Career Asking for it-Attempting my own National Puppeteer Challenge

lonfo · August 30, 2021

Well then, as promised here's my attempt at completing my very own National Puppeteer Challenge, about which you can read here:

Done your required reading?

Well then, here we go.

Year 2020: The Journey Begins

For this challenge, I'll be going to Italy's Serie C and taking charge of the glorious (not at all, actually, but it sounds cool when I say it) FeralpiSalò, which definitely does not sound like the name of a dessert.

As you can see, it's not exactly in a great place.

And this is how the team looked when I stepped in:

That average age is atrocious, but the rate of domestic players is great for the challenge: all I had to do was to get rid of a handful of players to comply with the challenge's nationality requirements.

Didn't earn much from them, but hey.

Club finances were also pretty average, and I got a neat 1M EUR for transfers, although a chunk of that immediately went to improving the facilities.

Interestingly, it seems like the club is an affiliate of Atalanta, which makes sense given we're two leagues below them.

Unfortunately this did not result in Atalanta sending me promising youngsters on loan, not even once.

Also, this affiliate status does not go away even as the club's fortunes improve. Just a curiosity.

No big signings for very obvious reason, but I did buy two young players that were already at the club as loans, centre-back Farabegoli from Sampdoria and winger D'Orazio from Roma:

Team Dynamics were also a mixed bag, with Work Rate being a big issue.

What will be of the not-so-young boys of FeralpiSalò and their newly appointed manager?

Find out in the next installment!

Rich · August 30, 2021

Love the name of the team, it does sound like a dessert, a delicious one. Good luck with this mate, look forward to seeing how you get on 😁

lonfo · August 31, 2021

Year 2021: Challenging Serie C

Note: The game language was set to Italian for flavor, translation will be provided when needed.

The very first game was a friendly away game against Legnago, not exactly a top team.

They actually played better than us but we won: a sign of things to come?

Things started off surprisingly well, the team had some very nice performance despite not having settled on a tactics yet, and FeralpiSalò managed to defeat some "famous" teams.

In fact, 29 games into the season we were on top of the league, albeit barely.

Looks like smooth sailing ahead, right?

Well, actually it wasn't.

Turns out that Serie C has a pretty packed schedule, which resulted in injuries and turnover to prevent further injuries, and by season's end...

-14 from first place, and just eleven goals scored in nine matches. Bad.

Best defense of the league, though.

Thankfully, Serie C has playoffs, so there's another chance at promotion!

The team was plagued by fatigue, injuries, red/yellow cards, and everything else, though, so the playoff were rough.

This one was the semi-final's second match, which we won at penalties after Guerra got injured and D'Orazio had a 90' goal voided.

Still, we made it to the finals.

We followed the time-honored (?) tradition of having crucial goals voided in the final as well, but were saved by Padova being very bad at penalties.

Pretty much every player in the roster was exhausted, injured or disqualified after that, but we did grab that promotion!

For reference, the real-life FeralpiSalò made it to the playoffs as well, but didn't get through, so I did a bit better despite the challenge requirements.

Next time: Serie B!

Rich · August 31, 2021

Great write up mate and fantastic start with the promotion, good luck for next season or as the Italians would say “buona fortuna per la prossima stagione” I didn’t google translate 👀

lonfo · September 3, 2021

Years 2022-3: With the Boys of B

Unfortunately I lost a bunch of screenshots and only realized it when it was too late, so this update will actually involve the second and third game seasons.

As anyone would understand, a team that had barely grabbed Serie B qualification is likely to struggle unless given some decent funding to improve the squad, so what did the board do?

They handed us around 800K and told me that struggling was just fine with them.

(A chunk of that went to upgrading the club's still largely crappy facilities).

Still, season two offered some satisfaction, including our first giant killing, in the Coppa Italia:

depns

Some might argue that Frosinone isn't that much of a giant, but that depends on how small you are.

(Note: The manager name is a reference to real-life friend and thus censored for privacy reasons.)

On the other hand, bigger giants were definitely beyond our reach, and our cup run ended here:

League games could also be mighty frustrating:

I was getting some recognition, though, and Watford came offering me the kind of transfer budget I could only dream about, so refusing hurt a little bit.