As I ended my first (half) season in charge of SC Austria Lustenau, I worried I had made a mistake. I had little room for error, taking over the first-place team during the winter break in a league where only one team is promoted. But we faltered in the final stretch, winning only one of our final five matches, and finished in second place.

I honestly thought of abandoning the project because of the limited opportunity for promotion*. I decided against that when I looked at the pre-season prediction and saw us as very heavy favorites. That looked like a bad decision when we lost our first two matches, but I quickly re-calibrated the tactic to my beloved Control Possession. We picked up points in 17 of our next 19 league matches and put ourselves in position to win the top spot.

*The goal of Promotion Hunter is to get 10 different teams promoted. I am now at 7 promotions in 19 seasons across nine countries. I have failed in Germany and Spain, but succeeded in Austria, Switzerland, England, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania and Northern Ireland.

Once again, we tried to sabotage that, but our quality shone through, and we won promotion with a game to spare. Even that was not without drama as we drew 0-0 only to see the teams chasing us lose and hand us the title.

Not only did we win the division, but we also won the Austrian Cup, which means that I won my seventh promotion AND qualified a team for Europe! We beat five first-division teams on the way to lifting the Cup. I am stunned we didn’t have major injury problems. We almost did, but that was more people getting hurt after the winter break than cup issues. We needed extra time to win in the final, which I was sure would decimate our team, but the guys stepped up the rest of the league schedule.

I would have to say that my biggest issue was my board selling my top striker after our transfer window had closed. Viking in Norway had been bidding, and I kept rejecting them, but then the board took me out of the equation. My second-best striker got hurt right after that, and we needed to use a stopgap option for a match or two before he was healthy.

I have to take a small amount of blame for this because I sold one of our really good wingers, who could also play striker. But no one was bidding for my striker at that point, he brought in $5M and we had two other options at right wing.

So now we endeavor to move on. I initially got excited when a Swedish team just out of the promotion places had a job opening, but they had already completed interviews – there has to be a way to program that in before you click the Apply button. Some options in England look promising, but I want to try a new country. I have applied in Poland and Greece, both completely new to me. Next post will reveal where we landed!