[FM22] LIV Football Invitational - Football but Louder

[WotinTarnation]

Unless you lived under a rock these past few months, you may have heard of the LIV Golf Invitational, the controversial Saudi Arabian PIF-backed golf league headed up by Greg Norman that has attracted numerous golf superstars, including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, away from the more established PGA Tour with untold riches and a shorter, 3 round, 54 hole schedule with 8 tournaments taking place from Bangkok, Thailand to Portland, Oregon. Even though the Saudis already have their own domestic league and more importantly own Newcastle United, I've always wondered what would happen if they applied what they're doing to the game of golf to the game of football/soccer.

The result is a new challenge of superstars, league building and money. Lots and lots of money.

Welcome to Football but Louder.

Welcome to LIV Football.

FORMAT

The LIV in LIV Golf is the Roman numeral for 54, which is the number of holes in a LIV Golf tournament, like the one about to tee off in Portland at the time of uploading. For LIV Football, getting to the number 54 is different. You essentially have to apply basic math to it. The main league, known as the LIV Football Invitational, consists of 33 games in an August to April schedule, with each team playing each other 3 times. Then you have the LIV Football Cup, which consists of a group stage, 3 groups of 4, with each group being double round robin for a 6 game schedule played between January and May, with the group winners and top runner-up going to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the Semis and Final. That adds another 2 to the tally. Add in the Champions League run from the group stage all the way to the Final, which is another 13 games, and you get to the magic 54 games.

Match rules for both the Invitational and the Cup are the same as you'd find in any other league, but the big caveat is money. And I mean convincing-Haaland-and-Mbappe-to-join-LIV-Football money. A £5.4 million pot per game (4 million for a win, 1.4 for a loss and 2.7 for a draw) and a prize of £54 million to the winners of both the Invitational and Cup, with the Cup semi-finalists guaranteed £40 million. For the LIV invitational, the money goes down by 1 million quid per position, so even if you finish dead last in the league you still walk away with at minimum almost £90 million (Which includes 43 million for finishing last!) And yes, since this is Saudi Arabia that's funding this, each team gets £800 million to start off with and an extra £200 million per season guaranteed. They got seemingly unlimited money, so why not waste almost 15 billion quid for the first year?

THE TEAMS

Since LIV Golf already has 12 teams which count towards team standings and a draft before every tournament, the easiest thing to do was to put these teams, colors and golf references and all, into the game. But with only 8 cities hosting LIV tournaments for the first year, I had to add in 4 cities to round everything out, all in Europe. For those living under a rock (Or wanting to know where these clubs are), here are the teams and their locations:

4Aces Football Club - London, England
Cleeks Football Club - Portland, Oregon, USA
Crushers Football Club - Newark/Harrison, New Jersey, USA
Fireballs Football Club - Boston, Massachusetts, USA
HyFlyers Football Club - Chicago, Illinois, USA
Iron Heads Football Club - Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Majesticks Football Club - Paris, France
Niblicks Football Club - Glasgow, Scotland
Punch Football Club - Bangkok, Thailand
Smash Football Club - Andorra la Vella, Andorra
Stinger Football Club - Madrid, Spain
Torque Football Club - Miami, Florida, USA

Each team practically requires you to sign high-reputation players, so more often than not you're gonna be chasing Kingsley Coman on day 1 or fall head over heels to poach Mbappe from PSG come January. To make things easier, each team's reputation is maxed out and Scotland, Thailand, Andorra and Saudi Arabia's transfer fees are buffed. To make things harder, every team has no players or staff unless you decide to generate players and staff. Without a doubt for your first season you might be looking at having grayed out players starting, but by season 3 or 4 your team will be rounded out quite nicely with stars. Each team also plays in their city/region's biggest or most famous venue, with Boston's Nickerson Field, home of the Fireballs, not big enough to host European matches from the playoffs and/or group stage on. Should you guide Fireballs to the group stage of the Europa League early on, for example, they will have to play their home games at "nearby" Gillette Stadium.

EUROPE
 

Yes, I said it. European matches. LIV Football is indeed based in Andorra and replaces the Primera Divisió as the "Andorran" top flight. That means, well... LIV teams can play in the Champions League and other European competitions, with Smash FC playing in the Champions League and Torque and HyFlyers playing in the Conference League as soon as you load up the game. Of course, since Andorra's club coefficient is near rock bottom, it will take a couple years for LIV to pull its weight together and get multiple CL spots. By 2026, thanks to the megabucks money leading to significant results on the pitch, LIV Football will almost every time have 4 CL spots to itself. Like other nations, should a LIV team get into the CL groups, they also qualify their Under-19 side for the UEFA Youth League. And yes, this means Champions League matches will happen outside of Europe for the first time ever. Unless you count Israel and Turkey and Kazakhstan and Armenia and Azerbaijan.

