Wolphox Posted April 3 Share Posted April 3 (edited) Intro Strap in, folks. This post will be more along the lengths of a blog post or a presentation to the corporate boardroom . This is probably a 10-15 minute read. For 10 short years, I've played FM have been interested in creating my own annual club world tournament in the game. I've made several attempts that have all broken down due to the technical limitations of the editor and my own high expectations. Every year that I've given up promising to myself that I'll never re-attempt this, I always come back a few years later. This time, with the small wisdom gained through age and knowing how many years have gone by, I decided to start with a somewhat "design-oriented" and "peer-reviewed" approach first before diving into the editor and hitting the same limitations that may exist from years past. The past few days I've compiled a large amount of notes, tables, and diagrams in Google Sheets and will be summarizing them here (the raw notes are too messy to share at the moment). Perhaps this post can be a reference for myself or others year in the future when these technical limitations no longer exist. I've seen and enjoyed the works of others over the years, going all the way back to this custom MLS league released in 2014 that included a very unexpected club world cup option. I've been long satisfied as others bravely carried on the torch for this annual tournament, and have seen many iterations of this theme pop up and different formats be attempted (such as a world super leagues). But my vision for an annual club world tournament has evolved as time went on and my desire to build one in FM with a fully integrated experience like the base continental tournaments has remained. Overview What we're talking about is a tournament that is essentially a UEFA Champions League tournament that: Runs every year Qualifies a few top division teams from every league in the world based on league performance (and feasibly, the nation's top domestic cup winners too) Is the highest reputation cup in the world, where all nations can participate and potentially win. Selects the number of teams per nation and sets their seedings based on national coefficients or league reputation Replaces all the other existing continental cups (due to fixture congestion and redundancy). On a technical level, what I want is a fully integrated base-game experience similar to other continental cups so that: It can slot into any existing database version without needing to modify nation rules It's cross-compatible with any custom nation rules imported for existing nations (such as adding top divisions not currently in the game) Has dynamic qualification that changes over the years, with clubs that perform well increasing their nation's standing to receive more slots and better seedings in the future. Is presented identically to other continental cups in the game UI with color-coded qualification bands on the domestic league table and qualification text in the domestic league rules. Is accounted for by boardroom expectations for qualification & minimum tournament performance and by players who seek promises for the team to participate in this tournament during contract-signing or day-to-day management because they consider this tournament to be the highest level of accomplishment. Appeal The reason that many people, including myself, desire a tournament like this is because it would provide a monumental challenge that gives every club a massive accomplishment to strive for each year. It provides the prospect that any top performing team from any nation that year can have the chance to compete at the top level against more difficult opposition to prove themselves further on a bigger stage, and maybe come away with some glory. In short, this would be the ultimate fantasy experience to have in Football Manager no matter what team you play. The problem with existing continental cups is that they are locked-in to a specific region of the world and end up stifling true long-term competition. The thing that fans and players most want is that "magic season" that comes once in a generation - this is what keeps the sport exciting and fans coming back for more each year. This isn't possible when the top accomplishments are limited to just a few teams in the world. For the next several decades (if not the foreseeable future), the highest reputation tournaments will be European and it has created a monopoly on the sport that threatens the spirit of the game. We've seen recent proposals for European super leagues and other structures that seek to further entrench this position and limit the opportunity of different clubs to compete and succeed, and ultimately the fans suffer knowing that their favorite teams may never have the same chance the top clubs once did decades ago under such a structure. This also harms the growth and popularity of the sport outside of Europe and within. Pipelines have become further entrenched to shuttle players out of non-European countries and the non-European clubs & leagues have failed to gain local followings because of the lack of opportunity to grow their reputation and compete in the top level. Without more global opportunities, the sport may lose out on top talents that could be recruited and potential dream teams that would make domestic European teams stronger to compete against. Guiding Principles Global competitiveness - the top teams from every nation has a chance to compete in and win the tournament, and likewise to lose in the tournament Earned rewards for fine play - nations that perform exceedingly well should be rewarded, but dominance must be earned each year with hard work. Rewards should be balanced to not ruin competition. Format If you've read this far, you'll be rewarded now with a proposed format that I think is 100% feasible within the editor today. What's prevented me from starting are work/life balance plus the technical limitations that prevent this league from integrating with the base game experience (see the Overview). 