[FM22] When you find a stranger in the alps.

[Reiver]

I have always been fond of the weird, the odd, the left-field, and this has always manifested itself in my FM saves. From taking Lok Leipzig back to European Glory back when the editor first came out allowing us to add further leagues to the game, to taking Albania to a 4th place finish in the 2014 World Cup back in FM13, powered by parking the bus and having Lorik Cana on free kicks. You used to be able to read all about these accomplishments (and also about my many many failures) at TheDugout, the same spot that @_Ben_, @Shrewnaldo, @Forza_Hellas, and others used to frequent. After the website went kaput, I was kind of FM homeless for a while - too old and not enough free time for Twitch or Youtube saves (plus, who'd want to watch my ugly face), not hip enough for Twitter (never understood how to use it to be fair), and too lazy to find a new home. I've tried posting about a couple of saves here before, but they ended up fizzling up. I really think this one will be different though.

Now, I can't boast to have the analytical mind of Ben, nor the tactical expertise of the other guys I mentioned, but I'll try to make up for it by going for a crazy, hard and crazy interesting challenge, one that I have tried before and always had fun doing.

 

 

 

South Tyrol, has fascinated me for the longest time - an area in the north of Italy where the majority of the population spoke German and that just 3 generations ago was part of Austria. A rich region nestled in the Alps, it's many little valleys home to beautiful villages, farm lands, ski slopes and areas so remote that to this day you can find pockets of languages long gone elsewhere - Ladin, a language potentially descended from the Vulgar Latin spoken in the central Alps; more amazingly, in neighbouring Trentino (the italian speaking part of the old Duchy of Tirol) you still have pockets in the most remote valleys were people speak a Germanic language that depending on who you ask descends from Bavarian brought my 12th century migrants or is a remnant of the language of the Lombards.This peculiarity also affects football. While North Tirol had FC Wacker Innsbruck which gave Tirol some silverware (and bankruptcies: it has also been known as Tirol Innsbruck, or Swarovski Tirol, or competing merged with Wattens because of this) and the aforementioned Wattens, now WSG Tirol, which is bankrolled by the Swarovski family, South Tyrol had none of the silverware, just the bankruptcies: the bigger club in the region was AC Bolzano - a common figure in Serie C through the 60s and 70s, money problems saw them slip down the amateur leagues, change their name and eventually merge with another local amateur team from Bozen (Bolzano in Italian, the region's capital) to form AC Virtus Bolzano, now playing at 5th tier level. Meran also had a team that spent some years at 3rd and 4th level of italian football, but again eventually ended up going back down the leagues. This isn't exclusive of the German speaking region. In Trentino, you have Trento finally back at Serie C level after many years in the amateur leagues after a bankruptcy, and teams like Rovereto, Mezzocorona and Porfido Albiano all had spells at or close to professional football only to go back down the leagues with money problems.

The only exception to this rule is FC Südtirol. Founded in 1995 by a group of South Tyrolean businessmen wanting the region to have a team back in professional football. Three promotions in 5 years saw them reach Serie C2. Since then it's become an established Serie C team, reaching the promotion playoffs on the last 4 seasons in a row - to the point where they already prepared their stadium to Serie B regulations. There's one thing they don't have though, a strong fanbase, having an average of 900 people at their home games before the pandemic - this as the only professional football team in a city of 100,000 people, where its greater metro area has about 250,000 inhabitants, and that claims to be the sole representative of a region with half a million people.

This could easily make you think that South Tyroleans just aren't into football. But that would be wrong. Südtirol just has been dealt a bad hand and have done little to change it. While South Tyrol as a whole has only 23% of Italian speakers, these are mostly in Bozen, where 75% speak Italian. Almost all of these Italian speakers migrated into the area from elsewhere in Italy, bringing in their customs and football affiliations, who then passed down within the families. On the other hand, the German speaking people have a hard time connecting with a team that does not cater for them - at the moment Südtirol has a grand total of 3 players from the region in their whole squad. On the other hand, people from outside of the region also have a hard time connecting to a team that despite being close to them, it's actual very hard to get to. 50 km from the stadium feels a lot more when you have to drive through the alpine valleys to get to the stadium. 