RESERVES AND YOUTH TEAMS

And yes, each team has their own reserve and under-19 teams built in to build up players. Their respective leagues, known as LIV Football Reserves and LIV Football Futures respectively, follow the same format as the LIV Football Invitational - 33 games, each team plays each other 3 times, but with the teams playing at secondary venues. For example, the Niblicks Reserves and Under-19s play at the Rangers Training Centre. Naturally, these teams call in from the academy systems for these respective teams, so for Iron Heads, for example, you'll get a lot of Saudi regens. There's also the Reserves and Futures Cups, modeled after the LIV Football Cup, with the Semis and Finals held in Bridgeport, Illinois, USA (SeatGeek Stadium) and London, England (Coles Park) respectively. These cups have their group stage run from December to February and the Semis and Finals are held in March.

OTHER

No, there aren't any awards. I could try adding them in a future update though.

SCREENSHOTS

These screenshots were taken in a simulation 3 years into the future. Obviously, the results from other files will differ from the one used for the screenshots.

















QUESTIONS?

Please don't be afraid to ask questions about this whole thing down below. It's a fantasy project I've been working on for quiiite a bit now, and I'm glad to present it to you especially since the league it's based on is still fresh in everyone's minds.

LIV Football.fmf

[oche balboa]

I love this, Its something which i've been thinking about. Will have a look at the download 

[WotinTarnation]

Hey there!

Yes, I know this hasn't been updated since first release, but LIV has been back in the news (Albeit for more... Shall we say political reasons regarding an owner of one of the courses used in the tour) so it's warranted that I would give some sort of update regarding this database.

Yes, unfortunately there won't be any updates to the FM22 version of the LIV Football database. We are getting a bit too close to FM23's launch to pump out an update for LIV Football (Even if it's as small as adding a couple awards) and I want to let other people highlight their works in the editor (fifteenminutes and owncredible's real life USA pyramid and Wolf_pd's Iron Curtain 1988 are upcoming ones that I will certainly have a look at once they're completed) and not load this forum with updates to a database based on a controversial breakaway golf league that is practically already complete. However, I still have something planned for FM22's lifecycle that I am 95% done on, and I can't wait to share that with you in the coming weeks.

However, there will be a LIV Football database for FM23 that, on top of adding in awards, may add in other new quirks to the system. LIV themselves have announced an expanded schedule for 2023 with 14 events and perhaps even a pro/rel system of some type. While unfortunately once that schedule is announced there aren't enough teams to assign cities too in the main league, the pro/rel concept could be adapted into a 2 tier league, with the LIV Football League (It won't be called the Invitational from the FM23 database onwards) at the top and the International Series at the bottom, with pro/rel between the 2 leagues and even an expanded LIV Football Cup. And yeah, expect me to have to come up with the golf puns myself instead of having to rely on LIV writing the jokes for me. Unless corporate sponsorship comes in, which I could very well add for the International Series.

As for other things, I might consider adding in a PGA Tour league with 16 teams as a supplementary database to the LIV one to see the two leagues duke it out not on the links, but on the pitch. Obviously the PGA would have to live on a different nation on a different continent (I would go with the US but I want MLS to stay in tact so maybe Bermuda?) and not in Europe (Where LIV well, lives via Andorra) and have that league get some cash as well, but obviously nothing as big as LIV, but with all the prestige that comes with being the Tour.

Majors? I have concepts for those, and they act as the main way that PGA and LIV teams can duel against each other:
 

Spoiler

The Masters - Augusta/Atlanta, Georgia, April
All PGA Tour teams
All LIV Football League teams
Atlanta United (As hosts)
3 random teams (Restricted to Big 5, MLS (Minus Atlanta), Saudi, Japanese and Australian teams)

PGA Championship - Rotating venues within US, May
All PGA Tour teams
Top 8 LIV Football League teams
8 random teams (Restricted to Big 5, MLS, Saudi, Japanese and Australian teams)

US Open - Rotating venues within US, June
All PGA Tour teams
Top 4 LIV Football League teams
Top 4 MLS teams
8 other random teams (Restricted to Big 5, Saudi, Japanese and Australian teams)

The (British) Open - Rotating venues within England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, July
Top 8 PGA Tour teams
Top 4 LIV Football League teams
Top 4 English Premier League teams
Top 4 Scottish Premier League teams
Top 2 Welsh Premier League teams
Top 2 Northern Irish Premier League teams
8 random teams (Restricted to Big 5 minus EPL, MLS, Saudi, Japanese and Australian teams)

These majors would all be 32 team knockout tournaments with only the venues kicking in for their respective finals. Each one of them will dole out a respectable payout and some much-needed prestige for the winners, as all events will have high reps and be at or above the reputation of the Club World Cup. This, well, also incentivizes competition, as I expect the results from the season beforehand to decide who goes into which major - For example, if Niblicks finish 4th in LIV for 2022/23, they qualify for all 4 of the majors for 2024. Yes, it's gonna be a fixture nightmare, but hey, realism. I can be talked out of doing this if it's not worth it.

I don't plan to do some sort of Ryder Cup all-star game between LIV and the PGA. Sorry.

And that should be it! See you for my next database!

Edited August 3, 2022 by WotinTarnation
Fixed mistake