I posted this in response to another thread and it was suggested that I give it its own thread. If people find it useful it might be worth tossing it a sticky.
How to Create a Club from Scratch
Firstly I would advise you to come up with some sort of pretend scenario in your head. In my case I have a multi-billionaire who has decided to create a new team from scratch and take it to the Premiership. Unfortunately in my scenario the FA refused to allow me to enter the league any higher than league 2. So that's where I have to start. In my scenario I have my multi billionaire chairman build a stadium and make a lot of publicity and advertising to get the team an initial reputation. There are lots of other things I have come up with but I am digressing so I'll leave it at that.
Why is this sort of idea important? Simple. It keeps the game interesting. With the editor I could easily create an amazing team and put them in the premiership and design and create a squad of players that would walk all over every other team in the world. Surely though that would get boring really fast? Of course it would, that's why I created my little story - to give myself some limits.
Anyway on the the how-to.
Go to your football manager directory on your computer, open up the folder "tools" and then run the editor.exe.
Go to File -> Load Database... and load the database of your choice (11.3.0 is fine).
Now you have the database loaded.
The next thing you need to do is to create your team.
Click on Database in the top left box, then on Clubs in the bottom left box, then click on the Add button at the bottom.
This will create a new team and bring up the Details box in the main window. At this point you can enter the following information:
Now in the bottom left hand box you will see other things - Stadium, Finances, and so on. Skip stadium for now (I will cover this later) and click on Finances.
On the Finances screen you have several tabs. These cover all the different types of finances, sell on clauses, debts and so on. I will explain the first two General and Other Income.
General:
Other Income:
Other income is things like sponsorship deals, grants, memberships, individual TV deals, and so on. You can add as many or as few as you like.
Bear in mind that the money from sponsorship comes in before the start of the game, and so it is likely that it will be disregarded or offset by the game balance when you start the game, so it is best that anything you do here is for at least two seasons, or you probably wont see any benefit.
I'll give you an example below:
Let's say you want a kit sponsor for the first two seasons at 7.5m per season. you would set up as follows:
Once you are done adding sponsorships let's go ahead and build ourselves a stadium.
To do this you need to click on Database in the top left box and Stadiums in the bottom left box. Then click the Add button at the bottom of the screen.
This will bring up the Details page of our shiny new stadium. I'll run through the options for you.
Once you are done with this let's go back and assign your team to this stadium. Your team should be in your recent items list, the image below shows you where that is. Alternatively if it isn't, click on Database then Clubs and search for, then select, your team.
So your team is selected now, in the bottom left box click on Stadium.
The Stadium tab should now be displayed. First you want to select the stadium you just created, so click on the arrow next to Stadium and find and select it.
You can also create and/or add a reserve stadium if you like... this is where your reserve team would play its matches.
Then fill out the rest of the settings as you like, info is below.
Okay so that's finances and stadium sorted... time to design our kits!
Click on Kits and Colours in the bottom left box.
You will be presented with a screen with six tabs. Home Kit, Away Kit, Third Kit, and the same three options for goalkeeper kits. There are five kinds of kit type that you can create; Shirt, Shorts, Socks, Icon, Text. The first three are obvious, the icon is used in 2d match view to represent your players, and the text is how the title bar will look in game. You can also create more than one kit type in each category. For example I could have 3 different designs of Socks in my Home Kit - one for the league, one of the FA cup and one for the league cup. I will explain how to create your home shirt, and this should then give you the knowledge you need to make all the rest as you see fit.
Here is the Home Kit Shirt for my team:
This is how it looks in game:
To create yours just click Add and then select type Shirt.
Before you play around with the colours you should set your Kit Style by clicking on the Change button to the right. This will bring up a window where you can choose your Kit Style (this is only the pattern, you will set the colours in a minute).
Once you have this done you can then go through and change the various colours. Note that if you set the number colour such that it doesn't have a high enough contrast then it will be set white or black in the game.
The option "competition" is where you would choose which competition this kit item will be worn for, if you only want one kit type for all competitions, then leave it alone. In any case you should leave it alone for your main home kit. Also if you really want to go mad you can set a year on a kit and then it will only be worn for the season you set... this would mean you'd have to create a **** load of kits for each season and you can only do this before you start the game, so I reckon it's a best left well alone.
Next let's look at Current Affiliations. This is where you can set up relationships between your team and other teams, you can set up feeder teams or parent teams. You can also set up different options in each case. You can setup any type, local partnerships, international loans, work permit bypass, or first option... to name but a few. I'll show you how to create a feeder team for the purposes of marketing only - a so-called "commercial link".
Click on Current Affiliations in the bottom left box, then click the Add button. A new blank entry will appear in the list at the top. First thing you want to do is find a suitable team. I'm going to go for a Japanese team to boost my shirt sales in Japan. So I click on the arrow under Affiliated Club to bring up the search box. Here you can search by name, but I want to search by country so I click on Filter and then Customise..., then I click Add Condition and I chose Nation and enter Japan.
Click Ok and this brings up a list of all clubs in Japan. I want to find a club that has a lower world reputation than me (which is realistic for a feeder club) and my team has a world reputation of 5000, so I will look for a team around 2500-3500 if I can find one. First I click on Reputation up at the top to order the list by reputation, then I scroll down and look for a suitable team in my desired range. In this list there are some semi-pro and some pro teams, I'd like a pro team from somewhere I've heard of... so how about Galeos Kagoshima? They are in a city I know, are professional, and have a world rep of 3100. Perfect! I'll choose them.
Now you will see the options appear in the bottom box as shown below.
The options are explained below.
You can create as many as you like, to create parent affiliations just don't tick the Is Main Club option.
Okay so, by this stage we have created our club, we've built our stadium, we've designed our stylish kits, and we've set up some club affiliations (or none). What's next?
Well we have three more things to do; enter some competitions, create our staff and players, and set up any other stuff like rivalries and so on.
Let's take a look at competitions. You can have your team in any competition you like, the easiest way to do this is to replace an existing team. However I personally like to keep it as realistic as possible, so I first of all swap myself with a practically unknown non-league team then I swap myself again with a team from the division above, and so on until I am where I want to be. I'll show you how to do this to put your club in English League 2.