512 teams from about 224 national domestic leagues around the world will enter a single qualification stage that will determine which of 3 tournament levels a team will play in for the year. A swiss-league style system is played during this stage to determine a team's rankings on a league table and teams are qualified based on their standings on that table. This qualification round is unique from other tournaments today in that no teams can bypass it based on seeding or standing, and the tier a team ultimately qualifies for is determined by performance at this stage rather than league performance the year prior. This ensures the highest competition level and interest in the matches, as well as gives the least reputable team a fair (though extremely challenging) chance to make it to the highest tier of play. Once assigned to a level, that tournament is locked in until the very end. All 3 levels will play another swiss-league style stage to determine who will advance to the knockout stage. The knockout stages are a classic double legged system that produces a single champion. The winner of the top level is the world champion. The champions from all 3 levels will play in a complementary super-cup the following year for traditional purposes. The levels are: Tier 1 (Star) Tier 2 (Gold) Tier 3 (Blue) (These are placeholder names stolen from a recent super league proposal). The full format is: Qualification Stage: 512 teams enter a swiss-league system and play 4 matches facing a new opponent each round. A 5th knockout playoff match is played to determine further qualification. 8 Swiss leagues of 64 teams each are created with teams from the same nation all being separated into different leagues. Within each league: Teams ranked 1-8 automatically qualify for Tier 1 (8 total) Teams ranked 9-24 qualify for the Tier 1 playoff winner qualifies for Tier 1 (8 total) loser qualifies for Tier 2 (8 total) Teams ranked 25-40 qualify for the Tier 2 playoff winner qualifies for Tier 2 (8 total) loser qualifies for Tier 3 (8 total) Teams ranked 41-56 qualify for the Tier 3 playoff winner qualifies for Tier 3 (8 total) loser does not qualify and exit (8 total) 8 teams ranked 57-64 do not qualify and exit (8 total) Across all 8 leagues, this produces 128 teams qualifying for Tier 1, 128 teams for Tier 2, 128 teams for Tier 3, and 128 teams do not qualify for anything Total matches: 4-5 Other considerations: Teams are seeded by league reputation For the first round only, the higher seeded / lower reputation team plays at home as a courtesy and keeps the gate income. This is almost always a giant vs minnow match. In the Swiss league system, teams with even records always play each other, and these are 1-legged matches with a tie-breaking penalty shootout. Therefore for fairness, the lower reputation team always plays at home (or maybe team with lower table position) In the playoffs, the higher table position team plays at home as a reward The limited number of matches and wide bands for playoff qualification ensures that every team remains interested in the competition until the final match. Even teams with 0 points by the final match have a (slim) chance to enter a playoff if they win based on other league outcomes. League Stage: 128 teams enter the league stage at each tier and play 3 matches. A 4th and 5th single-round knockout playoff match is played to determine further qualification. 8 Swiss leagues of 16 teams are created with teams from the same nation all being separated into different leagues. Within each league: Teams ranked 1-2 automatically qualify for the knockout rounds (2 total) Teams ranked 3-10 qualify for 2 round playoffs Winners after 2 matches qualify for the knockout rounds (2 total) Losers do not qualify and exit Teams ranked 11-16 do not qualify and exit Across all 8 leagues, this produces 32 teams for the knockout stages Total matches: 3-5 Same considerations apply as the Swiss league above. Knockout Stage 32 Teams compete in a double legged knockout system until a champion, runner-up, and 3rd place finisher are produced. Total matches: 2-9 In summary, I believe this format produces the fairest and most competitive results through the Swiss league system, provides prolonged excitement with each match which is further heightened by the inclusion of a playoff round at the end of the Swiss league system, provides a wide band of opportunity for teams to progress to a league stage for an appropriate tier (only 1/4 of teams do no qualify at all), and provides a similar fixture load as the existing UEFA champions league (4-19 matches, with an average of 9 for those who qualify for the league stage). A note on swiss league tournament This is the model adopted by the new UEFA format. More can be read about the