A new version of Football Manager is released today, which makes this, in my house at least, a time of hushed reflection. The old era is passing away, the new era is rising up before us. Everything we knew and loved is sliding into the sea, while before us, like a mountainous country, is thrust a terrifying and exhilarating possibility.

I thought about just posting the screenshot of the match report with no commentary, under the theory that what you fill in with your own imagination would be more intense than anything I could describe. But that isn't really true, and besides, you don't need this one to be made more intense. Even buffered in prose, this one is intense enough.

Before the climax, the anticlimax. Battered beyond the point of collapse by Roma's thug tactics, we crawled toward the end of the league season leaving bloody handprints all over the linoleum. If we won just one of our two remaining matches against Atalanta and Bologna, 16th and 14th in Serie A we'd win the title, but we were in no shape to practice, much less to play a competitive game.

This is a story about an honest, fair-minded, and well-meaning football club, and how they were pushed to the limit by a group of thugs, cheats, and bullies. It's an old story. It's a story that happens all over the world whenever a kid who's good at computers is forced to eat leaves by a kid who isn't good at computers; whenever a gleaming professional wrestling champion climbs into the center of the ring for a spontaneous awards ceremony only to be taken down by a folding chair from behind.

Remember how we never win a match at the San Siro? And how, not counting the Champions League final in 2020, which was against Manchester United and thus not exactly at the San Siro, we haven't done so in this decade, or at all since a highly random 4-3 win over Inter in the Champions League quarterfinals in 2019?

Reset: Spring collapses into summer, and we're hanging on in Serie A, three points behind Inter and even with Milan but with two games in hand over both. We've just played our Champions League quarterfinal against Barcelona, a tie in which fully seven players three on their team, four on ours once played for the other team.

I spent €125,000,000 on one player during the January transfer window. Meet Alessandro Polenta, 23-year-old Italy left winger, ex of Barcelona, and in my estimation, The Best Player In The World.

Here's Alessandro Polenta's transfer history, just to give you a sense of the shape his career has taken.

Early results are in. The 3-4-3 has been good to us.

Song clip: The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Shön"

Related posts:

1. Pro Vercelli: The Europa League Semifinal, First Leg
2. Pro Vercelli: The Mountain Stone by Stone
3. Pro Vercelli: The Battle of Milan

I'm not going to spend a lot of time crying about what a tragedy last season was. We won the European Cup. Yes, we lost our streak of consecutive Serie A titles and got blown out by A.C. Milan, but we still finished second in the league, won the Club World Cup and the UEFA Super Cup, and ended the season as champions of Europe.

Note: The following is part two of an excerpt from the bestselling Pro: How a Small-Town Team Defied the Odds and Conquered the World of Soccer, by an unnamed reporter from worldsoccer.com, which was recently published by the Jeeves imprint of Snirp WorldSports. Part one can be read here.

Note: After last week's unplanned hiatus, it's time to get this story moving. That's right: we're covering the entire 2020-2021 season in one day, in an epic, two-part update.

The following is an excerpt from the bestselling Pro: How a Small-Town Team Defied the Odds and Conquered the World of Soccer, by an unnamed reporter from worldsoccer.

My assistant manager quit. I have no idea why. He just stood there in the doorway, gingerly holding his resignation letter, muttering something about going to be the coach of Sorrento.

"Why, Roberto Colapietro!" I exclaimed. "You're going to be a manager, and you didn't tell me? Congratulations!

There was no heroic surge. We set a punishing pace from the outset, and we kept it up to the end. For a time it looked as though Inter would keep it up with us, but they'd faltered by midseason, and when we finally won the scudetto in a 4-1 home win against Genoa, with goals by Fábio (2), Michele Proietti, and Riccardo Caprioli; all players under 23, the latter two in their teens we did it without much drama.

By mid-May, we'd played Milan three times in four weeks twice in the Coppa Italia semis and once in Serie A and were set to play them twice more in an epic Champions League semifinal. The first leg was slated for Naming Rights Park, and then we'd be heading to the San Siro with a place in the final on the line.

YOUTH MOVEMENT

Pro Vercelli's success this season has been fueled by a new wave of talent emerging from the youth ranks. We sat down with one of the season's most unexpected stars, 21-year-old midfielder Alexander Zech, to learn about the roller-coaster ride of the season, what it's like to play with his childhood heroes, and how Vercelli's most talented youngsters cope with the pressure of playing for the defending champions.

And I can say that with authority, because we are the champions. How are we the champions, when we're not even halfway through the season? Keep reading.

Let's do this McKinsey-style, to bring some discipline to the lives of all the English majors in the audience.

Serie A
Through 18 games, we're undefeated outside the San Siro, but we've done badly enough inside the San Siro to be stuck in second place.

The two implacable enemies of a successful football club are stagnation and arrogance. Stagnation leads to complacency, to a drowsy sense of timelessness. If things have always been and will always be as they are, why should we bother being fierce? Arrogance leads to laziness and a bitter, spoiled entitlement.

One of the first pieces of news I got after the Champions League final was that the board had decided to expand the stadium by more than 11,000 seats.

In other words, our not-even-one-year-old arena is about to have its seating capacity increased by almost 40%. This is huge news, and it only heightens the importance of finding a good name for the place.

