This post first appeared in Issue Two of Latte Quarterly, a quarterly Football Manager e-magazine created by FMGrasshopper, AccordingtoFM, FMAdventure, and FMSamo. I'd thoroughly recommend you download all the issues and dive in for a read.
This year on FM I decided to create a club in the pre-game editor and enter them in the amateur leagues in Ukraine. The club in question is FC Pripyat,Pripytat was founded in 1970 as the ninth Atomgrad in the USSR, a one industry super-bloc, and part of the 'peaceful atom' project to house workers for the nearby Vladimir I Lenin nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. The football team had been making steady progress in the Soviet Union regional leagues before disaster struck in 1986 with the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster. If you want to read more background on my save you can read my introductory post here. Read on below to find out how I brought FC Pripyat back to life in Football Manager 20.
To create the Ukrainian league structure that FC Pripyat will enter into I used Classen's FM19 database and imported it in into the FM20 editor. Originally I did intend to create the Ukrainian football pyramid myself, but I found the editor to be somewhat counter-intuitive at times and updating a league in one part of the editor didn’t necessarily mean it was correctly updated across the entire database. My major stumbling block was setting up regional divisions which offered promotion into a country-wide division above. I searched the SI forums in the “editors hideaway” but very often my searches turned up no results or results that were not really relevant. There is so much historical stuff on there, and given I have never had a presence on the forums it can sometimes feel a little overwhelming for someone new coming along. Reading some of the comments and answers to other people’s questions it was clear to me that prior knowledge of the editor would be assumed by any potential helpers, something I don’t have. Constructing an entire football pyramid was a step too far, but creating a city and a football club was not. Below I have outlined how I went about creating FC Pripyat.
Step 1 - Create a City.
Upon loading up the database you wish to edit, in this case Classen's FM19 Ukrainian league structure. This is the screen you are presented with.
On the bottom left (Red Box) are all the things you can edit within the selected database. You can see I have selected Cities. In the highlighted yellow box you can search for anything, within the parameter you've selected on the bottom left, and filter results how you wish.
I searched for Pripyat and, unsurprisingly, Pripyat is not in the database. I had to create the entire city itself. This is easier than you might think.
On the same screen click ADD at the bottom (Highlighted in Red) and the following page will load.
First thing to do is make a note of your new city's unique ID, keep a note of this as it will be easier to search via ID later on. You can give your city a name and use the drop down menus (Orange) to search for a nation, language and local region.
Next is attraction this attribute is important. It governs how attractive a place your city is to live in, on a scale of 1-20. This impacts directly on how many players want to come and join your club. Initially, I thought to set this as 1. It is, after all, a nuclear exclusion zone. However, after some testing I found that when I loaded the game only six players in the entire database were interested in joining FC Pripyat. I decided to search other cities in the Ukraine for comparison. Kyiv is rated 19 in the database, Lyiv (another large city in the west of Ukraine) scored 16. Clearly these are too high for my new city. So I decided to check some cities in the Donbass region of Ukraine. This area is essentially a warzone at the present time with Russian backed rebels holding control of large areas. Shakhtar Donetsk can no longer play their home games in the city due to the fighting. Donetsk scores 4/20 and Mariupol 5/20. I decided that as we are, "RE-building Pripyat" it should score slightly higher than these two war torn cities. You can see I settled on 7/20. This resulted in 16 players happy to join us when we started the save.
Inhabitants - At the time of the evacuation Pripyat was home to around 51,000 people and was still growing. A fifth nuclear reactor was due to be completed at Chernobyl with another two being planned.
Latitude, Longitude and altitude I looked up these values.
Weather - Initially, I thought about creating the climate myself but upon search cities closest to Pripyat I found that they all used the same weather database. I searched for this and entered it here.
Now we have a city, next we need to put a stadium in our city.
Step 2 - Create the Stadium.
Following the same procedure as before, this time selecting Stadium from the menu on the bottom left then selecting ADD, we are presented with this screen.
