UKFA

I don't know if this would work, so I'd appreciate any thoughts. The Rivals Challenge You start at a relatively big, top flight club. Start as manager, and do your best to ruin them as much as you can. Sell their best players cheap, overpay for underperformers, sow discord among staff and players. Try to do as much damage as you can before being sacked, if you're patient you can do it gradually. Bonus points if you get them relegated. Eventually you will get sacked, and now your aim is to get a job at a lower division club. Ideally a team near to the first one, but it may be hard enough to get any job at all. Anyway now your aim is to get this club above the first one. Once you finish above the first team in the league, you win the challenge, but you can carry on to solidify the rivalry. Bonus points: The current manager of the first club dislikes you Players in the first club dislike you Your team regards the first team as rivals The first team regards the new team as rivals

Thank you! I always wanted to make some experiment videos, but I am not good at making videos, so I might try doing some written experiments, and of course upload them to Steam so others can try them too.

Sorry for all the posts. This is the last part of the series. Population Experiments Part 2.2 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2840373456 Part 2.2. Some big changes have taken place! Borehamwood city council have decided to build a state of the art stadium befitting of a city of its size (20 million residents) and 20 attraction. With 75k capacity (70k seated), retractable roof, undersoil heating, state of the art facilities and pitch in excellent condition, surely it must prove tempting for a team to move in? If that were not enough, Solihull Moors now own a similarly state of the art stadium in Borehamwood. The obvious thing would be to move in, will they abandon their current Solihull home? Or perhaps they will sell or lease to a team nearer the facility? Oh, and I forgot to mention, London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester and some other places got hit by nuclear missiles in a terrorist attack, reducing their populations to less than 1000 essential aid workers. Sadly for Chelsea, their Stamford Bridge stadium was hit directly, leaving only an irradiated shell of its former self. With radiation burns and mutant rats the attractiveness of these cities has dropped drastically to 0. Luckily however, millions of people survived, and have taken up residence in Dover and Aldershot, boosting their populations to over 20 million each, somehow. This kind of catastrophe raises some poignant questions, such as how will this affect the football? Surely with all these seismic events occuring something interesting will finally happen? I've simmed 30 years, up until August 2051. First of all, Chelsea took up temporary residence with West Ham, and rebuilt Stamford Bridge. The stadium that is, the pitch remains in a terrible state, just rubble from the explosion. Boreham Wood FC remain a Vanarama National League side other than a couple of short lived relegations. Borehamwood Stadiums 1 and 2 remain completely unused. Borehamwood city has produced one global superstar however, Michael Kelly was bought by Real Madrid for £176 million. Aldershot Town have also been consistently in the Vanarama National League, with one relegation in the 32/ 33 season, being promoted again for the 35/ 36 season. Dover Athletic have remained in the Vanarama League South, with a couple of relegations to lower divisions. Meanwhile at the top of the Premiership the winners have all come from our nuke-decimated cities of Liverpool, Manchester and London, with the exception of Newcastle who won some titles in the 30's to 40's. Leicester have managed some second and third places in 'recent' years too. As for England, it's hard to tell if there's any effect, as England tend to be a bit overpowered in FM. However they won the World Cup in 2022 and 2042, and lost the final in 2034 to Spain. They have done better in the Euros, winning in 2032, 36 and 48. Conclusions Although these experiments didn't seem to produce any interesting results for me, I thought it was worth sharing them for others to try, maybe there is something else I should have looked for, different changes to make etc. Please let me know any thoughts or results you have. I also hope that maybe SI can factor in population a little more in the future. Although of course it's difficult to implement without making China and India dominate the world in every save. Thanks for reading, I enjoyed doing these experiments a lot and I have a lot more ideas to make in the future, so keep an eye on my steam workshop if you're interested.

Population Experiments Part 2.1 Part 2 of the Population Experiments. This time I've taken an existing town, Borehamwood in Southern Hertfordshire, England, and boosted its population from roughly 30,000 to over 20 million. How will this affect the small Vanarama National League club Boreham Wood FC? Will their attendances increase? Will the region become a hotbed of new talent, providing future stars for Englands national teams? Why Borehamwood? The decision was a bit random, I wanted a small town so the population increase would be noticeable. Boreham Wood FC are in the Vanarama National League, so there's room for them to be promoted, but also to be relegated to the Vanarama League South and not drop off the map. In retrospect perhaps I should have chosen a town/ city like Nottingham, which has two teams so more chance of one of them capitalizing on their new potential supporter base. I've simmed up to 2035. There are a number of players (newgens) from Borehamwood, 45 to be exact, compared to 6 players from Boston, England, which has a population of 35k. So FM certainly takes the population into consideration when selecting newgens birthplaces. For comparison, there are 44 players from Liverpool, 43 from Manchester, and 196 players born in London. As for Boreham Wood FC, they have not seemed to benefit from their population boost. They were promoted to League 2 for the 26/27 season, but came 24th to be relegated again. They have broken some of their attendance records, but only with typical attendances for their level. So again, sadly, there doesn't seem to be much difference here, at least not within 15 years. However, perhaps in 30, 40 or even 50 years the change will make a significant impact. As always, I've uploaded the editor file to the Steam Workshop. If you try this yourself, please let me know your results. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2839995414

Population Experiments Part 1.2 Apologies in advance, this one didn't get great results either (5 years into the experiment at least). Anyway in this part I've built a state of the art stadium in the new city of Argleton, imaginatively named the Argleton Stadium. It has a capacity of 70,000, 65,000 seated, retractable roof, very good condition, undersoil heating, and is owned by the local council until 2023. The closest ground is Wigans DW Stadium. Will any clubs be tempted to move in? Will it host any games? I've simmed up until 2026, but sadly no teams have moved in, and it has not hosted any matches. Any ideas how I could encourage its use without actually moving a team there, let me know. In the meantime check out Part 2, coming soon. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2839835372

Population Experiments Part 1.1 In this short series of experiments, I want to see the effect of population in Football Manager. For the first part, I've created a new city in the Lancashire region of England called 'Argleton'. The population of this city is 20 million + inhabitants. For context, London's population is 8 million, making this by far the biggest city in England, the UK or Europe, and among the top ten biggest cities in the World. There are no football clubs or stadiums in this city at this stage, the aim is to see whether any clubs emerge there or move there. For the former, as far as I know football manager has no inbuilt function to create new clubs, and for the latter, I don't think football clubs will move cities, although it does happen very occasionally in real life. Secondary to this I was to see if new players will emerge from this city, statistically they should do as the city has such a massive population. Will other Lancashire clubs see a boost in support? Will England itself benefit from this massive population boost? 3 years in, the results are a little disappointing, no players (newgens) were born in Argleton. In previous tries when I've holidayed for 5 or even ten years the result has been the same. Although this part of the experiment didn't yield any interesting results, I've uploaded the editor file for anyone else who wants to try it and have a look. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2839827347

This experiment takes Jalen Ramsey of the LA Rams from Madden 22 to Football Manager 22. I've copied Ramsey's stats as closely as possible, allowing for some artistic license, but you may want to adjust these yourself with the editor. He starts at LA Galaxy with a short length on his contract remaining. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2834296822