SO, YOU WANT TO BUILD A LEAGUE...
Making a league can be a daunting prospect. You look at nations currently at the top of the standings, and you see long, sweeping histories, arch-rivalries, silverware. Maybe that seems unachievable - but the only thing separating those leagues from yours is time and effort. Whether you want to be the home of all the world's greatest stars, just want your league to quietly tick over in the background as somewhere to source your international players from, or something in between, this guide is designed to help you get there.

This guide will approach things from an at least mostly realistic standpoint, with at least some amount of interaction with the outside world. Maybe your nation is sufficiently medically advanced that injuries are cured on the spot, or your players are metahumans with long lives who never need to retire. The guide will assume certain things about your league are true, but even if they do not apply, hopefully some aspects of it will still prove useful.

I'll be releasing stages bit-by-bit; we'll be starting with Structure.

STRUCTURE
The first thing to think about is; what form will your league take? This depends on your nation's size, culture and wealth, as well as your level of ambition.

SIZE
How many clubs of note can your nation sustain? How many relevant leagues are you willing to score, and how many sides in each one? Larger, more populated, richer countries that are better at football can sustain more professional sides.

How many leagues you scorinate most likely depends on whether or not you have promotion or relegation. If there's no pro/rel, you probably only have the one league of any relevance - that's no shade on you, it's just there's going to be limited interest in the tiers below. Assuming you do have promotion and relegation, you'll want to score at least two leagues, but I'd advise no more than four at first. Don't worry, though - you're only expected to RP significant detail into your top league, and RP for your second tier is a bonus. Especially early on, don't sweat it.

Larger/richer countries can also sustain more clubs in each league. A country with a small population (or one that doesn't care much about football) isn't going to have more than 10-12 sides in their top flight, because there isn't the interest (and most likely finance) to sustain more. A bigger country, meanwhile, might well have 16-20 cities (or regions within cities) that can draw appreciable fanbases and deserve stadiums. From an OOC perspective, a smaller league has fewer matches and is easier to RP. Anywhere from 8-24 is realistic; my personal advice would be between 10 and 20.

Keep in mind as well that beneath the leagues you scorinate will be immeasurable small, grassroots sides. It would be impossible and unproductive to score every match of football that happens in your nation.

CUP
Something you want to take into account is your Cup. Not that you have to have a Cup, but most leagues do, in order to give lower-league sides a shot at beating larger ones. For convenience's sake, it helps to structure it so that it cleanly divides into eight quarterfinalists, four semifinalists, two finalists and, of course, a champion. If the structure you come off with does not, consider a staggered entry - this is probably ideal, if generally more annoying to count up - in which stronger sides skip the early stages. If your nation has a colony or something (but not a UICA puppet itself!), their sides could also be entered to bulk up the numbers, like France's main Cup IRL.

For example; Nephara, a large country with many giant leagues, has a staggered entry; the two Conferences (2x20) and Third Division (24) enter in the first round, the First and Second Division sides (2x24) enter in the second, and the Premiership sides (24) enter in the third. More simply, Brenecia has four professional/semi-professional leagues of 16 that all enter in the first round.

As far as rankings go, it's much easier to just rank every club within a league the same. Maybe having a slight difference for the best sides in the top tier, but you do still want to spread the glory around. It's the Cup, after all, where dreams are allegedly made of.

In Nephara, Premiership teams are given a rating of 100, First Division 75, 2Div 50, 3Div 25 and Conference 0. There are generally a couple upsets a round, but by the quarterfinals, there's never more than two sides out of eight outside the top flight, but rarely are there none. A First Division side has made it to the final once out of over 20 editions, but one usually goes get fairly far. In the Brenecian Cup (which isn't staggered) the A-League's roughly top-half clubs have a ranking of 100, its weaker clubs 90, B-League sides get 60, C- 30, D- 0. The Nepharim system is more even than the Brenecian pyramid - First Division sides are very credible opposition, B-League sides generally (but not always!) wilt before top-flight ones.

CLUBS vs. FRANCHISES
These are not synonyms, nor is it just a case of regional dialect. Whether your league runs with clubs or franchises reflects the culture of sport in your country.

A club system (or an open league) is a brutal meritocracy with a pyramid structure. The strongest survive, the weakest few (almost always one to four) get relegated. Regulation tends to be lax, and the sides with the biggest fanbases and budgets are free to dominate. They tend to come from the big cities, as a result. Clubs are formed organically from communities. Most football leagues IRL and on NS are club systems.

