Continental Competition - Qualifying Losers Move to Regional Tournaments

[TheWestender]

Long story short, I'm looking at changing the format of the UEFA competitions in a similar way to the old 'UEFA Revival' databases that were around for earlier FMs.

There'll be a champions-only Champions League, revived CWC, altered Europa League (two entrants for bottom 4 associations in coefficient ranking, three for everyone else but Liechtenstein), altered Conference League - now called the Conference Trophy for the Group Stage dropouts to enter between February and May - and tweaked Super Cup.

Additionally though, I want to run another competition called the Continental Shield that'll run from February to May and be competed for by the winners of twelve regional tournaments that run alongside the CL, CWC and EL between late August/early September and December.

Initially I wanted to limit the regional cups to teams that hadn't qualified for European competition already, but given that a good number of the dropouts from CL/CWC/EL qualifiers would likely be from countries lower down the UEFA totem pole, it seems odd not to have the biggest teams from those countries representing them in the likes of the Baltic League or Black Sea Cup.

How would I go about setting it up so that the dropouts would take the places in these regional cups that might otherwise go to qualifiers from their leagues? Would it be a case of setting up a UEFA Regional Cups parent competition, for example?

[rusty217]

I think you could do it by telling the regional competitions to get the losing teams from the qualifying rounds from specific countries. So have 1 instruction per country. Probably best to give them a different seeding per country too. Then after you've finished all of those instructions for each qual round/country combo, add an Ignore Teams instruction for teams in the European competitions so that teams that made it through are excluded. Then at the bottom of the teams list tell it to get teams from each country's league, sorting by last league position. Give them the same seeding as you gave that country at the beginning and set a max teams with overall seeding in teams list.

That should pull in all the teams that lost in qualifying for the highest competitions while excluding those that made it through. It should also reduce the number of teams pulled from the league if any dropped down into it from qualifying. So, eg. if Estonia has 2 place and nobody loses in qualifying it would take the 2 highest teams from last season's league table that aren't in any European competition. If a team loses in qualifying it would take that team + 1 team that didn't qualify for any other competition. Either way you'd get the same total.

[TheWestender]

On 21/02/2023 at 05:45, rusty217 said:

I think you could do it by telling the regional competitions to get the losing teams from the qualifying rounds from specific countries. So have 1 instruction per country. Probably best to give them a different seeding per country too. Then after you've finished all of those instructions for each qual round/country combo, add an Ignore Teams instruction for teams in the European competitions so that teams that made it through are excluded. Then at the bottom of the teams list tell it to get teams from each country's league, sorting by last league position. Give them the same seeding as you gave that country at the beginning and set a max teams with overall seeding in teams list.

That should pull in all the teams that lost in qualifying for the highest competitions while excluding those that made it through. It should also reduce the number of teams pulled from the league if any dropped down into it from qualifying. So, eg. if Estonia has 2 place and nobody loses in qualifying it would take the 2 highest teams from last season's league table that aren't in any European competition. If a team loses in qualifying it would take that team + 1 team that didn't qualify for any other competition. Either way you'd get the same total.

That's exactly the kind of explanation I was looking for! Thanks a ton!

A follow-up question to anyone who might be able to answer it - is it possible to have teams change countries from a fixed date in the future rather than at the start of the game? Part of my plan is to have the Welsh teams in the English pyramid move to the Welsh system around the same time as the UEFA regs change (more chance at the riches of the Champions League and Cup Winners Cup, after all).