This "distance" and travel difficulties make local football very vibrant though. The picture that opens this post is from a game between first and second placed teams in the Promozione Alto Adige (or Landesliga Südtirol, if we're going by the German nomenclature) in 2016. I have no problems in guessing that there were as many people at this game than in an average Südtirol game in the same year, and they were playing 4 divisions above this.

Well, my aim in this game is to give the South Tyroleans a team they identify with, and to grab an already existing global team and grow them up, all while keeping very strong connections to their land, by only hiring players from the Tyrolean lands: Nord and Osttirol in Austria, and Südtirol-Trentino on the Italian side.

Edited December 30, 2021 by Reiver

[rich ruzzian]

Your games posted at TheDugout used to be a good read. I will be following this. 

[Reiver]

Meet Andreas Reiverhardt, former lower leagues goalkeeper turned manager, and the new manager of FC Obermais, from the Obermais area of the town of Meran, the second biggest in South Tyrol. Obermais are everything Südtirol are not. Founded in 1972 as an amateur team starting at the very bottom of the Italian leagues, the team slowly  improved to the point they are in today: a strong team established in the local Eccellenza (Italian's 5th tier, at semi-pro level), regularly fighting for promotion, and one of the best South Tyrol-Trentino teams at the moment, and all while keeping a team of local players, as we'll see later. In theory, only Südtirol and Trento in Serie C, Levico Terme in Serie D, and Virtus Bolzano and St.Georgen, at our level but relegated in the last couple of seasons from Serie D would be better - this will keep the game interesting as we go up the leagues. They built a fanbase too, All the images above, and in the first post are of or include Obermais Tifo groups.

You might be thinking, how the hell am I going to identify Tyrolean players to sign? Well, step number one, I have identified all cities in Tyrol, both in the Austrian and Italian side, on the editor, adding "(T)" to the name, making it a lot easier to identify the teams. Number two, due to my love of the region and having tried to do this before, I am aware of some the best players on the Italian side. But, number 3 will be the most important: a whole lot of manual scouting, in the sense that instead of just sending my scouts to the wild and expecting returns, my strategy will be, depending on how many scouts I currently have, to have scouts go and look for specific competitions, or even asking for scout reports of entire youth squads, starting on the teams with best facilities. It also means that even if I don't find world beaters, a player that has the ability to be 4 stars on my team will be signed just because of small a pool of players I will be playing with. i will also try to help my fallow Tyrolean teams, because the higher they are and the more money they have, the more they will help me.

I find that South Tyrol has also had a bit of bad luck when it comes to developing players: despite having players with bags of potential in the last decades, they rarely reached the level they promised:  Michael Cia was an Italian Under-21 international signed at some point with Atalanta only for his career to fizzle at Serie B level and below, older FM players might remember he had quite the potential back in FM06 and 07. Manuel Fischnaller and his brother almost signed for Juventus while still on Südtirol's youth team; Simon Straudl (now at Werder Bremen's B team) and Amdewerk Tappeiner were also Italian U-15 internationals. Despite all this, as far as i could find, only 2 South Tyrolean players ever played in Serie A: Simon Laner, who played 18 games for Cagliari in 2010-11, and the unquestionable best player ever from the region, Klaus Bachlechner, who played for Verona, Bologna and Inter from 1975 to 1984. Let's see if I can get to the level where I have such players.

[corinthiano]

This looks really interesting, good luck with Obermais!

[john1]

Good luck I remember the good old days on The Dugout!

[Reiver]

5 hours ago, rich ruzzian said:

Your games posted at TheDugout used to be a good read. I will be following this. 

 

4 hours ago, corinthiano said:

This looks really interesting, good luck with Obermais!

 

3 hours ago, john1 said:

Good luck I remember the good old days on The Dugout!

Thanks you all! 

[Shrewnaldo]

Hey Reiver, good to see you posting and with some proper nostalgia heading back to Tyrol.

Are you intending to make this Tyrolese only, or just prioritising Tyrolese players and still being able to bring in talent from elsewhere?

[Reiver]

11 hours ago, Shrewnaldo said:

Hey Reiver, good to see you posting and with some proper nostalgia heading back to Tyrol.

Are you intending to make this Tyrolese only, or just prioritising Tyrolese players and still being able to bring in talent from elsewhere?

