Subject: [Idea] Merge of small countries/leagues

Yeah, that’s also my concern, especially since it would mess up all the different languages together.

You could still keep national forum and add an international league one, but since you’d rival different teams…

On the other hand there’s lots of very small countries with 1-20 active users and for them such merge would have much more benefits than vices.

Now the question is where you put the line and how big is big enough not to be included in the merge.

I would consider making an internationa league with 4 levels = place for 480 teams.
Puting there all countries with 15 users or less (there is a visible gap right now between countries with 14- users and 18+), that would completly fill three league level, leaving alot of free slots (bot teams) for newcommers.

I think the admins should take individual decision on that.... cause some countries with 15 true active users scream for it (like Australia), where as my nation has 60+ average top league still
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That's definitely not enough in my opinion.

You've seen what happened when they tried the advertising in Nigeria etc. - those countries suddenly got +100 users out of thin air. And they probably did just a limited advertising, so it's possible to bring even +500 in a single country in a week or two.

Of course these are only ghost users of out which 95-99% logged in once or never but you still need the capability to create clubs for so many teams on a regular basis in order to get the 1-5% playing. Otherwise you will be unable to assign clubs to new registering users.

And since this international league will be made up of many, many countries and they probably plan those kind of advertising actions in the future you need the potential free space.

Also, you'd need a proper cleaning first to choose the actual small countries. Australia has 46 users, but at least 20 are 100% inactive, just the same history as Nigeria and others.

Just looking at the list of countries it's very complicated and maybe doing it by size isn't the best way.

Merging Australia and New Zealand seems obvious.

There's a clear argument for a UK league, not so much for England but for Scotland, Wales and finally the Northern Ireland teams that have been in the game 20 years and never activated. I highly doubt Ireland would want to be part of that but they'd benefit from it.

Africa is... complicated. I think there's a very good case for merging them all but I'm not sure of the language situation. Same goes for the Asian leagues.

South America doesn't need merging, most of them are actually doing fairly well. However, the lack of a language barrier between them (excluding Brazil) would make it easy to do.

Europe is a nightmare.

North America would be fairly easy, depending on whether you want to split it into English/Spanish regions. You could mayyyyybeee merge the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as English speaking countries.

And for the love of god, can we have a single currency in this game? There's not 1 good argument for multiple currencies.
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Examples of users registered in a single week:

Nigeria
2024-03-19 107
2024-03-25 35

Cameroun
2024-03-29 34
2024-04-01 23

El Salvador
2024-03-29 19
2024-04-01 19

Kenya
2024-03-29 50
2024-04-01 45

Peru
2024-03-29 34
2024-04-01 39

So with a probably very limited, cheap advertising in just 5 countries during 2 weeks there were +405 new registered users.
In other words with tens of countries included & plans for advertising, you'd need thousands of potential free spaces. The lowest league must contain thousands of teams & be just a bot landing spot for new teams.

Honestly even adding another step in the ladder [so 121 leagues, 1452 teams] might not be enough.
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Language these days is not an issue at all.
I visit many forums and literally click one button on my base google Chrome (no add ons) and it translates for me.

As far as size goes, having done the math before (probably in this thread somewhere), you need to have a buffer for the top division.

3 bot teams in top division (due to there always being 3 auto relegations) affects the other teams by 25% (average fanclub members of the 9 humans is averaged over 12 teams basically as bots have very few) which then affects sponsorship etc.

Now if you extend this out to be 3 bot teams in div 2 in each league, it affects div 2 by 25%, but affects div 1 by just 6% (25% of 25%).

It's still significant but it at least has the buffer for the teams that succeed.

Ideally you want 3 full divisions, but that would mean almost all teams would be in a world league. Therefore initially I propose any country with less than 48 users after a clean out be merged.

Then moving forward, any country that drops below 48 users is added to the merged leagues, and any country that gets more than 3 leagues worth is removed to make their own country again.

It gives incentives for countries to grow, but also doesn't hurt those countries that can't grow

It's also for this reason (the above calculations) that the move the 12 team leagues from 8 really hurt small nations.

Small nations would have been much better off reducing to 6 team leagues, as there would have been more buffers from increased numbers of leagues

the solution would be to do it by free registration

You want to stay in your country league, stay
You want to apply in world league, apply

take a look to the real world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_football_clubs_playing_in_the_league_of_another_country

48 is way too high number.... barely nations as suomi and Bulgaria have those numbers if you made proper clean up

As long as there is at least 10 teams making 55+ rating, the nation has a competitive state....

Far from all with user number As Australia has that many noobs :p

I wouldn't say no to the idea but we'd have to work on the 'GB' league name a bit ;)

Call it commonwealth suckers

There are two reasons for merging.

1. Because the way sponsors etc. are worked out, depend on fanclub members. Even a single bot has a huge impact on prestige of a league (ie average fanclub members) and therefore huge impact on sponsorship

2. To give people someone to actually play against.

48 is what is required now to minimise point 1. When it was 8 team leagues the number 40, although at a minimum, I was promoting half filled div 2 leagues at the time (24 teams).
Using my initial promoting number in the new league system, this would equate to 30 teams, which is also fair enough

Yes a line must be drawn somewhere, but you can't have countries that have seasons where bots are being promoted in to div 1. You should not be having seasons where brand new players will be getting promoted to div 1. To stop bots promoting that means you need at least 15 teams (12 humans in this season + 3 auto promotions if they are perfectly spread across div 2).
You also don't want those 3 people to be literally playing just bots all season, and not be able to make money in their "off season" because they can't make any money in div 2. So to have some competition in div 2, they need at least a half filled league, which brings us back to the number 30.

Then when you look at the average regarding numbers of fanclubs, at 50% full div 2 leagues, the affect that has one the div 1 leagues (as shown in my previous formula) is approximately 12.5% reduction due just to bots (that's assuming all div 1 and other div2 teams are experienced, long term teams, which is not the case in reality). Which is where we come to 48 teams.

You may be looking at it superficially and thinking it's too high a number because so many teams don't hit it, but once you delve in to it more, you realise that's what we are dealing with in the new 12 team leagues.

Now if it were 6 team leagues, where we played our league mates twice a season, but just once per week (and therefore freeing up a space for an International Cup), the respective numbers for merged leagues would be:
- full div 2 - 24 teams
- half full div - 15 teams

Much more reasonable yes? For a game with a userbase this size, leagues per division should never have been expanded, and in fact, should have been made smaller, to allow more leagues - but that's another topic all together