International Domestic Soccer Discussion

[Commonwealth of Baker Park]

not to step on this excellent guide, but a personal aside:
I've been working on designing kits for all of the clubs in my leagues (3 pro, 1 semi-pro and 1 bottom tier) and to Neph's point--it gets tough trying to have a tiny bit of originality with colors and combinations:
Historically (and very generally) red denotes working class, blue is school/church origins and white is middle/merchant class. Again, I said Generally.
I have 124 clubs and so far I've finished 102. Different shades, different combinations, the use of vertical stripes or hoops or quarters can break up the monotony. And the oddball colors too--orange, green, yellow, black, violet or purple. Palermo in Italy has pink/salmon shirts and aqua or teal is newer and different.
If you were starting out with 18 or 20 top flight clubs/teams, maybe break the color line down: 3 or 4 with Red, 3 or 4 Blue, 2 or 3 white, and the rest a mix of others.
But I wouldn't obsess about this stuff right from the start, unless you are visual and arty and it's something that you are good at.

[The Plough Islands]

not to step on this excellent guide, but a personal aside:
Historically (and very generally) red denotes working class, blue is school/church origins and white is middle/merchant class. Again, I said Generally.

To add to the above, an important caveat is that those meanings for those colours developed in our universe, with our human on Earth cultural background, and our world where Ho Chi Minh had very strong opinions about lazy sports journalism (it's true!). In Nationstates, obviously, that does not necessarily apply, so you have the freedom to associate different colours with different origins - this is a very good way to distinguish your league if you're graphically inclined and give it a national flavour (if you've ever seen the flag of the UK...)
What does still apply is that football is a sport where being able to pick your teammates out from a distance is important, so simple, clear designs generally predominate in the absence of any sixth senses; stripes/hoops/chequers in two colours are as complex as the vast majority of real life kits get, and strong colour contrasts are needed between opposing teams; if half of your teams wear green, they'll need their away/change kits often!

[Oberour Ar Moro]

Kudos to Nephara for putting together such a fantastic guide.

In naming clubs, if you're looking for inspiration, Wikipedia has a really interesting article on association football club names. Not only will it give you an idea of what clubs are named across the globe, you can see different naming conventions, and get ideas for other ways your teams might be named.

[Nephara]

ROSTERS
It's all well and good to talk about clubs, but these matches aren't played on paper. Even when they literally are played on paper. There's still the business of the meat market, filling those clubs with the players that will help them to success. How can you talk about what happens in a game, or a season, or about a year's prospects, without discussing the players?

WHAT IS A [DEMONYM] PLAYER LIKE?
Compared to making 11-25 players for your BoF roster, filling a league is going to take more names, and a strong identity of what a player from your nation is like. In practice, pretty much RL countries have certain 'blueprints' for the players they produce, due to the environment, finance and culture.

Using IC examples: Nephara is a very grounded, professional environment, most of its players drawn from the working class, where hard work and strength of personality are valued above all. Players are encouraged to compete hard from a young age. Ceynes, being an offshoot, produces similar players.

Think about weaknesses as much as strengths, too.
Maybe physicality is emphasised over technique. A lot of huge strikers and defenders are produced, but maybe not so many creative playmakers.
Maybe your country believes largely in aesthetics over pragmatics, and would rather lose 5-4 than win 1-0.
Maybe your youth development is lavishly funded, with a focus on technique - but perhaps a tendency to over-coach players, and to lack competitive edge.
Maybe it's even something as simple as just people from your country tending to the short and lithe, which has obvious advantages and disadvantages. Pretty much any environmental factor can lead to inspiration.

NAMES
Establishing a coherent name scheme is important, though you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If everyone from your country just has bog-standard Anglo-Saxon names, that's perfectly fine. Similarly, if you like having an aesthetic of your nation being a hideous primordial soup of a thousand different cultures slammed into each other, that's fine too. But it's helpful to set those boundaries to help you build your brand and conjure up more names.

How do you get names? There's plenty of ways, and it depends on what's right for you. A lot of people take inspiration from name generators, like that on behindthename. My own approach is whenever I see a surname I like that fits into a Nepharim or Brenecian aesthetic, I note it down, slam a first name onto it and when I'm regenerating players or managers later down the line I have a pool to draw from. For some people, it's easiest just to come up with names on the fly. There's no right or wrong approach - though I would advise not being overreliant on name generation. It's nice when you need to come up with a block of new guys for whatever reason, like when you're first expanding your rosters from one stage to another, but if you use them for everyone all the time, pretty quickly the same names keep cropping up.

You're also more than welcome to take inspiration from your IC surroundings. If most of your guys are Italian, but you're right next to Brenecia, and you want to use that as an excuse to add some Celtic-Colonial English-style names to your pool, I'd be happy as a clam. People migrate! Especially away from Brenecia.

AGES
It's also very important to note down every player's age. One of the core factors of NSS is the flow of time, both internationally and in club terms. On the national stage, your Baptism of Fire heroes will probably be a markedly different group to your first World Cup qualifiers, who will in turn be a completely different side to your first World Champions, should you get that far. And on the club front, expect even more flux.

As a general rule, players tend to come through and be introduced to senior football between 17-20 (this will obviously be somewhat later if you have a collegiate football system of note), peak roughly between 25 and 30 (goalkeepers, centre-backs and large immobile strikers somewhat later, pacy, tricky wingers somewhat earlier), start to slow down in their 30s and retire around 35-36, unless injury forces them out sooner or they're particularly hardy. It's very rare for players to make it into their forties still playing, and these are usually goalkeepers. There are a couple of players IRL who managed to draw out their careers into their fifties, but one, Stanley Matthews, was from an era before sprinting had been invented, and the other, Kazu Miura, is pretty much still going only because nobody dares tell him to stop. Managers tend to retire in their 60s, and usually only manage ten years at their true peak, as tactics move on without them.

