack me, and I’ve successfully navigated them to the bottom of the Scottish Third Division. Nothing gives me more pride. I’m currently doing worse than Paul Le Guen.
Re: You’re assistant manager.
I like to think that five years ago he married a woman about thirty years younger than him. People questioned the relationship, but the reality was that they completed each other, and both were happier together then they had ever been in their lives. Their’s was a love, perfect and pure. She recently died in a tragic head on collision with a drunk driver. Upon hearing the news, Roberto didn’t cry. He shrugged. He shrugged because he has given up, because a world run by a cruel and malevolent deity who would take away his darling Franchesca, well, it’s a world not worthy of tears. Roberto is filled with hate. He hates God, hates the world, he hates himself. And he hates the game, hates it for having taken time away from Franchesca, time he could have spent in her arms. So he renounces his world class talent. He wants nothing more to do with it. He has decided that he is done giving to the world, done giving love and done giving hope to the players who would chew nails for him. He hates it all. So he quits his job, he moves to Sorrento, determined to drink himself to death before the year is up, to a post where he will be a nobody, a non entity, where he can wallow in his hate and pity and anger and self loathing without having to waste any time putting a comforting arm around spoiled superstars. His life in Sorrento goes according to plan, he’s drunk, angry and alone. Until one day he meets a woman…
Well it’s a theory anyway. But something tells me you haven’t seen the last of Roberto.
I’m going to say that’s it. Why? Occam’s razor.
I’m just sorry Roberto didn’t feel he could share any of this with me. I’m one of his favored personnel, but I don’t know. I guess I didn’t make enough “us” time or something.
Hey mate, it’s the first time I’m reading your blog and I must say that I love your style, you’re writing short stories more than blog posts
Keep up the good work, I like it a lot.
Anyone else noticed Sporting’s first choice penalty taker Diego missed 2 in a row during the shootout?