In the top left box click on Database and then in the bottom left box click on competitions. Search for "blue".
You will see Blue Square Bet Premier, Blue Square Bet North/South and Blue Square Bet North and Blue Square Bet South. If your team is in the North select the Blue Square Bet North or alternatively select the Blue Square Bet South. My club is in London so I've chosen Blue Square Bet South. Click on your chosen league and then click the Edit button down at the bottom. Then click on Teams in the bottom left box. I order by Reputation by clicking on the Reputation title then I decide on a team to replace.
I have decided to boot St. Albans out of the league and replace them (sorry any St. Albans fans) because they have almost the lowest Reputation and have the worst finances in the division at -40000 (£). So I click on St. Albans to select them, then click the Swap button down at the bottom. This will bring up the familiar Filter window - from here you can search for and select the team that you created.
Now your team is in the bottom league it's just a case of repeating this process to move them up a few divisions. So let's move them up to the Blue Square Bet Premier. Click on Database in the top left box, then on Competitions in the bottom left box and search for "blue" again. This time select the Blue Square Bet Premier and click the Edit button. Once again I look for a suitable candidate to relegate... this time I've gone for Histon because they have a low reputation, poor finances, and also I have never heard of them. So I click on Histon and then click on Swap and find my team. This will promote us to the Blue Square Bet Premier and relegate Histon to the Blue Square Bet South.
I just have to do this one last time, to get my team into nPower League 2. I repeat the steps above but this time instead of searching for "blue" I search for npower. Select nPower League 2 then click on Teams and find your vict.. err I mean candidate for relegation. It's a bit tricky for me this time, since the lower reputation teams all have decent finances... but let's go for Accrington (Stanley? Who are they? Exactly.) just because I still remember those **** milk adverts. Same again, I select Accrington and then click on Swap, find my team, and click Ok. Now I'm in the nPower League 2. Yay.
If you wanted you could repeat this process all the way to the Premiership. Alternatively if you don't care about continuity you could just go ahead and swap your team directly with a team in the league you want to start in (they'd probably climb back up again in a few seasons anyway).
What about the cups? I hear you cry. Well as it happens this is done automatically each season so you don't need to worry about it. Note: The FA Cup has a rule whereby a club must be three years old before it can participate, as such if you set your club founded date to 2010 you wont be entered into the FA cup until your third season.
Moving on, it's time for the bit that takes the most amount of time. Creating all of your staff and players.
Now it is worth pointing out that if you want to you can steal players and staff from other teams or appoint unemployed people as much as you like - you do this by clicking on Staff and Players when you have your team selected, and then click the Add button and search for them. You will save a lot of time doing this, but you'll probably mess up a lot of other teams in the process (unless you go for entirely unemployed people, which you can search for using the filters). So I will show you how to create a Chairman, a Coach, and a Player. Then you will have the knowledge to create people and assign them to your club to your heart's content. I spent a good 6 hours on this part last time I created my team, but I went into detail creating staff from different counties and set up realistic languages spoken and so on... you don't really need to go into all that detail if you don't want to. I'll show you how anyway just in case you're **** like me.
So let's start with the Chairman. First things first we need to create him. You should know the drill by now... click on Database in the top left box, then click on People in the bottom left box, finally click the Add button to create a new person. Choose Non Player as we are creating our Chairman.
First lets do the Details which is the screen that comes up first.
Most of these options are self-explanatory, just name him or her (ignore common name) feel free to ignore ethnicity, hair colour and skin tone, (they don't seem to make a difference anyway), choose a date and place of birth and country, don't give him an agent - in the case of players they will hire their own anyway. If you want to create a footballing history feel free, I didn't.
Once you have the basic details done lets sort out his Contract, so click on Contract in the bottom left box. First you need to choose the club he is employed at obviously you want to choose the team you created. Once you do that you will see a bunch of options as shown in the image below.
Set his job as Chairman and set a Date Joined and that is all you need to worry about for the Chairman - the rest is done automatically when you start the game.
Next let's look at Person Data. There are three tabs, Attributes, Languages, Days At Club/In Nation. For the chairmen the latter two don't matter (although I did give my guy some Language skills). The only one we need to worry about is the Attributes. NOTE: Anything you leave at 0 will be set automatically when the game starts. For me the two most important things I want in my Chairman are Ambition and Loyalty so I set both of those at the maximum of 20. The rest is up to you, leave it at 0 to be filled in automatically or set it up however you want, I don't think the other traits make that much difference.
So let's move on to Non Player Data. This is the most important screen for any person you create but for the Chairman we only care about two: Ability and Reputation and Non Tactical Attributes.
All you need to worry about on the first tab, Ability and Reputation, is current ability and potential ability. I want an awesome Chairman, so I set them both at 200. Leave the reputations as the are (0), they will be auto-generated. Now click on the Non Tactical Attributes tab at the top.
The only attributes we care about for the Chairman are the penultimate four: Business, Interference, Patience, and Resources.
For the best Chairman in my opinion you want high Business, Patience, and Resources and very low Interference.
Okay that's the Chairman done. Let's make a Coach.
Click on Database in the top left box, then click on People in the bottom left box, finally click the Add button to create a new person. Choose Non Player as we are creating a Coach.
Details is the screen that comes up first.
Again just name him or her (ignore common name) feel free to ignore ethnicity, hair colour and skin tone, (they don't seem to make a difference anyway), choose a date and place of birth and country, don't give him an agent - in the case of players they will hire their own anyway. If you want to create a footballing history feel free, I didn't.
Next is Contract, so click on Contract in the bottom left box. First you need to choose the club he is employed at obviously you want to choose the team you created.
Set his job as Coach, Youth Team Coach, 1st Team Coach, Fitness Coach, or Goalkeeping Coach and set a Date Joined. I like to give my staff a nice long contract, I set mine to 1.7.2020 (ten year contract) you can choose whatever you like. This guy will need a wage... you can leave it at 0 and the game will choose one for you, or you can choose it yourself now.
Next it's Person Data. I like to make most of my coaches multi-lingual, so add a bunch of languages on the Languages tab, but you don't have to. The Attributes that are important for a coach are debatable, but I like to give them high Adaptability and Loyalty. You will also want to set the Job Preferences Coach (or Fitness/Goalkeeping, as appropriate) to 20.
