FM22 game ideas

[GreyedOutMan]

Hi guys.

I've been really enjoying my French created club (starting in the Championnat National) in the last few months - I created a team for Courchevel, my favourite ski resort...I loved the idea of putting a team into a place I knew had no football teams (for obvious reasons) but that I knew well. I'm not going to get to the kind of glory I dream about  of CL glory or anything - I started this game late after a couple of other saves (I may not make it to Ligue 1 to be honest), but I hope to have just this one save for the FM22 cycle.

I want to do something similar but I don't want to do the French league again (or England which I've done before). Just wanted some ideas as to which leagues could work well here. My criteria:

Needs to be at least 3 divisions (and probably no more, to be honest - I don't think I'll get up from tier 9 to the top here!).
No DB tweaks needed
Ideally I'd like a nice big team to be a potential future rival - this could just be a country-based rivalry (Arsenal/Man Utd type) or, perhaps, a big city I know well which has just one major team at the moment.
A fairly obvious logo to use (Courchevel has a logo already so that was really easy)
Names I can pronounce (so probably not Eastern Europe, although I'm fine with Western European languages).

I'm leaning towards a big league because of the 3rd point above....presumably Germany, Italy or Spain, although if anyone can persuade me that trying a new continent could keep my interest I would be open to it (but not at all convinced!). So which league do you think could be good and what kind of club (location wise) could be interesting?

A few ideas I had off the bat:

There are only 12 cities in Europe with a population of over 500k and just one football team. I could create a second. I'd want to have some sort of credible back-story as to why a second would be set up and what kind of club it would be, but it could be fun to be a second team in :

Naples
Marseille (avoiding France this time though, I think)
Leeds
Palermo
Zaragoza
Wrolclav (probably not, just because of names!)
Dusseldorf
Dortmund
Malaga
Bremen
Hannover
Lyon (but probably not France)

These locations appeal to me significantly because the way I understand it, if I'm the only other team in a big city, my youth intakes are likely to be better than in a similar sized city with four, five, or thirteen (that's London, the most of any city) professional teams?

The other option is to go for a place that does not have a team at all - Courchevel was great for this, and I guess I quite like the idea of having a team in a very remote place too. Somehow the idea that PSG and co might be travelling up beyond 1000m for our home games seems funny to me!

One other consideration: Is it more fun to try to build a rivalry with big teams (whether Real/Barca, Juventus, PSG or Bayern) or to dominate a smaller league and try to drag it up to become a major league? My feeling is that the latter might take me forever - I'm not exactly an FM natural despite playing it for about 25 years! But not ruling it out entirely.

Any of these are potentially interesting projects. Anyone with significant experience of any of these leagues (obviously I'm not really considering Leeds!), please let me know what you think. The only thing I know for sure is that I will be starting in the lowest league playable with no downloaded DBs.

Thanks in advance!

[Freakiie]

The thing with a small nation is that you will generally outshine your national league very quickly. I've dragged leagues to the 5th spot in the coefficients in past FMs (which then nets you 4.5* league rep which boosts everything, because league rep in FM is way too dominant in everything), but it was basically my team with back to back CL victories doing 90% of the coefficient lifting, with our league rep dropping the moment I had even a single bad year in my 5 year rating. Also, while the values of all players in the league massively rose, the overall player quality was very poor, so I was pretty much the only club that could make use of the higher values. I've seen players drop massive fees on local talent to try and boost the clubs around them, but I'm honestly not sure how efficient that really is. So you'll be stuck in a league where even your reserves will be better than what anyone else has to offer for a very long time, which might get really boring since only the CL matches will bring any competition at all.

As for the big leagues, Spain and Germany work with secondary teams lower in the pyramid for your reserves. I'm not sure whether these secondary clubs get created for you in create a club (and especially in Germany I doubt they'll be anywhere near a level where you will ever see them in game), so depending on how much you like bloating your youth squad and using reserve teams to get them games, these leagues might be troublesome. Italy on the other hand has a reserve league for which you should be invited when you hit the higher tiers (I think, haven't done Italy that much tbf), so there should be room for your reserves.

The leagues themself, Germany has basically no registration rules at all which I definitely love to abuse! Spain has relatively small squads, room for a couple non EU players and relatively fast Spanish nationalities for some non EU nations. Couple times I managed there I recall bumping into that squad limit more than once. Finally Italy has pretty strict non EU transfer rules, but the squad size (iirc) wasn't limited.

[The Gold Guard]

Palermo kind of makes sense since it has been a basket-case of a club for a while. Could establish another fan-breakaway team from scratch and try and do things right? The south of italy gets hard-done by and I think Napoli are the only consistent southern team in the top tier so getting more representation could be a good goal

[GreyedOutMan]

1 hour ago, The Gold Guard said:

Palermo kind of makes sense since it has been a basket-case of a club for a while. Could establish another fan-breakaway team from scratch and try and do things right? The south of italy gets hard-done by and I think Napoli are the only consistent southern team in the top tier so getting more representation could be a good goal

Oooo I love the idea of a team on the side of Etna! Imagine the headlines if I throw a water bottle! Reckon if I had a team on the other side of Sicily, they'd still develop a rivalry with Palermo?

[GreyedOutMan]

How does Serie C work? There are 3 divisions. Is it regional, are there three tiers within it or just random?

[Junkhead]

2 hours ago, GreyedOutMan said:

How does Serie C work? There are 3 divisions. Is it regional, are there three tiers within it or just random?

Regional, North/Central/South.

[GreyedOutMan]

3 hours ago, Junkhead said:

Regional, North/Central/South.

Right so I need to put my team in the south division? Which one is that?

[Junkhead]

6 hours ago, GreyedOutMan said:

Right so I need to put my team in the south division? Which one is that?

Group C - Palermo are in there already I think

[Yuko]

I did this for FM19 by adding a Berlin team. 

Did it for FM20 with a London team. 

Both are saturated of course, but all clubs there are sort of regional, at least in name for the bigger ones. 

So the idea was to create a club for the entire city. 

 

For a second club you could also do Florence from Italy. Maybe Newcastle if you want England. And there's also Malaga in Spain. 

[GreyedOutMan]

4 hours ago, Yuko said:

I did this for FM19 by adding a Berlin team. 

Did it for FM20 with a London team. 

Both are saturated of course, but all clubs there are sort of regional, at least in name for the bigger ones. 

So the idea was to create a club for the entire city. 

 

For a second club you could also do Florence from Italy. Maybe Newcastle if you want England. And there's also Malaga in Spain. 

None of those are 500k. Arbitrary bar, of course, but has to be set somewhere.

[GreyedOutMan]

I've got it.

ASD Zafferana will be my team for FM22. They even have a ready made stadium!

[GreyedOutMan]

Usually when I start with a big team, I want to wait until the final patch so that the game is as stable as possible. I'm thinking if I start this low, though, then this might not be necessary? Given how low I'm starting, it might have less of an effect?

[Yuko]

1 hour ago, GreyedOutMan said:

None of those are 500k. Arbitrary bar, of course, but has to be set somewhere.

Metro area exceeds 1m for all three iirc.

[GreyedOutMan]

6 hours ago, Yuko said:

Metro area exceeds 1m for all three iirc.

My criteria was just the population of the city itself. As I say - arbitrary bar but needs to be set somewhere. Leaning towards Sicily. I think the game would think it's in Palermo but really it'll be on the side of Etna - ASD Zafferana.