*wave*
Hello all, and welcome to another post! With Football Manager 2012 only a few days away, I figured this would be an appropriate time to formally kick off my new story. I’ve (obviously) already decided to center the story in the Welsh Premier League, but I figured there would be a few things worth mentioning. For starters, you all need to know which team I’ll be playing, though the astute among you have already figured that out:
Team: Afan Lido F.C.
Status: Semi-Professional
Stadium: Marston Stadium
Capacity: 4200 (525 seated)
Location: Aberavon, Wales
Rivals: Port Talbot Town, Goytre United
Clearly we’re not dealing with anything overly special here. The team was founded in 1967, and it’s only notable achievement since then has been winning the 1993 League Cup. They earned promotion to the 2011/12 Welsh Premier League after finishing runners-up in the Welsh First Division, and the First Division winners (Bryntirion Athletic) were denied a Premier League license (or something like that, the whole promotion system in Wales is really quite baffling).
Secondly, the league structure is more akin to Scotland than England or Ireland. There are 12 teams in the Premier League, with each playing each other twice, once home and once away. After the conclusion of this 22 game schedule, the league is split into two, with the top 6 teams forming the «Championship Group», and the bottom 6 forming the «Relegation Group». Once this split occurs, a bottom 6 team cannot finish higher than 7th, regardless of their point total (the reverse holds true for a top 6 team). In this second stage, each team plays the other teams in its group an additional two times, for a total of 32 games overall.
Just to make things even more confusing, the Welsh Premier League also has a playoff for its second Europa League spot. The top 5 teams that haven’t already qualified for a European competition are seeded according to their final league position, and made to play for the chance to see international football. The bottom two teams play a «play-in» game of sorts, in order to reduce the field to an even 4 teams. At that point, it becomes a semi-final and final, with the winner going to Europe.
This of course brings us to Wales’ European spots:
Champion’s League — 1 place in the Second Qualifying Round (League champion)
Europa League — 3 places (League Runner-Up, FA Cup winner, and Play-off winner). The League Runner Up and Play-off winner enter at the First Qualifying Round, while the FA Cup winner enters in the Second Qualifying Round.
It’s worth mentioning that no Welsh team has ever made the group stages in the Champion’s League, and I doubt the Europa League either. We’re currently ranked something like 46th of 52 in the UEFA Coefficients, so it’s pretty far down the list.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve spent some time going through the database from FM11, trying to glean any helpful information I could for the upcoming campaign. The picture I’ve been painting isn’t pretty. There is no team that has a «maximum attendance» stat that goes 500 or so, with most (including Lido) topping out in the 200s. Average attendances range from the low hundreds, up to about 200 or so for TNS. Minimum attendances, needless to say, are all double digits.
So we’re already going in knowing that we’ll have a massive money issue that isn’t likely to ever improve substantially, and thus we’ll be forced to rely on player sales and foreign friendly tours to earn some cash. Unfortunately, this means it will take ages to improve sub-par facilities, and new stadiums are unlikely to be built anytime in the first twenty years.
Likewise, unless SI has improved the dynamic league system for FM12, the other teams in Wales will lag far behind my progress, and will see little benefit from a dramatically improved league rating. I need only point to RFC’s Polish story on Sortitoutsi as example number one, where any team he hasn’t managed is hopelessly worse than the top 3 or 4 in the Polish league. It’s my hope that SI has fixed this, but we’ll likely not find out until some 15-20 seasons into the story.
Alas, these difficulties will just go to make the save all the more interesting, and the challenge all the more intriguing! I apologize for the wall-o-text, and future updates will trend back toward my picture-happy ways. Cheers!