Tyrolese only. I did consider marking a few towns in South America started by Tyrolese diaspora (there's Puerto Tirol and Colonia Tirolesa in Argentina, and Novo Trento and Doze Tílias in Brazil, that I know of) but decided against it in the end. I'll be dependent on the youth teams of other Tyrolese teams for a while - Südtirol and Wacker Innsbruck mostly, but also Trento, Wattens and others.

[Reiver]

Day One

First day in charge of FC Obermais, and there's a lot to look into, as in any new save you should. Let's start by looking at our club and their facilities: we have basic Youth Recruitment, Junior Coaching, Training and Corporate Facilities, and Poor Youth Facilities, as expected really, for such a small team coming from the lower leagues. We play at the Sportplatz Lahn, in Meran, with capacity for 500 people, pictured here. It's not a lot to work with, but hey, as we go up the leagues we will work on improve those; the stadium specially, as we already have a decent support for this level, as soon as we go up to Serie D we might get something there. If not, we will for sure see some changes there when we reach Serie C and become professional as our stadium doesn't meet the grade there.

We can then look into our trophy cabinet: 2 Landesliga Südtirol titles (Promozione Alto Adige, one of the leagues on the 6th tier of Italian football), and one Landespokal Trentino-Südtirol (the League Cup for the league we're currently in). There's also a few lower league titles not shown in the game, because the leagues in question are not present in game. We have a nice near blank slate on which we can build our history and add our own trophies to. Nice.

Now we should look into our squad, see what are our strengths and weaknesses, where we are over or underloaded with players, see what would be our short term targets and potentially our tactic. Let's start with our...

• Goalkeepers

Patrick Wieser / Michele Moretti

Yeah, not great, even for this level. That 2.5 star for Wieser looks very very wrong to me. I mean, he's very determined, has decent speed and pace, decent decisions, and I'll give him that his rushing out is good, but I wouldn't trust this guy tending my goal. Moretti manages to have better goalkeeping stats where it matters most, but his mentals and physicals manage to be even worse. The second half of their mental stats, on both, are abysmal. One for the list: better goalkeeper.

 

• Defenders

Armin Rungg [DL] / Christian Parise [DR] / Jonas Platzer [DR] / Lukas Höller [DC] / Hannes Sonnenburger [DC] / Lukas Obkircher [DC] / Fabian Tratter [DC] / Hannes Gamper [DC]

Let's start with the good news. Despite being 32, club legend and captain Höller will be leading our backline. While their heading and tackling aren't amazing, he has good heading and passing for a defender at this level, great physicals for his age and footballing level and decent mentals too. We seem to have a decent guy for the future with Sonnenburger, which should be the first choice to pair with him. Decent mentals and physicals, even if more in line with the playing level we're in, but better marking and tackling. Obkircher, Tratter and Gamper are decent enough backups. Central defender position is not an immediate concern. Same for rightbacks. Platzer and Parise are good enough for this level, if nothing amazing. But we quickly find another issue. The only player we have that is natural at left back is Rungg, which is now 34, and is no longer good enough for this level. We definitively need a new left back right now.

Looking at the player pool we have available here and the level of football we're going to be playing and playing against this year, I'm going to keep it simple and going with 4 at the back,

 

• Midfielders

Michael Unterthurner [DM/MC] / Edoardo Ghiotti [DM/MC] / Hannes Luther [MC] / Martin Ciaghi [MC/(A)MR] / Raphael Schötzer [(A)ML] / Dario Hasa [(A)ML] / Simon Enz [MR] / Claus Maria Drescher [(A)MR] / Alessandro Capobianco [MC/MR] / Jamai Abderrahmane [(A)ML]

