FM26 Nations Update

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UPDATED

18 countries have a higher Economic Factor than China's 17? That doesn't feel right at all.

Thanks for raising the contention. I'm open to tweaks on these types of ratings where there is uncertainty on where to arrive on the correct rating.

From my interpretation of how “Economic Factor” works in FM is that its not explicitly meant to be raw GDP numbers but to do with wealth and investment to football specifically as well as living standard in the economy. 

I haven't done extensive testing on how these changes all effect the game but hopefully with community input we can try to adjust them to a level where they feel more correct.

Football Manager have basically left all these values the same for 10 years which is why it felt like it needed some type of change.

There's an extensive write up I found on the effects of changing some of these stats here.

https://community.sports-interactive.com/forums/topic/463026-oc-experiment-investigating-the-factors-behind-a-youth-intake-and-the-countries-with-the-most-potential/

I am very open to making all change data public so it can be disputed and we can ensure that the ratings are fair for their implementation in the game.

I've read through the link you sent, but I still believe the Economic Factor reflects a country's economic strength. And of course, this is not always equivalent to GDP. Perhaps FA Financial Power better represents a nation's investment in football. For example, we would never say that football authorities in China have greater financial clout than those in some Middle Eastern countries. This is merely my humble opinion.
Overall, thank you for the great patch. That said, do you think there are a bit too many National Team Rivals added? Many countries would not actually view each other as rivals. I can see these rivalries are rooted in history. Admittedly, England does have genuine historical rivalries with Iceland, Argentina and Ireland. When it comes to France and numerous African nations though, I suppose the ill will towards Les Bleus is largely one-sided.

I appreciate your opinion because for this update to improve it requires feedback to help me arrive at the correct ratings.

I think the truth with a lot of these ratings that are in the game is that hardly anybody knows what they really effect.

You are right to point out that China being below quite a number of countries feels wrong but most of these are steady European economically stable countries and a few are extinct nations or non football nations that don't effect the game.

17 out of 20 is still considered to be an extremely high rating by the game which is what China is at in my update, lowered by 1 from their intitial rating of 18 as there's been a scale back in funding to Chinese football was my thinking.

This ratings in the default game are confusing because Northern Ireland were actually one of the highest rated at 19 economic power so maybe there is some interpretation of what it's meant to mean that I am missing.

With the rivalries I've based them on historic rivalries and also lesser rivalries based on historic clashes at major tournaments as well as political/historic tension or even that the game between the nation's would be significant,

Obviously some will be less important than others and I tried to reflect that by giving them a lower rivalry %

When it's a lesser rivalry it's kind of a way of saying the teams/nations have history more than they full on hate each other.

It’s true that the era of money-fuelled football in China has come to an end. From what I know though, investment in youth development has risen substantially instead. It’s a tough transitional period. So I don’t take issue with your point considering the reduced investment in football. Looking forward to future updates!

That's interesting to know that there is still investment being put into grassroots at youth level because in western media it's pretty much been radio silence on all things Chinese football related for a long time so we don't hear about it. 

Would you say that any other ratings for China should be adjusted?

Looking forward to future updates!

Thank you buddy! The next project I'm going to release will be to update the Geography in the game with a bunch of cities.

I'm about halfway done with that so far.

The current group of young players does appear more promising. The U17 side lost narrowly 2-3 to Japan in the AFC U17 Asian Cup final, while the U23 team also reached the final and suffered a 0-4 defeat against Japan. Meanwhile, the senior national team failed to progress past the group stage at the 2023 Asian Cup.

Even so, youth team results do not equal a country’s football future. Back in 2004, China’s U17 squad won the AFC U17 Asian Cup, yet most of those players failed to live up to their early promise.

Investment in grassroots and youth football has increased noticeably now, so improvements to the youth system are expected in the long run. As discussed in the official thread before, if Youth Ratings can be adjusted dynamically, raising them in three to four years would be more reasonable. Youth investment works with a time lag — it serves the future rather than the present — and Youth Ratings reflect the quality of new talent each year.

For this reason, keeping the rating at 60 might be the safer option. The final call is yours. To me, 45 and 60 are practically the same haha.

I can certainly give China a second look.

Even looking at some of the youth ratings I have set I am thinking I will need to revise them a slight bit.