It might have been a bit anticlimactic after the drama of the Champions League, but we won our second consecutive Serie A title with a routine 1-0 win over Napoli. Albert Vrancken scored the winning goal. We followed the title-winning match with a 2-0 win over Treviso that was only un-routine in that the goals were scored by our 17-year-old youth striker Michele Proietti (for whom I nurture extremely high hopes) and our 18-year-old youth defender Riccardo Caprioli (who also featured in the last 10 minutes of the Champions League final).

Welcome to Pretty Much the Exact Opposite of the Thunderdome. Okay, here's the deal. It's 2019. A dozen years after Twitter (not a fad, by the way) transformed the very way we think about information, the power of social networking is being harnessed at all times to redefine who we are and how we interact in a world of dynamic choices.

Anything can happen. We haven't secured the championship. There are no guarantees. That said, we beat Juventus 2-0 (goals from Mark Linnane and "that man Michael Dogan"), Siena 3-1, and Catania 4-1, while Inter astonishingly drew 0-0 with last-placed Pescara and Milan drew 0-0 with Napoli. So with two games left, we've opened up a five-point lead at the top of Serie A and only need two points to clinch the championship.

Every season has a personality, and this season has been pressing, hard-nosed, and resolute. Last year was like a race on a beach, not far from civilization you could see the umbrellas just over the rise. This year's been like forging across some frigid mountain pass at the top of the world and enduring the blows of nature.

One of the great things about sports, even videogame sports, is that you never know what's going to happen. The truth of this proverb is nowhere more apparent than in the media's (even the videogame media's) ongoing attempt to interpret everything in sports according to storylines that events often turn on their heads.

I. Population

I decided to keep Ibrahimovic. When it came down to it, his character was just too fascinating to lose. I've never seen a player who was so expansively self-defeating or one so capable of turning every moment of triumph into a bellow of despair. It's as if the better he gets, the more he has to betray himself: he's playing for his favorite club, yet desperately wants a transfer; he's playing for his favorite manager, yet spends all his time complaining; he's a born leader, but never had a worse season than when he was asked to be captain.

This concludes your 2017/2018 Pro Vercelli season.

Related posts:

1. Pro Vercelli: The Europa League Semifinal, Second Leg
2. Pro Vercelli: The Europa League Semifinal, First Leg
3. Pro Vercelli: From the Vercelli Soccer Express, Amazon Kindle Edition, 23 May 2014

I knew there'd be an honor guard at the San Siro. I knew we'd be taking the pitch, in our first match as champions, before our biggest rivals, from whom we had just taken the championship. That's a satisfying feeling. But it wasn't quite enough. I wanted this moment to mean something more. I wanted to find a way to comemmorate 1910 with the joy of the scudetto.

The first goal ever scored in Serie A was scored in Vercelli, three minutes into Pro Vercelli's 3-3 draw with Genoa on the first day of the new competition, October 6, 1929. The player who scored it was named Bajardi, and he played for Pro Vercelli, though beyond that, information about him or about the moment is hard to find.

Our third-to-last match of the Serie A season was against Torino, and it wound up being historic for all the wrong reasons. At the start, it had looked so promising: our last home game of the year, and thus our last match ever at the Silvio Piola. With a six-point lead over A.C. Milan with three games left to play, we knew that if we took even one point from the game and Milan somehow lost to Siena, we'd win the championship in front of our home fans and give the Silvio a glorious ending.

We had a match at Sampdoria sandwiched between the first and second legs of the Europa Cup semi. Milan had put some pressure on us by beating Catania 4-0 the day before so our lead in the table, which had been seven points so recently, was down to just three. Fortunately, our players steeled themselves and sent a message back to Milan by equaling their 4-0 win.

Our fifth match of the year against Juventus fell on a cool night in early May, when the semifinals of the Europa League came to the Silvio Piola for the first and last time in its history. The crowd was nervous. Playing with a semi-fit Ibrahimovic (who was recovering from a bruised rib sustained in our last match against Juventus, all of eight days ago), and without the Ferj (who was ineligible for the Europa League), our defense looked sure to struggle, and the question was whether our attack would be sharp enough to help us take advantage of playing the first leg at home.

The season is nearing its apex. We're clinging to the rock face and praying we can be the first to crawl over the summit.

We're out of one competition, having turned up our worst result of the year to lose 1-3 to Juventus in the second leg of our cup semi. It was the first time we'd lost at home in any competition this season, and it came down to Jacob Larsen, who kept goal like he was committed to an ethic of hospitality.

Mid-March, and we're still alive in three competitions. We're in the semifinals of the Coppa Italia, where we hold a 2-1 lead over Juventus after the away leg thanks to goals by Rubino and Galli at the Delle Alpi. We're in the final sixteen of the Europa League, where we're set to play Olympiakos after beating København in the first knockout round.

Like the hard fist of Beowulf smashing repeatedly into the sternum of a cringing, slobbering Grendel...actually, hold that thought. Fifteen games into a do-or-die season with Pro Vercelli, it's time to confront an icy truth. Since I came to the club, we've done well. We've earned multiple promotions, done a cameo in the Champions League, and established ourselves as the fifth-richest club in Italy.

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Last season marked the first time in nearly a decade that Pro Vercelli failed to improve on its league position from the year before. After a summer of tough questions, Lions manager Brian Phillips sat down with our Riccardo Nicastro to talk about what happens next.

We went to the San Siro with a lot on the line. It was the 1910 Derby, which made it a massive game in itself. With our season collapsing around us, we'd fallen to Genoa, but come from behind to beat Juventus at the Silvio Piola, meaning we still had an outside chance of finishing in seventh and taking the last UEFA Cup spot but only if we could beat Inter.