So okay, you have a 23-year old guy. Are they going to stay 23 eternally? While it's not unknown to have players age in 'real time', this tends to be stifling OOC - the same names in the same places for your entire time on this site - and faintly ridiculous IC, with players playing 18 World Cup qualifiers in maybe 20 days, having a World Cup every three months. The most common methods are to either age 1 year per UICA season (2 per WC), or 2 per UICA (4 per WC). Granted, UICA seasons and World Cups don't actually necessarily take place at a 1:2 ratio, but it's generally close enough.

DEMOGRAPHICS
Not so much about race; think more species. Yes, NSS is a wild and wonderful place in which the world's best goalkeeper for a decade or so was a cartoon pegasus. Gender's important, as well. Most of the best leagues around the multiverse accept players of any gender, though you are welcome to have a league that only accepts one gender. You may also choose to have a separate men's and a women's league and RP both, but keep in mind that only one of these is going to be relevant to UICA, and the other risks being perceived as vastly inferior without a significant body of RP to massage that.

The Ceyne Isles will take players who are male, female or anything in between. A 'two legs good, four legs bad' rule permits humanoids such as elves, satyrs or the Vloo of Cosumar to play, but ponies from the Equestrian States, for example, would have no place in the league.

KEY PLAYERS ONLY
This method is just to write down the most 'relevant' players for a given side. Internationals, stars, captains, veterans... two to five people who genuinely matter. Assuming you've entered an international tournament, you already have a starting point - everyone from that roster is a key player, and so will any foreigners you buy.

In the Ceynes roster, Imperial Falston already account for three players - the 29-year old rightback Tanya Landon, the 33-year old centreback Tomas Spearman and the 33-year old holding midfielder Shay Wilshire. Sexy? No, but as good a place to start as any. But Imperial are a glamorous side, and also, who will be credited for their goals? So we'll say they've got a 26-year old striker, Gideon Rowan, who is seriously knocking on the door of the national team and has been freshly poached off... Roschester Pride. And it's also nice to include their manager (or head coach, if that's the terminology you're more familiar with - there is a technical difference, but it's largely irrelevant for NSS purposes). We'll say it's a seasoned 59-year old, Cathleen Sharpe, whose acerbic temper with the press make her an easy target, and whose tactical acumen have helped reinforce Imperial's dominance. In the header to their section of the season preview, that might look like this;

Imperial Falston
Home Colours: All-white with purple trim
Away Colours: Black / black / white
Stadium: Golden Gate (28,000)
Nickname: Imperial
Manager: Cathleen Sharpe (59)
Key Players: Tanya Landon (RB, 29), Tomas Spearman (CB, 33), Shay Wilshere (DM, 33), Gideon Rowan (ST, 26)

Roschester Pride are, as established, a younger and more dynamic outfit. They also have a couple of international representatives - the 21-year olds Corsica Green and Crowley Mathers - and we'll say they have a clever winger and an acrobatic goalkeeper, too. Both of them youngish, both ripe to be sniped by a bigger club. Fitting in with the holistic approach, the manager, Theresa Wilhelm, used to be their reserves manager.

Roschester Pride
Home Colours: Purple / white / purple
Away Colours: Yellow / black / yellow
Stadium: Lion's Vantage (17,000)
Nickname: Pride
Manager: Theresa Wilhelm (43)
Key Players: Mathom Drury (GK, 25), Corsica Green (LB, 21), Tamara Rutherford (RM, 24), Crowley Mathers (ST, 21)

Even lowly AFC Mosstown have a player of international class, the experienced 32-year old striker, Joseph Luther. But as far as players who deserve notice, it's probably more going to be defensive players. We'll say they have a doughty defensive midfielder from nearby Brenecia (this isn't normally something you can just assume, but Brenecia's a puppet) who has some A-League experience, de facto making him one of the best players in the league, and a promising local goalkeeper, Rasmus Garrick. They might be weak by CSL standards, but they're still here, and not going down without a fight. The manager is weary 64-year old Arran Cohen, a seasoned campaigner between the top two tiers, but very much in his twilight.

AFC Mosstown
Home Colours: All green with white trim
Away Colours: Blue / white / blue
Stadium: The Ridge (8,500)
Nickname: the Millers
Manager: Arran Cohen (64)
Key Players: Rasmus Garrick (GK, 22), Rook Whitman (DM, 35, BRE), Joseph Luther (ST, 32)

STARTING XI
Personally, I feel as though the Key Players Only approach is limited, at least for a top flight. If you want to ease your way into things, it's a starting point, but by nature it tends to be limiting and discourage change. Having a Starting XI encourages change, because it highlights weak points in a team that you might look to strengthen in a transfer window, and gives a bigger-picture view. You might also want to include a 'Notable Reserves' feature in case there's anyone notable (aka, anyone whose name has ever come up before) that isn't a usual starting XI. Also, keep in mind that 'starting XI' is just whoever's going to be there assuming form, fitness and tactical changes. Realistically, every side is going to switch things up, bring on substitutes, and try and blood young local talent - it's just that by taking the Starting XI approach, you don't need to regen whatever garbage backup 28-year old right midfielder is going to get three starts and none goals a season before vanishing from the top flight next season, because ultimately, they don't really matter.

So let's bulk out our three examples some more, and take the time to add the formations we settled on in the Identity stages. You might also like to add squad numbers! I like squad numbers. A lot. Probably to an unhealthy degree. To cut a long history short, teams used to just give the numbers 1 through 11 to whoever was on the pitch, and this is still how it works in some amateur leagues today. But nowadays, professional sides give all their players numbers at the start of the season. Generally, senior players will wear 1 through 30, and anything higher than that is for academy products promoted to fill gaps. The best will usually be in that 1-11 range. This used to just be numbering all of your guys from back to front and right to left, but because of how tactics have developed, modern numbering systems tend to be a lot more chaotic. The English tradition started with the two defenders (yes, I know) being 2 and 3, but two of the midfielders, the guys wearing 5 and 6, were eventually pushed back between them. Three of the five forwards were in turn pushed back into the midfield. Hence, the English tradition is that players in a 4-4-2 will be numbered 1; 2, 5, 6, 3; 7, 4, 8, 11; 9, 10. You are, of course, welcome to do whatever you want. This is also a good place to mark out a 'captain', a senior player expected to provide leadership to their peers. When in doubt, just throw it on an old guy who's been there for a long time.

