How do I get non-Europe club teams for a cup?

[AQ]

Hey there. Do any of you know how to add all non-Europe EPL teams to a cup? 

I'm trying to build a 32-team "Celtic Challenge Cup" that includes the following 32 teams: 

1. All teams in Scotland's top division, which I've increased to 16 or 18 teams (still undecided on which) and added the best Irish, N. Irish, and & Welsh teams;
2. The 13 English Premier League teams that have not qualified for Europe (Champions, Europa, or Conference League);
3. The winner of another competition (maybe MLS, Australia, France, Spain, or Portugal -- somewhere with Celtic heritage);
4. Optionally the winner(s) of other competitions, if I still need 2 more teams.

I'm pretty sure I know how to add teams from numbers 1, 3, & 4.

I'm not so sure about #2. I'm looking at Stage 0 (Group) > Teams, and I'm thinking it's either:

• Get All Teams from Division, choose EPL, then find some way to knock out the 7 teams in Europe; or
• Get League Stage Teams in Final Positions, then choose top and bottom position, then separately add promoted teams from Championship; or
• Get Teams from Bottom of List; or 
• You get the idea. I don't know what to do, and I'd be grateful for help that eliminates the hours of testing I'd have to do to figure it out. 

Can any of you help? 

Thanks!

 

Edited July 5, 2023 by AQ

[themodelcitizen]

Have an entry with "ignore teams" checked, with "get best teams in competition" and the Champions League. You might need "maximum teams" set to however many teams are left at the time your cup is drawn, but probably not in these circumstances. Repeat for the Europa and Conference. Then an entry to call the remaining Premier League teams using "get best teams in competition" (or best teams from division if you want last season's teams instead of the newly promoted teams), no need for "ignore teams" here obviously. Remember it might not be 13 every year if the coefficient changes

Might I suggest HFX Wanderers in the CanPL if they can spare the fixtures on their calendar. After all it's Nova Scotia...

[AQ]

Thanks! I'll try that. 

Also, thanks for the reminder, re: coefficient. Any suggestions on how to account for that variable?
(I have some ideas, but I'm still just novice-to-intermediate with the editor.) 

Lastly, great shout for Halifax. The problem is they'll get smoked by an EPL team, but I'm not sure I care because I love the idea.  

[rusty217]

19 hours ago, AQ said:

Also, thanks for the reminder, re: coefficient. Any suggestions on how to account for that variable?

Do it using a team pool. ie. your stage has Get Teams from Team Pool. Then scroll down the info section for that entry to the Team Pool part, add in the instructions to ignore teams in the continental competitions, then add in the get EPL teams add Maximum Number of Teams in Overall List to the EPL teams section with 13 as the info (it's 13 teams you want, right?) then if there are ever any more than that, it will just get 13 (you can set sort options to make it the 13 best or whatever you want). Then add another entry below that that gets teams from the Championship or something, again with Maximum Number of Teams in Overall List set to 13. Then if it finds 13 EPL teams the Championship instruction will be ignored. If it doesn't, it will add Championship teams until it gets to 13 then stop. So whether England gets more or less than 7 places you'll be covered.

[AQ]

So, it turns out this isn't working. For this setup, it fails to call the EPL clubs. I get an error saying it only has 20 of 32 required teams. (I think it's calling the 16 Irish/Scottish/Welsh clubs and 4 other Breton/Galician clubs in a team pool I set.)

Alternatives return other errors. I've tried with a few:

1. Doing it exactly as you described, with get best teams in competition. 
2. Switching to get best, all, or random teams from division.
3. Selecting the nation (England) for the Europe leagues to ignore or leaving it clear. 
4. Setting the nation for ignoring one UEFA league (UEFA Conference) or Europa/Champions and leaving the others clear. (Conference verifies, but still with Europe teams. The others don't.) 

I'm able to verify the competitions with some of these alternatives, but they still all call the teams in Europe (Man City, Liverpool, etc.) that I want to exclude. Verified file attached. 

Any thoughts? @themodelcitizen @rusty217

After starting from scratch twice due to the Europa League bug, I'm accepting this year's editor is just a mess since the updates. (I'm also trying to get it to set all group stage games at home stadiums for the host nation -- I can do this in knockout stages -- but I can't find an option for that.) Still, I figured it didn't hurt to ask. Thanks a bunch for the help. 

z - Celtic Leagues - basic 2.69.fmf

[themodelcitizen]

My solution will only exclude the teams you've told it to "ignore" if the setup date is AFTER those tournaments have been set. So if the Champions League has set a 32-team group stage by that date, you can tell it to "ignore" the "max teams - 32" "get best teams in competition" from the CL and it will exclude them.

Just a had a look, no setup date means it's probably trying to setup at the season start date. If the first fixture is Jul 22 I'd make the set-up date a couple of weeks before that, Europe should have all its teams ready by then.

