Man, I needed an escape. Seriously. You wouldn’t believe the corporate dumpster fire I’ve been wading through this last quarter. My real job? It involves trying to make sense of two ridiculously bloated departments that decided to merge—HR and Engineering. I was the poor sap stuck trying to figure out which legacy database schema we needed to keep. It was pure madness, zero logic involved. I spent three weeks just sitting in meetings, watching corporate drones drawing useless Venn diagrams and talking about ‘synergy.’ Synergy, my butt. I just wanted something that made sense, something I could actually control.
That’s why I fired up the PC and went straight back into the Lombardia FC save. I needed total dominion over something, anything, where results actually mattered and office politics didn’t exist. Lombardia FC 25, right? We’re talking about a sleeping giant—a club with a massive stadium, world-class youth facilities, but absolutely no spine. They had just dumped their manager, a guy who somehow survived two seasons playing pure anti-football, and the whole place was a motivational wasteland.
The Diagnosis: Why We Needed a Hard Reset
The first thing I tackled was the data. I completely threw out all the old scouting reports and analyst briefings the previous guy had used. They were useless, talking about ‘potential’ in players who were already collecting their pensions. I spent two solid nights just digging through the player morale charts and the financial books. Morale was absolutely toxic, obviously. They hated the old guy’s slow, tactical drilling. They were bored, and the fans were furious.
So, the mission was simple, but tough: Find a coach who could actually lift spirits and inject some aggression, not just another clipboard manager focused on defensive shape. I immediately set up my criteria. I wasn’t messing around with cheap hires or internal promotions this time. I needed a guy who could walk into that locker room and immediately shut everyone up.
- Reputation Check: Must have managed a major club or national side before, even if it ended badly. Needed immediate gravitas.
- Tactical Preference: Must favor high-pressing, vertical football. We needed goals and chaos.
- Man Management Score: Highest possible rating in motivating and handling player personalities. This was the dealbreaker. If they couldn’t hug a player after yelling at them, they were out.
The Candidate Hunt: Sifting through the Wreckage
I scraped the public list clean of the obvious names the board was pushing for. They kept trying to recommend some old Italian journeyman who specialized in avoiding relegation—that stuff just made me laugh. I wanted fire. I pulled up every manager unemployed or unhappy in their current role across the top five leagues. I ran the filter, and that gave me about 18 candidates.
Next, I slashed that list down to five after looking at their detailed personality profiles. Turns out, most of them were massive ego cases who’d immediately clash with my captain, and I needed that captain to be happy. No time for that kind of drama. It felt like my real job all over again, filtering out the people who sounded good on paper but were total nightmares in reality.
The final three were intriguing, but one stood out:
Candidate A: A technically brilliant Spaniard, but his reputation was too low. He needed three years to build trust, and I needed results yesterday.
Candidate B: A reliable German. Solid, good reputation, but his preferred tactical setup was just too slow and methodical. We’d be back to boring football within a few months, and that defeats the whole point.
Candidate C: A guy named Verratti. Not the famous player, but still an impressive name. He had just been fired after a huge argument with his previous chairman over transfers—a perfect sign of passion, if you ask me. His motivational stats were through the roof, and his preferred style was pure high-octane football. He was the risk.
The Implementation: Signing the Volatile Genius
I went for Verratti. I needed the volatility. If he was willing to fight the corporate guys at his old club, he had the guts we needed. I checked the contract demands, surprisingly reasonable. I immediately scheduled the interviews and essentially sold him on the idea of being the savior of a forgotten giant. He talked about culture change, getting rid of the dead weight, and focusing entirely on speed.
I signed him on a three-year deal right then and there. The fictional board in my save started grumbling about his ‘history of instability’ and ‘lack of commitment to corporate structure,’ but I just pushed the contract through anyway. I was sick of dealing with hesitation in real life; I wasn’t going to deal with it here.
And you know what? It’s working beautifully. The man is a maniac. His first press conference? He called out the previous regime publicly, promised goals, and basically dared the rest of the league to try and stop us. The training reports I started reviewing were immediately positive. Players were actually smiling in training again. The old, cynical core of the team actually started putting in a shift. It’s only been three months of simulated time, but we’ve shot up the table four spots, and the goals are flying in. Sometimes, you just need to ignore the paperwork and the safe choices, and choose the guy who brings the drama. It’s a lot more fun than trying to reconcile HR’s expense reports with Engineering’s budget codes. Absolute victory for Lombardia FC.