About a week ago I wrote a post introducing Rabona Soccer Manager, which was about to open gates to everyone in a few days.
In the meantime the game was publicly opened and I started poking around. As often when we start something new, we don't get it right from the beginning and make mistakes, from which we learn.
Obviously I had my share of mistakes and trials which led me to choose a certain strategy for Rabona going forward.
This is the right strategy for me, and may not be suitable for other types of virtual football managers.
My strategy will focus on scouting and selling players to bigger clubs after a while. I will also let auto-play take care of micro-managing the matches, I tried setting lineups myself but I had worse results than auto-play did, which probably would make me a pretty bad head coach. :)
What are the pros of this strategy:
- slow and steady growth
- less risks of going bankrupt due to short-term mismanagement
- more time to fix things when strategy needs adjustments
- you need less time daily to implement it, without involving lineup management or even constantly checking the market
What are the cons of this strategy:
- unlikely to be among the top clubs
- less profit than well managed top clubs
If you want real-world examples, Ajax is a great model for growing players from its own academy. They probably started this model, but I might be wrong. Incidentally, Ajax has been doing quite well in Champions League recently, but it's unlikely the club's results will compare to Real Madrid, Paris SG, Manchester City or the German machine Bayern Munchen (which just got their asses kicked this week-end from what I saw in the sports news, btw).
The strategy is not hands off, as matches still need to be analyzed to see what you need to train more or how certain players are performing and for home games especially, the economics too. You also need to track the contracts of your players and decide whether you will extend them or attempt to sell the players before their contracts expire.
Plus you need to scout, but there is this thing with scouting -- it's random. You can improve chances of better stats with a higher level Youth Academy, but you can't decide whether you want to scout for a certain class of player (goalkeeper, defender, midfielder or attacker). This kind of managing decision would make scouting even more efficient.
Image from Pixabay.com
Have you tried Rabona yet? If you think you don't have the skills or you don't have the time to be a top virtual football manager, that's ok. I thought so too. I'm not the best, but I'm not the worse either, somewhere in the middle for now. And it's quite entertaining.