Now you can better understand what we're working with. Unterthurner and Ghiotti are my two defensive minded midfielders. Unterhturner is average in every way having 8 and 9s in almost all of the most important stats for him. He'll most likely play second fiddle to Ghiotti, which is a much better option - his mentals are on average 2 to 3 points higher, plus 12 free kick at this level might bag me a few goals too. Looking at the rest of central midfielders, Luther also has 8 and 9s on his technicals, and has some decent mentals - as hard as it sounds 8 and 9s are decent values or this level of football as long as they're accompanied with decent mental or physical stats. Then you have Ciaghi. He is undoubtedly on of our best players, and one of two players we have with experience at professional level (with 1 game for Südtirol's main team 10 years ago). He has the advantage of not only being good as a playmaker in the center of the field, he can also be used as a winger or even as a wide target forward - if he wasn't 29, I could even think of retraining him as striker! Capobianco is a lot younger, and while he has the potential to be good for this team - great physicals for this level, he still has a lot to learn. Unsure if I'll keep him as a sub or a loan move would be better, as he'd be a regular on bottom half of the table teams. Schötzer is another for the future but as he can play on both wings and as a striker, I?ll probably keeping as a great sub option. On the left we have Hasa and Abderrahme and here I have to be honest - they're both decent, but none really excites me! 

Partly because of how our attack looks like, I am likely to go for a 1-4 approach, one DM, 2 MCs and wingers. Depending on what players I'll find before the transfer season ends, we might go for a flat 4 or even 2 MCs and 2 wingers instead. No position is in need of urgent care, though it would be nice to have a few more options in central midfield, and maybe a nicer left midfielder if one does appear.

 

• Strikers

Jonas Clementi / Matthias Bacher

My biggest headache. Only two players are natural strikers, so I can't risk playing two up top, but my two strikers are the two best players in the team! Either of them would probably see playing time even if they were in a mid to lower table Serie C team! 

 

So our main targets are a new GK and a DL, then also more bodies for central midfield and striker and maybe if luck will have us, a better ML. We do have a bit of leeway in our wage budget, so we can sign a few more players, but zero transfer budget, i am approaching this in 3 ways: offering free trials to free players, manually scouting players available from amateur south tyrolean teams, and checking bigger teams for lowers. For this last one I might give a shot at some Austrian teams too - I know my stature will probably not convince any Austrian player to come in permanently, but maybe some won't mind coming on loan.

 

We should also look at our youth teams, and joining both u20s and u18s together, the top prospects look like this:

On one end, this looks good! On the other, this looks good because we're a 5th tier team, with mediocre to bad staff members, and with bad facilities - we will take another look at this after I improve my staff; I'll be looking into that during the beginning of the save and will probably talk more about it on my next post.

 

Lastly, let's have a look at what competitions we're in this year: First, the league, the Eccellenza Trentino-Alto Adige, or Oberliga Trentino-Südtirol, the 5th level league for teams in our region. The top team goes up, while the second one goes to a playoff system to potential also get promoted. Top 4 go down. We're currently predicted to finish 3rd, so we have a real chance to go through. If we don't, there's still another way to get promoted. If we win our league cup, the other competition we're in, we qualify for the national Eccellenza Cup, and the winner of this also gets promoted to Serie D. I have no reason to believe that if I manage to get those players I mentioned, we'll won't be fighting for the automatic promotion.

 

[ElCuriosoJr]

Wow. Can’t wait to see more of this. 
 

I’m southtyrolean, and know a lot of your players at Obermais personally. 

so, if you have any questions or need some more knowledge of this place and their leagues, you know where to find me 

have fun!

[Shrewnaldo]

I like the squad review. I'm assuming Obermais don't have any affiliate links set up yet, is that something you'll look for early to encourage Tyrolese newgen development? 

[Reiver]

5 minutes ago, Shrewnaldo said:

I like the squad review. I'm assuming Obermais don't have any affiliate links set up yet, is that something you'll look for early to encourage Tyrolese newgen development? 

No affiliation, and the board thinks I haven't been around long enough to ask for one. Südtirol would be useful until I am in Serie C, though in an ideal world iI'd go for WSG Tirol or Wacker Innsbruck. It would be less likely to get them. Even though they're only from a few hundred miles away, they're in Austria, and they'll only be interested in us once we're a bit bigger than we are right now. As you'll see in the next update, we still use loans to help us.

On the other end, I want to start get links to local teams to help them along too.

[Reiver]

37 minutes ago, ElCuriosoJr said:

Wow. Can’t wait to see more of this. 
 

I’m southtyrolean, and know a lot of your players at Obermais personally. 

so, if you have any questions or need some more knowledge of this place and their leagues, you know where to find me 

have fun!

Thanks! For now, all I want to ask is if Ciaghi still have that luscious beard!