Now it's time for the Non Player Data. This is the most important screen for any person you create. For the Coach we care about: Ability and Reputation, Tactical Attributes, and Non Tactical Attributes.
For Ability and Reputation we want good current ability and potential ability. I set most of my Coaches at something like 140 Current Ability and 185 Potential Ability. The main difference here is that we really do care about the Reputations. To avoid our awesome staff being stolen by other teams we want to give them as low a Reputation as possible. For this reason I set all three, Current Reputation, Home Reputation, and World Reputation, to 50.
Now for the Tactical Attributes there is only one attribute in here that we care about, but it is probably the most important attribute for a Coach, Scout, or Assistant Manager and that is Determination. I always set this to 20. Always.
The final tab, Non Tactical Attributes, is very, very, important for all active staff. For different staff you want different things, and I would imagine most of you know what those things are, and if you don't you can find the information easily elsewhere so I am not going to list what each staff member needs the most. For this example I'm going to make a World Class Defensive Coach. Remember everything I leave at 0 will be set by the game anyway.
If you can't tell from the image above what I have given this guy is:
Of course you might want to make a more realistic coach... or you might not want to get too specific... anything you leave at 0 will be generated when the game starts, and will be determined by various factors including the Current Ability.
Finally let's create a player. I'm going to create a Goalkeeper for this example.
Click on Database in the top left box, then click on People in the bottom left box, finally click the Add button to create a new person. Choose Player as we are creating a Goalkeeper.
Details is the screen that comes up first.
Again just name him or her (ignore common name) you might want to fill in ethnicity, hair colour and skin tone, because for player this will determine what they look like on the pitch. Choose an appropriate date of birth, and place of birth and country, don't give him an agent - players they will hire their own anyway. If you want to create a footballing history feel free, I didn't. There are another couple of options for a Player including Declared for Nation where you can choose a nation for them to declare for international play, as well as some extra retirement options. I generally leave these alone, although I did have some of my future stars declared for England.
For a Player there is a whole screen dealing with Contract. Choose your club for Club, set his job as Player, set a Date Joined and a contract expiry. I like to give my players a nice long five year contract however they will almost certainly renegotiate the first time some other club comes sniffing. Set a Wage or leave it blank... again it will be auto generated, as will the various Bonuses and Clauses if you don't bother to set them.
Time for Person Data. I like to make my player's languages realistic, so English for English people, Dutch and French for Belgians, etc, make sure you add at least one language on the Languages tab. The Attributes for a player are hugely diverse, I like to give them high Loyalty, Ambition, Professionalism, and Temperament. Unless you plan to have this player for his entire career and beyond, you can leave Job Preferences at 0 and they will be generated (don't forget that these numbers can be influenced in the latter stages of a player's career by manager suggestions).
For a player we also care about the Days At Club/In Nation because most competitions have some rules regarding Home Grown and Club Trained players. So click on this tab and Add a new entry by choosing your new club and entering 1095 Days (3 years) or more and tick the box Between Age of 15 And 21 Only.
Now the big one, Player Data, this is where we work our magic. There are nine tabs to deal with here General, Positions, Mental Attributes, Physical Attributes, Technical Attributes, Goalkeeping Attributes, Preferred Moves, Injuries, and Bans. The bad news is that you need to fill in quite a lot on most all but Bans and Injuries, the good news is that there is a short cut.
Huge Time Saving Short Cut: Set a Current Ability, Potential Ability, and fill in the Positions tab, and leave everything else at 0 - they will be auto-generated when the game first starts. I did this with my two full backs, I gave them 130 Current Ability, and set DL or DR to 20 and the game generated two decent Full Backs.
If you decide you want to get into the nitty-gritty and fine tune everything yourself, remember that you can leave anything at 0 to have it auto-generated.
With that said, here is my fine-tuning for my Wonderkid Goalkeeper.
A note on Person relationships. I always set all my staff and players to have my team as their favourite team, you do this on each Person on the Relationships screen, but if you want to you can also set them up so that they all have each other as favourite people - it takes time but it is worth it because, combined with high Loyalty, it makes them almost immune to being poached by other clubs (although players will still need contract deals regularly re-negotiating to stay if they are very good).
Once you're done with all that you can also add some rivalries, favourite people, and so on. With your team selected just click on Relationships in the bottom left box.
And that's how you create a team.
There are also some other things that you can optionally play with - create club records and a club history, set some current tactical attributes.. but they will all get generated as you play the game so for me it's pointless.
Hope this was helpful. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask, I'll subscribe to the thread so I get an email when you reply.
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Inserting Custom Kits, Logos, & Face Pictures
Someone requested help with making custom graphics for your new club, so I have added this bit here.
The most important thing to note about adding your own graphics is how to set up the config file, which tells FM how to use your custom graphics. This is what I will explain below.
The first thing you need to do is navigate to your Sports Interactive user folder (this is the place where your save games, tactics, training schedules, and so on, are kept).
In Windows XP it's usually:
My Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2011\
In Windows 7 it's usually:
Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2011\
In this folder you need to create a new folder called "graphics".
Now from here it doesn't matter how you arrange your files and folders. You can make any you want like "kits" or "kits\clubs\" or whatever. The reason why it doesn't matter so much is because you need a file called a config file to tell FM 2011 which images you want to use, and where.
What's the config file? Well it's a record file in XML format, but don't worry it's not complicated.
First it is worth noting that you can have more than one config file. For example you could have one large master config file that just sits in your graphics folder (that's how I do it) or if you like you can have several config files in sub directories (and sub sub directories). For simplicity I will just show you how to do it with one config file.
So the config file tells Football Manager where to find your images and what to do with them by "mapping" one location to another.
You can create a config file using Notepad, but to make it easier to read I recommend using a programmer's text editor such as Textpad (which is free). This is because they do something called syntax highlighting (basically it makes the text of a code file easier to read, and since XML is a type of code, most text editors support it).
The config file is named "config.xml".
The start of your config file should be:
The end of your config file should be:
In the middle is where we tell Football Manager about our files.
The format is pretty simple but is slightly different for each type of image. I have listed them below, and further on I will show you a full example config file.
