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.