Hello friends and welcome to another update from my Football Manager 2012 story with Chieti. This is the first year that the team has ever played in the Serie A and after a decent yet unimpressive start of the season the team managed to step up and go for a nice run that almost ended with European qualification.

Actually, at first I was just happy with a 15th position, but towards the end of the season I started to really dream about Europe. It just wasn’t meant to be this year, even though we managed to finish an impressive 7th, 2 points away from Europe:

We also had a pretty interesting win against AC Milan where we were dominated from start to end, but somehow managed a historic win that will remain in the books:

Players-wise, I was very pleased with how the lads started to play and the performances they brought in. Yildirim was simply amazing on the field, as well as Lacourt while Peteleu could be considered another surprise this season: I signed him mainly because he was Romanian, but I didn’t think he would rise up to the standards. He did well, though, as most of our players:

The fans player of the year was not Yildirim, though and again came as a surprise: Lacourt was the pick of the fans and he was indeed the most spectacular lad in the team, which makes me believe that Football Manager is now taking in account fan appeal and not just numbers.

Our Serie A performance also gave us a welcomed award – we were considered the overachievers this season and hopefully the same will be said next season about the team:

The board decided to surprise me once more and announced that they plan an expansion of our stadium (even though previous requests coming from me were denied) and next season we’ll have an “impressive” 9,000 seats for our fans. Hopefully that will help us increase the profits even more:

And I’ll finish the post about a rather successful season in my opinion by saying that I was pleased to see that I now made it on the list of Legends of the club. Pretty impressed I am (as Yoda would say), especially since this is the first time I find my name on the list:

Hopefully next season we’ll manage our first ever qualification in Europe. I think we deserve it!