Stadiums: A Retrospective View

Over the last few weeks there has been a seismic shift in Football Manager Live. I obviously can’t comment from the perspective of a new Gameworld, but from the perspective of one moving into the 4th season, the effect has been astounding. Heres my stadium, followed by a few thoughts…

My stadium, “The Anchor”:

I redeveloped just two of the four stands. I erected a 3 Tier Mercantile Type I and filled it was Astilla seating, resulting in a capacity increase of 26,400. I also invested in an 3 Tier Ospitalia Type II, complete with two Flauta corporate boxes and 4,000 Di Lusso seats.

Total cost was just under 10.5m, with 7.5m paid upfront and the rest over the subsequent 8 weeks.
Projected stadium income is 223k.

The Transfer Market and Bankruptcy

Firstly, its effect on the transfer market has been nothing short of destructive. The amount of money that has been sucked out of the game is, put simply, unreal. This has resulted in no-one having any money to spend on players what-so-ever, with most trying to sell any player on anything approaching big wages for next nothing.

This has meant people like Theiry Henry being bought for £1 on a transfer auction, and players of the calibre of Luca Toni, Julio Cesar, Franco Semioli were not even receiving bids at the end of contract wage auctions. There are currently over 400 players available who are either high potential (greater than 4 star) or have an acquisition fee of over 50,000. There are several really great players who people just simply put, cannot afford. That doesn’t even include all the players who are available on wage auctions in the coming days.

The worst part of it is this makes it almost impossible to refresh your squad to keep ahead of the locks. I’ve done my best to keep my squad new, young and most importantly, ahead of locks, but it’s not been easy and this was greatly helped by the financial compensation. With players going for less than their acquisition fees in transfer auctions, I honestly can’t see when the market is going to pick up, as people seem to be getting into worse and worse financial problems rather than things getting better.

We’ve already had a couple of high profile exits from the Gameworld due to the paucity of several managers and the complete lack of options available to them. Some say they bought it on themselves by not planning far enough ahead, but even then it’s harsh to see so many people who just underestimated both the cost of the stadiums and the complete death of the transfer market. I was just fortunate enough to get a good understanding of how much it was going to cost and get ahead of the curve regarding sales.


Building Time

This was a personal annoyance of mine, but proved to be an issue with managers near the top end of the Gameworlds. The income switchover was scheduled for 28 days after the ability to start building your stadium was introduced. Unfortunately, to build the biggest stands with appropriate seat types takes a lot longer than 21 days. My biggest stand is taking 44 days to build with the seats – but I had to spend 3 and a half hours trying to work out what my financial projection was going to be given what I’d built. Someone on the forums said this and it struck a chord: We’re paying for a game, not a maths exam.

Stadiums and Financial Projections

This is another personal sore point, but one that is affecting a LOT of managers, whether they know it or not. The financial projection for the next 28 days is coded to project what you’ll make based on what the stadium you have BUILT will produce, not what you have building. This results in so called ‘Graphs of Death’ where the financial projection simply bombs after the income switchover. With drastic cost-cutting and the removal of auto-rebids and auto-extends, I’m currently sitting at -£800k – not a good situation to be in!! SI are looking at introducing a new patch, 1.1.2, ASAP to fix this issue, but it’s not looking good right now for a great number of managers, myself included.

Corporate Fans

My stadium will currently hold 35,000 people, of which 2,000 are corporate fans. Those corporate fans are going to bring in over 50% of the income. I understand that corporate fans bring in a lot of cash, but is one Flauta corporate box really equivalent to 26,400 fans?? I don’t know if this will be adjusted in the future – if it is, then a LOT of people will be out of pocket, as this was quickly identified as a quick route to a high daily income.


Overall, I feel like I saved enough cash and prepared wisely. Despite all of this, SI have made it almost impossible for me to stay afloat unless I had about £20m in cash before the switchover!! I’ll probably be financially fine, but it’s going to be a lean few weeks for Beaulieu FC!!