[Reiver]

Transfers

My plan is for us to eventually have a fully Tyrolean team: players and staff. Right now though, the pool of staff available on the market, even with the regen ones, is way too small to realistically do this, so I focused on just getting decent staff members. The biggest focus right now was on scouts, and on judging potential. i might not have the best facilities to get the best out of the best youth of the region, but I want to be able to identify the players with most potential in the lower leagues and bring them up the leagues with me - it's not like they would improve any better in the other teams anyway. I also want to be able to identify the best players from the teams with better facilities so that I can get them if I see them not developing due to lack of playing time. This is the result: 

 

Having identified our needs for this season, I sent my newly appointed scout team to work, going through the few players in amateur teams in the levels below us to try and find useful players. On the other hand, I offered trials to a whole bunch of south tyrolean free agents and manually scouted the squads of Südtirol, Trento in Serie C, and Levico in Serie D to find any loan prospects, always taking into account the fact the board wants us to sign under 23 players for the first team. I quickly tried to do the same in Austria, but quickly realised no one wants to join us while we remain at this low a level. In the end, we ended up making move for more players than I anticipated:

I'll break this down by position. In goal, I did something that might be risky and that I'd never done before. My main target, Matteo Conci, signed for Caravaggio. I don't blame him, they were offering him the first choice goalkeeper position one level above us, though at around the same pay we were giving him. At the same time, there was some interest not only in Moretti, who I was trying to offload, but also Wieser, that would on paper be my second choice keeper. So in the end I let them both go and went for not one, but two new keepers, both coming on loan, and both sharing the keeper position equally for the season or until one surprises or disappoints me. Or that was the plan until Melone got injured! Theiner is the current main goalkeeper, and he seems to have bags of potential (for a team of our level) and we can begin building a relationship we can use to eventually get him here permanently.

 

Searching for a left back that would be an improvement on Rungg and that would not force us to use Höller outside of his best positions was a lot harder than expected. No lower league team had any decent ones, nor did I find any during my trials, and I couldn't even find loan targets. Out of desperation, I even tried Austria, knowing it was very unlikely for anyone to accept. In the end, I had to actual pay cash for what is the worst signing of the season stats wise, and the most short term signing of them all. Gasser came for 1k€ from St.Pauls, another team in our division. I wanted a wing-back to play on support, but I don't trust this guy going forward at all with his 5 passing and 2 crossing. Beggars can't be choosers.

In central midfield, I wasn't in dire need of players for any position, but having a few more numbers for rotational purposes and a small increase in quality would always be welcome. We ended up getting 1 more offensive minded midfielders, two box to box and 1 more defensive ones in the end, which meant that Unterthurner ended up with very limited options to play and I let him leave for Anaune - and this is a trend I forgot to mention. Whenever possible, I only accepted offers for my players from teams in my division. From the very beginning, if I can help other teams from the region I will and so 3 out of 4 players leaving the club so far went for other teams in our division. But back to our signings. Giocondo and Pichler are probably the most well rounded of the 4, with decent first touch and passing, and then also marking, decent work rate,vision and decisions and pace. Sceffer comes from one division below us and more towards the end of his career, but will still do the job for us. Vasile Mauro was actually one that I didn't find, as he offered himself to us. More than good enough to be a rotational option, I couldn't say no.

For the winger position comes Tappeiner, a half-tyrolean half-ethiopean that was back in 2013 called up for the italian under-15s once - or so the internet tells me. As all my options were unspectacular and were all better employed as Inside Forwards, and he comes nicely to give me an option as an all-out winger. This also made me let Dario Hasa out.

For strikers we only had 2 options but they were our best players, so more than getting good players we needed back up options, so I once again raided Südtirol's youth team as decent options behind the two main guys. 

The last boy was our first hire for our youth team. I was planning to spend the first half of the season just scouting and identifying players from my division that showed promise and then spend the second half of the season trying to sign them, but then we played against Brixen. Already a a first team starter for them at just age 16, he made our game against them very hard, scoring twice against us - so I immediately tried to sign him. and I'm glad I did. I'm not sure exactly how much potential he really has, na d we really need to work on him phyisically, but he's already close to be good enough for our first team, and he is Farily Professional, which at this level I will more than take it.

