Romanian FM 2012 Story — Here Come The Youngsters!

Hello friends, I guess you were not expecting another FM 2012 story update from me so soon after the last one but what can I say, I had some time and I admit that I was quite eager to get on with the story. So, after getting promoted to the Romanian First Division my young club, Viitorul Constanta, had to step to a bigger level but with no money to buy new players. The situation was difficult from the financial point of view but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t bring in any new faces.

But before moving on to the transfers I have some other news to share, not entirely good ones… The bad news first: Romanian football is in decline, that is true in real life and sadly it’s also true in Football Manager 2012. It’s a realistic game after all… :) This will make it even more difficult for my team to achieve European glory but we’ll worry about that later…

Then there’s some good news, our chairman arranged a new and better kit sponsorship deal and that is probably because he still is a very respected person in Romania.

But then I received some more bad news, the projected transfer and wage budgets…

However, despite the financial situation I decided to ask the chairman for some help with our scouting range and I was extremely happy to see that he immediately agreed to grant my request. I have signed a few more scouts immediately after that, sent one to Western Africa, another one to Central America and another one to South America. They did find some very good players but sadly none of them were available on free transfers…

Our financial situation became slightly better once we received the Liga 1 TV rights for the season…

… but it still wasn’t good enough to grant me some transfer money. I decided to gamble and promised the chairman a mid-table finish for a bit of extra wage money.

Gheorghe Hagi probably was impressed with my courage so he offered me a new contract which I gladly accepted.

The bookmakers were not that kind though, our odds are… cosmic!

The transfers are coming up in a second, have a little patience! ;) I still have to show you the league rules so that you will be able to understand the whole context. The Liga 1 teams are allowed to field a maximum number of 5 non-EU players in the first eleven but there also is another restriction that forces a number of at least 5 home-grown players in the match squad. A player has to reside in Romania for 5 years before becoming a Romanian citizen so I guess I’ll have to bring in mostly very young players from abroad considering this rule.

As you have seen earlier the European spots are not too many any more, just the top team has a shot at the Champions League while three others can enter the Europa League (including the Romanian Cup winners). Last but not least, the bottom four teams get relegated and that’s not good at all for us considering that there are just 18 teams in the division.

OK, now is the time to see the transfers! I don’t have a screen shot with all the players that left the club simply because there were too many: 36 players were sold or released and 3 others were sent out on loan! Basically I offloaded all the players that had little perspective of becoming good top flight players and also managed to get 130,000 pounds to improve the wage budget by a few pennies.

As for the incoming names, we have 18 of them, all on free transfers. But don’t worry, most of these lads are very young and will go straight to the under 19s squad.

The first team squad has 22 players at the moment, let me introduce them (click on the player names to view their profiles):

Goalkeepers

Confirmed players: Alberto Cobrea, George Serban

Full Backs

Confirmed players: Visan Cretu

New players: Ionut Peteleu, Lucian Filip, Miroslav Sedlak

Centre Backs

Confirmed players: Chakib Benzoukane, Ionut Rada, Marius Rusu

New players: Ionut Putanu (promoted from youth team)

Central Midfielders

Confirmed players: Mihai Onicas, Alexandru Lazar, Nenad Grumic, Romario Benzar

New players: Georgian Marcu, Corado Carstoiu

Strikers

Confirmed players: Vlad Rusu, Valentin Simion, Nicolae Hertu, Marius Albu

New players: Joabe, Georgian Paun

Note: I will still be using the two versions of the Barcelona tactic, no changes there.

As you can see the squad is even younger than it was last season, our oldest player is 26!

That surely isn’t the strongest squad in the league, far from that, but what I’m sure of is that our under 19s squad might really be the best in all Romania! Have a look, we have a wealth of interesting youngsters and I hope that at least half of them will reach their potential.

Just to give you an example, here’s the lad that I think will have the brightest future: 16-year old Ciprian Nastase, a graduate from our own academy.

And now… the friendlies! You surely remember our terrible pre-season campaign from last summer and the horrendous streak that we had during the winter break. Well, this time it went a lot better as we recorded six wins out of six including a pretty glorious success against Bundesliga outfit Hoffenheim. I don’t know if these results are a good sign or not though, after all we did well after losing all the friendlies last winter, now winning them all might mean that we’ll play poorly in the league? Who knows…

The schedule is not very kind to us, we’ll start with an impossible visit at defending champions Dinamo and then we’ll meet strong Astra at home, a team that achieved a remarkable 5th place last season. Then we’ll have a chance to grab some points against fellow promoted side Snagov before facing 2011 champions Otelul Galati.

That’s how it went folks, thanks for reading and feel free to predict where we will finish this season. I’d be happy to be around 10th place at the end of the season and maybe go for a good run in the Romanian Cup but I have no idea how we compare to the other teams in the division at the moment. What I know is that we have a promising bunch of youngsters that just have to survive this season in order to take a chance at a higher level next term.