This is post five of a wider series. A series for FM23.
“Spending less isn’t a death sentence, but you are flirting with the chair.”
In-game date: 25 May 2025
This time last year, Sampdoria waved goodbye to Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Fabio Quagliarella, Ciccio Caputo, Antonio Candreva and Tomás Rincón. This left an almost 200-year old hole in the squad, with Enzo Scutari choosing the summer of 2024 to significantly propel his squad into the modern era with younger faces. With an average squad age of 27.19, Sampdoria are still the second oldest side in Serie A, but those exits were a defining moment for the club.
Serie A
By the end of the 2024-25 campaign, incredibly we again managed 73 points exactly. Two seasons in a row with the same points tally. Unfortunately this time around it wasn’t enough to finish fourth and bag UEFA Champions League football. This year it was only enough to finish sixth.
In Chris Anderson and David Sally’s excellent book The Numbers Game, there is a wonderful phrase used in the context of the correlation between spending power and sporting performance, a concept more deeply investigated by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski in other wonderful football books. That phrase is at the top of this post and is “Spending less isn’t a death sentence, but you are flirting with the chair.”
I can certainly relate.
Sampdoria sit 10th in the table for annual sponsorship income with £14.25million generated this year. By comparison, income table-toppers Juventus brought in £141million this campaign. When it comes to wage expenditure, Sampdoria are even further down the chart in 12th. An annual spend of £33.41million versus Juventus’ whopping £160million. Both Inter and Milan also parted with in excess of £100million each to line their player’s pockets this year. This puts the achievement of finishing fourth and sixth in Enzo Scutari’s second and third seasons in charge of Sampdoria into a special context. Long may the incremental improvements as we punch above our weight continue.
Facilities
On that note, a key goal for Scutari was to develop the facilities and youth recruitment network, in order to one day cultivate some home-grown heroes and attract other promising youngsters from around the world while we are at it. Progress has been impressive in his first three years.
The first notable product of this investment has been the emergence of 16-year old academy full-back Jacopo Martino. His debut at 16 years and 207 days away at Cremonese in the final league game of the season made him the youngest Sampdoria player of all time. How times have changed at the Luigi Ferraris.
UEFA Champions League
I don’t like the new format. It’s not just because we finished 30th in a 36 team ‘league phase’ either. Apart from a 2-1 home win against Marseille we were effectively battered by seven other seemingly random European sides, made very little money from the whole ordeal, and with the trapdoor into the Europa League or Conference League now gone, I feel like the soul of the competition has been torn out. Here’s hoping in real life, UEFA mirror FIFA’s decision to reconsider the proposed World Cup structure changes, and don’t ruin the world’s most prestigious club football competition.
Coppa Italia
NOW we’re back in business. In an incredible turn of events, we got to the final of the Coppa Italia this year, where our beloved Sampdoria faced off against Lazio and their ageless mega-stars Ciro Immobile, Luis Alberto and Sergej Milinkovic-Savic.
An Ismaíla Sarr-shaped double suckerpunch cancelled out Boulaye Dia’s opener meaning that with half-time approaching Lazio were in control of the tie. That was until first-half injury time where new Sampdoria favourite Dia (more on him later) scored again to bring the game to 2-2 at the break.
Scutari’s side controlled the second half, peppering the Lazio goal with eight shots to their singular effort fired at their former keeper Thomas Strakosha in the Samp goal. Though with more than 92 minutes on the clock, we just could not break through.
That was until a Samuele Birindelli interception and…
The Stadio Olimpico exploded as Ali Mohamed chipped Luís Maximiano in the Lazio goal in the dying seconds. Sampdoria picked up their first silverware in 31 years! Enzo Scutari’s first career trophy.
It was an incredibly dramatic end and it guaranteed Sampdoria UEFA Europa League football for next season, even though our final league position missed qualification by one position. We’ll be in Europe again!
