Interesting thought.

I was just wondering something the other day. Could being a succesful club affect your TOWN size? My narrow minded father disagreed, but I think differently.

For instance, you take over a BSS club, say Braintree. Now Braintree is a small village/town between Colchester and Chelmsford. It has quite a bit of room for expansion of the town. Now say you took this team to the premier league. Would the Town get bigger BECAUSE of the football team? Think about it, people from all over Essex come to visit the best team there, and then word catches on and Londoners start making it to away games etc. This brings people in from all over the area regularly and I was wondering if this would make a Town bigger?

Now apply this to football manager. If the team was extremely succesful, won multiple Champions leagues and their top flights, they would get a bigger stadium. Once they start getting to 60,000 though, this is where I see FM's downfall. For there is no evidence that the town size increases along with your club. Where would you get fans from? Some places are bound to be remote with barely anything around them. Tourist attractions can make towns bigger in real life, what if football clubs could? What do you guys think? Could this be a feature in future iterations (town size)

Winning the top domestic league's and continental honours possibly would make a town bigger, but name me a club that's done it.

Ah so that's where Braintree is situated. I will let you know if I manage to take Braintree to the dizzy heights one day.

I wouldn't imagine many people move to a town because of a football team tbh.

Fwiw (not much) my aunt and uncle used to live in Braintree. Near Tesco's.

To be honest the part of Essex where Braintree is situated is surrounded by complete wilderness then you have Dunmow and Stanstead one way and Brentwood the next, althought Brentwood is further away than Dunmow and Stanstead. The club has potential and there is building work all around the area, who knows what might happen So I mean with Britain the way it is today you just can't rule out a small club becoming big because the government is always looking to expand small towns/cities to home the increasing population.

Suppose if say Braintree were to become a top four club, they would attract obviously a fair amount of supporter. Business would then be attracted to Braintree, seeing a number of potential customer week in week out in a small area, and with businesses, comes jobs, and therefore comes development. But I doubt it would have any significant difference, for example look at Hoffeinheim (sorry about spelling) they’re a rather big German club , yet aren’t I mistake they are situated in just a village?

To expect the town, village or city population to be affected either in real life or in the game would be wrong I would say.

In the game, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a "catchment area" of sorts? The game already understands localities given the map coordinates, so it "knows" nearby stadia, rivals, etc... therefore I'm assuming that this is also the case for potential fan-base expansion for clubs. I'm sure someone will say I'm right or wrong on this.

Dan-Toon-Army - Saw a section on some sports programme about Hoffenheim when they were due to play a top of the table match against Bayern Muchich at the time. It was quite amusing seeing the village and the population, then the new stadium they're building on the outskirts. Now that was a perfect example of a club who haven't really encouraged any growth for the village of note, but have begun to increase their fan-base considerably, hence the requirement for a new stadium.

Just look at AFC wimbeldon,7 years alive and just been promoted to the BSP.

From a game point-of-view, it's worth mentioning (as I have previously in the Editor's Hideaway) that each city in the game has a field for settlement size, but that no size is actually set for any city in the database. While that would explain how it's possible in the game to take the tiniest village team to Premiership glory (since without a defined supporter catchment, the level of attendance can only be calculated on the basis of the originally programmed average attendance adjusted for change of reputation) it suggests that the game could calculate attendance with reference to the size of the city (otherwise why equip the database with the field at all) and yet doesn't bother to...

It's not like the village of Gretna grew when the club got to the SPL. Then there's clubs like Blackburn and Wigan whose towns haven't increased their populations because of their football clubs' successes. It doesn't happen in real life and I'm sure it isn't coded into the game.

I dont think the town size needs to increase to fill the stadium, but the reputation and followign of the club would.

There are teams out there in France and in Spain that have stadiums that hold more people than the population of the town. They get their support because people know about the team due to their success and end up following the team.

These people are unlikely to move to the town in which the team is located because these fans have only come on board due to the teams success, rather than being born and bread as a fan.

It's quite similar with a top London club. Are all the people in the Emirates from Hihbury and Islington? Are all people at Upton Park from East Ham? Undoubtedly not. But because of the team's reputation, fans travel in from essex etc.

That's not really a far example Kreman. London's population per square metre is probably one of the highest in London. not to mention that without traffic or anything like that, it would take less than an hour to drive through London. Also, I think you WILL find that in the North of London people tend to support Spurs/Arsenal, East is West ham, West is Fulham, Central Chelsea and south Millwall etc.

I don't think this would happen in real life to be honest.

Another poster mentioned Gretna, they were never going to survive because people aren't going to travel to watch a small team like that and they would never become a big team without a bigger support.