BeeInExile

I think this depends heavily on the manager's preferences more than being a universal rule. I would prefer to see it as a Non-Player Tendency in the database. A higher Tendency to Pick Players from Reputable Clubs would see international managers being more likely to pick players who play for teams with high Reputation, and a low Tendency would make them more likely to ignore that factor and pick based on Current Ability.

Sure, but that doesn't apply to players at e.g. Nordsjaelland. Look at Déblé in the attached pictures. He's an Ivorian newgen who was generated at 15 at Nordsjaelland. He was born in Cote d'Ivoire and has no other nationality. He can't get a work permit to play in Denmark in the game because he's a youth player (which is totally bizarre). According to the game he's been in Denmark for 4 years already, and has just turned 16, so he moved to Denmark when he was 12. There are several issues with this: 1) How many Ivorian kids are there in the greater Copenhagen area? Nordsjaelland generates a lot of Ivorian and Ghanaian newgens. Is this realistic? My understanding is that it is not. 2) From what I understand, Nordsjaelland in real life only actually signs players from Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire once they've turned 18, and of course this means they are signed from African clubs and should have a playing history in Africa. This is not the case with players like Déblé. 3) I appreciate that nationality laws are often rather arbitrary, but I really doubt that someone who had lived in Denmark since the age of 12 would be unable to get a work permit to work there. In fact it looks as though he might be able to get not just residency but nationality when he turns 17 as he'll have been there for 5 years including during his schooling. https://lifeindenmark.borger.dk/settle-in-denmark/danish-citizenship/the-acquisition-of-danish-citizenship-by-children There's two reasons why the game makes such a mess of this (well, aside from real life being messy): 1) It conflates residency with national eligibility. Someone who really had moved to Denmark as a child should have residency there, even if they might not actually be able to play for the Danish national team yet. Moreover, they may well choose not to play for Denmark anyway. The game isn't nuanced enough to reflect this. 2) As above, for understandable reasons SI really want Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana to generate enough good players to make a semi-realistic world, but they haven't worked out how to get Nordsjaelland to buy good players from those countries (partly because they don't generate enough good players in those countries). Consequently, they have Nordsjaelland generate African players without Danish nationality, so that those players won't decide to play for Denmark instead. Instead, they should rework the game to generate more and better African youth prospects in Africa, and get European teams to actually buy them. Of note, Nordsjaelland in my game in September 2027 have yet to sign a single player from Africa - this in spite of being affiliated to the Right To Dream academy in Ghana. My preference, which is much more like real life, would be for the 15 year old newgen Ghanaians to stop being generated at Nordsjaelland and for them to buy Ghanaians from RTD as soon as they turn 18 instead. (If the devs want more ideas for how to make that happen, please see my previous contributions to this forum.)

To be perfectly candid, it's hard to find out much of what's going on with Lusaka Dynamos right now. @StanBoy11's covered the main points. We'll have to see whether they still exist next season, but as you've found out, "Young Lusaka Dynamos" is the team who are still participating in competitions. Usually with a name like that they would be the B team of Lusaka Dynamos, in basically the same way that Barcelona B are the B team of Barcelona. The fact that they're competing but the senior team does not seem to be is weird. If you want to know more about Lusaka Dynamos in general, I would recommend this interview on YouTube that Hanif Adams did a couple of years ago. Some of the questioning is a bit weird though - you may also want to read this as background http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/7262763.stm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBAE9ZvBI2c

