Reputation

Football Manager's Frustrating Secret Sauce

Reputation

I came across this Twitter post the other day:

I know, I know, it’s Twitter. Still, this is a pretty interesting point.

My experience with Football Manager is that dumping a whole bunch of money on a lower league side tends to have no results at all. The team still doesn’t attract better players, and will wind up doing absolutely nothing in the end.

This is because of the reputation system in Football Manager. While I don’t know exactly how it works, I do know that Football Manager’s reputation system has a lot to do with how the AI controls teams.

In fact, if you try to dump a whole ton of cash on a random team using the pre-game editor, you will be required to raise the reputation to an acceptable level before you can proceed.

This makes sense, by the way. If a ridiculously rich person decided to pump 1.5 billion pounds into Blyth Spartans, the reputation of the team would absolutely increase based on media coverage alone. It’s not reasonable to expect that a small team could suddenly receive a massive increase in funds without attracting at least some media attention.

But, of course, it means that some of the rags-to-riches stories that attract us to Football Manager aren’t quite going to be possible. You’ll need to increase the team’s reputation if you make them rich. And, if you don’t want to see that reputation go up, you’ve got to hold off on the extra cash.