How to bring a nation/ league up with you

[splishysplash123]

If I want to start a save outside the traditional top 5 leagues, but don't want to outgrow the other clubs such that the domestic league is a walk (and that the other clubs improve alongside me/ start challenging in Europe), and want to make the national team as strong as possible, what sort of things I could do? I know I could sell them players for cheap/ loan them players, etc., and I'm not but so opposed to that as long as it doesn't feel horribly unrealistic, but are there any sort of settings or other factors I could change to make that happen more quickly/ make it happening at all more likely?

 

I know I'm far from the first person to raise this issue but it's frustrating that this doesn't seem to happen in FM the way it would in real life!

[rusty217]

7 hours ago, splishysplash123 said:

it's frustrating that this doesn't seem to happen in FM the way it would in real life!

It kind of does though. Look at France, PSG investing in their team to challenge in Europe hasn't really brought the rest of the league up with them. It has helped increase the overall TV revenue for the team and probably boosted attendances/sponsorships too, but there still remains a gulf between the big French clubs (with the exception of PSG) and the big clubs from the top 4 leagues.

As for your question, my suggestion would be to manage other teams too. I'm a big fan of managing multiple teams simultaneously anyway, but it would certainly work for trying to improve a league. Alternatively, you could use the editor to increase prize money and TV revenue for the league. It does dynamically increase with the league, but it's % based, so most leagues aren't going to be able to compete financially with the top leagues even if they overtake their rep since their starting revenue is so far off. You could also set it up to come into effect in a future season so it doesn't boost the league from day 1. eg. have the league start with it's regular money, but then get a 25% boost after 4 years or something. Do be careful if you do that though, the % increases are much larger for lower rep leagues than for higher ones, so if you set a very low league to have higher prize money it could increase exponentially with their rep. I once set Ethiopia to reward around 3m to the winner (- a few 100k for each position below that). After a few decades of rep increases their prize money ended up higher than Germany's.

[Freakiie]

Except, isn't that exactly how things work in real life?

Look at the Eredivisie, Ajax was massively dominant (and financially still is) until some serious mismanagement happened. PSV during that period failed to get through CL qualifiers and didn't really show all that much in the EL either and if it wasn't for teams like Feyenoord and AZ going deep into the ECL scoring lots of points the Eredivisie would look much worse coefficient wise and this is already one of the best leagues outside the top 5. Even with Ajax being a solid team in the CL for a while the other teams didn't come close to matching their performances and financially the league is still miles behind the big 5.

If you look at other even smaller leagues a lot have extremely dominant teams over the last couple years as income from continental football increases and this wealth compounds their dominance. Dinamo Zagreb missed one title in Croatia since 2006, TNS is massively dominant in Wales, Legia is pretty dominant in Poland, Copenhagen is the big fish in Denmark and I can keep going. These small leagues simply can't sustain multiple big fish as the big fish are way too reliant on money from European competition and the biggest fish will hover most of it up, especially when you as the player don't heavily mismanage things, which generally is the only thing that can slow these clubs down in real life.

SI already has added a lot of things over the years to ensure that smaller competitions can grow, such as dynamic reputation, dynamic TV deals, dynamic youth ratings, but in the end the assumption that a nation like say Denmark should become a giant in world football because Copenhagen manages to build itself up as one of the big clubs of Europe is completely unrealistic. As rusty pointed out, even with the French league having someone like PSG, the league having a much easier marketing potential as France is one of the biggest countries in Europe and France having a massive amount of talent already available to them the French clubs are doing so poorly in Europe they actually dropped behind the Netherlands on the coefficient ranking (admittedly, almost certainly not for long, but that it even happened is pretty nuts).

[splishysplash123]

OK, you guys are right - last line was vastly overstated. I still think It's fun in FM, though! But this has given me better perspective. 

[The Amazing Dale Watkins]

Well, it looks like in FM24 the dynamic TV deals might help with this (though I'm not sure there'd be any trickle-down effect in leagues where clubs negotiate their own deals like La Liga).