This sees us playing like this:

Now, I'm not, nor have I ever been an amazing tactician. i find something that works and go with it, and this seems to be working. I'm going on my lower level games. At this level everyone will make mistakes. I have one of the best squads so I'll be making slightly less mistakes, so I'm going to press the other team to try and maximise their mistakes and capitalise on them.  So far it's working, as you'll see on my next post.

[Reiver]

And a quick summary:

	Birthplace or Youth Team	Region	Distance to Meran by car
Gasser	Bozen	Südtirol	34 km
Melone	Trento	Trentino	83 km
Tappeiner	Naturns	Südtirol	13 km
Theiner	Meran	Südtirol	0 km
Volino	Bozen	Südtirol	34 km
Giocondo	Bozen	Südtirol	34 km
Pichler	Meran	Südtirol	0 km
Gennari	Bozen	Südtirol	34 km
Mauro	Kurtatsch	Südtirol	54 km
Sceffer	Rovereto	Trentino	106 km
Lehmann	Brixen	Südtirol	46 km

[Reiver]

Into the season - Friendlies

A very positive pre-season where we refined our tactics and used to test triallists, against teams roughly on our level: Anaune and Gardolo are Trentino teams on our league, Masi Torello also from our level but from Emilia-Romagna. Montichiari is a team from Lombardia from the division below us. Rum is from the lower leagues in Austrian side of Tirol and Vipava is from the Slovenian Third tier.

 

Coppa Italia Trentino/Südtirol

The first official games of the season were for the league cup. It starts with teams in groups of 3 playing each other once, with the top of each group going through. We got St.Georgen and Stegen in our group. Stegen is a bottom of the table team and we should be more than able to dispatch them, but St.Georgen are predicted to finish just above us in the league (2nd vs our 3rd placed prediction).

Despite the results, we actually dominated the second game a lot more - it's just that the first game was a lot more open that the second one, where neither team managed to get a full digit xG by the end of the game. Despite the fact that if you win this competition AND then also win the nation wide cup you get promoted, our board did not see this as important and I get the feeling most other big teams felt the same, I got the feeling St. Georgen did not field their strongest eleven. Nice to see my prediction be right, as right in my first game Ghiotti scored from a free kick.  The quarter finals will be in November, where we play Trentino side Anaune.

 

Eccellenza Trentino-Südtirol

I have to say things are going quite well. A first game against Bozner where we truly dominated the game, and where 12 minutes into the game everything was more than settled, followed a game against Rotaliana where we were extremely wasteful: 19 shots against 2, and 2 points lost because of a goal scored in the 94th minute. Again against Dro we had an easy game and never felt threatened. Mori managed to shut us off, and so we did the same to them . to give you an idea, all our defense and midfield finished the game above 7 rating, while the wingers and strikers finished at 6.6 or even lower.

Onto the next month, where we scored 14 goals in the first 4 games! The game against Brixen was crazy with 5 of the game's goals all coming in the last 10 minutes - i was actually losing 2-1 before then, and this was the game that led me to sign Lehmann for my youth team! The next 3 games were games we really dominated, including against Anaune, our next cup opponent. Our most important game was coming next. playing away against promotion favourites Virtus Bolzano. It was a very closed and level game until the 41st minute, where our captain Höller gave away a foul in the penalty box, and saw his second yellow card. You can see just how much that changed the game. At least we got our mojo back by defeating the team predicted to finish 2nd in the next game, and we're right at the top in the race for promotion from the very beginning of the season.

 

 

[ElCuriosoJr]

Il 3/1/2022 in 11:56 , Reiver ha scritto:

Thanks! For now, all I want to ask is if Ciaghi still have that luscious beard!

He has shorten his beard a little bit, but it looks still gorgeous 

Nice Start in the league and also in the cup. Beating St.Georgen two times shows you can fight up there with the big boys. 

[MattyLewis11]

An excellent start to the save, thoroughly enjoying your writing style and keen to discover more 👏

[Reiver]

On 06/01/2022 at 11:02, ElCuriosoJr said:

He has shorten his beard a little bit, but it looks still gorgeous 

Nice Start in the league and also in the cup. Beating St.Georgen two times shows you can fight up there with the big boys. 

