On
Club Home you will find a link to a comprehensive Fixtures List, which includes dates, results, attendance and even a link to
Match Reports, which give you a wealth of statistical details about each game, including your opponent's tactics and formation!
The
Profile tab shows you what others can view about your club. This can be edited under the tab marked
Edit profile. The other tabs:
Squad,
History,
All-time records and
Statistics are all worth exploring and are self-explanatory.
The
Finances tab takes you to an area that you must master if you are to be a successful
Itsagoal manager. The opening page gives you a summary of how you are doing this season, with last season's figure shown for comparison.
Income shows where your club's cash is coming from and
Expenditure shows where it is going. Your job, of course, is to ensure that one of those is bigger than the other! You will see that there are some elements that are directly under your control, such as ticket prices and wages, and others that are a little further away, being related to your stadium size and attendance figures, such as stadium maintenance and policing.
At the end of each season the IAG tax man will want his cut of your club's profit. This includes any prize money that your club may have won. Taxation is paid on profit in the following bands:
Profit Bands:
0 to 2,000,000 - 0% tax (no tax is paid on seasonal losses)
2,000,001 to 5,000,000 - 10% tax
5,000,001 to 10,000,000 - 20% tax
10,000,001 and upwards - 40% tax
Try to plan ahead with your finances. If you run out of available funds, you will find that you are unable to expand your club. You won't be able to buy players on the transfer market, expand your stadium or hire new staff.
However, you will still be able to: renegotiate existing contracts for players and staff, and you will be able to sign new youth players. You are also still allowed to sell players on the transfer market.
The
Board page is another important one. The Board sets you targets each season (being a Board, these are known as
Objectives) and assesses your success against these. The Board also sets limits on what it will allow you to do, (listed under
Board Sanctions). It's worth noting that if your club makes good progress, as measured by your Club Rating, these will change for the better, e.g. by allowing you to employ more staff or have a larger squad.
Under the
Stadium tab, you will see the following subheadings:
Stadium home - Profile - Stand developments - Ticket prices - Attendances - Help.
Stadium home gives you information about any ongoing stadium development and lists the attendances and income from recent home and Cup matches.
Profile lists each section of your stadium, showing its status, capacity and condition.
You can order additional stadium construction on the
Stand developments page, if your finances will allow it.
If you wish to check or adjust your
Ticket prices then consult the named tab. Prices are shown separately for League and Cup games. There is a short summary of recent matches, showing attendance, ticket price and income, with a fuller one available on the
Attendances page.
There's a lot to think about here, and so you are invited to look at the
Help tab, where there are some useful hints.
Attendance
Your attendance figures are affected by a number of factors, such as your club's recent performance, your ticket price and the quality of the opposition. It's a good idea to monitor attendances and to consider adjusting the ticket price in order to take account of changing circumstances and to maximise the income from your stadium.
Be careful about this, though: your fans may not all be happy to pay significantly increased ticket prices and might stay away. However, if your matches are consistently oversubscribed, it's usually a good strategy to raise your ticket price, but also usually best to do this by small amounts at a time.
All of the gate income for league games go to the home club. All cup game income is split 60/40 in favour of the home team unless a game is played at a neutral venue, where gate receipts are split equally between both clubs. Friendly and reserve matches do not generate any income for the club.
Development
One way to increase attendance is by calling the builders in. You will see that construction costs are quite significant, and that building a new stand takes a bit of time. In the long term, if you get your ticket price right, then a new stand should be profitable, but it can take a number of seasons for this to be so.
Bear in mind that a larger stadium cost more to maintain, and that bigger attendances will attract increased policing fees.
Your club is limited to a maximum of two new constructions at any time.
Now we turn to considering the employment and management of your club's
Staff.
In the
Staff section, you will see a list of all of the Club's staff, together with their contract lengths. As Manager, you are not concerned with appointments to the following positions: Chairman, Secretary, Groundsman, Club Doctor, and Directors, and their salaries are not displayed. You are responsible to the Board for the employment of the following members of the Club's staff:
Staff are required to assist in the smooth running of the club. The Board will have set you objectives, and having a good staff will be key in helping you achieve those.
Staff Recruitment
You will need available funds in the bank in order to go about hiring new staff.
If you wish to recruit a new member of staff you have to post a staff vacancy. To post a vacancy, go here
Home > Club > Staff vacancies or click
here. When posting a vacancy, you must decide how long the vacancy will remain open: this may range from 1 to 7 days. The shorter the duration, the fewer the candidates that will respond but the less it will cost. The best candidates may not necessarily respond immediately to your advertisement for new staff. Bear in mind the charges for each vacancy posted.
Be aware that if you start to negotiate with current staff while you have put out adverts for new staff, the adverts can get cancelled. If you decide to advertise for new staff, we recommend you leave the staff pages well alone until the applications have returned.
Staff Attributes
All staff have the same list of attributes which are explained below. This has the advantage that you can re-assign a staff member to a different role if required. So, for example, if you have a coach you think would be better suited to scouting, then you can suggest a new role and ofer him a new contract.
The Staff Attributes are as follows:
Staff Roles
An overview of each staff role.
Staff Team Building
It is worth noting that although you are only responsible for the employment of staff to five different roles, the Board allow you to engage a greater overall number than this. It is also worth noting that this number can increase as your Club Rating rises: keep an eye on this and also on your Board's objectives as when this number increases you will also be able to employ higher rated staff.
You might ask whether there is any advantage in employing more than one person for a given role. The answer to this question lies in the rating of individual attributes that each employee or candidate has. Each person is provided with an overall rating, but two candidates with identical overall rating might have a different balance of individual abilities, as shown in their list of individual attributes.
For example, you might have two applicants for the position of coach. One shows a particular strength in Goalkeeper Coaching, whereas the other does so in Player Ability. Perhaps you should consider the pros and cons of employing both candidates. Where a post is filled by more than one employee, the overall strength of that role in your club will be represented by the highest rating in each individual attribute.
Managers very often employ more than one Scout, in view of the variety of tasks that they perform for the Club.
The Board
The Board will determine the maximum number of staff that it is prepared to fund. It also sets an objective regarding the quality of the staff at the club. To review the board objectives, go here
Home > Club > Board or click
here.
Moving on to managing your
Scout Network: as mentioned above, your Scouts are used to help identify possible targets in the Transfer Market, to find you promising players for your Youth Academy and also to report on matches.
Regarding searching for players on the Transfer Market, you may wish to get results back quickly. If that is the case, then the less specific you are in your search criteria the quicker they will return with results.
The same advice holds true if you are searching for players for your Youth Academy, though of course if you are very particular in your requirements, you may find that they sometimes draw a blank.
Scouts who are sent to watch other matches have three choices:
You can follow the progress of your scouts' searches on the Scout Network tab.
