Hello friends and welcome to a really late episode from my Chieti story in Football Manager 2012. Life has been really busy on my side and unfortunately I wasn’t able to play as much as I wanted, as you certainly was able to see. Funnily enough, when I look at Steam’s stats for Football Manager 2012, I played less than last year when I got married and I thought I had no time for the game It sucks getting old!

Now back to Chieti – this is the first time that we managed to qualify for an European competition and we were extremely happy. Even better is the fact that I was mostly satisfied with the squad and how it looked and I didn’t have to sign many players, as you can see below (with Lefevre and Fischer being guys that I already had in the squad, co-owned and who remained with Chieti):

I am extremely pleased with the signing of Luis Francisco, an extremely promising central midfielder coming from Getafe. I have really high expectations from this lad:

We’ve strengthened the central midfield area even more with Dragan Mitrovic, a young lad coming from Serbia with bags of talent:

I was lacking in the left fullback area, so I brought in Moroccan international Julien Rey who I’m sure will provide to be a great asset:

And finally, a very determined lad, Joaquin Cabrera to fight for a starting spot as an AML with Gil:

With the new squad ready, we started pretty bad: despite a few massacres in the friendlies, our last two were draws against very poor teams. This happened mostly because I let my assistant manager control the friendlies: it’s obvious that I won’t have to do that ever again! We also had a pretty tough leg against PAOK in the 4th Qualification Round for the EURO cup and we barely managed to make it to the group stages and I must admit that I am pretty happy about this performance:

In Europe, we were drawn in a not so bad group, against Sheriff who should provide no competition, as well as Sporting and HSV against which I hope to get some decent results, maybe even grab a random win somehow. Either way, we should have no problem grabbing the 3rd spot and learn a lot from this year’s Euro cup experience:

And this is it – we’re ready to start the season again against a very strong AC Milan… and hopefully we’ll manage to progress even further this time!