I decided for the final half of the Football Manager 23 game cycle, I would become a savior of sorts. I started this kind of save in FM22 as rebuilds and decided to continue that philosophy with a slightly new angle.

Part of that came after I utterly failed in my rebuild of the San Jose Earthquakes in MLS. I started looking for another challenge and found one with the news coming out of the end of real-life competition.

I saw something that said Rochdale’s relegation from League Two meant they would be out of the Football League for the first time in over 100 years. That gave me the idea to start from the beginning of the 2022-23 season with the vanilla database and try to reverse their fortunes.

I failed miserably, but I was undaunted and went looking for other teams I could rescue from their real-life fate.

I originally considered Nancy in France since they appeared headed out of the third division (they have since been spared because soccer is messy). But France hasn’t always been kind to me in FM so I kept going east and ended up in Italy with Brescia.

When I started this save, the northern Italian team was headed down to Serie C for the first time since 1984-85. Things are super muddy now. They appear to have saved themselves through administrative means (kinda like Nancy) as other teams will be kicked out for financial issues. But they still might go down. It’s a mess.

But what isn’t a mess is the season they had under my direction in FM23. We had a rough start, but rose to first place for the first time in December. We bounced as low as third after that, but took the top spot for good on January 22 and won the title by three points. We tried to blow it with only two wins in our final eight matches, but everyone else kept screwing up as well and we lifted the trophy after an uninspiring 1-0 away loss to Frosinone.

We lost our first two matches playing a wide version of a 4-2-3-1, but pivoted to a 4-3-3 with a DM and two wide attacking midfielders for the rest of the season. We only lost three matches between the switch and the awful final two matches of the season.

We weren’t huge scorers with three goals only four times through the season, but we had the best defense in the league with only 25 allowed in 38 matches – 10 better than the next-best defense. My keeper and regular defense all had average ratings of 7.05 or better in league play.

The goals largely came from striker Stefano Moreo with 18 in 35 appearances. He was pretty much spot on his XG of 18.77. No one else had more than six goals although 11 other people scored. Left-sided attacking midfielder Enrico Baldini led with 14 assists.

In fact, only two people who started 10 or more matches had ratings under 7.0 and one of them – a rotated defender – had a 6.96. We did need rotation because we had four guys, three of them defenders, with five or more yellows. We also had three reds. Suspensions were not abnormal.

Baldini was one of my top signings. We got him for $900K from Cittadella. We also named started defensive midfielder Andrea Danzi from the same team for less than $1,000,000. Keeper Luca Lesserini was a free from Venezia and all my other buys were reserve/depth moves.

So it really was just finding the right mentality and keeping the team happy. Getting on that early win streak after the first two losses played a key role. I trusted the assistant manager’s suggestion to find the tactical style we needed and then meshed the things I like with the player preferences.

Having a team that would win a bunch of one-goal matches – like 12 of our 22 wins were – made me sit on the edge of my seat a lot. But we got through it and will make the move to Serie A.

Since this is my secondary save (behind Promotion Hunter – update on that soon), I have a few options going forward. Initially, I will take this group into Serie A and see what happens. I only have a $2,000,000 transfer budget and lots of places I want to improve so we will see. A lot of my guys are wanted by other teams as well.

But I have also saved another version of the file and may see who else in Serie B needs saving. I may take a team promoted from Serie C or see if any jobs open up from teams in the bottom half of the table. I’ll update in a couple of weeks.