Wherever it says "FILE LOCATION" should be the location of the image file in your graphics folder. For example if the image is in the same folder as the config file (just in the graphics folder) you just need to tell it the name (without the .png extension). So you might have an image called "awesome utd home kit.png" - instead of "FILE LOCATION" you would simply put "awesome utd home kit" (without the quotes). If your "awesome utd home kit.png" was inside another folder called "kits" (e.g. graphics\kits\awesome utd home kit.png) then you would put "kits/awesome utd home kit" or if it is in a folder called "home", inside "kits" (e.g. graphics\kits\home\awesome utd home kit.png) then you would put "kits/home/awesome utd home kit" and so on.
Wherever it says "UNIQUE ID" it should simply be the ID of the target club in the case of logos and kits, or person in the case of face images. You can find the unique id of a person or club but turning on "show unique ids" option in game, or having a look using the data editor.
Also note anything in between "<!--" and "-->" is called a comment and is ignored by the game. This is how you can make little notes in a code file that don't affect anything, they just help the reader.
So my full config file for my custom club (who's ID is 2062002128) is:
As for how to actually create your own images? Well you'll need an image editing program like GIMP or Photoshop and then do a search for help creating FM 2011 graphics, because there are a lot of easy to find helpful guides out there.
Hope this helps!
How to Create a Club from Scratch
Firstly I would advise you to come up with some sort of pretend scenario in your head. In my case I have a multi-billionaire who has decided to create a new team from scratch and take it to the Premiership. Unfortunately in my scenario the FA refused to allow me to enter the league any higher than league 2. So that's where I have to start. In my scenario I have my multi billionaire chairman build a stadium and make a lot of publicity and advertising to get the team an initial reputation. There are lots of other things I have come up with but I am digressing so I'll leave it at that.
Why is this sort of idea important? Simple. It keeps the game interesting. With the editor I could easily create an amazing team and put them in the premiership and design and create a squad of players that would walk all over every other team in the world. Surely though that would get boring really fast? Of course it would, that's why I created my little story - to give myself some limits.
Anyway on the the how-to.
Go to your football manager directory on your computer, open up the folder "tools" and then run the editor.exe.
Go to File -> Load Database... and load the database of your choice (11.3.0 is fine).
Now you have the database loaded.
The next thing you need to do is to create your team.
Click on Database in the top left box, then on Clubs in the bottom left box, then click on the Add button at the bottom.
This will create a new team and bring up the Details box in the main window. At this point you can enter the following information:
- Name - the name of your new club (e.g. Awesome United)
- Short Name - this is what you see at the score indicator in a match. ( e.g. Awe Utd)
- Six Letter Name - as it says the name in 6 letters or less (e.g. AUFC)
- Nickname - the affectionate name (e.g. The Machines)
- Second Nickname - optional second affectionate name (e.g. The Somes)
- Extinct - this should not be ticked.
- Nation - choose the nation that your team is in (e.g. England)
- City - choose the city that your team is in or near (e.g. London) - this is important as the size and reputation of the city will affect your attendances as much as your reputation.
- Year Founded - tick the box and choose what year your club was founded. (e.g. 2010) NOTE: A club has to be three years old to be entered into the FA Cup, so if you want FA Cup football in your first season, make your club at least three years old.
- Status - Pro, Semi-Pro or Amateur
- Maximum Age - don't tick this.
- Morale - the starting overall morale of your team 1-20, 20 being the highest. Note that this will change as you play the game.
- Reputation - 50-10000 your clubs world reputation ( e.g. League 2: 2000-3000 to top teams in the world 9000-9500).
- Reserve Teams are whole separate clubs that you consider your reserves (e.g. Barcelona "B" Team). Best to leave this empty.
Now in the bottom left hand box you will see other things - Stadium, Finances, and so on. Skip stadium for now (I will cover this later) and click on Finances.
On the Finances screen you have several tabs. These cover all the different types of finances, sell on clauses, debts and so on. I will explain the first two General and Other Income.
General:
- Balance - How much money the clubs has in the bank. (Note: when you start a game this will be adjusted depending on the division you start in, for example I set this to 2 billion and when I started my game in league 2 I had 10m in the bank.)
- Transfer Budget - The transfer budget for the first season.
- Remaining Wage Budget - How much more you can spend on wages after your entire team's wage is taken into account.
- Public Limited Company - Is it a PLC?
- Sugar Daddy - Foreground is an active sugar daddy who calls the shots and provides money, background is someone who is less involved but provides money, underwriter is not involved except financially.
- Stadium Rental Per Year - If you're renting your stadium put a figure here, but most likely you will want to own your stadium so set this at 0 (£)
- Average Match Ticket Price - Be realistic, this will change over time anyway.
- Average Season Ticket Price - Be realistic, this will change over time anyway.
- Number Of Season Ticket Holders - How many season tickets did you sell for the 10/11 season?
Other Income:
Other income is things like sponsorship deals, grants, memberships, individual TV deals, and so on. You can add as many or as few as you like.
Bear in mind that the money from sponsorship comes in before the start of the game, and so it is likely that it will be disregarded or offset by the game balance when you start the game, so it is best that anything you do here is for at least two seasons, or you probably wont see any benefit.
I'll give you an example below:
Let's say you want a kit sponsor for the first two seasons at 7.5m per season. you would set up as follows:
- Amount - 15,000,000 (£)
- Income Type - Kit Sponsor
- Start Date - 1.7.2010
- End Date - 1.7.2012
- Renew Income - No
- Fixed Value - No
Once you are done adding sponsorships let's go ahead and build ourselves a stadium.
To do this you need to click on Database in the top left box and Stadiums in the bottom left box. Then click the Add button at the bottom of the screen.
This will bring up the Details page of our shiny new stadium. I'll run through the options for you.
- Name - The name of your stadium (e.g. The Arena of Awesomeness)
- City - What city is it in or nearby? Should probably be the same as your team!
- Nation - What country is it in?
- Owner - Who owns it? You do! Click the arrow and search for the team you created, and set it as the owner.
- Capacity - What is the current capacity? (Max 200,000)
- Seating Capacity - How much of the current capacity is seated? (Must be less than or the same as the above capacity!)
