Training Camp Selection

[MaskedReferee]

Evening guys,

As a manager at a top club, every summer the board approaches me and gives me a choice of holding a pre-season training camp from a list of 3 or 4 countries. There doesn't seem to be much impact or obvious benefit of picking one country over another though and just comes down to where I most fancy going that summer.

In reality, I'm sure managers are sitting down with the DoF/Board/Club Secretary and selecting specific training camp locations based on what they want to get out of the camp and looking at several criteria. My suggestion is to try and replicate that in the game so the training camp location selection becomes more meaningful.

Rather than generic locations (i.e USA, England or Portugal) you should be picking a specific location based on some specific information for each camp. The screen would look similar to the one you get for picking an affiliate club and would be the equivalent of sitting down with the coaching staff and board with a bunch of brochures. For example, where you currently select either USA, England or Portugal (to use the examples above) you would instead get IMG Academy (USA), St George's Park (England) and Browns (Portugal) with the following infor for each location:

Training Facilities (out of 5 stars - would influence the quality of training sessions during the camp)

Player Facilities (out of 5 stars - would influence the level of team cohesion gained away from training sessions)

Commercial potential (out of 5 stars - would a training camp here have merchandise/reputation benefits? A training camp in NY for a high profile Prem team might have 5 stars but the same team going to a camp in the mountains of Switzerland might only have 2 or 3 stars)

Cost (how much will the camp cost you at that location)

Teams known to be touring nearby (a list of teams known to be touring nearby who could provide opposition for friendly games)

 

So, when I get asked for a pre-season training camp I might be presented with the following:

St George's Park (England)

Training Facilities: *****

Player Facilities: ***

Commercial Potential: *

Cost: £25,000

Teams touring nearby: None

 

IMG Academy, Florida (USA)

Training Facilities: ****

Player Facilities: ****

Commercial Potential: ***

Cost: £40,000

Teams touring nearby: Rangers, Lille

 

Nike HQ, New York (USA)

Training Facilities: *****

Player Facilities: *****

Commercial Potential: ****

Cost: £80,000

Teams touring nearby: Barcelona, Juventus, Everton, Dortmund

 

Browns (Portugal)

Training Facilities: **

Player Facilities: *****

Commercial Potential: **

Cost: £30,000

Teams touring nearby: Palermo, Southampton

 

So from those choices I could then pick a training camp depending on if my focus was the quality of training facilities, the player facilities to improve team cohesion or keeping my commercial team happy by building the brand at a location with more opportunities to sell merchandise and open training sessions etc...

A few of the regular training camp locations are actually already in the game (university, the national centres like St George's, IMG and Clairfontaine) but a bit of research would be needed to add the facilities info, happy to help with that research as it should be fairly straightforward to come across as most clubs publish where they go each year.

[Dropveter]

I like this, kind of adds to my suggestion about the  Club friendlies and training camp, you take it even to a higher level.

[Zachary Whyte]

Thank you for the detailed suggestion. The developers will put this under consideration.