 

16 hours ago, MattyLewis11 said:

An excellent start to the save, thoroughly enjoying your writing style and keen to discover more 👏

Thanks to you both! I truly believe we have the needed talent to go up this season. Serie D is when things will be a little more challenging, where I think getting a team good enough to remain there is doable, but getting good enough to go up to Serie C will be a whole lot harder.

[Reiver]

Through Winter

I got a bit carried away. My original plan was to stop and update either when you got to January before the winter transfer season or right at the end f it, but I kept playing and it's now the end of February, and we're around 2/3rds of the way in the season. Let's see how we're doing!

Coppa Italia Trentino/Südtirol

6 months into my tenure and we get our first trophy! 11 years later, the boys from Obermais lift the regional league cup for the second time. Away against Anaune we had an easy game with Tappeiner bagging a hat trick, so for the home tie I fielded a largely rotated team, with 6 players that would usually just sit on the bench or would even be in our youth team. We still out xG'd them 1.07 to 0.63, had more shots on goal and more possession, But the one time the ball entered the net in our favour was from an offside position, and we ended up losing the game 1-0. As we had a huge advantage from the first game, and I had purposefully fielded a slightly weakened side, this didn't worry me too much.

The first game against ViPo Trent sure was an odd one. I get the feeling they had "Shoot on sight" on the whole game as they had  15 shots against our 6, but only 2 on target and we managed to out xG'd them - and no, we did not have a penalty. Still, other than the game against Virtus Bolzano, this was the most balanced game we've had so far, so in the end a draw was not an unfair result. We would get the result and exhibition I wanted in the second leg, where the result matches how we played to the T.

This meant we got dugout tickets to the cup final. I considered filing a formal protest as to where the local LND committees chose to have the final: The Centro Sportivo Galicia in Leifers/Laives is a nice stadium for this level, nothing against that. It's just that it's 64 km away from Meran while being 8km away from Bozen.

There's no suspense here as i posted all the results above, but I just wanted to stress than unlike most other games in the cup or the league, Virtus Bolzano are a team clearly at our level. We won 1-0 this time, but it was the closest game we've had so far all season, and this could have clearly have gone either way. I«m very happy it went my way, and we got a trophy out of it.

Winning this competition qualified us to the Italian amateur cup, the Coppa Italiana Dilettanti. The first stage, just like in the regional cup, is a regionalised group stage where we play against the winners of the  Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Veneto region cups. This means we will be playing against Montecchio Maggiore and NK Kras Repen - another minority team in Italy, this time from the slovenians living near the border with Slovenia.

 

Eccellenza Trentino-Südtirol

The league has clearly become a two horse race. There's not much to talk about results wise - we've been dominating most games and winning convincingly most of the time, though occasionally suffering from wastefulness. This can be seen specially in the game against St. Pauls: they scored their goal in one of their two shots, while we had 26 shots and only 6 on target; 2.56 xG against 0.17. Considering that the difference between us and Virtus at the top is one draw, I hope this result is not what separates us at the end of the season. We also have an unlikely hero: Ciaghi and his beard playing on the right as a wide target man is bagging more goals in the league than our strikers, and with 10 goals in 18 games is the second best goalscorer in the league! Clementi does also have 10 goals but one was in the cup and Macher has 14, but 5 in the cup, i hope he keeps going, I'd love to get a top goalscorer that isn't proficient as a striker at all - i did say if he was younger I'd train him to play there though!

 

The winter transfer season was a quiet one for us - you don't really overhaul a winning team. One more player joined our youth team, which we'll look at in more detail in a future update, while a single player joined our main squad, and it's one I could not say no to.

Despite, as far as I can see never having played before in a team from Meran, Simon Laner was born here, and he's probably the active sudtiroler player with the best career stats.We can also now say that we have a  winner of the 2003 UEFA European Championship with the Italy Under-19 national team playing for us. Formed at Verona, the first few years of his career aren't in the screenshot cause I couldn't fit the whole thing but you can see how he was a regular Serie B player for a while and even played for Serie A teams for a few years. I know he's 38, and while his physicals aren't too bad for this level they will continue to drop, but he more than makes up for it in the rest of his stats - I'm confident I can still extract a year and half of him at a level where he'll be useful in the team, and let's face it, he'll likely retire after that time.