A pyramid system works when every league is connected. At the end of the season, the bottom 1-4 sides are 'relegated', and replaced with the best sides from the league below. This means that things change and remain exciting, and that success is rewarded and failure punished. To win the top league in the country is the ultimate honour, and given enough time to earn enough promotions, theoretically any side could win it.

A franchise system (or a closed league) is a planned, structural league. A franchise cannot be relegated; it has a license to stay in the league it's in, and will only be stripped of it on financial grounds. Sides tend to be evenly spaced from population centres around the country, avoiding oversaturation to try and have as large an overall catchment as possible. Franchises are made by board-rooms who feel like the league needs to expand into a new market, and creates an identity around that. Almost all North American leagues IRL of any sport are franchise systems.

Franchised systems also have lower tiers, but they're generally less popular than club-system equivalents. A side from the second tier can never make it to the first tier, at least not from their results on the pitch alone. The weakest sides often get compensated with things like draft picks to make them more competitive, and avoid having one team be terrible for its entire history - unlike under an open system, where a bad team will simply drop down as low as they have to until they reach a level they can compete at.

If there is no promotion/relegation system, then it's almost necessary to have a finals series/playoffs to keep things interesting, drawn from your best teams (generally around the top half of the league, often staggered in a way that favours the best ones). This way, if one team dominates the league and has it sewn up ten matches in advance, there's still something to fight over. If you have a finals series, the team that wins the league will generally not be considered the 'champions' - that's the playoff winners - but given another title, like 'premiers'. There's still prestige and a trophy in that, and they will probably have your second-highest UICA slot, with your highest going to your finals champions.

Now, these are very simplified explanations, and you can pick and mix parts as you want. The Australian A-League in RL started off as a franchised league to ensure financial and political stability, but many of its sides are clubs that predate the league, there is no draft, and promotion/relegation is likely to be added within the next 20 years, as soon as the infrastructure can be built. Similarly, many club leagues across Europe 'split' their leagues near the end-point, inspired by finals. It's your show; run it the way you want.

PROFESSIONALISM
This is another simplification, but clubs and players are either amateur, semi-professional or professional.

Amateur players are not paid, train once or twice a week and if they can't make it, the worst that happens is they get dropped from the team. This reflects their performances. Any amateur side would realistically get hammered by most any full-time side they face, especially in UICA where they face the best the rest of the world has to offer.

Semi-professional or part-time players do make money from football, but not enough for it to be a full-time career; they generally have another job, or study. Often, there are semi-professional players who could step up to the professional game, but just make more in their current arrangement. Semi-professionals can go toe-to-toe with professional players, on a good day, but it's still a huge step up in quality. But compared to ordinary people (like most amateurs), they are untouchable on the pitch.

Professionals make a full-time wage from football, though all but the best will still need to find another career after football. They train hard and often, and are expected to devote themselves to maximising performance. Your best league is probably professional. Your second league probably should be as well, either initially or after a couple of seasons; the step up in quality between professional and semi-professional football is massive.

EXAMPLES
Are you someone who likes having examples? Good news! I'll try and pimp out an abandoned puppet's league, and take you through the thought process, step-by-step. Our example will be the Ceyne Isles - in the interests of full disclosure, the nation was a collaborative work between myself and the now-retired Anglatia. I've had his blessing to take over.

The Ceyne Isles are a relic of when Nephara was really good at subjugating nearby islands. As a result, they have a lot of the post-colonial hangups, though at least the Nepharim have been fairly remorseful over it. They sought, and received, independence, and with it also sought stimulus from Anglatian businesses. It didn't end well. Ceynes survived a lot of talk about a brave new world and all they got was this stupid star on their flag.

A lot of the population lives on the coast, with Falston the main mainland city of the western isle (and the overall capital) and Roschester the largest in the east. Culturally, they share Nepharim respect for hard graft and a strong sense of self. The temperature is too damn hot.

