I'm back/football manager 2011!

Hello people, I'm back! After going on a break from blogging as I thought I just wasn't committed enough to do this. I will be continuing from now on if I have the time, and I may even post separate blogs on football manager and keep this blog for non-football manager related blogging.Having now got football manager I decided to start a game with.. wait for it... Catania, in Serie A of the Italian league, with me being Italian myself
The author of TrueFootballManager gave me inspiration for this as it was one of the voting options for when he started his first football manager 2011 game but lost out to the eventual winner of Deportivo. I also thought it would be a reasonable challenge to get them into a European spot as I am not the best of managers and their media prediction was 12th. The other interesting thing about this team is that half the squad is made out of Argentinians!

I told the board that I could achieve a mid-table finish and was given a budget of around £2m which was enough for the players I was targeting.

My first signing was a bit of a cliche, and a well-known wonderkid in the name of Marco Verratti. As with the signings I was trying to make were for the long-term, as I was planning to stick to this game for a while, he will be my future playmaker and will make his impact from the bench.

My next signing was to provide some competition and rotation at left-back, as i was not happy with the cover in that area. This came in the form of a free transfer in Pierre wome, who will hep out at throw-ins and hopefully score a few screamers! He has also decent attacking stats  which should help out in my tactic, which I will hopefully write a detailed post about one day!

My last signing was a striker as I wasn't too happy with some of my strikers. I think he is well heard of, and comes in the name of Garra Dembele, who came in for a small fee of £375k. What I like about him is that he is equally adapt at playing as a target man or a poacher.

Here is the summary for my transfers:

As you can see I have not sold anyone..yet. With such a big squad it was hard for me to give them all enough playing time in pre-season to judge them. I hope such a big squad will not cause players to get out of hand as some player will probably end up making only a handful of  appereances this year...

And here is the tactic I will be playing with:

This is built around a 4-4-2 but focuses passing down the flanks, in which I am using an inside forward. One day I will write about my tactic in more detail.

Another thing I noticed when I took over is that a lot of my players had a high aggression rating, but hopefully they won't pick up too many suspensions!

p.s I apologize that I do not have a screenshot for my start of season expectations and information about the club, and as some of you may have noticed I am currently in May, so I will probably do a full-season update going into detail of some matches. Thanks for reading!