[FMT 21] - The second kingdom of the Lombards - Take 2.

[Muttley84]

1 hour ago, deltablue said:

It's still nice that you produced a couple of future internationals.

Yeah, can't really take much credit on the two of them as I found them at the club, but hoping I can nurture one from the youth intakes into playing for Italy. Long road ahead.

[Muttley84]

Things started off really well for us, but then we hit a rough patch towards the end of October. It is true that we had a hard schedule meeting Lazio, Juve and Milan (with Braga away between the last two), but still, having 4 defeats in a row is never pleasing. We are sitting in mid-table, but we remember that's exactly how we started the last season also. In Europe we have 6 points after 3 games, winning at home to Fener and Arsenal before losing away at Braga, and we are still in the mix to qualify for the knockout stages. Oh, one could not ignore that Serie A is lead by our biggest rivals - Atalanta (hoping they don't keep it up like this all season).

[13th Man]

Hard to compete across multiple competitions as a “small” club! Nice results in Europe though, and hope you can turn the league around when the fixture list gets kinder.

[Muttley84]

On 07/05/2021 at 18:32, 13th Man said:

Hard to compete across multiple competitions as a “small” club! Nice results in Europe though, and hope you can turn the league around when the fixture list gets kinder.

Yeah, hoping for the same. But I wont throw Europe away just to clear the schedule, I think its good to build some pedigree as an European team.

[Muttley84]

I have yet to understand how the mentoring works in FM Touch. I think they are some things hidden under the hood and not much control on what happens besides choosing the mentoring groups.

[Muttley84]

Another of our player who wins Young Player of the Month. This time is Fabio Simonetti who we bought last season from Milan and manage to break into the team this season, making most of the appearances in the AMC position.

[Muttley84]

We are still in the top of clubs producing players for Serie A, with some nice names on the list alongside the youth currently at our club.

[Muttley84]

One more round to play but we already qualified out of the Europa League group. It remains for us to battle Arsenal for the first position in the league.

[Muttley84]

Yeah.. Reality check!

[13th Man]

5 hours ago, Muttley84 said:

Yeah.. Reality check!

Ouch, but you’re still through!

[Muttley84]

The draw has not been kind on us, Porto are really a good team.

[Muttley84]

Despite the thrashing we got at Arsenal I would consider us having a good finish of the year. After losing at Cagliari and at home to Napoli we went on a run of 4 league wins without conceding a goal, so pretty satisfied with that. After 15 games we are 7th in the league, but the European places are within reach. Should be a quiet winter transfer window for us, if we ignore the constant offers we get for loaning or selling youngsters produced at the club. It is kind of weird, that they are in the first team squad, play an odd game now and then, but still get upset over me refusing to loan them out to a Serie B team. Seems that teens these days are pretty hard to please.

[Muttley84]

Now when u see someone as Andrea Caracciolo being interviewed by the media about the upcoming match with Atalanta, you got to know he is pretty important to the club. He is the holder of the record for Most League Goals by a Player with 166, and I hope Colombo or Maldini could challenge that record in a few years. I seriously doubt it anyone can come even close to the league appearances record (would mean playing continuously for around 12 seasons) or the goals in a season (31). The youngest player to start for Brescia remains Andrea Pirlo, and the oldest goalscorer Roberto Baggio. Two great legends who played for us in the past years, just hoping we could produce more players of that caliber. 

[Muttley84]

So January was a pretty much up and down month, with the positives being represented by the two stages we have passed in the Cup. Given we were lucky to get both draws at home against Torino and Roma we managed to qualify to the semi-finals. In the league our form was rather poor, taking only 6 points out of 5 games, to keep us in 7th position in the league.

[deltablue]

Hopefully you won't get another 8-0!

[Muttley84]

Still mid-February but I could not stop showing off what seems to be our biggest performance so far - qualifying in the final of Italian Cup where we will meet our Lombard rivals - AC Milan.

[Muttley84]

This was a perfect month for us. Go through the semifinals of the Italian Cup and also managed to pass another round in Europa League against Porto. Won all the games in the league, but we are still sitting in 7th, but reduced the gap to Inter and Lazio - champions league places seem a bit to far for our reach.

[deltablue]

The cup final looks like it could be a good match.

[13th Man]

Season seems to be going very well for you! Challenging for the European places.