Imperial Falston
Starting XI (4-3-3): 1 - Grey Thistleman (29); 2 - Tanya Landon (29), 18 - Marietta Klein (23, NPH), 6 - Tomas Spearman (33), 3 - Clarisse Henderson (26); 8 - Shanna Quarterstaff (25), 4 - Shay Wilshere (33, c), 11 - Chloe Shufford (25); 7 - Cassius Hereford (28), 21 - Gideon Rowan (26), 10 - Bryson Curtis (31)
Notable Reserves: 5 - CB - Bors Longman (37)

Roschester Pride
Starting XI (4-4-2): 1 - Mathom Drury (25); 2 - Esther Comstock (27), 5 - Clement Rinehart (28), 19 - Persephone Wright (23), 22 - Corsica Green (21); 7 - Tamara Rutherford (24), 8 - Blake Findlay (28), 6 - Jeorge Morgan (24), 11 - Jane Wyclif (31, c); 9 - Mia Foreman (33), 14 - Crowley Mathers (21)

AFC Mosstown
Starting XI (4-1-4-1); 12 - Rasmus Garrick (22); 2 - Ivan Stoneshoe (28), 5 - Clifford Russ (30), 6 - Cherami Barr (36, c), 16 - Jess Jackson (23); 4 - Rook Whitman (35, BRE); 32 - Leigh Arnham (19), 8 - Roxana Clarke (26), 14 - Harrison Enfield (29), 11 - Rutger Margetson (26); 10 - Joseph Luther (32)

FULL ROSTER
Fuck it, maybe you just want to list every senior player at the club. My strong personal recommendation would be not to do this in your first season. Build up to it first. Also, this is definitely something to have alongside a Starting XI! You don't want to make other players just guess which 11 of your 23-25 listed guys are the best.

That said, this comes with several advantages. When you want to drop one player for one reason or another, you have a ready-made replacement with an actual history to step in for them. Often, you can set up a succession within the club - if that 33-year old striker doesn't cut the mustard, but you like the looks of her 23-year old backup, that solves itself. And that can extend to the national team, as well, if you generate an 18-year old with a great name and can start shaping their career from the very beginning, with a view to bringing them through the ranks to start and eventually grooming them for national selection. It is, however, a lot of work, and cuts somewhat into your freedom of movement. See how you feel about Starting XIs first.

THE INEXORABLE MARCH OF TIME AND HOW TO FIGHT IT
So you score your first season. It goes great! And you've submitted it and all that jazz. So what comes next? Let's take that Imperial roster and age everyone up by a year.

Imperial Falston
Starting XI (4-3-3): 1 - Grey Thistleman (30); 2 - Tanya Landon (30), 18 - Marietta Klein (24, NPH), 6 - Tomas Spearman (34), 3 - Clarisse Henderson (27); 8 - Shanna Quarterstaff (26), 4 - Shay Wilshere (34, c), 11 - Chloe Shufford (26); 7 - Cassius Hereford (29), 21 - Gideon Rowan (27), 10 - Bryson Curtis (32)
Notable Reserves: 5 - CB - Bors Longman (38)

Oof. You know, Longman's not looking so hot. It's probably time to scrub him off entirely. And a 32-year old winger, well, Imperial can obviously look to improve on that... and Shanna Quarterstaff, well, on reflection I think I stream-of-consciousnessed in too much of the recent focus on RL guy Sean Longstaff and I just kind of want to yeet her out into space now. So, okay, scrub those off the list and we're left with... no left winger. So either we generate a new one (likely the backup from last season, only now given a name), promote the backup (if we have a full roster, which, again, I recommend working your way up to) or turn to the transfer market. Imperial like buying players. So maybe they poach Rutger Margetson off AFC Mosstown, who were probably relegated. Or maybe, well... it's a big wide world out there, isn't it?

The transfer window opens every UICA cutoff. It's currently closed, but when it reopens after your first season, here is a FAQ for using it. viewtopic.php?p=35260662#p35260662

Next up, we start looking into FORMAT. How do we turn what you've got into a product to be read and adjudged?

[Commonwealth of Baker Park]

not to step on this excellent guide, but a personal aside:
Historically (and very generally) red denotes working class, blue is school/church origins and white is middle/merchant class. Again, I said Generally.

To add to the above, an important caveat is that those meanings for those colours developed in our universe, with our human on Earth cultural background, and our world where Ho Chi Minh

Another caveat I didn't think of . Appreciate the clarification.

[Abanhfleft]

Really nice guide you've got going here, Neph. Even though I've been around the NS Sports community for a good few years, I'm still learning things. If I eventually have the time, I'll take notes from your guide and use it to clean up my own leagues.

[Nephara]

FORMATTING
This one kind of got out of hand.

THE CHALLENGE IS TO MAKE PEOPLE CARE
Here is a league table.

What can you glean from this? Really. I mean... it seems to me that a club caled Valletta is good. And Balzan is pretty good. And Lija are fucking terrible. I guess it's pretty rad that Floriana chalked up the best goal difference in the league and only lost four times but are still stranded in midtable. And... that's... about it. Unless you are Maltese, you probably don't really care about what you're seeing here, and your life is not going to be significantly changed by the knowledge that St. Andrews stayed up in the 2017/18 Maltese Premier League despite scoring the fewest goals in the league.

Now watch this video. Hope you like dance music, the original soundtrack got taken down through a copyright claim, but I digress.

Notice how shit is actually happening. Same clubs! Same country! But suddenly there's a narrative. There's excitement. Apparently Birkirkara, in the yellow and red, are in the centre of these a lot. I like Birkirkara now! I'm glad they managed to come fourth now. Maybe next year they'll even push Valletta for the title.

The results are the results. The video - the fluff, the jazz - it can't happen without the skeleton of the results to sustain it. But it is, in the end, nothing more than that. And, look, there's nothing wrong with just wanting to have a domestic league as something to check off - you have a big country that is good at football in the WCC, it makes IC sense for them to have a league, so you phone something in just to have some names to send to CH just to have a place your guys come from. Genuinely there is nothing wrong with that. But those guys probably aren't still reading this tutorial.

