Attempting the Great San Marino Challenge
Hey everyone, I know there are a lot of these but I have decided to give The Great San Marino Challenge a go! Credit to kandersson for reintroducing the challenge after last year's success. Basically, for those of you who haven't heard of it, the goal is to take San Marino (the club) and San Marino (the nation) to the ultimate goals of Champions League and World Cup/Euro victories. For this thread I will be referring to the club as San Marino (Cl) and the nation as San Marino (NT). Enjoy!
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Tactics, Pre-Season and Transfers
My aim for the first season is to gain instant promotion with the club into the Italian Serie C1 Divisions. To achieve this, I need to bring in the right players that can take my team to glory. For the national team, I will see how things go and hopefully can improve my world ranking. I have a wage budget of 32k, and with only 12k being used at the start, there is some room for a lot of free transfers.
Transfers
I tried to get decent scouts so I could tell more easily who was worth getting, but the best 'Judging Player Ability' I could get was 9. This meant that sometimes the scouts would say the players were amazing, but they turned out to be useless. I looked at getting players that I could just use for this season primarily, so many of them were signed on 1 and 2 year contracts. I (stupidly) let some players go on a free which meant I had to pay money, but all in all I signed pretty much a completely new starting 11 with some extra deadwood.
If you want individual player attributes just ask me in the thread.
Tactics
My first attempt for the team was basically a simple 4-4-2, including a Sweeper Keeper, an Attacking Playmaker and a Ball Winning Midfielder. I started off using the Attacking strategy and Fluid philosophy, to keep the football attractive and exciting, with constant goal threat, as well as responsible defending.
I cancelled all the originally arranged friendlies (except for the Cesena one which couldn't be cancelled) so that I could vs much stronger opponents and earn the money that you make from these matches. My last two friendlies, against Reggiana and Pisa (both in the Serie C1) were the only matches that I actually believed I had a chance in winning. As well as this, I played three Serie C Cup games, with two wins and a loss, finding myself in 2nd place in the group. A surprising and motivating draw with Cesena was followed by losses in my other 4 friendlies, with a couple of the matches being quite close. Still, it was very disappointing. I'm still confident in my team and tactics though...
The only fixture I had with the national team was a friendly with Andorra. With San Marino (NT) being ranked 207th, and Andorra 201st, this was the type of game I should be winning. But, being focused on the club for the moment, I uses the suggested squad and did not look into the national pool or the other players I had. Disappointingly, I lost 1-0 in the fixture, despite having 17 shots to their 4 and 63% of the possession.
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On the whole I'm quite happy with how the pre-season has gone and am looking forward to an exciting challenge!