swiss system here. In summary, each round matches a team with a new opponent who has a similar record. The more you win, the harder your opponents will be because they've similarly won multiple matches against harder and harder opponents. This has the most desirable quality of ensuring teams progress based on tournament merit rather than reputation or seeding. It's more accurate to describe the approach here as a partial swiss system, because unlike chess we do not seek to produce a single champion from the stage. Teams will play a limited set of matches and their points / scores will be recorded on a league table which will determine who automatically qualifies for the next round and who qualifies for the playoffs. A winner must be produced each round in the Swiss system, and a two-legged system will produce far too many matches. So each match must be decided by a penalty shootout at the end. No extra time will be given because that could be too tiring for players traveling halfway around the globe. To keep the table varied and interested, 3 points should be awarded to the true full-time match winner, 2 points to the penalty winner, and 1 point to the penalty loser. Further sorting should be done by goal difference, discipline record, etc. Schedule The tournament will run from August - June of each year. This perhaps unfairly biases the tournament towards leagues following this schedule already, but was the simplest thing to do. Leagues following a summer schedule (like South American leagues, Asian leagues, USA, Sweden, etc), would benefit greatly from switching to a winter schedule in order to have the most relevant winners chosen and avoid having the main legs of the tournament fall within their breaks or pre-seasons. This is perhaps saved by the fact that these leagues typically have very large breaks (typically 3-4 months from December - March). To account for travel times and time zone exhaustion, there should always be a minimum of 2 weeks between tournament matches to allow teams to recover and play their domestic league games. Domestic league games should always be rescheduled to have a minimum of 3 days surrounding the tournament match. The tournament matches are best scheduled on Saturdays or Sundays to provide the best TV coverage and opportunities for fans to travel halfway around the globe when they're off of work. The following is a tentative schedule to show where major dates might fall in the 2023-24 season with respect to international dates and a winter break that always falls at the final week of Dec and 1st week of Jan: July 2023 Week Match? 1 2 3 4 5 Super Cup August 2023 Week Match? 1 2 3 Qual 1 4 x x September 2023 Week Match? 1 Qual 2 2 (internationals) 3 Qual 3 4 x x October 2023 Week Match? 1 Qual 4 2 (internationals) 3 (internationals) 4 Q. Playoff 1 5 November 2023 Week Match? 1 2 League 1 3 (internationals) 4 League 2 x x December 2023 Week Match? 1 2 League 3 3 4 Playoff 1 5 (winter break) January 2024 Week Match? 1 (winter break) 2 Playoff 2 3 4 x x February 2024 Week Match? 1 1st KO leg 1 2 1st KO leg 2 3 4 x x March 2024 Week Match? 1 2nd KO leg 1 2 2nd KO leg 2 3 4 5 Qtr leg 1 April 2024 Week Match? 1 Qtr leg 2 2 3 4 Semi leg 1 x x May 2024 Week Match? 1 Semi leg 2 2 3 4 x x June 2024 Week Match? 1 Final / 3pp 2 3 4 5 Competition Qualification About 224 national domestic leagues produce 512 teams to compete. A maximum of 8 teams may qualify from a single national league. Hold on, doesn't Google say there are 195 nations in the world? Yes, it's really up to us if we want to limit this to national domestic leagues from 195 nations or include all of the leagues from what FM counts as a "nation", such as Puerto Rico (part of USA), Hong Kong (part of China), etc. Also some nations aren't fairly counted in that number due to being colonies or "dependencies" of other larger nations like French Guiana or America Samoa, etc. They should certainly be included. What about tiny nations that don't have any leagues or teams? Unfortunately, there needs to be a top domestic league with pro/semi-pro teams for a nation to qualify in Football Manager. So this means we have to exclude some nations like Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Liechtenstein. I've calculated this table based on leagues only, without doing the additional work to factor in top domestic cup tournaments (noting there are only 196 I could reason about in the FM database), but including cup winners should be possible with some small effort. It's fairly trivial to arrive at 512 teams from this many nations, so these bands can be adjusted as needed. Nation Rank Slots Total 1-2 8 16 3-4 7 14 5-6 6 12 7-13 5 35 14-51 4 152 52-76 3 75 77-136 2 120 137-224 1 88 512 Note on Editor Technical Constraints and Design I decided to make a section outlining some of the technical constraints on the editor that factored into the design of the tournament under advanced rules: 30 stage indexes maximum per competition 100 round indexes maximum per stage 1000 team maximum may qualify for a stage or round 500 matches maximum per round This means we cannot create gigantic sprawling tournaments with endless stages, and need to constrain certain things particularly when creating the swiss-league style in the editor. The technical approach for a swiss-league stage was inspired by this post. As a result of this, the qualification stage swiss-league should be it's own separate competition that feeds into the 3 tiers. The qualification swiss league needs to produce 16 stages (1 per league table, 1 for the match rounds of each league) + 8 playoff stages (1 per league) for a total of 24 stages to keep it under the 30 stage maximum. The proper tournament at each tier will have the same 16 swiss stages + 6 for the knockout rounds and finals. Each swiss league match needs to be its own round in order for you to properly pair the winners and losers with the correct next team. At most with the editor, we can have 6 swiss matches to produce a maximum of 62 rounds to navigate the teams through. 