As all the readers from this blog probably know already, I am far from being the most innovative manager in the community, but I make it up by reading what everyone has to say and making up my mind about what I think works and what doesn't. During my first season I had already devised a rough plan to how I intended to play FML, and I say rough because I just didn't understand the game well enough yet to make any real plans bat that point.
Similarly to pretty much everything else I do in life, I like to have a plan and my plans tend to be long term. For FML, my plan was to build my team and reputation slowly but in a way I could manage. My first big decision was to start working on my stadium still on my first season. My idea was that I shouldn't be spending all the money I had on players that I coulnd't use well anyway. Instead I decided I should spend my money on something that I can't screw up, which is my stadium. The fallacy here is that you can very much screw up your stadium and that's what I want to talk about in this and maybe future posts.
My team was mediocre in my first season, and I have to say losing is not that much fun really, but I knew better and I knew I just had to hang in there and do my best without spending any more money than I needed to. By the end of my first season I had already started building a tier-2 Aziendale stand and soon enough I would be able to start working on some seats. I just knew that despite my performance my team would eventually start to climb up in reputation. It took a while but I got to 2 stars before the end of my first season and I believe 2.5 stars before the start of my second season. Thats when I started to really need some more seats at Carlin Park (my stadium). I think the timing was great and with some help from Jackswan's blog I learned enough about stadium building to at least get an idea of what to do. SI didn't do a great job at presenting us with a tutorial on stadium building so it looks really intimidating for new users. No one can possibly be confortable with spending millions of pounds on something they don't really understand, and I don't blame them, ideally my posts can help some folks out that way.
My main advice, is something Jack has said many times, but I completely agree, build ahead of time. Don't wait until you need 18000 seats to build them, look at where you are and where you think you will be next, from that information (which I will talk more about later) you should get a sense of what you need and how much you need. It takes an average of 10? days to get a 2 tiered stand up and probably another 10 days to get seats in it. That's almost a whole season that you are not making money off of your fans. There really is no point in spending all your money on players, building your reputation and getting more fans if you are not making more money and investing back on your team. Buying players is seldomly an investment, and when it is, it still isn't as good of an investment as building corporate boxes. So play smart, there needs to be a balance between how much you spend on players and how much you spend on infrastructure. From what I've been seeing in my budget so far, I have been spending on average 45% of my income on my stadium while spending around 35% to 40% on my players, and even then I have been having trouble keeping up with my reputation. The situation stabilized a bit last week because I was on vacation and my rep was frozen, but even now that I have finished my first two 2 tiered aziendales and seats I still think I'm slightly behind in terms of infrastructure. For the first time I had enough seats for everyone, but that lasted me a good 24 hours only. So don't wait too long to start building your stadium, unless its your first week or two in the game, there is no better time to start investing than now.
As a final aspect of stadium building, I feel like I need to mention something Jack has been preaching people about for months, I'm talking about the costs of building. When you first look at your budget and you see that it will cost you several millions to get what you need don't freak out. Unlike in real life, SI was nice enough to give out interest free mortgages and still pay us interest for our savings, if only real banks were like that. In other words, you don't need to have 3 million to start building a 3 million pound project. I got to the point where in my second season I had a 4 million pound project going on when I only had about 1.5 to 2 million in my account. My favorite installment option is the 8xweekly pay, which means that with no downpayment you can still build this project and start paying 500k installments every week for the next two months. May seem like a lot of money but considering that within a few weeks you will be making more money then you are now, these 500k blows will certainly be softened over time. Also, how many times I've seen players spending 500k on a player after their first season. A player with 500k aq will cost you 500+(10xwage) which would be 700k for that season if the player had a 20k wage. Intead spending 500k on your stadium will bring in more income which later on will allow you to buy better and more expensive players in a sustainable fashion.
In the end my strategy in FML has more to do with economics than it has with football and tactics. The truth is, the game is a manager game not a coach game. To succeed you need to be not only good at coaching your team through games but also thinking about all other aspects of the game as well.
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