Football Manager 2021: born again?
Intro
At the beginning of the 2020–21 Serie A season, a strange thing happened, as many as two teams had the opportunity to put the historic symbol of the championship, lo scudetto, on their jersey.
Juve for winning the last championship and Spezia as honorary title for winning the 1944 Italian league during the war.
To be fair, that championship was never recognized by the Italian Federation as official, but in 2002 to Spezia was given the right to display on their jersey a tricolor badge to represent that success.
Newly promoted Spezia is the club I’m going to manage in Football Manager 2021.
Spezia is basically a Serie B team that unexpectedly found itself in Serie A, for the first time in 114 years, after a surprising campaign.
Moreover, due to the tight time frame for the current pandemic and the limited budget, they had serious problems in preparing to compete at this level.
The classic small fish in a big pond situation, my kind of game.
Benevento and Crotone, the other teams promoted from Serie B, look more ready than us to face the new league.
The challenge is real and we’ll try to stay up, obviously the bookies have a different idea.
Media prediction: 20th
Targets
I could set a series of objectives for the next few years and bore you to death, the usual things, but for greater realism I am sticking to the management’s request, more than a request a scream in the dark: to survive.
Surely the idea of making Spezia win a proper scudetto is attractive, but before we have to challenge Genoa and Sampdoria for local supremacy.
The team is largely made up of loans, if you like there are even too many players, not all of them so useful, but the transfer market during the Covid is very complicated, we will see what can be done.
I certainly cannot hope that the market will fix our problems: tactics, physical preparation and teamwork will be the key to overcome our limits.
The little eagles (gli aquilotti) are less than average in many departments, being mainly formed by experienced second-tier players and unproven youngsters, more on the team in another piece.
I will try to improve the staff, especially the scouting team, finding good prospects before the others will be vital for the survival of the club, improving the youth sector will be an issue that I will address later, not this year.
The stadium is another thorn in the side, the arena dedicated to Alberto Picco (first captain of the squad dead in the Great War) has a capacity of only 10330 seats and is owned by the municipality.
It seems that I cannot expand it or even buy it.
I’m going to start this journey when the full game will be released, so stay tuned for further updates, you’ll discover with me the style and the frequency of my next articles about Spezia.
I’m intrigued by the improved match engine, keep the faith, it could be fun and now a little preview while waiting for the journey to continue…
The shape was thus a 2–3–2–3, a W-W. At the time it seemed, as the journalist Mario Zappa put it in La Gazzetta dello Sport, a model of play that is the synthesis of the best elements of all the most admired systems.
Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid
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