LarsC

Using birth hospitals isn't really a solution to the city of birth issue, even though that is literally what the field is called. You'd literally end up with no people with a rural place set as their home town, as you generally travel to the nearest hospital. The c.o.b. field has always been used as the (admittedly slightly dubious) term "home town" or "place you grew up". Excel would probably be heavily involved in a remapping such as this What I would need help with is actually tracking down individual players and setting their home town correctly, after an acceptable solution to the municipality split-up has been found. That will absolutely be the most time consuming issue in a project like this. Setting stadia and clubs in their correct places would require far less leg work. I'm sending you a PM and we'll take it from there. If any other people have suggestions, please feel free to reach out.

We made a conscious decision quite a few years back to use municipalities (kommune) instead of cities or towns, yes. I agree that this removes some detail that would be fun to have in the game, but there's also a question of making this more manageable from a research point of view. Municipalities are the smallest official administrative division in Norway, and it gets very hard to tell where you draw the line if you choose to make your own definition. Like for instance, how big does the town have to be to warrant a place in the database? I've had numerous bouts of mental gymnastics trying to figure out the best way to do this, but have yet to come up with a better solution than going with municipalities. Going back on this now - adding all towns and cities in Norway - would require that we revisit each individual player and place them in their correct city, which is a quite monumental task. A person previously from municipality Bærum would now have to be placed in either Sandvika, Bærums Verk, Lysaker, you name it. So do realize that any proposed changes to the current system involves a lot of tidying up. Previously we had a mix between cities and municipalities in the database, but that leads to a very messy situation where both towns and their overarching municipalities existed simultaneously as geographical locations within the game. You kind of have to choose one or the other. We went with municipalities to create a tidier database/research situation. What has happened since then, of course, is the municipality merger reforms of the previous few years, where a good 50 municipalities or something suddenly went out of existence. So I'll agree that the detail level is on the borderline now. We certainly don't want fewer cities/municipalities than what we have now. I like this initiative, though, and I'm open to doing some kind of database reform over the next year - for instance, we could identify some key municipalities that need to be broken up into smaller entities, but we'd have to come up with a plan that doesn't create an absolute metric ton of work and the changes need to be 100% warranted. So feel free to propose a system to replace the current one, either here or send me a PM, @Maaka.

The numbers in the database are lifted from the clubs official financial reports. Bergen is the second biggest city in Norway, housing a number of very large companies with big sponsorship coffers. It's also more or less a one-club city and a bit of a football fanatic city. "Everybody" supports Brann, even all the smaller clubs. I lived in Bergen for near 20 years and know this from first-hand experience, not just reading the financial reports. It's a similar situation to Trondheim and Rosenborg, but maybe Trondheim being slightly smaller than Bergen means that Rosenborg doesn't reach the same level of sponsorship revenue. This is pure speculation on my part, of course. I've attached 2 screenshots from RBK and Brann's annual financial reports, as these are the best numbers we have to go by. There is no good reason why Brann couldn't be the club with the biggest sponsorship income in Norway. The problem for them from a financial point of view is a rather large debt and a similiarly large overhead, meaning that the club is not turning a profit, despite their substantial income streams. FFK and Vard missing sponsorship money is a glitch, as I made my way through all the playable clubs just before release, but it looks like the numbers I found wasn't entered into the database for those two clubs. I'm sorry about that.

Thanks - All of this will be amended. Do you have any info on when Ezeonwurie left the club?

Just here to confirm this.

Holse contract and Thorvaldsson future transfer reported.

Too young to be in FM23, doesn't turn 16 for another month.

Veierød is in RBK as a fitness coach in the database already. Maybe you have played with a smaller database and he didn't show up?

Fixed

Thanks. Fixed in db.

@sigurdandreas is right. The five substitute rule has been made permanent by IFAB. I thought this would be implemented by FM globally in all competitions, without needing to report this individually for Norway etc.

This one has been fixed. THanks

He has actually been without a set wage in the database since his transfer back from France. It's hard to know the real facts here, but the iTromsø journalist has a very clear angle and bias in this case, and he doesn't cite any sources for the sums he is mentioning. I would think that the base wage is rather high by Norwegian standards, but probably nowhere near 9M NOK. Maybe it could reach those heights if you include a maximum bonus scenario with winning the league, qualifying for Champs Lge etc.

Send me a PM!

Sandefjord has been a problem this year, missing a dedicated assistant researcher. I will make sure these players are added for the full release.

Aware of this. This will be fixed for the full release.