2014 - 2015 Football Thread - Page 133

1

For any Serie A fans out there, Palermo started off their competitive campaign yesterday with an embarrassing 3-0 home loss to Serie B side Modena in the Coppa Italia. You may remember Palermo's last Serie A campaign (2012-13), where at one point in March '13, the team had more coaching changes than wins, so it came as a bit of a shock to everyone when mentally unstable owner Maurizio Zamparini didn't fire the current coach straight away after the loss.

In fact, he even promised supporters at least 3 more new signings this transfer window. One of them is almost certainly going to be Giancarlo Gonzalez (Costa Rican defender from Columbus Crew - hooray MLS), which to me is boring, but necessary. Fingers crossed for a couple other good signings - they definitely need an experienced striker and could use a defensive midfielder or wingback.

There are a lot of bad teams in Serie A this year, and at least 3 that are significantly worse on paper than Palermo. Chievo Verona and newly promoted sides Cesena and Empoli come to mind, and I'd say Sassuolo, Cagliari, and maybe even Hellas Verona (after being gutted for parts this summer) are pretty bad, too. In my mind Palermo should be able to stay up and start to build to where they'd eventually like to get, qualification to the Europa/Champs League. That may sound crazy, but they were inches away from CL qualification a few years back, so it's not totally insane (just mostly insane). They have a young core that's already had great success in B and actually set the points record last season in their promotion campaign (Juve had more after their calciopoli relegation and subsequent promotion, but they were docked points so the actual total was lower than Palermo's 86 in 2013-14).

If you ever get the chance to watch (look for the aforementioned pink kits), they have some exciting young players with a lot of potential - specifically Andrea Belotti (Italian U-21 striker), Paulo Dybala (Argentinian striker/10), and they just bought Robin Quaison earlier this summer (Swedish MF from AIK). I don't know too much about Quaison, but he looked good in preseason and his youtube videos from AIK were impressive. Maybe some Swedes here know more.