This section is about making people give a shit.

THE SEASON PREVIEW
So, you have your names, or at least an idea to get to them. You don't necessarily need to write anything up before slamming results down on the page. But for people reading along, it's going to be really hard to write about your clubs and how they play football without having access - so it's usual to have a season preview to let people get to know your clubs and their expectations. What you establish here, you'll reinforce throughout the season; repetition is the key.

The preview is where you really start to showcase what those clubs are about. You have the reader's attention, but nobody has the focus to take in everything at once. So you have to get your foot in the door with the people who matter and the things you want to stick in the mind. If you mention your hotshot striker, Silas Slamdown, once in a roster, he'll blend in the crowd. But if you put Silas Slamdown in the roster, mention they just bought hotshot striker Silas Slamdown, say their big threat going into the season is Silas Slamdown and then repeatedly credit goals throughout the season to Silas Slamdown, people aren't gonna fucking forget Silas Slamdown. Granted, do have some sense of moderation - it's not the best look to have an obvious 'RPer's pet' character - but on the whole, repetition is the key.

Using the framework from the Rosters post, here's one I prepared earlier. It's not one I prepared earlier; I slapped it together in three hours. But it establishes visual and historical identities, lists relevant figures, and outlines the realistic chances of the season. It's probably going to take more than a season for individual clubs to stick in someone's mind, and that's okay. Repetition is, after all, the key.

RANKINGS
So now you have to figure out how good each club is. But how to communicate this to the scorinator? This is going to depend to some degree on your personality, and to personal preference. A lot of people don't want a say in their rankings - they want to base it on numbers, one way or another, whether making a formula where past results cough up a club's approximate strength - like the KPB rankings for the WCC, or indeed the coefficients of UICA - or rating individual players on their ability out of 5 or 10, then using that to evaluate clubs as a whole, which is how me and Apox ranked our sides against one another when we ran a joint league for a while.

Me, though, I'm not great with numbers. I lucked into a pretty reliably good way of making rankings work with my initial guess and I haven't had to deviate much since. I just set my max rank to 100 and array the clubs of a given league from a range, usually between 100 and 40. Sometimes an especially good club will weigh in at a 105 or 110; yes, without changing the max rank from 100 (this might not work in xkoranate). Sometimes an especially weak club will be a mere 30 or 35, and an almost certain relegation. I used 25 as an occasional floor for a while until I had a team go through a 0-3-27 season which was really funny at first but then just kind of got sad. For the most part, though, 100-35 or so will produce results with a fair degree of variance, a fair few shocks but, for the most part, final results that can be explained.

1. Imperial Falston (100, 2)
2. New Rozelle (95, 1)
3. Roschester City (90, 0)
4. Freeport Sharks (85, 3)
5. Roschester Pride (80, 2)
6. Brunswick Town (75, -1)
7. Falston Bohemians (70, 1)
8. AFC Shroveshore (65, 0)
9. Meade Rovers (60, 1)
10. Wyndham Athletic (55, -1)
11. Shrove Wanderers (50, 0)
12. AFC Mosstown (45, -1)

SETTING IT ALL UP
If you're using NSFS, your league should look something like this. As far as tiebreakers go, I recommend having goal difference and goals for as one of them - whether you want this to be higher- or lower-priority than head-to-head is up to personal preference.

If you aren't using NSFS... well, this is going to assume xkoranate largely works the same way for leagues. Xkora is almost universally considered the best way to scorinate competitive tournaments between users, because the numbers are fairer (don't ask me, I don't know why) but for my money, NSFS' quality of life and interface make it superior for domestic leagues, and especially cups.

Got it all set up? Good. SAVE. It's going to be a whole lot easier setting this up again next season if you already have your league framework saved, season-by-season.

TIME TO SCORE!
Alright, so I have the Ceynes Super League set up. How many matchdays would I like to scorinate? NSFS asks me. This comes down to how many posts you want to break your season down to. The league is going to come to 33 matches in all, and I'm going to break it into three posts - so I'll want to score my league in batches of 16, 16 and then 1, for the finale. I always recommend making the final day its own thing, so you can make it nice and special.


And now we're looking at this. Whew, Wyndham cannot score for shit. Okay. That's great. Now you're going to want to take this brick of text and put it into a GoogleDoc or an Evernote or whatever word processor you want to use. I strongly strongly strongly strongly strongly recommend never drafting up anything in NS itself. It goes down constantly and doesn't autosave, and there's so many horror stories of people just closing a tab and losing everything, this goes for WCC stuff too. Write stuff on word processors, then paste it into the thing. Okay. Soapbox moment over.

Now that you have these results in a word processor - worry about formatting them later - Save League In Progress. Not Results. That just makes a text document that will be useless to you unless you also save league in progress. Then hit done, cancel league creation and Continue League In Progress on the main menu. Open the thing you just made.


Then take that baby for another spin. From here, you don't have to close out and save and re-open again; you can just score for 16, then 1, right after one another... just make sure to always copy and paste all your results somewhere.

THE CUP
Most leagues have Cups, because small clubs want to take a shot at big clubs, and big clubs want more silverware to fight over. The Cup is where the game reaches its most primal form, 11 v 11 under the same rules, no matter the disparity in quality; where heroic David v Goliath performances are the norm. Sometimes David knocks Goliath off his perch. Sometimes Goliath annihilates David 13-0. Either way, it's a good day out for the neutral, and a breath of fresh air from the league. I covered most of the basics in the Structure section.

For the Ceynes Cup, 12 on its own is a really awkward number to try and turn into a factor of 64. Is... that what the term is, I don't know, I haven't taken a maths class since 2010. If this was a serious nation, though, you could easily have a top tier of 12 and then a second and third with 10 each, no staggered entry - boom, that's 32, done. For these purposes I'm going to fudge it - say there's preliminary rounds for all clubs below the top tier, and that there are four survivors which I will choose arbitrarily - and, hey presto, 16. To reflect the openness of the Cup, I'm going to rank the top six CSL sides by league performance 100, the bottom six 75, and the four randoms 50.