- Expansion Capacity - How many seats could this stadium potentially hold if you expanded it? (Max 200,000 - set this to whatever you like, but no less than your current capacity!)
- Used Capacity - How much of the expansion capacity has been used? (Set this to the current capacity).
- Pitch Type - Grass or various other types... you probably want grass.
- Pitch Length - I like to set this to 120 yards, you get the chance to change it every season anyway.
- Pitch Width - I like to set this to 80 yards, again you can change it later.
- Pitch Condition - 1-200 (200 being the best).
- Pitch Deteriation Rate - How fast the pitch condition drops... lower is better.
- Pitch Recovery Rate - How fast the pitch recovers condition... higher is better.
- Date Pitch Last Relaid - I like to set this to 1.7.2010
- Pitch Relay Required Date - Leave this empty.
- Build Date - 2010? Whenever you want, but not in the future.
- Latitude - Tip: Use Google maps to find a nice place near your chosen city where you could put a stadium and then just enter the latitude that Google maps tells you. (e.g. 51.09).
- Longitude - Tip: Use Google maps to find a nice place near your chosen city where you could put a stadium and then just enter the longitude that Google maps tells you. (e.g. -1.73).
- State - The general state of (dis)repair of your stadium - very good is best.
- Decay - How fast the general condition deteriorates - 5 is normal.
- Used by National Team - Does a national team use your stadium? I leave this unset.
- Used by U21 National Team - Does a national under 21's team use your stadium? I leave this unset.
- Extinct - NO!
- Is Covered - Yes or no... does it have a retractable roof?
- Has Undersoil Heating - Yes or no, if you set this no then some of your winter games might get postponed due to frozen pitch.
- Nearby Stadium - Is there another stadium nearby? If so choose it.
Once you are done with this let's go back and assign your team to this stadium. Your team should be in your recent items list, the image below shows you where that is. Alternatively if it isn't, click on Database then Clubs and search for, then select, your team.
So your team is selected now, in the bottom left box click on Stadium.
The Stadium tab should now be displayed. First you want to select the stadium you just created, so click on the arrow next to Stadium and find and select it.
You can also create and/or add a reserve stadium if you like... this is where your reserve team would play its matches.
Then fill out the rest of the settings as you like, info is below.
- Attendance - Your average attendance for the first season.
- Minimum Attendance - What is the lowest attendance you could have.
- Maximum Attendance - The biggest attendance you could have.. I generally set this to higher than the potential maximum capacity of the stadium.
- Training - Training facilities quality from 1-20 (20 is world class).
- Youth Setup - Youth training facilities quality from 1-20 (20 is world class).
- Youth Academy - Does your club have a youth academy?
- Youth Recruitment -Quality of your youth recruitment scheme 1-20 (Higher numbers mean a higher number of good potential players and from a more diverse area).
Okay so that's finances and stadium sorted... time to design our kits!
Click on Kits and Colours in the bottom left box.
You will be presented with a screen with six tabs. Home Kit, Away Kit, Third Kit, and the same three options for goalkeeper kits. There are five kinds of kit type that you can create; Shirt, Shorts, Socks, Icon, Text. The first three are obvious, the icon is used in 2d match view to represent your players, and the text is how the title bar will look in game. You can also create more than one kit type in each category. For example I could have 3 different designs of Socks in my Home Kit - one for the league, one of the FA cup and one for the league cup. I will explain how to create your home shirt, and this should then give you the knowledge you need to make all the rest as you see fit.
Here is the Home Kit Shirt for my team:
This is how it looks in game:
To create yours just click Add and then select type Shirt.
Before you play around with the colours you should set your Kit Style by clicking on the Change button to the right. This will bring up a window where you can choose your Kit Style (this is only the pattern, you will set the colours in a minute).
Once you have this done you can then go through and change the various colours. Note that if you set the number colour such that it doesn't have a high enough contrast then it will be set white or black in the game.
The option "competition" is where you would choose which competition this kit item will be worn for, if you only want one kit type for all competitions, then leave it alone. In any case you should leave it alone for your main home kit. Also if you really want to go mad you can set a year on a kit and then it will only be worn for the season you set... this would mean you'd have to create a **** load of kits for each season and you can only do this before you start the game, so I reckon it's a best left well alone.
Next let's look at Current Affiliations. This is where you can set up relationships between your team and other teams, you can set up feeder teams or parent teams. You can also set up different options in each case. You can setup any type, local partnerships, international loans, work permit bypass, or first option... to name but a few. I'll show you how to create a feeder team for the purposes of marketing only - a so-called "commercial link".
Click on Current Affiliations in the bottom left box, then click the Add button. A new blank entry will appear in the list at the top. First thing you want to do is find a suitable team. I'm going to go for a Japanese team to boost my shirt sales in Japan. So I click on the arrow under Affiliated Club to bring up the search box. Here you can search by name, but I want to search by country so I click on Filter and then Customise..., then I click Add Condition and I chose Nation and enter Japan.
Click Ok and this brings up a list of all clubs in Japan. I want to find a club that has a lower world reputation than me (which is realistic for a feeder club) and my team has a world reputation of 5000, so I will look for a team around 2500-3500 if I can find one. First I click on Reputation up at the top to order the list by reputation, then I scroll down and look for a suitable team in my desired range. In this list there are some semi-pro and some pro teams, I'd like a pro team from somewhere I've heard of... so how about Galeos Kagoshima? They are in a city I know, are professional, and have a world rep of 3100. Perfect! I'll choose them.
Now you will see the options appear in the bottom box as shown below.
The options are explained below.
- Is Main Club - Ticked = you are the parent, unticked = you are the feeder.
- Start Date - When did the link begin?
- Affiliation Type - Stick with Normal Affiliated Club for now.
- Yearly Fee - How much the parent club pays the feeder each year (I am setting up a commercial link and these deals almost always involve an annual fee of 1-2m so I set mine at 1.5m).
- Players Move Freely - I set this to no, I haven't tried it in practice.
- Players Go On Loan - Parent can send players on loan to the feeder, wages paid by parent, no obligation to play the player. For my commercial link I don't tick this, it's not a loan affiliation I am creating.
- First Option to Buy - parent club has first option on any players feeder sells. I tick this.