Once again make a note of your unique ID. Once you have named your stadium you will need to tell the database what city the stadium is in. To do this click the drop down menu and click search. Here you can enter the unique ID of your newly created City, Pripyat. Everything else in this section is fairly self explanatory. I have used capacities that the new stadium in Pripyat was due to hold. It was never opened due to the disaster but in Ruslan Chepiga's world they have spent the last 6 months redeveloping the site to its former glory.
We have a City, we have a stadium, now we need to give them a Football Club.
Step 3 - Creating the Club.
Finally we are ready to actually create the club. This time when you select Club from the bottom left hand side menu and click add, you’ll notice there are many more options along the left hand side. I didn't edit everything here, being new to the editor I wanted to keep things as simple as I could.
This is where things get interesting and you need to consider your options carefully. I'll not go through them all but lets look at the 'details' section.
Once again your club will be given an unique ID, keep this for later. Now you can give your club a name, nickname and hastag amongst other things. Select your nation, and the city you've created in the database.
The next important parameter to decided on is the clubs starting reputation. This is absolutely vital, you can see I decided on 400, I did a bit of searching through the division I intended to put FC Pripyat and found the lowest reputation in the division was 500. For comparison Manchester United's reputation in the database is 8,650.
Next we need to assign the stadium we created to our new club. Click Stadium from the menu on the bottom left and you will be presented with this screen.
You can search for the stadium name by selecting the drop down menu and entering your stadium's unique ID. You then need to give an estimate of the attendance, I have gone for 2,000 I read in some literature that FC Pripyat was attracting crowds of around 2,000 despite playing in the fifth tier.
Assigning values for the facilities was difficult. In the end I compared values from across the division I would be going into. The lowest for any parameter was 3 so I selected that for Training, Youth Coaching and Youth facilities. I gave Youth Recruitment and Youth Importance higher values as Pripyat had a very young demographic at the time of the disaster and it is something I am keen to continue in the save.
Step 4 - Putting your club into a league.
We need to find the league you want to put your club into. As mentioned at the start I am using Claassen's extended database which activates the fourth tier of the Ukrainian football pyramid. After some studying I decided to put FC Pripyat into the Ukrainian Amateur League - Group 2. The fourth tier is split into three groups, roughly by region. Most of the teams in Group 2 were from the Ky'iv Oblast, the same as Pripyat.
After clicking Edit you will be taken to the following screen where you can, unsurprisingly, edit the league.
So what I did here was check the teams listed above and, as this is a FM19 database, some of the teams are no longer in this league. I clicked one of them and removed them. I then simply clicked ADD and I could search for my newly created club and add them to the division, simples.
Step 5 - Add players and staff to your club.
After much deliberation I decided that when I set up the save I would allow the game to create players for playable teams. I was concerned I would not have enough players interested in joining the team at the start. In all my test runs FC Pripyat were relegated as they didn't have enough real (i.e. not greyed out) players. If this happened the save would be over before it had really started. This meant I didn't need to add any players in the editor. So, I decided to have a bit of fun with some staff members. If you read my save reveal you should know who Valentin Letvin is. If you don't you can read about him here.
I created Valentin Letvin in the database and made him FC Pripyat's Director of Football and Head of Youth Development. I even got a photograph of him and put it in the graphics folder.
So, how did I do this. It is much easier than you might imagine. This time we select 'people' from the menu on the left and then select ADD to create a new person. You'll then be taken to the screen below. You can see there are many parameters you can edit here. The first thing you need to do is select 'details' and give your staff member a name, date of birth, place of birth etc. You can be as in-depth as you want to be with this. Below I have highlighted the 'club contract' section. First things first, use the drop down menu beside 'club' to search for your new club. Next give your staff member a job, you can see I have given Valentin two jobs, I felt this was realistic given the small stature of the club. I've also given him a very long contract and high loyalty rating. He can't leave!
I hope you enjoyed this little insight into how I used the editor, it is by no means comprehensive but should help anyone starting out to do some simple editing. Why not give it a go and create something unique.