Wizards on the rise!
More Benevento goodness in Football Manager 18
Welcome back guys, three seasons are gone and Benevento improved a lot since my reign started, to be fair our results firmly improved while the club is more or less the same cause the lack of money obliged me to put first other things, only being able to upgrade out training facilities in a minor way.
This season we’ve added some silverware to our (empty) trophy cabinet, winning for the first time in our history the TIM Cup (Coppa italia) defeating 2–0 Ascoli in a not so predictable final.
But we did more, we reached Europa league semifinals, losing to Liverpool and finished 2nd in Serie A, only six points behind Juventus and qualifying for 2020–21 UCL.
Obviously I dind’t expect all these things to happen in such a short period of time but I hope the best is yet to come for Benevento, even if from this point we’ll have to cope with more pressure, from the media, the fans and the board.
The first aspect I always try to improve and keep under control when I begin a Football Manager save is finances, a small club needs a tight wage structure to survive and we’re really small, after this succesful season our average attendance at “Ciro Vigorito” has been 12.454 in the league, definitively not great.
Things went a bit better in our European campaign but there we have restrictions, our 25.000 stadium capacity is reduced to 15000 due to Uefa rules.
Our stadium is a problem that in the long term I’m planning to fix, hopefully more successful seasons could attract more fans.
I talked before about our wage structure, as you see our wage budget will be limited (25 M)for next season as well, to make a quick comparison Juventus and Inter spent respectively 140 and 94 M for wages, therefore the difficult part starts now, keeping my best players will be a complicated task as I clearly can’t cope with these clubs offers.
Fabio Depaoli joined Benevento from Chievo last year for 6 M, he’s earning 800k per year and his contract will expire in two years (2022), he’s probably the most important player for the club: 14 goals, 10 assists and 9 Pom’s this season, voted as best best Serie A midfielder of the year as well.
Juventus are interested and when I tried to offer him a new contract his answer was predictable but still annoying: 3 M per season, the board blocked the deal.
This quick example shows the challenges I’ll have to face quite regularly preparing for the oncoming season, as other important players are in a similar situation.
News from the tactical front
My shape evolved, the goal I had in mind this year was to develop a more possession based tactic derived from last year 4–5–1 framework and so I did.
Inside forwards and the mezzala are key in this system, they exploit spaces created by my hard working lone striker that is great at putting pressure on defenders and keep them busy; wingbacks are mainly employed to recycle possession as they’re instructed to dribble less, with better players the next step for this tactical asset could be adopting complete wingbacks so to become even more aggressive down both flanks.
Below you could see my TI’s, I’m not a big fan of tactics using too many of them and I love to keep things simple: my players need to start building from the back without losing possession in dangerous areas of the pitch and these settings help to achieve this.
In some games I tried to use a more creative lone striker, Yordanov, in a false nine role, a change that could have further developments.
This way he drops deep and help when we’re struggling to create chances from midfield, leaving more room up top for my two inside forwards.
Different combinations of roles are a great way to change your style of play without changing your shape in the tactics creator
That’s all for now, I’m truly enjoying this save and I’m already planning for my fourth season, for more info & news about this career follow me on twitter: Armchair_Gaffer.
If you want to discover what happened before simply go to the main page of this blog.
On a final note real life Benevento just gained their first serie A point last week thanks to their goalkeeper, Alberto Brignoli, who scored a last minute goal in their 2–2 draw vs. Milan, as depicted in the opening image.
Forza Stregoni!