- Play Friendlies - Feeder hosts an annual friendly - I tick this.
- Same Board - No no no!
- Financial Help - Parent gives money sometimes.
- Renewable - Not 100% sure what this does I leave it off. Presumably it means it gets renegotiated every season.
- Youth Players Training - Feeder can send players to parent for experience.
- Help With Facilities - One off lump sum given to feeder for facilities upgrade.
- Marketing Relations - Yes - this is the main purpose of my reason for this feeder.
- Scouting Knowledge Shared - I usually tick yes on this.
- Cannot Play in Same Division - If you are not in the same country it doesn't matter, so leave it. If you are in the same country then it's best to tick it. It's not really appropriate for one Premiership team to be the parent of another is it?
You can create as many as you like, to create parent affiliations just don't tick the Is Main Club option.
Okay so, by this stage we have created our club, we've built our stadium, we've designed our stylish kits, and we've set up some club affiliations (or none). What's next?
Well we have three more things to do; enter some competitions, create our staff and players, and set up any other stuff like rivalries and so on.
Let's take a look at competitions. You can have your team in any competition you like, the easiest way to do this is to replace an existing team. However I personally like to keep it as realistic as possible, so I first of all swap myself with a practically unknown non-league team then I swap myself again with a team from the division above, and so on until I am where I want to be. I'll show you how to do this to put your club in English League 2.
In the top left box click on Database and then in the bottom left box click on competitions. Search for "blue".
You will see Blue Square Bet Premier, Blue Square Bet North/South and Blue Square Bet North and Blue Square Bet South. If your team is in the North select the Blue Square Bet North or alternatively select the Blue Square Bet South. My club is in London so I've chosen Blue Square Bet South. Click on your chosen league and then click the Edit button down at the bottom. Then click on Teams in the bottom left box. I order by Reputation by clicking on the Reputation title then I decide on a team to replace.
I have decided to boot St. Albans out of the league and replace them (sorry any St. Albans fans) because they have almost the lowest Reputation and have the worst finances in the division at -40000 (£). So I click on St. Albans to select them, then click the Swap button down at the bottom. This will bring up the familiar Filter window - from here you can search for and select the team that you created.
Now your team is in the bottom league it's just a case of repeating this process to move them up a few divisions. So let's move them up to the Blue Square Bet Premier. Click on Database in the top left box, then on Competitions in the bottom left box and search for "blue" again. This time select the Blue Square Bet Premier and click the Edit button. Once again I look for a suitable candidate to relegate... this time I've gone for Histon because they have a low reputation, poor finances, and also I have never heard of them. So I click on Histon and then click on Swap and find my team. This will promote us to the Blue Square Bet Premier and relegate Histon to the Blue Square Bet South.
I just have to do this one last time, to get my team into nPower League 2. I repeat the steps above but this time instead of searching for "blue" I search for npower. Select nPower League 2 then click on Teams and find your vict.. err I mean candidate for relegation. It's a bit tricky for me this time, since the lower reputation teams all have decent finances... but let's go for Accrington (Stanley? Who are they? Exactly.) just because I still remember those **** milk adverts. Same again, I select Accrington and then click on Swap, find my team, and click Ok. Now I'm in the nPower League 2. Yay.
If you wanted you could repeat this process all the way to the Premiership. Alternatively if you don't care about continuity you could just go ahead and swap your team directly with a team in the league you want to start in (they'd probably climb back up again in a few seasons anyway).
What about the cups? I hear you cry. Well as it happens this is done automatically each season so you don't need to worry about it. Note: The FA Cup has a rule whereby a club must be three years old before it can participate, as such if you set your club founded date to 2010 you wont be entered into the FA cup until your third season.
Moving on, it's time for the bit that takes the most amount of time. Creating all of your staff and players.
Now it is worth pointing out that if you want to you can steal players and staff from other teams or appoint unemployed people as much as you like - you do this by clicking on Staff and Players when you have your team selected, and then click the Add button and search for them. You will save a lot of time doing this, but you'll probably mess up a lot of other teams in the process (unless you go for entirely unemployed people, which you can search for using the filters). So I will show you how to create a Chairman, a Coach, and a Player. Then you will have the knowledge to create people and assign them to your club to your heart's content. I spent a good 6 hours on this part last time I created my team, but I went into detail creating staff from different counties and set up realistic languages spoken and so on... you don't really need to go into all that detail if you don't want to. I'll show you how anyway just in case you're **** like me.
So let's start with the Chairman. First things first we need to create him. You should know the drill by now... click on Database in the top left box, then click on People in the bottom left box, finally click the Add button to create a new person. Choose Non Player as we are creating our Chairman.
First lets do the Details which is the screen that comes up first.
Most of these options are self-explanatory, just name him or her (ignore common name) feel free to ignore ethnicity, hair colour and skin tone, (they don't seem to make a difference anyway), choose a date and place of birth and country, don't give him an agent - in the case of players they will hire their own anyway. If you want to create a footballing history feel free, I didn't.
Once you have the basic details done lets sort out his Contract, so click on Contract in the bottom left box. First you need to choose the club he is employed at obviously you want to choose the team you created. Once you do that you will see a bunch of options as shown in the image below.
Set his job as Chairman and set a Date Joined and that is all you need to worry about for the Chairman - the rest is done automatically when you start the game.
Next let's look at Person Data. There are three tabs, Attributes, Languages, Days At Club/In Nation. For the chairmen the latter two don't matter (although I did give my guy some Language skills). The only one we need to worry about is the Attributes. NOTE: Anything you leave at 0 will be set automatically when the game starts. For me the two most important things I want in my Chairman are Ambition and Loyalty so I set both of those at the maximum of 20. The rest is up to you, leave it at 0 to be filled in automatically or set it up however you want, I don't think the other traits make that much difference.
So let's move on to Non Player Data. This is the most important screen for any person you create but for the Chairman we only care about two: Ability and Reputation and Non Tactical Attributes.
All you need to worry about on the first tab, Ability and Reputation, is current ability and potential ability. I want an awesome Chairman, so I set them both at 200. Leave the reputations as the are (0), they will be auto-generated. Now click on the Non Tactical Attributes tab at the top.