I'd agree with @StanBoy11 - South Africa and Tanzania are the main destinations in Africa, and DRC is both the main place where Zambian teams buy their foreigners, as well as where some of the best Zambian players go and play (particularly TP Mazembe historically, which is just across the border), so I'd definitely try to add that too. You might want to add in Malawi and Zimbabwe for the flavour, and some of their players come to Zambia (but not all that many) but Zambians very seldom go and play in those countries. If you're specifically managing Kafue Celtic, I'd recommend adding Mali and Georgia, since that's where their affiliate clubs are based. But otherwise Georgia's not needed, and Mali would just be to flesh out the world. Until recently a few Zambians went to Israel on short-term deals because the superagent in Zambia is Israeli, but I don't think the game emulates that well so I wouldn't say it's particularly important. If you're trying to do an African save, I'd definitely add in France and Portugal so they buy players from Africa and bring more money into the continent, although they seldom buy Zambians. Cagliari have bought a couple of players from Atletico Lusaka in the past, and Lameck Banda is at Lecce, so I suppose Italy might be an option too, although again it's quite slim pickings. RB Salzburg bought Patson Daka and Enock Mwepu to Europe, so I'd also be tempted to add Austria (also it has lax registration rules so again, more demand for your players). But yeah Stan's right that European leagues don't sign enough players from Africa in the game (and in fact I've logged bug reports about it).

I've noticed something very similar. I was wondering if it was to do with the agreed playing time being the basis of the assessment for this vision, rather than the actual game time you give to the youth players. I tend to minimise agreed playing time as much as possible, so, for example, I have a youth player who's a Future Prospect who I'm using like a Regular Starter. Just an idea. In any case, there's clearly something dodgy about how this Club Vision is programmed.

It's actually allowed in some leagues in real life, such as in Zambia. For example both Green Eagles and Young Green Eagles played in the Super League in the 2020/21 season. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020–21_Zambia_Super_League Personally I think it's pretty ridiculous and open to obvious abuse, but it is a thing.

Not sure why I didn't get a notification of this reply, but... I genuinely don't have an answer to how to make the home kit thing work - I'm no programmer - but I think there might at least be a method for the away kit: -There are 50-odd different styles of Shirt. The game picks one at random, excluding the Home Kit style. -As regards colours, the game records colours based on their RGBA values. So the game could look at the Home Kit colours, pick the highest value of RGBA, and ensure that in the away kit it is the lowest value of the four in the away kit, or even zero it. And then randomise the other three RGBA values. This would guarantee that the colours are substantially different, no? -The game picks one of say 9 basic colours - the primary colours - for each of Shorts Foreground and Shorts Background, and the same for the Socks. Possibly it does something similar with the RGBA values to ensure that they aren't the same as the home kit, although that's less of a problem. -The game picks one of the Shorts Styles and one of the Socks Styles at random. Again, arguably, could exclude the Home Kit value. If you need a third kit, the game does the same as this again but excludes the Away Kit values as well. I imagine you'd get some pretty funky strips doing this, and many of them might be aesthetically questionable, but it might at least provide some variety. With that said, I would imagine that the best thing would be to allow the player the option of choosing whether to accept the new Away Kit or stick to the original. You might also want a button to keep generating these kits until you got one you liked, which would be one way of dealing with the inevitable eyesores that would be created sometimes.

