Carpi's regular season was troubled and mostly below expectations, anyway, thanks to a final effort they managed to reach the 7th position and therefore the right to fight for promotion through the playoffs. In these they gave the best of them, managed to pull out their proverbial fighting spirit, first eliminated Cittadella, then the favorites for promotion Frosinone (in an epic second leg won away despite being two men down for long!) and reached the final where they were defeated by Benevento. As said, the season has been characterized by many ups and downs, after a good start when the biancorossi were constantly in the playoffs, the team went through a dark period in which they had many problems in winning in front of the home crowd. The consequence was that they slipped out of the playoffs and only thanks to a very good season finale, where they finally managed to express their distinctive football made of a solid defense and burning counterattack, entered again in the first eight. Back in August there were all the necessary preconditions to do well, during the summer the club didn't make many changes, decided to renew Castori's contract and to keep most of their best players. Moreover in the transfer campaign they moved wisely signing players experienced with the division like former Spezia striker Catellani and former Frosinone centre-back Blanchard. In addition the biancorossi continued their policy of signing interesting youngsters. The most notable goodbye was the one of striker Mbakogu, who anyway was back in January. That means they could count on a group of players who knew each other very well and all already knew the tactics of the coach. On the other side even though they had a united group their weakness was that not having skilled players in midfield have always been forced to apply the same kind of play made of counterattacks, that's why the biggest difficulties came when they played at home, the opponents, knowing their strength, were waiting for them in defense, hardly leaving room for their fast strikers...they couldn't count anymore on the surprise factor. Needless to say that the defense worked very well having conceded only 40 goals, this thanks to the excellent defensive organisation and to players such as Slovenian Aljaž Struna, Riccardo Gagliolo and Simone Romagnoli who once again showed very good qualities. Their main problems were in attack (they only scored 41 goals!) where the only player to stand out was Kevin Lasagna who scored 14 times, more than one third of all goals scored by the team! Just consider that the second best scorers were Mbakogu, Bianco and Di Gaudio with only 4 goals.