The result looks something like this. You almost definitely want to randomise any rounds in which new teams are entering, you may or may not want to have any particular rounds take place over two legs, you probably want your final to be on neutral ground. It's fairly intuitive. Keep in mind there's a known bug with the NSFS Cup feature - do not scorinate before you save. Save, scorinate, get your results, then cancel out. Otherwise weird shit happens.

So, you have your league scored, you have your cup scored, and if applicable you have your results from international tournaments such as UICA, the Cup Winners' Cup or a regional tournament like the AOCL, CdC or CEdC. You have your results. How do you turn this into a video? We'll be going over two basic methods, which you can adapt or frankenstein however you like into whatever you decide you want to write. While it's important to keep your readers hooked, ultimately this is about what makes you happy to produce every two or three months. And don't worry about settling on something that will last the test of time - you can change elements in and out freely, to find what does or doesn't work for you. That goes for previews as well.

THE SEASON REVIEW
A review is when you score the league and take a few stops along the way, looking at what's happened, what the state of play is. Who is at the top? Are they the kind of giants you expect, or is there an underdog fighting at the top table? Are there big teams struggling away from the top? Who's at the bottom? Is anyone dominant? Or, for that matter, notably abysmal? What players are making a name for themselves, and which have been utter busts?

You'll probably also want to at least link the individual results under a spoiler, just for anyone who's curious. Look through them yourself; maybe there's one or two that stand out, or a particular run of form that's made a given club good or terrible. The final result should be a few paragraphs to just put that league table into some kind of context.

If you're already feeling overwhelmed by the world-building and the preview, I recommend you start with a review format.

MATCH BY MATCH
This is the more intensive approach, and takes more effort both to write and to absorb as a reader. You'd best sink your hooks deep. But this is also a deeply rewarding method of RPing your league, one that can let individual storylines flourish, and really pull your readership into the world you've created. This one is for the grognards.

Here's an example of how to put narrative into a bunch of results. Compare these results to a glance at the season review a couple of matches before, and to what we know of the sides generally.

Brunswick Town 2-2 Meade Rovers
AFC Mosstown 1-2 Imperial Falston
New Rozelle 4-1 Freeport Sharks
Roschester City 2-2 Falston Bohemians
Roschester Pride 1-1 Wyndham Athletic
Shrove Wanderers 2-2 AFC Shroveshore

First thought is that Freeport Sharks, who were oh-so-recently ruling the roost, get hammered 4-1 by New Rozelle. That's a nice, juicy scoreline. In fact, reading ahead, you notice that Freeport are about to go on a pretty dismal run of form. Find runs of form as you go, and remark on the patterns you see. Obviously, though, IC nobody knows that the Sharks are about to go into a slump - but this is a fat, juicy result for New Rozelle. Are the Sharks choking? Why has their defence gone to shit? Who's scoring the goals for New Rozelle?

Also, at the bottom of the table, Wyndham and Meade both pick up decent away points against midtable sides. Look at Mosstown's 2-1 defeat at home to giants Imperial - on its own, that's a pretty respectable result. In context, it's a point dropped in the race for survival compared to their peers. So mention that, too. Maybe also mention that Imperial kind of had to work hard for that win. Also, hey, four draws from six games? That's kind of a lot. Individual details like that aren't a bad thing. But what else is here besides league position? Oh, right. Shrove vs. Shroveshore - yeah, a derby. A high-scoring one, too. Maybe it didn't even devolve into bloodshed and fan riots, which is always a classic arc to liven up low-scoring derbies. There's plenty to squeeze a par from out of that, and then move on to the next; you'll be done with the season in no time.

Granted, not every matchday has so many results with immediate relevance. These are the matches where you really get to talk about individual events happening - really cool goals, tempers flaring, rumours swirling off the pitch, crazy red cards. These are important, too - it's not all about cold, hard results, but about making your league fun, vibrant, energetic. These are also, realistically, going to be the only chances for midtable sides to shine. Finding that balance is hard, but you'll get there.

Regarding other tournaments, you might choose to interweave writing about them with the rest of the league, or you might sequestre them into its own sections - or you might ignore them entirely until the finals. I'd recommend at least writing something about them, though. Some of your best moments and narratives are lurking in your Cup, and RPing the results of international tournaments is a great way to really feel a part of the wide world of NSS. Just be mindful not to contradict any RPs your opponents may have written first on the same match!

Of course, every matchday comes in a greater context. Beyond scanning the raw results looking for notable runs of form, good or bad, towards the end of the season teams are going to start to lock themselves in for relegation, UICA or the title. Tracking results on the fly is something that xkoranate apparently does better than NSFS - but even without the aid of that, you can backtrack through results and see when certain outcomes were mathematically assured. If you're very lucky, everything's going to come down to the very end...

THE GRAND FINALE
So you have almost everything done - just 90 minutes remain. Traditionally, the last round of every league's fixtures are played simultaneously, to avoid teams settling for mutually acceptable results and screwing over others. This has the added side benefit of having a shitton of drama. Your final post is where you milk the hell out of it. Also, you get to focus on the finals of your Cup and, if applicable, any other tournaments - your big chance all season to really focus on an individual match, WCC-style. And at the end, it's always nice to throw out some awards for top performers. Wrap that all up with your entry form to the UICA and that's done and dusted.

This guide, though, is not. We're going to be closing with a FAQ that should hopefully address anything the rest of the guide did not.

[Nephara]

MISC FAQ
When does UICA happen, in-character?
According to common convention: if you're familiar with real-life football, it's similar to how the various Champions Leagues work there, happening across the season. That said, if you'd rather treat it as a whole block of events that happen before your league season, you're entitled to do that.

Can I at least get a hint as to how to schedule leagues/cups/international tournaments alongside each other?
There's no strict global calendar you have to adhere to. Here's what I use for Brenecia and Nephara.

You've vaguely mentioned the difference between the popular scorinators. Where can I take scorination questions to people who know what they're talking about?
Here.

What happens when I'm about to miss a cycle?
So the cutoff's in two days and you're panicking. But there's plenty you can do in that time. If it's not your first season, you already have the infrastructure to score another season with minimal changes. If you have a free hour, you can score the season, format the table, and at least throw up a couple paragraphs of season review.

