Hello friends and welcome to a new episode from my Football Manager 2012 story with Chieti. As you probably remember, last year we managed to get a completely surprising promotion to the Serie A, after our first ever season in the Serie B. I would’ve loved to spend one more year there to be able to actually win the division, but who am I to complain?

We had to strengthen the squad quite a bit in order to hopefully stand a change in the Serie A and it wasn’t that easy to find Serie A quality players to join for almost no money. So it was a painful and frustrating experience, but we ended up signing no less than 17 new players, although a bunch of them went straight to the Youth team. We have to build up for the future when Europe comes and we have no Home Grown players…

I also had to let go many of our players, the most notable ones out being Michael Cardinali, the lad who played most league games for Chieti (at just 24) and Nicola Porfide, with the defender strangely refusing to renew his contract and moving to a lower team. I also signed 2 very solid co-ownership deals for striker Monachello and winger Uwe Rahn – this managed to put in our pockets quite some money and also lets us keep the players for at least one more season, which is great. Here’s how the transfers looked like (more on the players later):

Even after signing these new lads, things didn’t look too good for Chieti and the bookies certainly have absolutely no faith in our survival chances. I got some really frightening title odds, at 5001.00, probably the worst odds I ever had to fight against:

The board wants us to stay in Serie A no matter what, and the lowest expectation was to Avoid Relegation and since I don’t think we can aim higher, I accepted that quite happily. I also turned a big part of the transfer budget into wages to help us bring some better players in:

The facilities are also starting to move towards the right direction: we have managed to buy the stadium and we are going to have upgraded training facilities soon, while the upgrade of the youth facilities will strangely take a very long time. But anyway, things are moving in the right direction:

New Chieti Players

Let’s check out the new players that will hopefully help us stay clear of relegation this season. We’ll start with one of the players I am most proud of signing, central defender Augustin Saint Louis:

We’ve strengthened up the left side of the defense as well, with experienced fullback Archimede Morleo who I hope will not fail us this season:

Noe Fritsch was brought in as a back-up for the left winger position and hopefully he’ll improve a lot this year:

Pablo Hervias – a back-up for the right winger position this time, I really had no better option to sign:

Ales Novak – A very promising and young right fullback, he will be used as back-up:

Vana – we also needed a goalkeeper and I was quite happy to sign the Brazilian keeper who has some great stats (although his mental ones are far from good):

Ilyas Zeytulaev – experienced winger from Uzbekistan, Zeytulaev is a versatile player that brings something we lack in the team: experience. He also has some decent stats, even though he’s not that young.

Jonathan Lacourt – The central midfielder will hopefully take up on the playmaker role and do a good job. He looks pretty decent for starters…

Cristian Bustos – I signed him for just a season, the experimented defensive midfielder will act as a solid back-up to Giurgiu.

Luca Rigoni – yet another central midfielder, not that good on the offensive side but hopefully a valuable asset for the club.

Wanderson Cafu – and finally, our new right fullback that should be able to be better than last year player’s of the year, Coubronne.

With the new players ready to rock, we’ve had a pretty solid pre season: a solid display against Inter, and a win against Koln gave us some hope for the season ahead.

However, if we are to look at the stats of the players, compared to the other teams in Serie A, they’re not very encouraging. We’re the youngest team, which is not bad, but we’re also the shortest and least valuable (and we have other negative records for all positions, but I won’t post them here since there are many images to post):

So yes, we’ll have a really difficult season ahead, but I hope that we’ll manage to do well and reach our goal of staying in the Serie A for another season.