Hello, friends! Sorry for the late update, I’ve been quite busy in the real life, as it sometimes happens, and didn’t have too much time for Football Manager.

Either way, I am here now and I am ready to share with you all the details about my pre-season campaign with Chieti for our second season in the Italian Serie A at the end of which, hopefully, we’ll be able to get to European competitions.

I was completely surprised from the start by the amount of money the board decided to make available to spend on transfers: almost 33 million, even though we only have 18 in the bank. I am glad to see that they have faith in the team, though:

Of course, the bookies have no faith in us being able to win anything this season, but let’s hope we’ll be able to prove them wrong. I am actually upset with their predictions after the solid season we had:

Anyway, back to the transfers, because they are important. Here is the list of players that joined in and those who left:

Pre-season 2016-2017 Players Out

As you can see in the image above, I had to leave some important players go: striker Monachello is probably the most important on the list, closely followed by Luca Rigoni and Wanderson Cafu. I have decided to accept the money for some co-ownership deals since the money was great and all offers were for 2 years (meaning that the players will remain at Chieti for 2 seasons, no matter what). This is a good move, I think, because we will surely get to keep the players 2 seasons and there is no risk for some other team to “steal” them and second, judging from last season, teams tend to stop wanting the players and most likely they will still remain at Chieti, and we get some free money. It’s a risk I am willing to take.

Pre-season 2016-2017 Players In

The first three transfers are not actually transfers, are offers I made for the co-ownership deals and it appears that I rushed to offer too much money since only for Karabacak there was an offer bigger than 1 Euro However, I did not want to lose him since he’s an amazing lad, the best defender we have:

Next, I wanted to get a solid central midfielder and I was pretty surprised that we can’t find too many great ones – mainly because of the wage cap. However, I splashed the cash for Castellani who I hope will be a great asset for the team:

Now here are the other players I have brought in (excluding the youngsters that went straight to the U20 team):

Sebastien Delaunay – He’s a really solid player and even though he was not necessarily a must have, I agreed to sign him before knowing if Karabacak or Cuntz will remain at the club. He will certainly not be extra weight though:

Vid Belec – even though he’s not much better than our current keeper, he has some better stats and I always like to have a solid keeper. Probably not one that will be with us with many seasons, but we’ll have to do for now:

Sekou Diallo – A very promising young striker, I will probably train him to get better as a Left Inside forward and… who knows? Maybe he’ll become our next star!

Gianluca Sansone – I needed some quality on the wings and Sansone came in. He’s not brilliant, but decent and hopefully he will do a good job:

Carles Gil – probably the starting player for the left winger position, Gil came straight from Valencia (although he didn’t play for them) and hopefully he’ll put in some nice performances!

Viorel Achim - being a Romanian I couldn’t help it and I had to buy Achim when my scouts found him. He’s a decent player for his age and according to the reports, he will get much better.

Rui Silva – finally, an investment for the future as our captain and defensive midfielder Giurgiu is getting old and we need a back-up for his current back-up. Makes sense?

I am not completely satisfied with the transfers – we still lack quality players on the wings and I would’ve loved to be able to sign another great midfielder, but overall the team is better than last year and hopefully this is enough to get us to Europe.

We started well with the friendlies but continued with a morale-breaker, starting the season against AC Milan who simply crushed us:

As I said, Milan completely dominated us and we looked like a different team in this match. A worse one!

Hopefully things will turn around and we’ll enter a winning streak after this bad start.