Of course, as always, RL comes first. If you are absolutely swamped or don't have access to your scorinator, you get one cycle to resubmit your old clubs. I would strongly recommend you RP this as 'the season happened, but just happened to have the same teams finish at the top' - it's a hell of a coincidence, but it beats your players twiddling their thumbs for a year.

What happens when I do miss a cycle?
Sometimes shit just happens. I've missed a cycle myself, not for any OOC reasons apart from just missing the cutoff post. For IC purposes, I do believe it's best to assume a league season still happened in that time, but that its submission to UICA was thrown off by off-field factors. Match-fixing scandals, corruption or autocracy in your FA, bureaucratic fuck-ups, fan trouble, financial issues - any of these could be a reason to not have been able to submit to UICA despite a league that on the surface functioned fine.

In terms of how this will affect your rank, you won't be crippled. In five seasons, the 'missing' cycle will polish out, and you're still capable of holding onto a top 32 place and a solid reputation. In Nephara's case, I feel missing a cycle early on actually helped ground the league in the 20s for a bit, allowing me to build it up and steadily grow it to make sure that when it did advance up the rankings, it was worthy of that.

My league was meant to be shit but now it's good, how do I justify it?
If you RP your league very skilfully as a struggling backwater, your league will get a high RP bonus, and that will help you rise up the rankings. The better you RP about being terrible, the less terrible you'll be. This does mean that, barring some exceptional cultural factors, it's unlikely to make much sense to still be a semi-professional operation when your league's in the top 32.

That said, there's a few mitigating factors that can explain overachieving UICA performances. Most obviously... your midtable sides aren't the ones doing much in UICA. You can establish an overclass of two to five genuinely strong sides who have all the money and influence, while everyone else is garbage and scrapes around picking up free transfers. What also helps explain the results is that your overclass can probably afford to rest players against weak local sides and put their full attention on international matches. Alternatively, if your country is small and poor but you have no objection to splashing big in the transfer market, you could RP that you have loose ownership laws that encourage huge investment by club owners, and patch over the inferior quality of local players by making it rain in the transfer window. It might be infeasible, most of the time, to have a league top-to-bottom full of losers - but if you want the aesthetic, you can at least have it be a crumbling wreck outside the face it shows to UICA.

Does my league have to abide by the FIFA rules as written? Should it have VAR?
As long as it's recognisably football, it flies. You don't have to abide by dumb shit like VAR or people being booked for taking off their shirts. How far can you push the envelope? Well... so far I've never seen UICA throw out a league for 'not recognisably playing association football', but better safe than sorry. But cut some of the fat, if you want.

Should I base some of my teams or players on RL ones?
No. Obviously, you can and naturally will take inspiration from what you see in the real world, but if you just copy over things wholesale, that comes off as lazy and, worse, an immersion-breaker. Granted, there are only so many names out there, and you might accidentally wind up copying someone from RL - I generated a promising young striker called Lukas Rashford maybe six months before promising young striker Marcus Rashford burst into prominence IRL, it happens - and I'm not saying you should sweat that. Nobody's going to call you out if your big city rivalry happens to be nouveau riche in sky blue against a traditional powerhouse in red. And there's always room for a bit of power fantasy - what if your crap local team IRL was actually good? But just... do more than file off the serial numbers.

Okay, but do we generally assume the 'real world' to exist?
No. There isn't a Real Madrid looming somewhere in the background that can be interacted with - we have our own world, our own giants, our own history. Of course, nobody is regulating this, and nobody is going to ban you from UICA or the Transfer Window or whatever if you say you have some German players on the books. But it doesn't make for great RP fodder, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have this other world in the background we can see but never interact with.

Is power in UICA as tightly focused as it is in UEFA?
Thankfully, no. Unlike in real-world club football, where four leagues tower above pretty much all the others, here things are more even. Even a side outside the top 32 can occasionally muster a serious upset, and provided the RP is there, it won't take long for them to reach that top 32 and get their second CC place. Most people are comfortable putting quality players in well-RPed top 32 leagues, and by then you're probably looking at fairly respectable UICA showings year-on-year. It's very hard to reach the pinnacle, and very competitive - but being respected, having quality, getting your foot in the door to sign great players? That doesn't take too long.

Should I make my own domestic newswire thread?
If your league RPs are just one or two posts a season, I think you can get away with just posting them in the Newswire. If they're longer, I do recommend making a threat to put them in. You still do have to submit in the Domestic Newswires thread - link every RP you write into your entry post to ensure they're graded. CH has more than enough to do without chasing up other threads in their own time.

Okay, so I've done my league. Do I need to do anything special to enter UICA/other tournaments?
Nope! Post your entry form - outlined in the OP - to every tournament you want to to, all in one. Make sure, of course, that you can see that teams have actually done enough to qualify for these on sporting merit. Your best teams go into the Champions Cup and into your regional tournament; your next-best teams to the Globe Cup; your Cup champions into the Cup Winners Cup.

And with that, I think we're done here. Whether you wanted to do everything from scratch, or just wanted to look for inspiration going forward, I hope there was something here that could help. Looking forward to seeing you all in UICA next season!

[Commonwealth of Baker Park]

Notice how shit is actually happening. Same clubs! Same country! But suddenly there's a narrative. There's excitement. Apparently Birkirkara

Dodgy keepers and bad defenders make for fun football leagues.

Another reference to Nephara's point: in my domestic thread, I did an interview where my FA boss mentioned Qusmo, and how his league has risen quickly in the UICA in comparison to my own, but our national team were still ahead of his (I think I said "way ahead", but that was IC). He puts more effort into his domestic league than I do, so he deserves to be further ahead.

[Ontorisa]

alright guys, I need to bounce some logos off of y'all and get some feedback pls. As a disclaimer: I suck ass at making logos, so just bear with me. I prefer more of a minimalist design to my logos as well.

LSL, aka the South Isles League, is the top-level of football/soccer in Ontorisa. Since the Estonian name is (obviously) a pain in the ass for Anglicized keyboard users like myself to type, its commonly referred to as simply "The South Isles".

