Real life Championship Manager

[gufcfan]

I stumbled across an article in 442 magazine about a local french club, Web Football Club.

All the important desicions regarding line-up, formation, tactics, training and so on are made by members of its website "www.webfootballclub.com".

They have made steady progress through the regional leagues in their area following 3 successive promotions since the club's founding.

At this point it is definately worth mentioning that the site is written solely in french. I wouldnt expect much interest in the site in its current form, in this part of the world.

I myself have a little understanding of the language but i find myself strangely compelled by it all the same.

I have no intention of setting up such a venture, but im sure there is somebody that would find the idea of founding an english version an interesting project.

It would be interesting to see such a club enter the Leinster SL, or Division 2C West of the Galway and District League!

The club have very little financial resources, owing mostly to the fact that they charge no sign-up or subscribtion fee.

The club is at a very delicate stage, so they possiblly want to achieve a certain amount of publicity before they go down that road. A move to a subcribtion service would lose them a subtantial amount of members. The club would need to be stong enough to withstand that.

Does anybody think it would take off.

I would love for it to happen. Then I could take all the credit for starting the ball rolling...

SF

[gufcfan]

...All decisions are made using a voting system.

When you start up on the site, you can only vote on line-up, formation and a couple of other things.

You are given points based on the performance of your choice of players and formation. If you picked 442 but by popular vote 352 was chosen and the team won 2-0 you would not gain anything but you would not be penalised either.

The same goes for your choice of line-up. At the end of each game every player is given a rating based on their performance. From that your points are calculated.

All the members are put in a category according to their points tally. The elite few are permitted to vote for everything although there will be some decisions that they and just a few elite will be voting for, who takes free kicks and corners and throw ins, substitutions, training and such. But broader decisions like formation and line-up is voted on by everyone. Higher ranked member's votes carry much more weight than that of a newcomer.

The fella that runs the site, along with some buddies, meticulously log every game. They come up with an OPTA Index™ type stats page for all the players so that you can evaluate the player's performance.

That makes the club sound like a real life Championship Manager PC Game, but if the club wasn’t run the way it is it wouldn’t have been promoted 3 times in the last 3 seasons.

It might sound like the players would find the set-up a bit strange, but they all seem to love it. If a player plays well he gets picked. He plays bad he gets dropped.

The team are still 7 or so divisions below the top flight so other clubs in their league would have local people playing for a local team. Favouritism towards friends, neighbours and relations on the part of coaches can frustrate players. But of course this would never be the case with Web FC.

They film all the games. But all they post on the web at the moment are the goals. Decent quality though.

The players all go online to the forums post-match to receive feedback or criticism, or to explain why they weren’t able to hit a barn door that day.

The whole system works really well

[Block G Raptor]

Nut's Completely Fcuking Nuts.............. It Might Just Catch On
Someone please set up an Irish version

[superfrank]

Je ne parlez francais. But I do know a fair bit of Spanish so that might help...

Anyway sounds like a crazy idea.

My guess is it was founded by a teenage kid who sat around playing Championship Manager all day and his ma said "Get off you arse and get outside!" so him and his other friends who also spent all day playing Championship Manager decided to start playing football.

But because they spent all day on the computer their brains are brilliant mechanic machines, yet their bodies are either skinny from lack of exercise or fat cos they stuff themselves all day in front of the computer so they get their older brothers to sign up for the team and they use their brilliant minds to organise the club and run it via a website. Yes, and they were called......Wizkids United (or whatever that is in French)!!!

Or maybe not.:(

[gufcfan]

That's exactly what i reckoned. My french is a bit dodgy but i reckon that was wat it translated to roughly!

Seriously though if you would like to see it happen then SPREAD THE WORD!

Yee have full permission to copy and paste my message into any other boards yee subscribe to.

Keep me posted on progress/interest

SF

[superfrank]

That's exactly what i reckoned. My french is a bit dodgy but i reckon that was wat it translated to roughly!

Seriously though....
Got my hopes up...