[Muttley84]

Our finances are looking rather good. Unfortunately I am a bit afraid that we hit the ceiling regarding the players we can bring at the club. Just a few of them out there are better than what we currently have and we cannot afford them.

On 14/05/2021 at 11:31, deltablue said:

The cup final looks like it could be a good match.

It has the potential to be, unfortunately Milan is in very good form and battles at the title. Sure, that could also mean they will concentrate on the League fixtures and hopefully we can sneak a win in the Cup.

15 hours ago, 13th Man said:

Season seems to be going very well for you! Challenging for the European places.

Yeah, unfortunately Champions League is still far from us, and I dont see how we are going to get there soon.

[Muttley84]

We only have a handful of players left in the reserves, and although they look promising they are performing rather bad in the reserves league.

[Muttley84]

Yeah, things were going on a little to good to be true. We had a little reality check in March, out of the Europa League and only 4 points in the league.

[Muttley84]

This season our intake is rather poor when compared with the other years. We still got a couple of decent players and going to sign them all and move them to reserves to create a competitive team there also (at least in numbers).

[Muttley84]

Won 3 and lost 3 and the European places are moving away from us and not sure we can catch them...

[Muttley84]

We still cannot battle with the top clubs in Italy but we slowly growing both on and off the pitch. 

[Muttley84]

Not the best end of the season as we lost the Cup final against Milan and also did not do much more in the league. We finished in 7th, in a league won by Juve who were 26 points ahead of us. We sneaked into the Europa Conference League though. Full season review soon.

[Muttley84]

Some of the key figures of a season where we failed in the end to either bring a trophy to Brescia or improve on the league position (we finished lower than last year). Silver lining is that we qualified for Europe again and that we have a young squad with a good potential to grow. Key players were Plizzari, Colombo and Maldini, who practically carried on their young shoulders most of the weight of our performances.

[Muttley84]

Talk about a busy period for our dearest chairman Massimo Cellino. He kept bugging me with emails about how our finances are going (the biggest budget we ever had - 53M wage and 25M transfer), the changes in our facilities and youth development budget. I have yet to make a single request to the board so far, but probably going to require them to invest some money in our facilities soon.

[deltablue]

At least you still managed to get into Europe.

[Muttley84]

Another disappointing season for Italian teams in European Cups. In Champions League we had though two teams in the semi-finals (Milan and Napoli) but they were pretty clearly eliminated by their English competition. Lazio was unlucky to meet Milan in the quarter-finals and got eliminated, while Juve has fallen  in the first knockout round against Liverpool.

Things were not much better in the Europa League also, where we already know that we are out of the 2nd knockout stage against Sevilla (who to our excuse went all the way to the finals - only to lose it against Arsenal). It was the same Arsenal who took out Inter in the semi-finals. Inter had a pretty hard schedule, as meeting Lyon, Spurs and Arsenal is not an easy task.

Atalanta reached again an European final. They lost it though against Leverkusen, to leave Italy with a trophy-less season.

 

[Muttley84]

Great, exactly the news we needed during the summer transfer window. A transfer embargo who prevents us at the moment adding quality to the team. I am not even sure that a new owner would benefit us a lot, its not like we can invest in south-american wonderkids...

[Muttley84]

Lucky for us the situation with the board was short. We got a new owner in the end, but nothing spectacular happening so far.

[Muttley84]

Not that many players coming in this summer. The top of the bunch is the arrival of Dimarco on the left side of the defense and Zappa on the right hand. Also some interesting deals in bringing in Piccoli (ST), Leali (backup GK) and Cortinovis (backup AML, AMC and MC). A lot more players going out of the club, although we were not able to do any big sales. We bought five players for 22M and in the same time sold 10 players for just close to 6M. It is true that we just wanted to offload some of them due to their wages (like Darmian or Augello), and others like Caponi or Bianchi would find little to no playing time this season as we look into integrating more of our youngsters in the squad. We currently have 8 out of the 25-man squad produced at our club during my career, and some of them have a really good potential as judged by our staff.

Edited May 19, 2021 by Muttley84

[Sheriff7]

We had Leali here in Olympiacos,he was awfull here but let's hope he will help you.

[Muttley84]

7 hours ago, Sheriff7 said:

We had Leali here in Olympiacos,he was awfull here but let's hope he will help you.

