Academy Task 5: Ramblings of a first-time Academy manager

[CamGoldenGun]

I’ve decided to do my deep-dive on my insights from my first (half) season of being an Academy team manager. (*And upon researching this while doing the writeup, I discovered I had very little to corroborate with due to only 3 seasons containing 8 teams and some of the teams in that season were comprised of a lot of NPCs but that sort of gives credence to my theory.)

It’s been brought to my attention that Academy teams are filled out as follows:
- Initial placements to an Academy team are heavily favoured to their proximity of the player’s chosen nationality. 
- Secondary is the position they’ve chosen
- Lastly as the season goes on, fleshing out the other academy teams that are missing key pieces, the players will then fill those spots.

This sets up Port Royal to be the perennial favourite as the majority of the players would get allocated to this team based on our Nation Tracker of Players. 
On this assumption, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Academy the way it’s designed would be as follows for team ranking for an average season:
Port Royal
Stockholm IK
Atlético
Istanbul F.K.
Adowa Accra FC
Sydney City
Victoria Falls
PS Jakarta

Researching this hypothesis was a bit challenging however. Records are spotty and the best I could do was grab the Match Day save files from the forums. In the earlier Academy seasons some of those files appear to be missing so I have no idea if the season was shorter, what the final outcome of the season was (as there could have been more games to play or was the last match day of the season). 

For the newly initiated to the SSL, you may be surprised to know that there were only 4 academy teams: Stockholm, Victoria Falls, Atletico and Sydney. For the sake of this article, it appears Stockholm took the lion’s share of the “west” and were the favourites for most of the seasons up until the expansion in Season 19 with the introduction of Port Royal, Istanbul, Adowa Accra and Jakarta. So unfortunately for me and the purposes of this topic, the only seasons this applies to is S19, S21 and the current season S22.

Season 19


Port Royal had an insurmountable point total. They lost twice (both away games) and drew once (another away game). 
This was the first year with 8 teams and they surprisingly filled out a lot of them with player characters. Port Royal, Istanbul and Atletico were the most consistent sticking with players from around their respective regions. Most of the others were a grab bag of players from a lot of other regions. 

Season 21


Season 21 was interesting. Both Victoria Falls and Jakarta were entirely made up of Legends (NPCs). I'm rather impressed the Eagles got 3rd this season but it looks like it was a very competitive one for the top 6. I actually feel a little sorry for Atletico as they only had 3 legends in their XI but ended up so low on the table.

Season 22 still has one game remaining 


Stockholm is down at the bottom and it really bugs me as it kind of shoots my theory to dust. Not only do they have 10/11 players in their squad, all of them are active players!
 
Anyways this whole dive turned into a bit of a jumbled mess and my theory... well lets just say correlation does not imply causation. Since the introduction of the other four teams, Stockholm has struggled to regain its throne that it held onto much of the early Academy years.

With two out of the three seasons, we've seen some clubs with a high percentage of Legends. One would think that means we should cut down the Academy to 4 teams again. I'm not sure how that's decided, maybe it's done a week before start and if there's not enough academy players they'll cut it down to four teams (as in Season 20?). There's also the matter of home field advantage in the Academy as it's not played in neutral ground like in the other leagues. This makes it really difficult to win away games.

Thoughts for the future:
What I'd like to see is when creating a player for SSL, that there's some kind of squad view or list that shows what each team has and maybe a bit more clarification during the creation process on how they get assigned to their academy team. I think this would kill two birds with one stone with respect to the World Simulation Football Classic as we might get some more representation in areas like Africa and Asia without having to "fill in" those squads with overflow players from USA, England or Central Europe. 

Thoughts for Academy mangers:
As someone mentioned in Discord, there's an attribute "tax" to really be competitive in SSL: the physical attributes. If you have a squad with players who have 15+ pace and acceleration, you really have a leg-up on the rest of your competition if they didn't follow the same formula. Those stats in a league of an average attribute of 10 will generate more xG and run down attackers (as defence) more than anything else. I would encourage all managers next season to sit down with their team and emphasize that before any other fleshing out of their other attributes. I haven't gone through the draft yet but I suspect managers for the minor clubs would encourage re-rolls at the end of the academy season to both fit in better with their draft club and to keep them physically close to the other players in the league they'll be expected to compete against.

[DivogoJota]

Ramble as much as you want when it is this quality. 5/5