No worries - I appreciate it's more something for future editions. @Zachary Whyte What do you mean by real life examples? Examples of clubs that in real life sign lots of players from Africa but don't do so in the game? I don't have a full list but I would suggest looking at the transfer behaviour of the following clubs: -Vyskov (any save from the past 3 or 4 years until the most recent update, when they changed ownership). They should have been signing 50%+ of their players from Africa. In my experience, you're lucky if they sign anyone from Africa at all. -RB Salzburg and Liefering - should be signing players from Mali, and to some extent other West African countries -Nordsjaelland - should be signing players FROM the Right To Dream Academy, not just having 15 year old Ghanaians coming through their youth intake. -Portuguese teams - Mafra? Benfica? Not overly familiar but they should be buying players from Lusophone Africa -Several French clubs e.g. Metz IIRC should be buying players from Francophone Africa -Random clubs in Central and Eastern Europe - e.g. in Romania, Croatia, Poland - should be signing players from Africa now and then -As mentioned above, Horsens have signed some Africans recently. Are you seeing African players turning up in Denmark? At the other end, look at the obvious candidates: ASEC Mimosas in Cote d'Ivoire, Generation Foot in Senegal. I have an (admittedly modded) save with both the Senegalese and the French league system enabled, in which Generation Foot have sold two players to Europe in three years - one to Amiens, and one to Blackburn of all teams. To say the least, that does not reflect reality! https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/generation-foot/alletransfers/verein/30031 I would think that checking this behaviour to see that it is actually happening should be fairly trivial - just look at any of the saves SI must have that are for more than say three seasons, and check the Transfer History of the relevant teams. If you'd like some suggested ideas of how to reduce this issue, I've put a couple of suggestions on the suggestions forum (below). I also wonder how much being known as a particular location for great young talent is being filtered through - professional football clubs IRL know that Generation Foot produce good players. Do they in the game? But the fact that as far as I can tell even when they have perfect knowledge, as Nordsjaelland do of the Right to Dream Academy, they don't sign players from there, suggests something significant is wrong.

No worries - it's a long-term issue. Yes, I'm getting that too, although 1) Ghanaians moving to Nordsjaelland before the age of 18 is actually illegal in real life so it shouldn't work that way (https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/66b4ce38a7998b38/original/kgl4gp7cl25ut2dbuz7y-pdf.pdf), and 2) the Ghanaians and Ivorians coming through the Nordsjaelland youth intake tend to lack work permits (because again, it's illegal, and the game is correctly reflecting that). Are you finding that Nordsjaelland buy players that are generated by the Right To Dream Academy in-game? In my experience they don't do that. Which in my opinion is pretty weird, because they're cheap players, sometimes with good potential, that they have perfect knowledge of. Yeah I don't necessarily want Nordsjaelland to be made a special case - I just think they're a good illustration of the issue. I saw something similar with Vyskov in Czechia and RB Salzburg/Liefering in Austria. Would welcome any thoughts from @Zachary Whyte or anyone else at SI on this. Grateful as well for any suggestions about what I should do at my end, as an AR for Zambia, to encourage the brightest young talents there to be picked up by European clubs.

Oh well!

Several line items on the Finances section could do with being split up or clarified: 1) On the Expenses tab, "Ground Maintenance" seems to include the following: Upgrades to Training Facilities (Possibly - this is not clear) upgrades to Youth Facilities Ongoing costs of maintaining the stadium at which your team plays Ongoing costs of maintaining the training ground at which your team trains. I am an native English speaker. "Ground Maintenance", as far as I am concerned, should only include Item 3 above. Items 1 and 2 are capex, not maintenance, and should definitely not be included in a budget called maintenance. Item 4 is also not necessarily your team's "ground". For me, "Ground Maintenance" would be things like: -paying for security for your stadium when it is not in use -paying for people to clean the stadium toilets when it is not in use -lighting/heating/mending broken parts of the stadium in the course of regular wear and tear -paying for groundsmen to keep the stadium pitch nice (which is I think the single most natural reading of the phrase). I therefore suggest that there be a separate subsection on the Expenses item list called Capital Investment, under which are added the following line items: 1) Training Facilities upgrades 2) Youth Facilities upgrades 3) Stadium upgrades - adding more capacity to the stadium, and/or building a new stadium (building a new stadium could be a separate line item) "Ground Maintenance" should be renamed "Facilities Maintenance", and only cover Items 3 and 4 above. 2) Stadium Rent - this should be a line item in Expenses. If I am renting my stadium from the council or another club, I am presumably paying them a certain amount per year. How much is it? This figure is surely part of the puzzle when evaluating whether to build a new ground or not. 3) The other issue I have noticed, which may possibly be a bug, is that "Loan Income" in the Income tab does not seem to display the one-off income a club gets when it takes out a bank loan. It seems to me that it should. This income may possibly be going into "Other" instead.