Promotion and relegation leagues get a lot questions on this board and I think it’s one of the features of this game that is simultaneously fun and sometimes unintuitive. It takes a lot of adjustment to get it to work right and I’ve posted in a lot of places asking for advice on how to get it working.
Check out this
Reddit post, and these
forum posts for background.
Here’s how my setup works. I’ll walk through the league settings screen tab by tab.
Functions - N/A
League & Teams
League Level: The main leagues of my system are all major leagues. Originally, I had them as minor leagues, which seems to make sense initially, but the way the game handles minor and major league signings means a lot of five star players sign with the minors on weird contracts, and that the big teams don’t look for players in the lower tiers.
So first off, all leagues are major leagues, except what I term the “National Leagues,” which are the sub-pyramid leagues. Those are setup as independent leagues.
League Reputation: These are scaled down based on level and prestige, which corresponds roughly to Champions League places. The big four leagues (England, Germany, Italy, and Spain) are at 10 and France is a 9. Here’s the whole rundown:
10 ENG-1, GER-1, ESP-1, ITA-1, World Cup, UEBA Euros, Champions League
9 FRA-1
8 POR-1, Big Four Cups
7 BEL-1, NED-1, EUR-1, ENG-2, GER-2, France Cup
6 RUS-1, AUT-1, SCO-1, ITA-2, ESP-2, FRA-2
5 ENG-3
3 ENG-4
1 All National Leagues
League Configuration: All leagues except the Europa League are single leagues, i.e., G[(n-1)*6]_Tn_SL1_D1 in game setup terms.
Rules
Roster Expansion date: All teams run their schedules based on a shared end date, the first or second Sunday in November, so I have this set the same for all leagues
Enable Amateur Draft: This is something that came up in the reddit post I linked to above. For the top tier leagues, I have an amateur draft enabled. For lower leagues I don’t. This is to bring a stream of players into the game annually, and with the top leagues active it more or less creates enough players to fill up the universe with players. So lower leagues have an amateur draft unchecked.
Financials
This screen took some research. Essentially, I went hunting for the financial and attendance information for European football for 2012. Sites like transfermarkt.de are pretty helpful, also FIFA and Football Manager video game sites have a lot of great data.
The specific numbers vary by league, but generally the tier one teams are super rich, the lower tier teams are not.
The other teams are various steps down from the Premier League, since that’s the league with the most revenue. The percentage adjustments (“Mass adjust current financial values”) is a good way to do it and when I originally had it set up using that feature it went something like this:
ENG-1: 2012 settings
ENG-2: 2012 settings -50%
ENG-3: 2012 settings -75%
ENG-4: 2012 settings -95%
Options
Auto pro/rel works fine in a strict table setup, but if you have divisions or sub-leagues, the game doesn’t divvy it up correctly. Even if you have “per Sub-League” selected, it will choose the teams just fine, but it doesn’t place them correctly, so for example, it might look something like this:
Relegate teams to league: {UEBA Europa Conference League}
Number of teams to relegate: {1} {per Sub-League}
Team Destination Division
{Slavia Praha (Northern League)} {ECL - NoC}
{Galati Otelul (Southern League)} {ECL - NoC}
Promote teams to league: {UEBA Europa League}
Number of teams to promote: {1}{per Sub-League}
Team Destination Division
{Levski Sofia (Southern Conference} {UEL - NoL}
{Riga Skonto (Northern Conference} {UEL - NoL}
Notice that the game would automatically send both teams to the same sub-league in each direction, despite each team coming from a different sub-league.
Also, sometimes, when making changes to a league structure (like if a team folds or a league expands), the game will try to do pro/rel right then, which could be a mess. So uncheck automatic pro/rel.
Players
I adjusted the player creation modifiers for all leagues. The general formula is [League reputation] x 0.1, so the Big Four leagues are basically all 1.000 or slightly higher (as you can see), while France is 0.9, Portugal is 0.8, etc. This ensures that the players created for each league aren’t OP. This comes into play sometimes when a team has an incomplete roster. The game will ask you if you want to use country defaults (option Yes) or adjusted PCM (option No). I always select No, particularly because countries from Europe don’t have very high default player creation modifiers. I want players from England or Germany to be good ballplayers.
If your league is based in a traditionally strong baseball country, then you can probably select option Yes and go with game defaults for created players.
I also adjusted the national composition for each league to reflect the real world. This helps make sure that there’s a stream of players from other continents arriving in Europe.
Stats & AI
No changes to this screen really. Although I’ve toyed with the idea of changing each league slightly to make maybe Germany more low-scoring and built around defense, Spain on baserunning and steals, and England on strong pitching, for example, so that each league feels a little different. Might be worth exploring.
Global Settings
Highlights from this screen include 100% accurate scouting, which is just because I play in Commissioner mode and like to watch the world happen.
Also important is the relative ratings setting. Set that to your top tier league.
AI Settings
I adjusted these based on some feedback from the Reddit post. See my attached screenshot.
Pro/Rel General Tips
I execute the actual pro/rel on 1 Jan each year. This lets things like the Champions League and World Cup play out and closes the book cleanly on stats and history.
Don't get lazy on manual pro/rel, just when you think everything is set up right, you'll forget about the league assignment gotcha or violate one of your own rules without noticing.
Problems with a team getting promoted and then going on to a 100-win season inspired my original Reddit post. This had to do with both PCM settings and player contracts due to setting the lower leagues as minor leagues. I still have no real idea why that is, but setting up lower leagues as major leagues and making a small draft pool for the big leagues seemed to help.
Definitely check out u/ParisHL’s comments on my Reddit thread and the various Pro/Rel threads in this forum. There’s no real secret sauce for pro/rel, it takes a lot of little tweaks to get it working right.
Next post will kick off a series of league-by-league overviews.
Please weigh in with what you'll want to see once the seasons start.
I don't want to just data dump every time anything happens, so are there specific player screens I should keep an eye on? Is highlighting real world rivalries or matchups valuable?
Let me know what you want to see.
After rundowns of the leagues we'll get into the season starting with the Big Five cup tournaments.