[FM14] Balkan Super League by Ruh Roh

(add Hungary too)

I read this article and figured that although the plan in place to merge some number of football leagues in the Balkan peninsula will likely never happen, it would make for a good FM database. There are a lot of fun teams in these leagues with a lot of history, but all of the national leagues tend to be pretty gloomy noncompetitive affairs on the main.

The logic behind agglomerating the leagues both in the real world and the game world is that it will give the top teams more competition, more money, and more of a chance of breaking through on the world stage a la 1991. At the same time, of course I want this to be balanced in the game world. If Dinamo Zagreb are throwing around 70k/week contracts, they either got a tycoon, did incredibly well in Europe over the years or you should ask me for a bugfix. Reputation-wise, I want this league to be on par with Holland, Russia, Turkey, etc. I started it out at a little higher than Ligue 1 and let the dynamic league reputation do its work on moving it down a bit over the years as Olympiakos et. al crash out in the group stages.

I mishmashed teams together from the domestic leagues of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Hungary, Romania and Greece into a surprisingly neat and tidy three-tiered 140 team pyramid, 224 teams if you count the unplayable lower division. I thought about including Turkey and I really wanted to, but the standard/finance level of Turkish football is so much higher than the other nations in the region that it would change everything. Still thinking about an alternate version, though.

I'll throw a couple pictures around, which should do a better job of demonstrating the pyramid than me talking would.

Balkan Premier League (20 teams, this image shows what I was talking about regarding league rep)

Balkan First League (40 teams split up into East and West)

Balkan Second League (80 teams split up into Northeast, Northwest, Southeast and Southwest)

Changelist, in no particular order

- Added teams from Kosovo's premier league to the database/league pyramid

- Set base nation to Serbia (felt bad about not giving them a bone after tacitly accepting Kosovo's existence)

- Zeroed out EURO coefficients of constituent nations while raising that of the base nation, so "Serbia" will send sixish teams to Europe and the rest will send out one minnow each to get stomped in qualifiers

- Zeroed out reputations and facilities of non-pyramid teams in constituent nations; made national leagues extinct

- Modestly increased youth ratings of constituent nations to add a bit of fun/account for the fact that non-pyramid teams have effectively been edited out of existence

- Fiddled around with some reputations (Specifically, I thought Romanian teams would have been overrepresented otherwise)

- Removed feeder/B/C teams so everyone participates in the same reserve and youth leagues

- Added generic "Balkan Supercup" competition which includes all teams, including unplayable lower league sides

- Copied over transfer/wage value table in the editor from France

To do list

- More cups? Either something for the lower leagues or small national competitions, but I definitely don't want to force people to play 60-game seasons

- Turkey?

- Look for more confederated databases, I'd love to see this in action alongside a Scandinavia, a UK/Ireland, etc.

- Add Kosovo as a nation, though I don't really know how to do that cleanly and it's a very low priority

- Maybe add a bit more money in TV and prizes, I have a 14m/yr TV deal for the Premier League but I'm not really sure what those numbers are supposed to be like

- Tweak attendances slightly upward

Link is right here, I just put it up on sendspace. Not to be a jerk but man, they couldn't have made it more obtuse to upload content on the Steam Workshop if they tried. It's like they don't want people to bother.

Awesome. Looks really well done.

Look forward to more regional databases!