[Discussion] Tragedies as part of a team's history

[BeeInExile]

Recently as I've been making suggestions for how to improve Zambian teams in FM, I've realised that there's nothing in the game that marks tragedies, or their anniversaries. These can often be very important to how a team tells its own history. Not every football team is associated with a tragedy, but several are. For example, Manchester United with the Munich air disaster, Liverpool with Hillsborough, Torino with the Superga disaster, Al-Ahly with what happened in Port Said in 2012, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Said_Stadium_riot and the Zambian national team with the Gabon air disaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Zambia_national_football_team_plane_crash). These are often reference points for fans, and their anniversaries are topics of public note.

Perhaps there should be an extra part of the history section to capture this. It could be as simple as e.g.“Hillsborough disaster – 1989”. The game could then bring up news reports on the significant anniversaries of the event, much as it does with the year that the team was founded. They might say something like “This is a particularly significant season for Club x, as it is y years since the tragic z disaster”.

Potentially this could be extended slightly – for example, when Zambia won AFCON in Libreville, Gabon in 2012, it was widely remarked that this was close to the site of the plane crash in 1993. Therefore potentially if Zambia were to play Gabon in-game, some reference could be made to the event.

I fully appreciate that it might be tough to get the right tone for this, but I thought I should suggest it in the interests of realism and further discussion.

To be absolutely clear, I would definitely not support the possibility of tragedies happening in-game – this would just be about marking ones that happened in real life and are considered highly significant for fans.