The only attributes we care about for the Chairman are the penultimate four: Business, Interference, Patience, and Resources.
For the best Chairman in my opinion you want high Business, Patience, and Resources and very low Interference.
Okay that's the Chairman done. Let's make a Coach.
Click on Database in the top left box, then click on People in the bottom left box, finally click the Add button to create a new person. Choose Non Player as we are creating a Coach.
Details is the screen that comes up first.
Again just name him or her (ignore common name) feel free to ignore ethnicity, hair colour and skin tone, (they don't seem to make a difference anyway), choose a date and place of birth and country, don't give him an agent - in the case of players they will hire their own anyway. If you want to create a footballing history feel free, I didn't.
Next is Contract, so click on Contract in the bottom left box. First you need to choose the club he is employed at obviously you want to choose the team you created.
Set his job as Coach, Youth Team Coach, 1st Team Coach, Fitness Coach, or Goalkeeping Coach and set a Date Joined. I like to give my staff a nice long contract, I set mine to 1.7.2020 (ten year contract) you can choose whatever you like. This guy will need a wage... you can leave it at 0 and the game will choose one for you, or you can choose it yourself now.
Next it's Person Data. I like to make most of my coaches multi-lingual, so add a bunch of languages on the Languages tab, but you don't have to. The Attributes that are important for a coach are debatable, but I like to give them high Adaptability and Loyalty. You will also want to set the Job Preferences Coach (or Fitness/Goalkeeping, as appropriate) to 20.
Now it's time for the Non Player Data. This is the most important screen for any person you create. For the Coach we care about: Ability and Reputation, Tactical Attributes, and Non Tactical Attributes.
For Ability and Reputation we want good current ability and potential ability. I set most of my Coaches at something like 140 Current Ability and 185 Potential Ability. The main difference here is that we really do care about the Reputations. To avoid our awesome staff being stolen by other teams we want to give them as low a Reputation as possible. For this reason I set all three, Current Reputation, Home Reputation, and World Reputation, to 50.
Now for the Tactical Attributes there is only one attribute in here that we care about, but it is probably the most important attribute for a Coach, Scout, or Assistant Manager and that is Determination. I always set this to 20. Always.
The final tab, Non Tactical Attributes, is very, very, important for all active staff. For different staff you want different things, and I would imagine most of you know what those things are, and if you don't you can find the information easily elsewhere so I am not going to list what each staff member needs the most. For this example I'm going to make a World Class Defensive Coach. Remember everything I leave at 0 will be set by the game anyway.
If you can't tell from the image above what I have given this guy is:
- Hardness of Training: 15
- Level of Discipline: 20
- Motivating: 20
- Working With Youngsters: 20
- Coaching Defending: 20
- Coaching Tactical: 20
Of course you might want to make a more realistic coach... or you might not want to get too specific... anything you leave at 0 will be generated when the game starts, and will be determined by various factors including the Current Ability.
Finally let's create a player. I'm going to create a Goalkeeper for this example.
Click on Database in the top left box, then click on People in the bottom left box, finally click the Add button to create a new person. Choose Player as we are creating a Goalkeeper.
Details is the screen that comes up first.
Again just name him or her (ignore common name) you might want to fill in ethnicity, hair colour and skin tone, because for player this will determine what they look like on the pitch. Choose an appropriate date of birth, and place of birth and country, don't give him an agent - players they will hire their own anyway. If you want to create a footballing history feel free, I didn't. There are another couple of options for a Player including Declared for Nation where you can choose a nation for them to declare for international play, as well as some extra retirement options. I generally leave these alone, although I did have some of my future stars declared for England.
For a Player there is a whole screen dealing with Contract. Choose your club for Club, set his job as Player, set a Date Joined and a contract expiry. I like to give my players a nice long five year contract however they will almost certainly renegotiate the first time some other club comes sniffing. Set a Wage or leave it blank... again it will be auto generated, as will the various Bonuses and Clauses if you don't bother to set them.
Time for Person Data. I like to make my player's languages realistic, so English for English people, Dutch and French for Belgians, etc, make sure you add at least one language on the Languages tab. The Attributes for a player are hugely diverse, I like to give them high Loyalty, Ambition, Professionalism, and Temperament. Unless you plan to have this player for his entire career and beyond, you can leave Job Preferences at 0 and they will be generated (don't forget that these numbers can be influenced in the latter stages of a player's career by manager suggestions).
For a player we also care about the Days At Club/In Nation because most competitions have some rules regarding Home Grown and Club Trained players. So click on this tab and Add a new entry by choosing your new club and entering 1095 Days (3 years) or more and tick the box Between Age of 15 And 21 Only.
Now the big one, Player Data, this is where we work our magic. There are nine tabs to deal with here General, Positions, Mental Attributes, Physical Attributes, Technical Attributes, Goalkeeping Attributes, Preferred Moves, Injuries, and Bans. The bad news is that you need to fill in quite a lot on most all but Bans and Injuries, the good news is that there is a short cut.
Huge Time Saving Short Cut: Set a Current Ability, Potential Ability, and fill in the Positions tab, and leave everything else at 0 - they will be auto-generated when the game first starts. I did this with my two full backs, I gave them 130 Current Ability, and set DL or DR to 20 and the game generated two decent Full Backs.
If you decide you want to get into the nitty-gritty and fine tune everything yourself, remember that you can leave anything at 0 to have it auto-generated.
With that said, here is my fine-tuning for my Wonderkid Goalkeeper.
A note on Person relationships. I always set all my staff and players to have my team as their favourite team, you do this on each Person on the Relationships screen, but if you want to you can also set them up so that they all have each other as favourite people - it takes time but it is worth it because, combined with high Loyalty, it makes them almost immune to being poached by other clubs (although players will still need contract deals regularly re-negotiating to stay if they are very good).
Once you're done with all that you can also add some rivalries, favourite people, and so on. With your team selected just click on Relationships in the bottom left box.
And that's how you create a team.
There are also some other things that you can optionally play with - create club records and a club history, set some current tactical attributes.. but they will all get generated as you play the game so for me it's pointless.
Hope this was helpful. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask, I'll subscribe to the thread so I get an email when you reply.
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Inserting Custom Kits, Logos, & Face Pictures
Someone requested help with making custom graphics for your new club, so I have added this bit here.