Islas Dawtiir is the inter-continental isles competition between football/soccer clubs from both Ontorisa, and its neighbours in Eglasour, Heratoi, and Kejia. It's probably the best football played on the Isles.

Chaskot d'Ontorisa is essentially the Ontorisan-equivalent of the FA Cup. Clubs, both from the four "top" professional leagues, and the lower pro leagues will compete for this trophy, with clubs from higher leagues receiving bye's.

Muskattar siri-Haar is essentially the Ontorisan-equivalent of the EFL Cup. Only clubs from the top LSL league, the second-tier SRJL, and the third-tier RJU are permitted to compete (with an equal division of all competition clubs, with the top LSL teams receiving a bye if required).

---

Looking forward to reading any feedback. Thanks guys!!

[Abaja]

- Le Snip -

I don't think you're bad at all, especially if you're a beginner. Those last two look really formal/professional

[Commonwealth of Baker Park]

alright guys, I need to bounce some logos off of y'all and get some feedback pls. As a disclaimer: I suck ass at making logos, so just bear with me. I prefer more of a minimalist design to my logos as well.

I'm a believer in minimalism as well, so I think they are very good.

[Farfadillis]

I've got an important announcement to make regarding my league:

As many of you likely have noticed at this point, I've been really struggling to balance RL with NS lately. My university life has basically been biting off bigger and bigger chunks, trying to find out how much is too much for me to chew. Things have come to a head this semester as it looks like I may very well be at my limit.

With this in mind, seeing as I've been unable to even roleplay the last two seasons, despite having promised I would, I'll be releasing all foreign players from clubs in my league.

The OOC justification is that having relevant players from other nations makes things more stressful for me, as there's the obvious added responsibility. I just can't do it at this point, and I'd like to apologize to those of you who obviously expected more from me. I've reached a point where my league database is out of date to the point where I'm not even sure who plays in my league anymore. Again, I'm very sorry for this. Specially for those of you who had some of their best players in my league, some of whom I signed and even forgot about.

The IC justification is that Farfadillis is currently extremely unsafe and unstable, and your players likely would leave of their own volition anyway. Their lives are likely at danger every hour of every day. Basically, no club in Farfadillis is fully professional anymore, and as a result your players can leave because they get paid peanuts and are no longer tied to a contract.

On the off-chance that some of you want to keep your players in my league, I'm afraid I won't be allowing that. I want to restart my database from scratch. Create new players for every team and only leave the important Farf players. The IC justification is that the others likely died, were maimed or something similar.

As a side note, if anyone cares at this point, the Farf league will undergo a format change following the unfortunate events in the no-longer-really-a-nation nation. The first half of the season will consist of state-wide leagues, from which a couple of teams will qualify for a national league in the second half. The national league will be played exclusively in Induja, the state at the center of Farfadillis, which has been the least affected by the almost complete collapse of society.

If any of you would like me to clarify anything that I've written in this post, or have any further questions, you can TG me or find me on Discord.

[Savojarna]

I wanna use more graphic stuff in my league, but I kind of fail at designing logos (or finding good help online)... does anyone have a good resource or advice on how to make it a less daunting task? I can use wiki-style jerseys for now, and I know how to make these, but logos are kind of more useful at establishing identities if one would manage to make them look good.

In other news, I finished this poster thingy for Partisan Sjoedrhavn and wonder what people may think of it:

[Kita-Hinode]

I wanna use more graphic stuff in my league, but I kind of fail at designing logos (or finding good help online)... does anyone have a good resource or advice on how to make it a less daunting task? I can use wiki-style jerseys for now, and I know how to make these, but logos are kind of more useful at establishing identities if one would manage to make them look good.

I'd suggest downloading Paint.net and fooling around with it. Make sure to get a Plug-In Pack as well.

[Savojarna]

I wanna use more graphic stuff in my league, but I kind of fail at designing logos (or finding good help online)... does anyone have a good resource or advice on how to make it a less daunting task? I can use wiki-style jerseys for now, and I know how to make these, but logos are kind of more useful at establishing identities if one would manage to make them look good.

I'd suggest downloading Paint.net and fooling around with it. Make sure to get a Plug-In Pack as well.

I feel like I have a decent grasp on GIMP (is Paint.net worth switching?) but with logos I am lost because I don't know what to make. It may actually be more of an idea issue than an execution issue, at least when it comes to 18/20 clubs.

[Krytenia]

I'd suggest downloading Paint.net and fooling around with it. Make sure to get a Plug-In Pack as well.

I feel like I have a decent grasp on GIMP (is Paint.net worth switching?) but with logos I am lost because I don't know what to make. It may actually be more of an idea issue than an execution issue, at least when it comes to 18/20 clubs.

Best I can suggest is to look around at existing logos, either fictional ones here or real ones on your search engine of choice. Doing a bit of digging on heraldic websites is a good place to find basic templates for shield outlines, too, if you want to go that way.

Also, searching for <<design element>> clip art is a good way to cut corners.

[Commonwealth of Baker Park]

I feel like I have a decent grasp on GIMP (is Paint.net worth switching?) but with logos I am lost because I don't know what to make. It may actually be more of an idea issue than an execution issue, at least when it comes to 18/20 clubs.

I use GIMP too and as a novice artist, I think it works great.
Definitely agree with Krytenia too. Just randomly browsing through existing logos is a good way to spark an idea or two.
You've got the Baltics/Scandinavian thing for your nation, and a lot of clubs in those countries have funky logos and "invented throwback" (something modern that's made to look retro) looks.

[Qusmo]

I'd suggest downloading Paint.net and fooling around with it. Make sure to get a Plug-In Pack as well.

I feel like I have a decent grasp on GIMP (is Paint.net worth switching?) but with logos I am lost because I don't know what to make. It may actually be more of an idea issue than an execution issue, at least when it comes to 18/20 clubs.