A tactical reshuffle
After a couple of years of 4-4-2 diamond and a wide 4-3-3, Scutari this season reverted to his very first tactical shape. A 4-2-3-1. The combination of last summer signings Alberto Grassi and Hugo Vetlesen were a wonderful pairing in the middle of the park. Grassi excelling in the Sergio Busquets role of sweeping up from deep and playing effective passes, while Vetlesen regularly drove forward to support the front four.
Player Analysis
I have plans for some new in-depth analytical articles relating to weighted age and playing time vs cost evaluation so I’ll keep our Sampdoria series analysis a wee bit lighter this season, highlighting a couple of key performers in Scutari’s system.
Key insights:
- Thomas Isherwood deserves more game time at centre-back. Nikolaou and Basso were our first-choice pairing this year, but Isherwood was a powerhouse in his 1,143 minutes on the field.
- Frederic Guilbert was our best full-back for the second season in a row. Creative, a goal threat and solid defensively. Another brilliant year from the free signing. The 30-year old Frenchman now has 78 Serie A appearances on record.
- Alberto Grassi is the perfect example of a player who does not excel in a specific area statistically when it comes to counting key contributions, but as a midfield metronome, his involvement is unrivalled. More detail on this in the embedded Tweet below.
- 33-year old Manolo Gabbiadini is still very much a big part of how Sampdoria play. Despite four months out with an achilles injury, the veteran shows his worth as a constant attacking threat. He weighed in with 10 goals in just 23 appearances this season.
- Boulaye Dia is a God. You could be forgiven for thinking that when money isn’t exactly flowing at Sampdoria, spending £5.5million on everybody’s favourite six foot seven Italian striker Lorenzo Lucca was a mistake when you compare his statistical output to Dia’s. It wasn’t. It’s just that after Dia’s £2.4million January 2025 arrival from Inter’s reserves, he was absolutely incredible. The 28-year old notched 29 goals in 27 appearances and proved to be the signing of the season. I was delighted to see the gamble pay off. I wanted to inject some pace into our attack, and the return we got from Dia far exceeded my wildest expectations.
Below is some deeper analysis on key signings Alberto Grassi and Boulaye Dia from my Twitter feed.
End of season (three) review
Summary and future plans
The end of season three is always an awkward period in the development of a side in a one-club save. That’s why I was happy to keep this blog post more like a traditional save update, filling you in on all of the events over the past twelve months.
Season three is when the original squad members you didn’t want to keep long-term have eventually all moved on, the main core of the side you wish to depend on have been brought in, your tactical system and staff are well embedded and your investment into developing youth is really just getting started.
I am delighted we have qualified for European competition twice in three seasons, and lifting Sampdoria’s first trophy since 1994 was a special moment.
If you are to derive any take-home value from this update, I’d like it to be that sometimes signing a unspectacular squad player in his late 20s can bring a metronomic stability and consistency to your side (Alberto Grassi). It’s not always about the biggest and brightest stars. That and if you identify a particular tactical deficiency in your game, like a serious lack of pace in your attack, it doesn’t always need to mean tearing up your strategy and buying a whole new front line. Sometimes a 28-year old fringe player on the transfer list (Boulaye Dia) might be surplus to requirements for his current club, but absolutely transformative for yours.
This summer, fringe players Nicola Murru, 30, and Francesco Forte, 32, will both leave the club, oddly both to Portsmouth in the Sky Bet Championship. I plan to bring in a replacement left-back, and there’s a couple of teenagers joining our youth teams from outside the club. Fundamentally however, the goal of the 2025-2026 campaign, Enzo Scutari’s fourth in charge of Sampdoria, will be continued stability. If we can maintain the ability to qualify for European competition each year while developing our facilities and hopefully seeing more young stars like Jacopo Martino break through, I’ll be absolutely delighted.
All this means that there is much more fun to follow as we head for season four.
Thanks for reading.
FM Stag