The most important thing to note about adding your own graphics is how to set up the config file, which tells FM how to use your custom graphics. This is what I will explain below.
The first thing you need to do is navigate to your Sports Interactive user folder (this is the place where your save games, tactics, training schedules, and so on, are kept).
In Windows XP it's usually:
My Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2011\
In Windows 7 it's usually:
Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2011\
In this folder you need to create a new folder called "graphics".
Now from here it doesn't matter how you arrange your files and folders. You can make any you want like "kits" or "kits\clubs\" or whatever. The reason why it doesn't matter so much is because you need a file called a config file to tell FM 2011 which images you want to use, and where.
What's the config file? Well it's a record file in XML format, but don't worry it's not complicated.
First it is worth noting that you can have more than one config file. For example you could have one large master config file that just sits in your graphics folder (that's how I do it) or if you like you can have several config files in sub directories (and sub sub directories). For simplicity I will just show you how to do it with one config file.
So the config file tells Football Manager where to find your images and what to do with them by "mapping" one location to another.
You can create a config file using Notepad, but to make it easier to read I recommend using a programmer's text editor such as Textpad (which is free). This is because they do something called syntax highlighting (basically it makes the text of a code file easier to read, and since XML is a type of code, most text editors support it).
The config file is named "config.xml".
The start of your config file should be:
Code:
<record>
<!-- resource manager options -->
<!-- dont preload anything in this folder -->
<boolean id="preload" value="false"/>
<!-- turn off auto mapping -->
<boolean id="amap" value="false"/>
<list id="maps">The end of your config file should be:
Code:
</list>
</record>In the middle is where we tell Football Manager about our files.
The format is pretty simple but is slightly different for each type of image. I have listed them below, and further on I will show you a full example config file.
Wherever it says "FILE LOCATION" should be the location of the image file in your graphics folder. For example if the image is in the same folder as the config file (just in the graphics folder) you just need to tell it the name (without the .png extension). So you might have an image called "awesome utd home kit.png" - instead of "FILE LOCATION" you would simply put "awesome utd home kit" (without the quotes). If your "awesome utd home kit.png" was inside another folder called "kits" (e.g. graphics\kits\awesome utd home kit.png) then you would put "kits/awesome utd home kit" or if it is in a folder called "home", inside "kits" (e.g. graphics\kits\home\awesome utd home kit.png) then you would put "kits/home/awesome utd home kit" and so on.
Wherever it says "UNIQUE ID" it should simply be the ID of the target club in the case of logos and kits, or person in the case of face images. You can find the unique id of a person or club but turning on "show unique ids" option in game, or having a look using the data editor.
Also note anything in between "<!--" and "-->" is called a comment and is ignored by the game. This is how you can make little notes in a code file that don't affect anything, they just help the reader.
Code:
<!-- Normal Logo (badge) -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/club/UNIQUE ID/logo"/>
<!-- Large Logo (badge) -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/club/UNIQUE ID/logo/huge"/>
<!-- Small Logo (badge) -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/club/UNIQUE ID/icon"/>
<!-- Left Background Logo (badge) -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/club/UNIQUE ID/logo/background/left"/>
<!-- Right Background Logo (badge) -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/club/UNIQUE ID/logo/background/right"/>
<!-- Face Pictures -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/person/UNIQUE ID/portrait"/>
<!-- 2D Home Kit -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/team/UNIQUE ID/kits/home"/>
<!-- 2D Away Kit -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/team/UNIQUE ID/kits/away"/>
<!-- 2D Third Kit -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/team/UNIQUE ID/kits/third"/>
<!-- 3D Home Kit -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/team/UNIQUE ID/kit_textures/home"/>
<!-- 3D Away Kit -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/team/UNIQUE ID/kit_textures/away"/>
<!-- 3D Third Kit -->
<record from="FILE LOCATION" to="graphics/pictures/team/UNIQUE ID/kit_textures/third"/>So my full config file for my custom club (who's ID is 2062002128) is:
Code:
<record>
<!-- resource manager options -->
<!-- dont preload anything in this folder -->
<boolean id="preload" value="false"/>
<!-- turn off auto mapping -->
<boolean id="amap" value="false"/>
<list id="maps">
<!-- Normal Logo (badge) -->
<record from="logos/normal/awesome utd badge" to="graphics/pictures/club/2062002128/logo"/>
<!-- Large Logo (badge) -->
<record from="logos/large/awesome utd badge" to="graphics/pictures/club/2062002128/logo/huge"/>
<!-- Small Logo (badge) -->
<record from="logos/small/awesome utd badge icon" to="graphics/pictures/club/2062002128/icon"/>
<!-- Left Background Logo (badge) -->
<record from="logos/background/left/awesome utd bgl" to="graphics/pictures/club/2062002128/logo/background/left"/>
<!-- Right Background Logo (badge) -->
<record from="logos/background/left/awesome utd bgr" to="graphics/pictures/club/2062002128/logo/background/right"/>
<!-- Face Pictures -->
<record from="faces/vini holden" to="graphics/pictures/person/2065000013/portrait"/>
<!-- 2D Home Kit -->
<record from="kits/awesome utd 2d home" to="graphics/pictures/team/2062002128/kits/home"/>
<!-- 2D Away Kit -->
<record from="kits/awesome utd 2d away" to="graphics/pictures/team/2062002128/kits/away"/>
<!-- 2D Third Kit -->
<record from="kits/awesome utd 2d third" to="graphics/pictures/team/2062002128/kits/third"/>
<!-- 3D Home Kit -->
<record from="kits/awesome utd 3d home" to="graphics/pictures/team/2062002128/kit_textures/home"/>
<!-- 3D Away Kit -->
<record from="kits/awesome utd 3d away" to="graphics/pictures/team/2062002128/kit_textures/away"/>
<!-- 3D Third Kit -->
<record from="kits/awesome utd 3d third" to="graphics/pictures/team/2062002128/kit_textures/third"/>
</list>
</record>As for how to actually create your own images? Well you'll need an image editing program like GIMP or Photoshop and then do a search for help creating FM 2011 graphics, because there are a lot of easy to find helpful guides out there.
Hope this helps!
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