7 matches produce 126 rounds (over the 100 round limit). I chose a much more manageable 4 swiss matches (14 rounds) and 3 swiss matches (6 rounds) to make editing easier. Main challenges Solving the base game integration experience. The domestic league table color bands do not seem to appear appear for custom "World" continental cup rules the way they do for other custom "Europe' continental cup rules. Nation coefficients for custom rules are opaque and lack a page in-game. Unclear if these even work for dynamic qualification. Unclear if board / player expectations experience is the same, as I haven't gone that far with testing. Maintaining the rules across multiple database and game versions is essential due to the complexity involved. So ideally one should build this with the standard continental qualification rules rather than hard-coding the domestic competitions or cups in. It might be easier for dynamic qualification to work with hard-coded competitions, but the tradeoff here is increased work to maintain each DB version and more difficulty with integration with other custom league files. Conclusion / What comes next? I'd really love to see this tournament come to fruition, either with the game integration experience missing (see Overview) or with this solved by a future version of the game / editor years in the future. I'd estimate that creating this format in the editor advanced rules would take about a week of fulltime work, and I haven't even estimated the time to test it out over multiple seasons or create awards or other nice-to-haves that could go alongside the cup rules. I know I'd probably want to create or use some custom leagues (like USA w/ promotion) that could go alongside this tournament too. That said, I don't see myself getting started on this anytime soon because of work / real-life getting in the way and knowing that the editor is usually a very painful experience. I created this post to serve as a reference for myself and others in the future, and welcome anyone who likes what was proposed here to take a stab at it. Thanks for making it to the end! Best of luck to you and your football management careers. Edits: clarity; typos Edited April 6 by Wolphox two-legged vs round robin Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolphox Posted April 3 Author Share Posted April 3 (edited) Here are my notes for those interested: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DfJQb7uP_rdmLIgmZldlfQdN4UzN3RtPyqrQl92Vtng/edit?usp=sharing Preview of some tables: Nations / Qualification Format Calendar And swiss league match calculations included inside too. Edited April 3 by Wolphox Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf_pd Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 8 minutes reading time for me I like your level of preparation. The balancing will be hardest to do since there is some bias in game towards the European side of things (datawise as well as possibly some coding). Your main challenges have sometimes being fixed by users in previous versions. Question is whether those fixes can be applied on newer FMs. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolphox Posted April 6 Author Share Posted April 6 Thank you for the vote of confidence! I agree with you that I would want to take additional time to balance for the best experience - as a purely fantasy exercise one would imagine that having a world club tournament could open up more investment opportunities into lower-reputation nations' domestic leagues that I'd want to allow for. I'd probably want to study how things like how tweaking nation's economic factor / game importance / youth rating might influence the growth of top tier leagues in other major nations outside Europe. I'd certainly like it to be possible, for example, for a nation like India or Nigeria to have at least 4 teams with high-valued players (including some foreigners) / pretty good facilities / good finances if they continually made it to the knockout stages over 10 years. I'd probably also want to factor in more time researching how other people have integrated some of the desired base-game experience pieces (ie: color-coded leagues tables, etc) and seeing if I can replicate it. This is the part that usually blocks me because I consider it too late. I'm thinking a good approach would be to prototype at the start to see if I can get those technical pieces in before I build the whole tournament rules. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf_pd Posted April 7 Share Posted April 7 You might want to download the Daveincid files to study them as they have a different balance than the default game and can give you ideas for that. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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