Before I get into the title of this post we got a trophy roundup because we won both the Supercoppa and the Serie A once again and only one of them would be counting towards miles if we still counted it.
The Supercoppa was up first and the semi was straightforward with a narrow win to Juve(I have just embraced it at this point 😅)
Di Gregorio(Their keeper) is always on a mad one against us seemingly.
And the Supercoppa final was a goddamn penalty shootout win over Milan which should have been finished up in either normal time or even extra time but given we play the same style of system(3 back) as Milan and Allegri it came down to the shootout really and we pulled through.
The winning penalty was scored by probably the BIGGEST PAUSE name in FM regen history. I swear I’ll find a good nickname for the guy bear with me 😅.
United couldn’t stop goddamn teasing me with a board takeover:
But just like my disdain for the Rat that is in charge he still stayed. In reality he is a goddamn cockroach who would never leave the post despite the crippling debt. And it infuriates me just as much as it does in real life trust me.
We had Samu miss games for a while which was a painful moment because we had Liverpool in the Round of 16 knockouts which annoyed me because I had to travel beyond that round to satisfy the objective set for this season.
And given we had 2 suspensions after the nightmare that was the win against United it was respectable to get a draw at Anfield in the first leg:
A horrid back pass from Nico Gonzalez was the reason for them scoring that early 😑. Other than that they honestly had no other big highlights apart from towards the end. But we managed to finally make it back after a foul led to a penalty which was slotted by Almada and I thought I won it from a set piece but I deflated instantly when I noticed the offside flag but this was a good base given Samu is on track to be back for the return leg. And the return leg was good enough for us to win
We did decently enough but once Robertson did a two footed tackle our dominance was really obvious and the winner came from Kayode who has really developed amazingly and also is a long throw machine just like he is IRL.
A minor problem I ran into was the Serie A rules on non EU players where you can only sign 2 of them every season. I wound up signing 3 in January. 3 regens from Turkey(That pause name who scored the winning penalty against Milan in the shootout), Brazil and Colombia. So it wound up meaning the Colombian missed out(So now I understood why so many clubs wanted to loan him in towards the end of the January window😅). But I think he will be part of the squad from next season for sure. And I am bringing a Serbian wonderkid striker who will also count as a non EU player and I signed another player so I will hit the quota for next season already now.
Given I mentioned another player I need to tell you why I am signing 2 defenders.
The elephant in the room
Arsenal tried hard to destabilize us by wanting our newly appointed captain Rafa Marin and I settled on a bid of 83M which made them pull out immediately. I knew they had enough finances to cough it upfront but clearly they didn’t go for it and went for Bitshiabu instead from Leipzig. I thought I could expect professionalism and good training and the dumb guy decides to down tools. Basically giving us torrid training ratings and even after scolding him for it he still kept it up. I wish I took a shot of it back then but now it has stabilised a bit really. And I think Buongiorno doesn’t need much of an introduction given he has been sent off for a straight red twice in the season so far. I will try to move Marin at the end of the season because I never expected this level of work from somebody I trusted the armband and I will say this: I HATE THIS TYPE OF PLAYER. Just because the guy didn’t get his move he absolutely stunk it up in training and because of that I never had my best defender out there. I took the choice to take a stand. Same with Ake as well. I’m glad that guy is leaving to Saudi because his wage demands were Saudi inflated let’s just say.
So because of that I went for 2 perfect options: one of them for squad depth and one as a locked in starter:
We are developing a defense of giants who are corner kick magnets.
And this will be the 2nd non EU signing for next season along with the Serbian wonderkid as stressed by our new Director of Football
He was unhappy at Bayern and it surprised me how stingy they were towards someone who clearly has the quality to be a good defender. Their loss our gain. Marin will clearly move on. Buongiorno I want to phase down to squad player status if I can just to fulfill squad registration rules of club and country.
Then to round it all off we had one match to seal the league title against Sassuolo and we once again made it hard on ourselves(The last time was Al-Fayha and Al-Nassr for the Saudi Pro League)
The Brazilian regen I brought in had a goddamn stinker(I was still trying to take a stand but it didn’t last long 😅) and I had to bring Marin on quickly just to stabilise things after they scored their second goal. Then later on a short corner routine worked a treat with one defender assisting the other and the assist was from his goddamn weak foot to boot as well which surprised me but we won it in the end when all we needed was a point.
But it was official nonetheless:
Lauro Jobim was the Brazilian regen in question. He has the quality and ultimately I want to try and develop a good pool of at the very least home grown in country and club for these wonderkids because it always is useful for continental registration especially. Next up in the UCL is Man City who we did draw against 1-1 in the League Stage so I have some form of confidence to get something. My only faith is our system is difficult to score against most times.