Also you don't need the "nation" set to "England" for the ignore teams box, not sure if that's doing anything but it's unnecessary anyway. You're already telling it to ignore the best (i.e. every) teams in UCL, whether it groups non-English teams like Barca into that isn't gonna hurt anything, and it won't exclude teams from your Celtic Prem because that entry is higher in the list than the "ignore teams" one (game goes downward entry by entry)

I might also try "get best teams in competition" or "get best teams in division" (for last season's standings) for the remaining English teams like I said above, not "get all teams from division". We already know we don't want some of the teams, so "all" is just confusing

Max teams for that is set to 13, but if you want the possibility that it could be 14 or 15 if England's co-efficient somehow dropped, just set a higher number (this is "max", so if the game only finds, like, 13 teams, that's fine, it won't cause an error just for that).

Then I'd set the "random teams to team pool" to have "max teams" at whatever the max you want, i.e. you might need more if England's co-efficient got them even more teams in Europe (not sure if that's possible mind you). If you put max 5, but you only need 4, then the game should just take the first 4 (but since you're using "get qualified teams from end of list" and the team pool is the bottom entry, you might need to check "reverse the order of teams in this list" under "qualified teams" for all of this to work).

Also might consider adding a Cornish club in there somewhere (maybe after the entry for Prem teams so they're also excluded if they're in Europe)

[themodelcitizen]

Also it doesn't fully realize your goal of the non-Celtic League teams being "away" in every group game, but you could take every possible contestant (or at least the top couple of divisions of English teams) and give them an "alternate stadium" somewhere in Celtica/Ireland for the Celtic Isles competition. So if Man Utd was deemed the home team they'd play their "home" group games in that comp in Croke Park or wherever

[rusty217]

Yeah, as themodelcitizen said it's a setup date issue. Your competition is trying to setup ASAP, ie. the 1st may. While European competitions don't even update for the new season until mid-June. I added the 8th July as the setup date and that seems to work to correctly remove the teams qualified for Europe:

Also, "you might need more if England's co-efficient got them even more teams in Europe" this is definitely going to be an issue. England is very likely to get 8 teams in Europe every year from 2024, so you're competition won't find 13 teams and will fail. I recommend adding an instruction to get teams from the Championship like this too:

The max number of teams with seeding in overall list is key here. Since it's the same seeding as the EPL team instruction (1) it will just add teams until you have 13 teams with that seeding. So if you already got 13 from the EPL then it won't add any, if you got 12 it will add 1 and so on. It ensures you'll have the right number regardless.

[AQ]

Hey, thanks a bunch, guys. I did some more testing and found something I missed earlier: It works after the first season, which I can accept. So your logic is absolutely sound, and it plays out the way you're saying. Sorry that I didn't see that earlier.

Separate but related -- 

@rusty217 The idea of moving the setup date to July makes perfect sense. Thanks for playing with it! I'll try it.

Separately (but possibly related), I've had to move the tournament up about two weeks earlier, or else it runs into conflicts with the EPL (and UEFA competition) schedules and the invitational ends up postponing matches until like September. (Essentially, I think this invitational cup works as long as it's basically a preseason tournament for EPL clubs.) I've yet to test how well that fix works, as I've been traveling the last week.

Also, yes, I have added some other pools of teams to add as backups for England getting a higher coefficient. First I have the four Breton & Galician teams, then more (see below), then another pool of random teams consisting of two 2nd tier teams from Brittany and Galicia (Guingamp and Deportivo Lugo) and then another random team pool of league champs whose season starts in August/September (Belgium, Denmark). 

@themodelcitizen Fully on board with your thinking. I have the top Cornish team (Truro) and Isle of Man FC in the leagues (Welsh leagues, specifically), so they can win promotion to the top tier and play in the competition. I also tried your suggestion on putting Halifax Wanderers in the team pool (with winners of MLS and Australia), but I eventually took them out because the prospect of them getting a home match kind of messes with things. (That could never happen in a real tourney with four-day breaks between matches, given travel.) The alternative home stadium is an interesting suggestion though, so I'll probably test it. (I can see it running into conflict with different teams wanting the same stadium for a game at the same time though. I haven't figured out how to stagger game days/times in the same stage, like the World Cup does. I think it's offset dates, but I want to actually try/share the league sometime this year. ) If it works, I can do this with the MLS/CPL clubs too and pull them back in. 

I'll post the final league file once I work out the last bug(s) and do another long-term test. Currently deciphering Northern Ireland's insistence on sending some of their clubs' reserve/U18 teams to NIFL leagues. Hopefully that's the last step. 

Thanks again! Very grateful for the help. 

Edited August 2, 2023 by AQ

[themodelcitizen]

You could put the dates on European dates, the EPL must be set up to schedule around those, and you're excluding teams in Europe already. And yes, the offset dates do work the way you think