Anyway, with the release of FM18, I have been playing around with it to see what changes can be made for the 2018 version of the tournament. The set-up is described below.
Teams
In the 2017 edition, I only allowed nations with an FM-playable league to have their own side, with the rest grouped into geographic regions (e.g. North Africa, Middle East). This time round, every nation on FM that have enough players to make a squad will be represented! This means not only will there be a whole host of familiar faces appearing, like Cameroon, Egypt and Paraguay, but also that there'll be some pretty obscure sides like Réunion, Gibraltar and Sint Maarten. Can one of them shock us and do well? Probably not.
Squads
Last time around, squads were limited to a maximum value of £250m, which was the highest available in FM17's Draft Mode. This time, I am not going to use the Draft Mode (which has had the limit increased to £500m), but instead use the Editor. This is mainly for boring reasons, but the upshot is that there will be no value limit. This means the biggest nations are going to have some extremely talented sides!
Rankings
Of course, with all the teams in the competition, we need some way of seeding them, so a ranking system has been devised. Each team is given a base points total, made from a combination of the scores their top three club sides receive on footballdatabase.com and that sides' national team's FIFA ranking points. This is added to points accrued from the 2017 Draft World Cup.
For sides like Central Asia which was a combination of several sides, the sides' 2017 points are split across all teams with a player in the squad. For example, the Oceania side scored 58 ranking points, which are split equally between New Zealand, Tahiti, Vanuatu and Samoa.
The rankings will be updated as the tournament progresses - you can view the current standings below.
With so many more countries (211 in total, compared to 72 last year), we can have qualification tournaments for each continent.
For the actual World Cup, each confederation gets the following number of spaces at the finals:
- Africa 5
- Asia 4.5
- Europe 13 + host
- North America 3.5
- Oceania 0.5
- South America 4.5
You may wonder why some have half-allocations. These come from inter-continental play-offs, for example the 5th-best Asian side faced off against the 4th-best North American side. I like this, but I don't see why Europe and Africa aren't included. So I have used the above allocations, but taken 0.5 away from Europe (particularly since there's no host for the Draft World Cup) and given it to Africa.
I have also decided that instead of arbitrary play-offs (for example, why do the South Americans get the easier draw of Oceania instead of North America?), and all six sides will go into one big group - which will be pretty exciting! This means that qualification for the Draft World Cup will be as follows:
Africa
Asia
Europe
North America
Oceania
South America
The Finals
Once we eventually have our 32 teams, we will have a World Cup! And our grand plan is for our 2018 Draft World Cup to run parallel to the actual World Cup! So that will mean there'll be the outcomes of 2-3 games a day posted. This is probably a terrible idea, as there's a saturation point in following football, but hopefully World Cup Fever will have taken hold.
Next time
So that's the plans for the new version of the Draft World Cup! We'll be getting stuck into the early stages of qualifying soon. We'll be flitting between the different continents.
As always, I'd love it if you can share this on social media with like-minded people. And please get in touch via here or twitter!