Suggestion: Scheduling friendlies

I wanted to open up this thread to the topic of scheduling friendlies and some new features to make that process better. Here's a few things that have been said already:

Rather than let your assistant find you 8 poor teams to play, or spend ages finding big teams and when they're available, you should be able to ask your assistant to find you teams of [slightly higher/similiar/slightly lower] [reputation/ability] to you who are available on certain dates, i.e you set a period (from early July to mid August or something) and he finds you X matches against similiar teams, so your friendlies will be slightly more competitive and help you to adjust tactics to suit the quality of teams you're likely to be up against.

Setting friendlies can be so time-consuming, offering games to opponents who have no intent on ever accepting, guessing about open dates or conflicts, et cetera. If I pick a date first, it could only show teams that are available on that date. If I pick a team first, it could show me the dates that team is available. How about that lovely little 'filter out unrealistic targets' check-box option, too?

Of course you can let your assistant manager schedule them for you, but many manager want to have a more hands-on approach to crafting their friendly matches. The above quotes are two ideas to make that easier or more effective.

Please share more ideas on this topic.

I would like to see affiliate clubs actually offer to play a friendly with you.

Rather than let your assistant find you 8 poor teams to play, or spend ages finding big teams and when they're available, you should be able to ask your assistant to find you teams of [slightly higher/similiar/slightly lower] [reputation/ability] to you who are available on certain dates, i.e you set a period (from early July to mid August or something) and he finds you X matches against similiar teams, so your friendlies will be slightly more competitive and help you to adjust tactics to suit the quality of teams you're likely to be up against.

i like the idea of being able to tell you ass man where you would like to go on tour, or what type of clubs you would like for your preseason games. for me its a real pita trying to set friendlies up, so i usually leave it to the assman anyway, but sometimes he comes back with some terrible choices. the worst of it is, if i cancel them and try and arrange my own, it takes 24 hours to find out if they have accepted. and if they dont, i have to try again. and then that takes another 24 hours....

i would like to see more tangible reasons to have international friendlies.

currently i arrange 3-4 matches aganist my reserves to get them in shape, mainly because i can...and my fans seem to not care :-)

i would like to tell my assistant what to do eg. bring all players off at half time or bring players off when fitness reachers 85 % or bring off major players

I would like to see affiliate clubs actually offer to play a friendly with you.

They do. It's just the game is against your reserves as you are "under no obligation to field a strong team".