The Night Watchman

What does it take to get double-deluxe academies? How do you sustain this? What’s it like?

Achieving such task takes time. How on earth do you build towards such expensive constant investment from the beginning? Personally, it takes 5-6 seasons of fun prize-money distribution, rising through the divisions, and playing the game right. This article separates itself to two sections

a) Loose, rough guide to get double-deluxe
b) What’s it like?

How it starts

From the beginning, I never had the aim to feast my eyes on deluxe but only to go up and up if possible. I won my easy games at division 5, went on an express promotion train ride to Div 1.1 T20 Aus. Div 1 SOD Aus took 3 seasons longer however. Promoting means more experience for your players, however small the gain, it’ll eventually add up. Valuable players on the transfer market either have a good blessing of experience, or the potential to have it. Other includes talents.  With a better academy, your training times increase (small but when accumulated, you’ll see the difference), and with better experience this makes it even better.

Few steps to get double-deluxe:

- Don’t sell your performing players as you promote
- Distribute your prize-money evenly for your weekly investments
- Distribute additional amounts to a value that you can sustain without bankrupting yourself
- Get some luck from your youth pulls along the way, sell the fringe players you get, sell whatever players you deem unfit for your club
- Get some bonus gate receipts off Pav Cup

Selling a player for $1m means you can distribute an additional $63,000 per week for a whole season. When you’re in a country like England or Australia, that means around 2.8x the average alone. Prizemoney amount to 300-600k usually, so that adds another $20,000++. Just because you’re selling good players, doesn’t mean it’s detrimental to the future of your club. Out of perhaps 60 pulls in 4 seasons, you’re likely to keep around 20% of them, thats 12 players. Maybe 2 to 5 will be in ur first team, and the rest in your 2nd XI. They’re assets by themselves that could be sold for much given they have a good price tag in them (helped by the added Exp if you’re in a high div and/or progress further in the Pav Cup)

What is it like to have double-deluxe?

Yes there’s bragging rights, however let’s all be humble pies in this game shall we? There are several ways to play FTP and this is just one of them. Although I have double-deluxe, I’m not a top FTP gun and even if I were, we ought to celebrate our achievements something not on the virtual world

I did not realise this, but having double-deluxe academy means your players train faster than 99% of all managers in FTP. This has actually costed me a fair bit, added with my lack of researching training times or checking them, I did not realize that of the many players I’ve had in my youth academy, 90% of them had the potential to out-skill my current older first XI. And yet only 30% probably are getting the games and experience right. The rest are either 2-4 levels of experience behind. Whether it was very costly or just costly, I’m not sure, because I wouldn’t know if I could’ve promoted to top tier Aus.

Double-deluxe, if you haven’t realised already, comes with a price. My expenses are:

As you can see my main income comes from selling players. Many of these sales have not stopped me from winning games, and I’ve had the potential to play my younger players (players that have enjoyed a higher-level of academy more than my older players) so that they have more experience (their skills out-potentialize my older ones by 2-3 seasons).  My #1 rule, and a rule that I know many managers keep (otherwise the market would be filled with awesome players) is to never sell performing players, they are almost simply priceless. As long as you have 11 performing players every week, theoretically you won’t need your other players, so go sell them, make money, splash it on your investments, go rich and be like me.

~ Triplelite (Wild Tangent)