Fans and sponsors

Fan mood

The members of your fan club decide a lot when it comes to your team's finances. Membership fees (30 US$ / member) are paid once per season, but more importantly, their mood helps determine attendance, which affects gate receipts at your stadium.

The easiest way to keep their mood up and attract new fans, is to match (or even exceed) their expectations. Their current mood can be seen on the Fans page.

Season expectations

At the start of every season, fans will tell you what they expect of the team. These expectations depend mostly on what happened last season, what fans expected then, and what the outcome was.

As your team advances (or drops) through the league system, your fans will slowly get used to the new situation. If you just got promoted, fans will not expect much. But if you are staying put in the same division year after year, fans will tend to hope for just a little more.

Match expectations

The season expectations influence the expectations your fans have for each match. On the Fans page you can see what they expect from each match. Generally, fans expect more from you when you play at home.

If the match result is what they expected, a win will make them like you and a loss will not disappoint them too much (if they were predicting defeat). If the result is better than their expectations, their mood will be even better. But, if the result is worse than their expectations, it will affect their mood negatively. For the first league rounds of the season, your fans' reaction to the results will be a bit more moderate.

At the start of the season, match expectations are based on the seasonal expectations of both teams' fans. As the season progresses, the actual league standings (position and points) of both teams becomes more important. In cup matches, fans base their match expectations only on the seasonal expectations (including division level) of both teams.

Team attitude and your cash funds influence fans

Telling your players to "Play it cool" or play the "Match of the Season" also influences the fan reaction to the match result. If the result is as expected (or better), playing it cool will reduce the positive effect and match of the season will increase the positive effect.

If the result is worse than expected, playing it cool will increase the negative effect and match of the season will reduce the negative effect.

If you have a lot of money saved up, your fans are a bit harder to please as they feel you could be spending to reach success. Rich teams' fans react more harshly to losses and less positively to wins than fans of poorer clubs. The more money your team has, the higher the effect.

Sponsors

Sponsors provide an important source of income for your club as well. Like with fans, this means that more successful teams get paid more. But sponsors also compete with each other and have different strategies for how they want to reward your team, and this is something a clever manager can use to their advantage.

In Week 16, the week before the new season starts, the manager is presented with a number of sponsor offers for the upcoming season.

All teams in a series have the same chance to receive a certain offer, but amounts may vary, as sponsors base their offers on fan club levels, as well as division. This means that all teams will be presented with a unique mix of offers, requiring the manager to think carefully about what will work best for his or her team.

All contracts come with a fixed income every week. In addition to this, they also have one or more bonus payouts. Some of these will be very easy to complete in exchange for a set reward, while others are riskier, but also come with a larger potential bonus. Contracts expire at the end of each season and you’ll then get new contracts to choose from.

If you don’t select a contract, the Board will do it for you. They’ll always select the contract with the least amount of risk, and thus the least potential reward.