Influence of reputation on performance

My friend called me today and we had one of our good longish Football Manager talks. I had always been under the impression that reputation would influence a lot of things in the game, but he brought to my attention exactly how far that goes.

He and I are playing a hot seat every time he visits, and I have done extensive edits to the database to make it more exciting and turn everything upside down. A lot of things are change and things are not how the usually are (made Manchester United weaker, for instance, while Stoke, Sunderland and Notts Co are top teams in the Premiership). The level of the Premier League is probably slightly higher than in the normal database, and talents abroad are more abundant (made a bucketload of good Italians, a fetish af mine).

We are currently in our second season, but since he cannot visit me all the time, he also plays some other savegames on the side. We are trying to learn more about the world I have created in the database I made and learn more about the kinks of the game. Lately, my mate had been playing with Everton and found it interesting to take over the club, buy players with potential on free transfers and leave them on holiday. Yesterday he had been doing some different testing, however:

My friend did two different savegames with only the English league loaded where he just left the game on holiday.

Game 1: Left Everton as they were and didn't change anything. They didn't really do anything and did poorly like they have done in every test game I played and in the hot-seat game that the two of us are playing, where they relegated first season and are now mid-table in the Championship.

Game 2: Change the reputation of Everton from 6050 to 10000. The team went on to finish second in the Premier League five years in a row. They won the FA Cup one season and just generally did well. They did not buy a single player for those five season or hire any staff (apart from manager), but sold a few good players like Jagielka and Shorey.

This was really quite interesting. The only difference between the two games apart from the reputation was the manager, seeing as Everton started without one (believe I send Moyes to Stoke as I found out he did quite well). Everton definately did have some players with the potential of being decent under the right conditions, but never would I have believed they would be capable of such performance. It's as if every single player was the best they ever could be. James Vaughan, easily the most promising player for the team at the start of the game, has gone on to be a big star, and he has been the top scorer of the league for the last two seasons. Players like Rodwell, Kissock and Duffy had become some of the top performers. Normally in the test games I did, Everton often played them quite a bit and they become fairly decent regulars, but they Gosling and Vaughan were always the only ones close to becoming top players. Anichebe did quite well also, but he has always done fairly well for me in the game whenever I have had him, so that doesn't surprise me much. I suppose it must have made a difference that the talent pool was limited by the fact that only the English leagues were loaded, but my friend is saying that the only reason that Everton didn't get first place was that Arsenal, who have basically been given most of the best players in the normal database (my friend had composed his dream team as we is managing them in our game), won every time. Those two were above all the rest.

Here is an overview of the Everton team as the start of the game:

First team

Reserves

U18s

Other attributes:

Training facilities: 16

Youth setup: 16

Balance: £5M (£50M debts)

They will say it doesnt affect playable leagues but everything Ive seen playing myself indicate reputations do count in playable leagues, poor (ie half the players struggling to break into double digits on theie stats) "big" teams will nearly always beat a team like Burnley or Wolves even if they are full of world class players.

Reputation affects match odds which affects AI tactical strategy.Not hard to go on a run when few teams bother to attack you. If some sort of AI squad quality assessment were introduced into the algorithm you'd have a different story as AI managers would realise a team is there for the taking as it were. Sounds easy in principle (CA as a measure) but probably not so much in practice (how exactly do you define the CA assessment and how do manager attributes affect their ability to make that call or desire to do so, etc. etc.)

SCIAG, it would certainly be bound to affect their morale. Image being an average Premier League player, a starter for the world's most well-known club.

Ahhh ... my friend just cleared up an important detail. In the test games he did the following about the manger position: He gave the club the best assistant manager possible, he took over the club and left them with no settings except never sell anyone. That explains why they never bought anyone

Another important thing to notice is that right off the bat, more people came to watch Everton's matches because they were a big team, the average attendance being 40.000-44.000 instead of 30.000.

However, the point is the same. And they still got the results with the same players.