With dynamic youth ratings, do you know how much difference they make to long term saves in FM?

A couple years ago they implemented it but it seems like it barely made a difference  

Also I wanted to say that maybe you could help me release a Chinese language version of the names and that could feature in the download so they aren't in English for you.

It's relatively simple to update the names so I could release multiple languages but the difficulty is writing the nation names in a way that seems authentic and not like Google translate. 

Update:

Club Coefficients

Nation Coefficients

Currency Exchange Rates

Region Tweaks

Nation Relationship Tweaks

Youth Ratings Adjusted

I like some of the things that you did, like changing the development level of nations (which, honestly, while the SI is more or less accuratte, doesn't make sense for the game, as an south american team wouldn't be able to hire a south american player from a different nation in europe).

However, there is one thing i disliked in your changes, the languages part. It doesn't make sense and doesn't match reality, just as an example, you added the Fulani language (Fula in game) to Brazil, that language is not spoken in Brazil, at least not in significant levels, or it would be necessary to add chinese, japanese, arabic and etc. On the other hand, Guarani, could be added to the regions of Brazil that border Paraguay, with a low percentage. To be fair, SI also doesn't jave any care for the language system in the game and it is already a mess, the only way to represent the languages somewhat would be to add new ones

Fulani being added to Brazil is an error that I thought I fixed because Fulani replaced the language that existed in the database called “Brazilian” but I edited it to be Fulani and assigned it to the West African nations it is spoken in.

It shouldn't still be set as a Brazilian language. 

The only African languages that are documented to be spoken in Brazil still are some Nigerian languages like Yoruba in Bahia but even the percentage of speakers for this language would be so low I wouldn't include it.

The development level of nations in the base game is probably 20 years out of date as they had several high level economic nations in Eastern Europe as an example as “developing” which makes no sense because by every grading system these nations are considered developed.

To determine my rankings of what should be “developed”, “developing”, "lower developed" I used the Human Development Index with a cutoff at different numbers for each rating.

Adding languages to regions is part of my next project so that will be released soon.

Ok, that happens. However, again, I wouldn't worry very much about adding languages, the whole thing is done on a very superficial level, and to be done correctly would take a tremendous effort, since the game tries to represent only official languages of states and regions in the game, just get things somewhat correctly, you would need to do a lot of research to not forget some languages that are not official but spoken by a number that would statistically be relevant, not nly, you would need to think a way to discern between what are dialects and what are languages, something even linguists will say it's very arbitrary, and should matter somewhat, take Spanish and Portuguese as an example, there are so manu different places that speak those languages, but in many cases there are relevant divergences that they are usually considered different languages by linguists, and sometime, languages that are considered different, are said to be dialects between them by linguists

For nations it's more about adding the predominant languages in the nation because if you set a bunch of languages at different percentages it doesn't effect the percentage of people who speak that language it actually effects the fluency of the language by default of people in the nation so it would be weird for everyone of the nationality to have like a basic level in some obscure language 1% of the population speak.

With the geography update I'm working on I've added a 1000 languages and assigned them to existing and new regions at different percentages based on speakers and even cities. 

I've tried to not use dialect so there is overlap of languages between nations like Fulani for example which actually has a few variations of name and dialect like Fula, Fulfulde, Pulaar but I've tried to default to Fulani so it doesn't become too broad. I imagine this would also influence players moving between these nations as they have an understanding in the language. 

Although I have added some languages that are more like dialects just so they can serve the purpose in the game of influencing nationality or names in places they are spoken because the newgens will be influenced by the language's nation in some cases.

I've put a lot of research into this project already. 

Updates:

Language FIle Errors Fixed 

• Fulani no longer listed as language for Brazil
• Chinese no longer listed as language for USA

Naturalisation File

• Years to gain nationality changed for China (6), Qatar (5), UAE (5)

State of Development FIle

• Brazil changed to “Developing”

Live Currency

Live Nation Rankings

Live Club Coefficients

Live Nation Coefficients

Eventually I will add agreements to the zip file because I imagine using exclusively nations in the “Treated as EU” relationships could potentially cause minor issues in saves that reach the point where new member nations like Serbia, etc join the EU around the 2030 mark in game usually.

Can't handle the amount of updates, but I'll give it a try. Just downloaded it (for the 3rd time).

