Serie A 2015/16: Winter Update
Time for mid-season update for 2015/16, our second year in Serie A.
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San Marino with a shocking 2nd place after first half of the season! Star striker
Ailton and club favourite
Eric were hit hard by injuries, Ailton in particular seemed victim of some voodoo curse - food poisoning, flu, broken toe and other freak accidents kept him out for a total of three months. Luckily their back-ups
Bruno Veiga and
John Fleck were ready to step up and carried the team both in the league and cups. Fleck, who joined San Marino during our Serie B season, is finally maturing as a player and as a person after years of poor performances and personal issues.
San Marino still struggle against top 5-6 clubs in Italy and we're generally quite inconsistent away from home, but we're doing a great job against clubs in the 10th-20th range usually dominating and recording comfortable wins, that's where we get most of our points! I'm not thinking of Scudetto right now and tbh Napoli, Inter, Milan and Juventus should be out of reach for San Marino looking at their players... but... looking at the table I have high hopes of finishing top three and qualify for Champions League!
Our Europa League experience has also been great so far:
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We mainly played our youngsters in this competition (our injury crisis also helped this policy...), wasn't expecting to qualify from the group but we made it in the end! Sammarinese golden boy
Alessandro Paolone was surprisingly the key player here, scoring 6 goals in 7 matches (always coming off the bench) including a brace in the crucial game against Marseille. Love him!
As for transfers we kept making good profits via co-ownerships while these were our signings for January:
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Samuel Souprayen from Celtic was our most expensive signing ever at 5M euros. He's a strong, pacey defender who can handle both CB and LB positions, and I can see him becoming our first choice left back very soon.
Fabio is a young, talented Brazilian projected to be a long-term replacement for Eric as our left-footed AMR (once retrained). Fabio was quite cheap at 1.9M and we still had a non-EU spot available for this season, hopefully his signing will prove to be a good deal in the next years.