Team Guides

Right, a Team Guide. A team guide looks to help the reader of the guide fully understand a team in football manager. It should be helpful, interesting and funny. Obviously. And will give the reader all pieces of information possible so that he can go onto fm and win the league with relevant team aye? Well... in theory yes. Team guides are a good concept and I think the scene is lacking a good guides site.

Fm-guides.com had a go at it. The guides were made manually and weren't en mass. The guides were of the finest quality the scene has to offer and told you pretty much everything you needed to know about the team; info and stats, history, good players, bad players, best players of each position, best tactic, players to buy etc etc. They were cracking reads. And under he reigns of Simmo the site, should it have opened, would I'm sure have been a sucess in its own way. Unfortunatly it never opened to the public because of hosting issues.

However the site would have faced a major problem. Quantity, or lack of it. Its all well and good saying well 'I prefer quality'. But do you really? Think of a n00b searching on Google for guides for Grays Athletic or other ridiculously obscure teams. They just aren’t available. OK you might find the odd LLM guide but its no where near as deep and comprehensive as it needs to be. Getting staff to do 1 guide a week to keep content up on places like TI just wont do. (I know that staff aren’t forced into doing that anymore before WW3 starts.) 1 guide per week is 52 guides per year per staff member. say there are 2 staff members on the job of writing team guides. that’s 104 guides per year right? Well no. There will be some weeks the staff wont do anything, I dare say every other week. So we are back to 52 guides per year per site. But take away about 5 for various other reasons like staff changes or holidays and Christmas etc. Its not a lot of guides is it?

There are thousands of clubs in fm. 290,000 people. It doesn’t tell you how many clubs damn it, just take my word for it, there are thousands. Scene-wide 1000 unique clubs aren't covered every year. No where near that sum in fact. So it goes without saying club guides don’t cover what is needed of them. Its just humanly impossible for club guides of the quality of This One and cover the amount of teams required.

Apart from the sheer scale of a task undertaken by a site who 'does team guides' team guides pose another dis-advantage. In my opinion team guides are a waste of time. I know they are helpful, and people do(cough) appreciate them. But I can't help but think that writing 'Rooney is best played just behind his partner up front who I recommend to be...' or 'buy this fella cause he’s good for his current club and will fit in nicely' must be boring. They are uniformed and pretty drab. The only real reason I can see myself reading a team guide is if I am managing the club at this present time or the Authors last guide as any good.

OK so team Guides are shit pieces of literature in most cases. We cannot avoid that fact tbh. But they don't need to be epics do they? I would rather see a system put in place on websites where all teams are listed and there are certain categories in place such as;

• Best Players of every position
• Deadwood
• Recommended Tactic
• Recommended Players to Buy
• Recommended Players to Sell
• Other Good players in that League

In my opinion nothing else is needed. Just bullet-points for each category and more team guides will be made. I am not saying it will happen but its just my two cents on what I think would be a more efficient way of working.

When I start up fm I look at teams and subconsciously have a look at the above categories. I can't see why people need to do a 10 paragraph every angle look at ny opinion. The scene needs a home of guides. And guides for obscure teams as well. I think that we can safely say that Chelsea don't need a lot of guidance. Its just about been covered a million times.