Stadium Logic

Things that frustrate me

Stadium Logic

I started my latest project off at Hallam, one of the smaller teams in England. Hallam’s home park in real life is Sandygate, which looks something like this:

The most recent versions of Football Manager are incapable of creating grounds that small. We started out with a standard English lower league park, which, of course, we quickly outgrew. I think Sandygate in game can technically fit 1,000 people, including standing only tickets. We were selling it out before the end of the first season.

After some prodding, the board decided to expand:

But then, after we secured promotion our first season, I received this in my inbox:

I think there’s an issue here. The capacity of the stadium was not actually 370 when all was said and done. It’s not clear from this press release how many standing areas were reduced and what the actual overall capacity would be.

This is the sort of odd logical bug that you’d think Sports Interactive would work on fixing. Sure, graphics are attractive and all — but this is part of the actual in-game experience.

In the end, our stadium went from a capacity of about 1,000 to just over 600:

I asked the board immediately for a new stadium. We were selling out our stadium before the work had begun. Reducing the overall capacity is insane.

The board, of course, refused:

This was particularly frustrating because I gave our team a spending happy sugar daddy owner for the express purpose of avoiding this kind of situation. Oh well.

To give you an idea of how crazy all of this was, here is how our stadium stacked up against other stadiums in our league in our second season:

If I hadn’t have given our side a sugar daddy owner, I doubt we would have ever been able to compete.

Anyway, there’s more to come in this ongoing saga. Stay tuned.