I would personally prefer a next season expectations at the end of the season review post to make it clearer how much transfers strengthened the squad and if that and the preseason in general went according to plan or if things changed, e.g. missed targets, found a bargain etc.

As some of you might have already seen in the stats of the different players, our dominant offense leads us to a comfortable promotion. The final table could have looked even more impressive if we would have won more than two of our final nine games. Promotion never looked in danger as the team dominated the league. This has been the only goal for this season and we’re excited to have achieved that.

Next stop: Serie C. The plan has to be to quickly get to Serie B to further improve our financial situation. Back-to-back promotions cannot be expected although I want to try to get as close as possible so that with a good string of results the sensation might be possible. It’s probably more realistic to aim for promotion in two or three years. My personal minimum goal for next season is the upper half of the league table. I will continue to heavily rely on loans to get there with the occasional free transfer – especially from our affiliate Cesena who promoted to Serie A which is great news for us. A lot of players have expiring contracts which i really appreciate in this situation as we can fill their spaces with better players. I’ll go into that in further detail in the next updates.



A quick look at the national team: I'm lazy for once and summarize the year 2017 instead of cropping the information together from two screens for the 2016/17 season: After six losses in 2016 without scoring a single goal San Marino won the second game in NT history in 2017. Midfielder Luca Tosi was the hero of the night with his first international goal. A look at his stats shows the urgency of improvement in terms of player quality.

The other matches were also surprisingly close. The match against Lithuania was only lost through a late goal (82. minute). One win and two goals, this season has to be considered a success for San Marino.



In this kind of save the Youth Intake is possibly the most important day of the season so I will constantly be updating you about it each year. I'm quite happy with our first youth intake. I see three players that could turn into useful players which is much more than what i expected at this point. A couple more future NT players will be amongst them but that doesn’t mean much at this point. I’m very happy about this talent class.

knockout wrote:
European nations league is a thing in FM17 and will surely help to rise in the world rankings rather early

Squad registration
- Maximum of 16 over-23 players
- Teams are not allowed to sign non-EU players from abroad
- 12 subs named, 3 used
promotion/relegation rules
- 1st promotes directly
- 2nd to 10th of each group qualify for promotion playoffs
- promotion playoffs are played in a knockout tournament with 5 rounds and only the winner promotes to Serie B
- 16th to 19th qualify for playout
- Playout consists of one two-legged round and all losers relegate
- 20th relegates directly

# The promotion playoff system is absolute mad
# i love having so many players on the bench. perfect to develop talents. not that i have many yet
# no limitation of loan players in the match squads anymore allows me to continue being loan crazy
# we should aim for promotion playoffs - no matter how small the chances are to promote through them

Promotion always means that a big challenge is ahead of us. Only the league winner promotes directly while 2nd to 10th qualify for playoff promotion. Promoting to Serie B would be a massive step forward for our mission so we will try to promote immediately.

This obviously means that we need to strengthen our team again. Lots of loans expired and those who took a close look at the contract details in previous screenshots saw that also many contracted riders had expiring contracts. The majority of these were not renewed and a couple more players who didn't match our expectations were sold:



Notable departures include our starting goalkeeper Andrea Dini and starting defender Marco Arrigoni. Leaving loan riders are not listed here. This leaves the following core of retained players:



Yes, these are all players who are remotely close to the first team at this point. This already includes Seminara, Ravanelli and Damian whose loans were already confirmed to be extended earlier. Renzetti, Gandelli and Fantini are not considered good enough to play any role in the team which means we need a lot players to replace all these departures. Instead of listing what we still need I'm gonna list what we have because it is much shorter: left backs, one starting CB, a good depth in central midfield (which won't stop me from further strengthening it) and a starting striker. Everything else will have to be added. There is a lot of work ahead of us to field a competitive team.

All those departures needed to be replaced and 17 new players were signed to get a better team capable of competing in the new division.

In this thread i will once again only post a couple of transfers. To be more exact: Only new signings that are intended as starters for the season. For a complete overview click the link below:




I'm quite happy with the transfers as we strengthened the team a lot. The team should be a top 10 squad within the league and while the automatic promotion spot might be too far away, playoffs should be realistic. The one position where I'm not satisfied is the goalkeeper position as D'Arsie is at most decent at this level but there were no better options available to us.

The first half of the season is over and the team looked stronger than expected. We started the season with three losses in the first four games but after that the team was tough to beat and went from victory to victory in the league and is still in the Serie C Cup.



At this point, we are a serious contender for the league title with Alto Adige only four points ahead of us. The situation looks good enough that i decided to try to strengthen the team further in an attempt to promote directly already this season:







We have two notable departures: Our fullback Gandelli (1x subbed in this season) didnt play a role for us and Crialese should be an upgrade over him so we could afford letting him go. Corsale is a talent that had received very good reports by our staff. However, our coaching team and our facilities aren't yet on the level to help talents to get the best possible development so Lazio's offer convinced me to sell him because he can develop better. The 135k fee helps us but the 50% of the next transfer fee made the deal for us as that should be more than whatever we can get with him in the near future:

March is youth intake time and we're looking forward to it a lot but this time there was not much to enjoy. Being in Serie C with still mediocre facilities, nothing good can be expected so I'm not too disappointed but we should hope that the next classes will be better. Two players are worth presenting to you and none of them is outstanding:




Giovagnoli**** has not developed much yet but the tutoring was succesful as his personality isnt unambitious anymore and determination has been raised by six points.

Laghi*** with very small improvements. He's the first player from our academy to earn a NT cap.

First up: NT update. Not much to say really. All matches lost but congrats to the coach for keeping the matches reasonably close.



The Serie C cup was never too important for me but with every advanced round the wish to win a competition grew. We had little problems until the semi final. Viterbese Castrense (13th in our group) scored a last minute equalizer in the first leg and the second leg went without any goals so we only advanced due to away goals. Our finals opponent was Foggia (3rd in Serie C/C) and it came to two eventful matches. After Ilari and Pomiro gave us a 2-0 lead after five minutes the game rippled for quite some time until Foggia scored three times in 69, 70. & 75. minute. That score didnt last long as Ilari scored the final equalizer in the 76. minute. And then the rematch happened and I'm just showing you the picture - it was magical:


Meanwhile the league: The team could not continue like in the first half of the season and simply could not start another run of good results. I'm not sure what the problem was. I'm questioning if it was smart to do those winter transfers as they might have been disrupting to the team chemie. A big negative was the team disciplin - three of the losses were in matches were we had to finish the game with 10 men after red cards.


This hurts especially when looking at the final table. Alto Adige couldnt deliver in the second half of the season so promotion would have been possible. Still fourth in the league is above pre-season expectationso we have to be satisfied with it:


And we qualified for the playoff. Going against only 26 other teams for one final promotion spot - can we win the lottery?