I relate, because I tried to create crests for each of my twenty top-flight clubs, even though I am decidedly not a designer & thought I only had a couple crest ideas to start with. I'm only able to use the most basic software (mostly because I'm bad at this sort of thing, & partly because I'm cheap), so I did mine by first associating a colour scheme to each club & then thinking up various symbols, patterns, or shapes which might go with each. For example, my crest shapes include circles, ovals, triangles, squares, diamonds, parallelograms, &c., while many of my colour schemes were based on RL teams I knew, especially from American sports leagues. Whenever I was stumped, I tried to think, "What haven't I done yet?" If you keep making sides sporting blue or red, it's worth keeping in mind that some colours, like pink, grey, & brown, aren't as popular as some others. So are some shapes, like parallelograms or pentagons. & once I had a colour scheme & at least one or two design elements, I somehow seemed to get all the others together. The crests are minimalist, but I like them. Hopefully, you'll like yours, too.

[Savojarna]

I feel like I have a decent grasp on GIMP (is Paint.net worth switching?) but with logos I am lost because I don't know what to make. It may actually be more of an idea issue than an execution issue, at least when it comes to 18/20 clubs.

I relate, because I tried to create crests for each of my twenty top-flight clubs, even though I am decidedly not a designer & thought I only had a couple crest ideas to start with. I'm only able to use the most basic software (mostly because I'm bad at this sort of thing, & partly because I'm cheap), so I did mine by first associating a colour scheme to each club & then thinking up various symbols, patterns, or shapes which might go with each. For example, my crest shapes include circles, ovals, triangles, squares, diamonds, parallelograms, &c., while many of my colour schemes were based on RL teams I knew, especially from American sports leagues. Whenever I was stumped, I tried to think, "What haven't I done yet?" If you keep making sides sporting blue or red, it's worth keeping in mind that some colours, like pink, grey, & brown, aren't as popular as some others. So are some shapes, like parallelograms or pentagons. & once I had a colour scheme & at least one or two design elements, I somehow seemed to get all the others together. The crests are minimalist, but I like them. Hopefully, you'll like yours, too.

The shapes are a good idea! I do have colour schemes and historic/"spiritual" identities for all my top flight teams, but that is kind of insufficient. There is indeed lots of blue/white/red, but that is somewhat necessitated by the system of having state-sponsored teams who are just likely to wear the colours of the flag or the (revolutionary) red, so I kind of feel justified in that?

[Flavovespia]

I wanna use more graphic stuff in my league, but I kind of fail at designing logos (or finding good help online)... does anyone have a good resource or advice on how to make it a less daunting task? I can use wiki-style jerseys for now, and I know how to make these, but logos are kind of more useful at establishing identities if one would manage to make them look good.

In other news, I finished this poster thingy for Partisan Sjoedrhavn and wonder what people may think of it:

(Image)

Paint.NET is a good idea, especially if you can get some basic crest designs. It's not too difficult to learn, and there are tutorials online.

In terms of design, it depends on how unique you want to go. Some designs I see are totally unique, others will sometimes take inspiration from real-world logos. Some countries might favour a certain aesthetic to their designs (to use a RL example, compare American NFL logos to English Premier League logos)

Having some idea of what the team's history, colours and background is also really useful. For instance, did the team have a recent redesign? Are they fond of one historical logo design? Do they have a club nickname?

One website that might be useful is designevo.com . Their designs tend to be quite generic, but there's a fair amount you can play around with on there. It's what I've been using recently to design some logos for my teams.

[The Sarian]

Inkscape is good, as you can mess around with elements of different .svg files which can produce some really nice results.

[Flavovespia]

A few questions about qualification to the Globe Cup and the Series B Champions’ Cup.

1. For the Globe Cup, can for instance the team placed 2nd and 3rd in the top division, and the domestic cup winners, if not qualified already to the Champions’ Cup or Globe Cup, be chosen as representatives or does it have to be 2nd, 3rd and 4th in the top division.

2. For the Series B Champions’ Cup, my second division has the top 2 teams win promotion, and a playoff system for the teams ranked 3rd to 6th to get the 3rd promotion spot. Can the winner of that playoff be entered into the Series B Champions' Cup, if they finished 4th, 5th or 6th in the League?

3. Are teams only eligible to enter one tournament per cycle i.e. a second division team winning both the division and the domestic cup can't enter the Globe Cup and the Series B Champions’ Cup?


Also a more technical question, anyone know an easier way of taking values from an Excel sheet and using them as values in Xkoranate without just manually replacing them each season by typing them out?

[Commerce Heights]

A few questions about qualification to the Globe Cup and the Series B Champions’ Cup.

1. For the Globe Cup, can for instance the team placed 2nd and 3rd in the top division, and the domestic cup winners, if not qualified already to the Champions’ Cup or Globe Cup, be chosen as representatives…

Yes. You’re free to decide which of your domestic competitions merit UICA qualification and how the available places are allocated among them.

2. For the Series B Champions’ Cup, my second division has the top 2 teams win promotion, and a playoff system for the teams ranked 3rd to 6th to get the 3rd promotion spot. Can the winner of that playoff be entered into the Series B Champions' Cup, if they finished 4th, 5th or 6th in the League?

Yes. As above, you’re free to decide the relative merit of positioning in the league table versus the play-off.

3. Are teams only eligible to enter one tournament per cycle i.e. a second division team winning both the division and the domestic cup can't enter the Globe Cup and the Series B Champions’ Cup?

Yes. If a second-division team qualifies for The Champions’ Cup (only possible in leagues with more than one place that allocate one to the cup or something) or The Globe Cup, they enter that competition and the next-placed second-division team (typically the fourth-placed team, or perhaps in your case the play-off runner-up) qualifies for The Series B Champions’ Cup.

[Darmen]

Also a more technical question, anyone know an easier way of taking values from an Excel sheet and using them as values in Xkoranate without just manually replacing them each season by typing them out?

Yes, using semicolon-delimited files. In your spreadsheet, orient your columns so that Column A contains the team's name, Column B contains two semicolons (";;") and Column C contains the team's rank. Copy and paste those columns into a text file (I personally use Notepad) and save it. Open xkoranate, and in the participants window, select the "Import from text file" at the bottom. Select the text file you just made and hit open. It will automatically import the teams from the file and their ranks. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to also include style modifiers, if you use those you will still need to input them manually.