FM 2012 Story — Tough Summer By The Black Sea

Here we go, my Football Manager 2012 career is officially starting! As you know I chose Viitorul Constanta as the starting point for my career, the reasons are explained in the previous post. The club is not a big one at all, it doesn’t have much of a tradition either since it was founded in 2009, but it does have great ambition. Let’s see what happened during the summer, you’ll know all about the transfers, friendly games, league rules and so on…

As you know the board expect me to steer the club towards promotion, an ambitious goal for such a young club. The bookmakers believe that we have a good shot, not the best but good enough considering that the top two teams in the group get promoted to the Romanian top flight (we’ll go into details about the rules and league structure later).

On to the transfers now… Nothing spectacular to be honest, mostly due to the lack of funds but also because of the scouting restrictions. I am only allowed to send my scouts in Europe and with attribute masking enabled finding good players is a pretty tough task at the moment. However, I managed to bring in three players and also got some money for the players I no longer needed.

You might remember that I chose to restrict my transfer policy to only two experienced new players (over 21 years old) per season and Moroccan defender Chakib Benzoukane is one of them. He was available for free and I decided to get him  because I really needed a good defender to strengthen my back line. He is fairly quick and that is important in my game plan but he also has pretty good mental attributes at this level.

My back four was not nearly strong enough though so I decided to bring in another centre back, a younger one: 21-year old Romanian defender Ionut Rada. He is my most expensive signing so far, a staggering 24K was paid to top flight side Pandurii for his signature.

Last but not least, an exciting prospect from Serbia: 19-year old midfielder Nenad Grumic. This lad has what it takes to slot straight into the first eleven but he also has pretty good margins for improvement so I believe that he might be the best signing of the season for the club.

That’s about all the transfers I could manage, I have a 22-man squad and I believe that should be sufficient for the challenge.

Or at least that’s what I believed before the friendly games… The first four friendlies were a total disaster, including a humiliating 8-0 defeat, but luckily the morale didn’t hit rock bottom and we managed some plucky wins to spare the blushes. I was expecting a lot better though, a lot better…

And since the friendlies didn’t go too well I decided to play the first three competitive games and stop the game at the end of August. We won the opening league match courtesy of a corner kick goal, then we cruised past a non-league side in the Romanian Cup, but ended the month with a disappointing 1-1 draw at home at the end of a boring match.

Now let me explain the league structure in Romanian football… The top flight is called Liga 1 and it has 18 teams while the second tier is called Liga 2 and it’s divided into two groups with 16 teams in each group. The top two teams in each group get promoted while the bottom five get relegated. In Liga 2 the matches are played from August until November and then, after a long winter break, from March until May.

There are some interesting and important rules regarding players in Liga 2: no more than 3 non-EU players in the first eleven (I have only 2 in the squad) and at least two under-21 players in the first eleven (I’ve got plenty of those :) )

That’s about it for now, not a very promising pre-season to be honest but hopefully things will pick up sooner rather than later. Thanks a lot for dropping by, looking forward to your comments.