Transitioning to a new league setup

[Tony I M]

I'm ok with setting up a new league structure and starting a game with it - have been practising stage by stage to make sure it works.   

But how do I set it up to have the original league setups (for England, Scotland etc) in place for the first season and then each team's position in the new structure determined by their finishing position in the original structure - for example would want the top 13 English Premiership, top 2 Scottish Premiership and the English Championship winners to form the following season's British Premier League and so on down throughout the levels?  Is this where Fates come in, and would I need to remove all promotion and relagations from the existing competitions?  Also when adding Nation Rules to get into Advanced Rules for this would I have to start with Create New Leagues and Cups and recreate the existing structure first or can I do Add Lower Leagues and then build in the changes?

[rusty217]

I don't think that's possible. You can change the format of a league or leagues by making another version of the file and using start/end years on them to finish the original version and start the new version. Transitioning to a new league competition is very unlikely to work though, given how many times the league setup is referenced in various places. Additionally leagues don't work with teams from other countries in them, so trying to merge English/Scottish teams into one league isn't going to work.

There could be a way to do it though. If you create a British Premier League and add all the teams to that (all teams will need to have the same nation set. Any teams that don't have the same continental cup nation set as the nation the league is in will be ineligible for European competitions so they should probably be the same too, based nation can be different and should be so that newgens match the nation the teams based in), then set it as the parent competition of the Premier League and Premiership. Then in the BPL, create two stages, 1 that uses the EPL and one that uses the SPL, you'll probably have to manually assign teams to one or the other to ensure they're in the right one. You could have a look at the MLS which does a similar thing with its conferences. Set the relegation places up accordingly. Then create a new file for the league that starts the next season, this one with a different number of teams set and just a regular league stage. Do that for all the leagues you want to change.

It'll be a lot of work though, good luck! Oh and if you choose Add Lower Leagues you can edit the existing format. You're only restricted to adding new competitions in the basic editor, in the advanced one you have full access to everything for that country.