The updates are mainly just to updates fifa rankings, uefa coefficients, etc. that are changing frequently. 

There have been a lot of international friendlies the past couple days so they all alter the fifa rankings. 

If it's getting a bit confusing over what the updates are I can space them out maybe weekly.

With the world cup coming up I might have to rework reputations and youth ratings depending on nation performance but won't do that until the tournament is at least mostly through.

I appreciate you using the update so thanks for that.

Always open to feedback.

Turkey has 3 of the best wonderkids in fm26 i cannot understand how you come to decrease the youth rating. Güler sometimes going to upto 180 pa dynamically

I will reassess youth ratings after the world cup.

For now 124 seemed too high for Turkey.

Since you asked I can update it today. 

Hi @renskay ! What a mesmerising job you made, great update, thanks for the effort on this! I noticed the youth ratings table includes several of the smaller nations and territories that already exist in the database as playable countries, such as Monaco, Kiribati, Palau, Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Bonaire, Sint Maarten, Saint Martin, Martinique, Réunion, Northern Mariana Islands, and Niue.

Out of curiosity, is there any way (either through your update or via the in-game editor more broadly) to make these nations, along with the Vatican, Nauru, the Bailiwick of Guernsey, the Bailiwick of Jersey, the Isle of Man, Northern Cyprus, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Somaliland, and Western Sahara, playable as a national team manager? Failing that, would it at least be feasible to have the game generate newgens with these nationalities, even if in practice those players would have to ply their trade at clubs and in leagues abroad due to the lack of a domestic league structure?

I have actually tried tackling this myself through the Pre Game Editor, but it seems quite restrictive in what it allows you to change. I could not even reassign the continental affiliation of a nation, and with Monaco specifically the continent field appears completely empty yet still will not let me populate it, which suggests it is hard-coded rather than simply left blank.

I understand several of these are non-FIFA nations or dependent territories without their own confederation membership, so I imagine there are hard-coded limitations on the SI side regarding playable national sides. Still, wanted to check whether this falls within what your nations database can influence, or whether it is purely an engine-level restriction that no data update could work around.

On a related note, is there any known way to tweak or unlock the Pre Game Editor itself so these restrictions are lifted, whether through a workaround, a third-party tool, or some sort of hex editing approach? Or is this something that is simply baked into the editor and not something the community has found a way around?

First of all thank you very much for the kind words, I really appreciate it.

With regards to your question about creating new nations in the editor this is very much possible and can be done quite easily although there is the hardcoding issue you spoke of that stops you from being able to alter continent and make the nation international but there is a fix to this available by altering a boolean in the editor config files from false to true.

Depending on the nation used there can be issues with the ethnicity of the regens or names not matching what they should be but for names names in particular the way to resolve this is by adding people to the nation to build up the name pool the nation has to choose from.

I haven't tested it but I think you need at least a hundred or so players for the nation to show up as playable and you need about 500-1000 person names for it to start drawing from the name pool.

This shouldn't be done by hand as it is very time consuming but can be made faster by importing the data into the editor.

The update I am currently working on will make it so several nations can be added to the game but because there's a limited amount of "replaceable" extinct nations in the existing db they won't all be compatible but I'm going to try to make as many as I can.

Essentially what this update will be is roughly 200 nation files that contain added cities and regions for each nation and eventually clubs.

I'm doing it this way rather than bundling all the files in one editor file because it will allow league nation rules to be made on top of the changes and additions for each nation instead of having duplicated data every time you want to make a new leagues nation rules.

For smaller territories I'm planning on packaging them as their own file too and with a separate file I will make an option to activate the nation.

This is will include places like Isle of Man, Guernsey, Falkland Islands, Western Sahara, Greenland, Northern Cyprus, etc.

The default geography files for each one will assign the newly added geography and data to a nation already active in FM like Northern Cyprus data will be assigned to Turkey but the file to activate the nation will just move that data to a newly created nation instead. 

Since I am adding so much data to the game it could get a little confusing but hopefully by the time I am done it will make more sense what the project is.

I just finished Oceania so I am very close to being finished with it, just need to review some larger nations like Brazil, USA, etc then import the data.

If you would like any assistance of how to create a nation in the fm editor I'm happy to help try to explain it.