So, once again I have managed to ignore the process and flow that I was planning to follow with this series to bring you something completely different. I had planned for this post to cover the basics of my tactical plan for Atalanta going forwards. Instead, I have decided to bring you a smaller post giving you a first look in depth at some of the young players we have at the club and how we will look to develop them. I have identified three players for this initial post to introduce you to, I must add now, however, that I am at the end of my first season already and as such I will be able to show you a comparison between players at the start and at the end of the season.

Continue reading “La Scuola di Calcio: Youth Development 1.3” →

Having just written a post introducing my approach to recruitment in this series and in Football Manager, in general, I had intended to move on and for my next post to surround my tactical approach to the game. That was however until something came up in my save that I thought was worth drilling further down into. This will very much be a theme as I continue this series with my intention to introduce you all to my thought process as I try to build Atalanta in my own particular way.

With that said we will look in-depth at my first signing in the game through a case study.

Continue reading “La Scuola di Calcio : Recruitment 1.2 – A Case Study” →

Within Football Manager there are a number of different aspects of the game that you have to pay attention to in order to be successful. From the tactical side of the game through training and to squad management it is no longer possible to only specialise in one area whilst all but ignoring all of the others. The purpose of this second piece of this series is to give you an idea of how I plan to manage recruitment at the club in order to be successful both at home and in Europe.

Over the last few years, I have been lucky enough to be involved with recruitment within the ‘real’ footballing world. This has gone some way to show me exactly how I think a club should handle their recruitment in order to be successful both over the short term and the long term. The combination of these two viewpoints is the key in continuing to be successful within your Football Manager saves.

The now and the importance of horizon scanning

As a club at the level of Atalanta, there is no immediate shortcut to success at the domestic level. Realistically we are already behind the likes of Lazio, Roma, Inter and AC Milan and that is before we take into account the current ‘big two’ of Napoli and the all-conquering Juventus.

Continue reading “La Scuola di Calcio: Recruitment 1.1” →

Hello, it has been a while since I have written anything related to Football Manager but thanks to the invite from Samo to contribute my thoughts to his blog I now have a place to do so. There were a number of factors that stopped me from actually writing about Football Manager 18 but in all honesty, I did not enjoy that version of the game as much as I had previous versions. I had even considered not playing the new version at all, that was until the new features were announced and the improvements to training and tactics caught my eye.

Now it is safe to say I am once again invested in the game and with that comes the desire to write.  Continue reading “La Scuola di Calcio – Introduction” →