He's just a backup who wont complain to much about not playing, no way he is going to start ahead of Plizzari.

[Muttley84]

A weird summer with the ownership change and all, but we still managed to remain focused on our games, and we qualified for the group stages of Europa Conference League after defeating Brondby. Not the greatest start in Serie A with a late equalizer at Torino, but hoping we will fight again for the European places this season also.

[Muttley84]

I dont know how Serie A has become the top spending league in Europe, but this season we had spent almost double than Premier League.

[Muttley84]

TO be fair that's a pretty easy group to be in, fancy a lot our chances of finishing first in that one.

[13th Man]

Good thing you didn't get the boot after the takeover!  That'd be a very annoying end to the save. 

I'm hoping you can find a way to improve on your last two seasons.  Maybe your young squad can improve enough to challenge for the CL?

[Muttley84]

2 hours ago, 13th Man said:

I'm hoping you can find a way to improve on your last two seasons.  Maybe your young squad can improve enough to challenge for the CL?

Still seems like a long shot, especiay now that the big boys have thrown so much money at bringing in new players. On the other hand, our squad might be the youngest, but it has just a few new faces and a high team cohesion. We been playing together for a while and hopefully this season we won't suffer from our European matches as weaker oposition in them should allow me to rotate a bit more. I am just moderately optimistic about it.

[Muttley84]

This is got to be the longest contract I received in FM21. I mean 5 years contract really is a proof of long term commitment from both the board and the manager, just hoping I can resist at the club for this long.

[deltablue]

That's a nice and comfortable group.

[Muttley84]

Just have a look at this - our run of results in September and October! All wins across the board either they were in Serie A or Europa Conference League! We never were this good during this career, so are sitting after 10 games first in the league. Some unavailable scenes in Brescia this season. Of course, it will get harder as the schedule is pretty unbalanced. Just consider that in the last 5 matchdays of the first part of the league we will be meeting with Lazio, Milan, Inter, Juve and Roma! Our undefeated season can not surely remain like this, but we seem to be fighting for Champions League places this season with real chances.

[13th Man]

9 hours ago, Muttley84 said:

Still seems like a long shot, especiay now that the big boys have thrown so much money at bringing in new players. On the other hand, our squad might be the youngest, but it has just a few new faces and a high team cohesion. We been playing together for a while and hopefully this season we won't suffer from our European matches as weaker oposition in them should allow me to rotate a bit more. I am just moderately optimistic about it.

Ye of little faith!  Just look at those results from the beginning of the year! 

Long term, maybe you won't be able to keep it up or keep your young squad together, but you might have a good chance at a really nice season or two.

[Muttley84]

Just a quick overview of how the best available first 11 of Lombard players looks like (and their value in Million Euro). We have the two cheapest options in the squad (Dimarco 15M and Colombo 22M), but also two former players in Papetti (48) and Tonali (63M). I would not dare dream to bring them all together at the club by transfers in this career, but hopefully we can grow some of our younger players to reach the values needed to be included in this.

[Muttley84]

Asked the board for a request to increase the youth level and got a surprising answer. I would have not expected the boardroom to say they would prefer to rely on signing players ready to play, and not put an emphasis for developing players at our club.

[Muttley84]

We continue our good record in producing Serie A players, with no less than 15 of them in our books, we are now 6th in this classification, lead by the two Milan clubs.

[deltablue]

That was a fabulous run of form.

[Muttley84]

Four of our players are among the best in the league - according to the average ratings so far. That includes our CB pair of Lorenzo Pirola and Andrea Cistana, and our attacking force of Daniel Maldini and Lorenzo Colombo. Actually Maldini is the best in the league now, and out top goalscorer with 9.

[rafaelbenitez]

23 hours ago, Muttley84 said:

Just a quick overview of how the best available first 11 of Lombard players looks like (and their value in Million Euro). We have the two cheapest options in the squad (Dimarco 15M and Colombo 22M), but also two former players in Papetti (48) and Tonali (63M). I would not dare dream to bring them all together at the club by transfers in this career, but hopefully we can grow some of our younger players to reach the values needed to be included in this.

Wow, Cutrone must be doing well in your save.

Playing a Valencia save right now and he's bang average and really poor value for money.