Official add on leagues?

I'll be shortly buying a new laptop and FM16 (haven't had a new FM since 12 so I'm excited! Yes, I know, I don't get out much...)

Looking ahead to installation, which of the official add on leagues would people advise downloading?

Is Albania available? I've always wondered about managing there, plus they're on the rise with their Euro 2016 qualification.

Cheers

The only official add-on is Gibraltar. The rest are all unofficial.

Does 'official add-on' mean the league is likely to be part of a future game?

As a sort of bonus question - are bugs with this league things we should raise? I've read a lot about the Gibraltar league (some guy on the forums did an excellent 60 odd season save in it, it was truly terrific - who knows what happened to that guy ) and relative to my Wales save I've noticed things like TV deals and attendances are far easier to scale in a nation of 30,000 people than in one of over 3 million (not to mention prize money for the cups). I guess what I'm getting at is 'Is the Gibraltar league considered canon'? I suppose if it is anticipated to be part of the future games some useful community testing would be useful but if it's just a fun add-on that isn't part of the 'real' FM package then it doesn't matter if the finances go a bit doolally after 30 years of hard graft on the peninsula.

Does 'official add-on' mean the league is likely to be part of a future game?

As a sort of bonus question - are bugs with this league things we should raise? I've read a lot about the Gibraltar league (some guy on the forums did an excellent 60 odd season save in it, it was truly terrific - who knows what happened to that guy ) and relative to my Wales save I've noticed things like TV deals and attendances are far easier to scale in a nation of 30,000 people than in one of over 3 million (not to mention prize money for the cups). I guess what I'm getting at is 'Is the Gibraltar league considered canon'? I suppose if it is anticipated to be part of the future games some useful community testing would be useful but if it's just a fun add-on that isn't part of the 'real' FM package then it doesn't matter if the finances go a bit doolally after 30 years of hard graft on the peninsula.

I doubt it'll ever be added to the game without needing to download the editor file. I'm not really sure what the difference would be between them doing an add-on, and just putting it in the game, but I'm sure there's a decent enough reason why.

Basically, it's as close to official as you're probably going to get. There are a few small issues with it, but I'm not convinced they're data, more limitations in the game engine itself. I'd imagine if SI created it, you should still raise bugs for it. It's then up to them whether they deem them important enough. Every bug will be logged, tracked and prioritised, but I imagine bugs with the Gibraltar league specifically will rank pretty low.

I wondered if it had something to do with them not being part of FIFA thus legally the clubs are not eligible for the Club World Cup (though not sure if this has ever been clarified as they will never win it anyway)? Not sure if an add-on circumvents that, but it might. This has obviously changed now so it will be interesting to see if it changes next year/year after.

The other theory is the aforementioned, it's just a bit of fun and more of a 'fantasy' league that's a quasi-challenge - allowing attendances for fixtures to be larger than 50% of the entire population gives this one a little weight. FM is supposed to be a sim, and the GIB database's existence in the proper game might cause more issues than it's worth fixing (which feeds into your game engine point).

Thanks for your thoughts though, it might provide useful comparison for my ongoing bug report regarding Welsh football.

I wondered if it had something to do with them not being part of FIFA thus legally the clubs are not eligible for the Club World Cup (though not sure if this has ever been clarified as they will never win it anyway)? Not sure if an add-on circumvents that, but it might. This has obviously changed now so it will be interesting to see if it changes next year/year after.

The other theory is the aforementioned, it's just a bit of fun and more of a 'fantasy' league that's a quasi-challenge - allowing attendances for fixtures to be larger than 50% of the entire population gives this one a little weight. FM is supposed to be a sim, and the GIB database's existence in the proper game might cause more issues than it's worth fixing (which feeds into your game engine point).

Thanks for your thoughts though, it might provide useful comparison for my ongoing bug report regarding Welsh football.

They can participate in the Club World Cup, that's for sure. Same in FM14 and FM15. Given it's an add-on file, they wouldn't have hard-coded in that Gibraltar don't participate, as they have with the World Cup Qualifying. In real life...well, like you say, it's a moot point since they're extremely unlikely to ever qualify.

With the attendance thing, bear in mind that it takes around 40 seasons to get to the point where attendances are anything more than a few thousand every other week. In the same time-span, the population of the UK grew by ten million. I imagine in forty years, the population of Gibraltar will not be static. Not like I have anything to base that on, but it's not the biggest stretch. If you're going to go down the route of saying things like that are against realism, then you're opening a can of worms about hundreds of other things that users can do in FM that would presumably never happen in real life.

I meant IRL could they participate. I know in save games on FM they can, but I wonder if a non-FIFA nation can have a club side participate in it, there's no precedent afaik. Hence if it's not 'allowed' irl they might not want to release it as part of the game.

I don't think it's a can of worms to suggest the Wales should scale a bit easier than Gibraltar. I get 600 after around 25 seasons, I have 4 players rated World Class by staff and my board wanted me to reach the semis of the CL (I of course lost in the play-off after a sticky draw). This was my point of the quasi-challenge nature of GIB, not that it defies realism, more that it defies the logic of other nations built into the game as default.

I'm on the verge of failing FFP because attendances, prize money, and TV rights have barely increased (I might get a million combined for the latter two excluding CL, where my TV revenue adds another 900k) despite the league being in the top 15 both for coefficient and reputation with club sides often having 10 players in the Welsh side (I have none).

Your Gibraltar save when I read it last week or the week before is quite possibly my favorite FM related story ever because of the level of depth it goes into, but I did take away that the end game of those saves can reach silly levels in terms of revenue, relative to everything I have seen in my own save of the smallest in-game European nation in terms of quality/scope for expansion. I would assume Wales is not alone and that N. Ireland, Ireland and perhaps some other leagues suffer the same fate as my save does.

Although the Gibraltar file is an official SI release it is still quite thin on data & as some have found is prone to some interesting issues in long term saves, if it was to ever make it onto the list of leagues available out of the box I would expect a much more stringent level of testing to sort out those issues.

Interesting discussion, chaps. Sorry, I didn't realise Gibraltar was the only official add-on.