Important things to consider:
+ Smallish population (probably not many clubs)
+ Football only relevant sport (but not THAT small)
+ Pretty poor (not very good initially, not a high ceiling)
+ Hot (a lot of night games, league probably won't go through summer)
+ NW Esportivan, ties with Nephara (many foreign players will come in from Nephara/Brenecia)
+ Two major cities, population fairly dispersed (probably not more than 2-3 sides in Falston/Roschester, not more than 1 anywhere else)
+ Nepharim influences (league will be open system, league style likely to be physical and athletic)

Other examples;
The Askari Union is a small and insignificant country on an island somewhere. It is communist, and reflects this in its structure, using a closed system with a salary cap. The Legaskari is a single professional league which started out with ten clubs, before expanding to twelve a couple of years into its existence. Then, underperforming Gaillard had its license removed, and it was replaced by Sainati Bohemien. The top six compete in the finals at the end of the season.

Brenecia is a smallish, somewhat poor Esportivan nation struggling in the post-industrial era, but football is its primary sport and a national obsession. It sustains 48 sides of relevance - four leagues of sixteen sides. The top two are professional, the others semi-professional. It uses an open club system, and most of its best sides tend to be in the northern hub of North Hall or the southern hub of Rozelle.

Nephara is a large developed country in the footballing hotbed of Southeast Rushmore. Football is by far the most important sport in the country. Nephara has four (expanded from three) professional leagues of 24 sides, which makes for a gruelling 46-match season, and regional, semi-professional Conferences, West and East (it's a large country) of 20 apiece. There are also semi-professional and amateur state leagues beneath that, but they aren't scorinated and their sides don't participate in the Cup, because I don't want to go insane of financial and logistical reasons.

IDENTITY
The most important thing writing a league is to establish clear and vibrant identities. You will always have a very good idea of who your clubs and players are in your head, but realistically, none of your readership will share in that knowledge. Every club has to have a reason to exist, both IC and OOC, and you should go to every effort possible to establish their brand.

You probably already have some idea of at least a few clubs, if you've focused on your national team first and have described some of your players as coming from those clubs. But you'll still need to build on those names, and are likely to need to bulk out your league with new creations, to say nothing of lower leagues.

These are the core factors to take into account when you are constructing a club. These are presented in a particular order, but your actual thought process may well shuffle them around.

NAME / LOCATION
This is probably the part you thought of first, and already had down on paper. Most club names consist of a location and, usually, a title. Think of real-life examples - Manchester (loc) United (title); Real (title) Madrid (loc); Sydney (loc) FC (title); Kerala (loc) Blasters (title); Bayern (loc - region) Munich (loc - city); Liverpool (loc; no title).

Try to have some variety, both in terms of location and name. Obviously there's IC caveats here - maybe your country has one huge capital city and everything else is an afterthought. But even then, don't just have Capital City, Capital FC, Capital United, AFC Capital and South Capital. A few of those are fine, but you can still name others after regions of the city, or other things.

A name can tell you a lot about a club. To go back to RL examples, think about Real Madrid (aka 'royal Madrid', big and prestigious) vs. Atletico Madrid (aka 'athletic Madrid', which conjures up a more physical, workmanlike image) vs. Rayo Vallecano (a much smaller Madrid side, named for the neighbourhood of Vallecas). Similarly, looking to the MLS - from the name alone, compare the loud, brash Los Angeles Galaxy (as in 'of stars') who revel in their American identity and go out to buy stars to the more low-key, grassroots, Europhile Los Angeles FC, with their more 'traditional' European title.

We'll be keeping on with our example of the Ceynes Super League, and looking at three clubs in particular. Imperial Falston sound big and impressive, and name-drop Falston, one of the two relevant cities in the Isles. They're probably going to be big, flashy heavy-hitters, especially as they've provided a few players for the Ceyne Isles national team. Roschester Pride represent the smaller of the two relevant sides - they have a less 'prestigious' title, but a loud, flashy one. And not every side is going to be good - it is clear just from the name that AFC Mosstown are a pack of bland bottom-feeders, struggling to survive.

COLOURS
In many real-life leagues, England being especially guilty of this, 80% of the clubs wear primarily red, white and/or blue. And, okay, these are nice colours. But it gets a bit dull. While club colours in real life are generally just an accident of tradition, you have the luxury as an NSS RPer of constructing a varied palette.

If you're using any kind of graphics, it also helps to use different shades. Instead of all your red sides having that classic 200/0/0 RGB red, give one a slightly more orange tint, and another a darker, more royal shade. Also, you can mix and match using stripes, hoops, chevrons or sashes to switch things up a bit. If you want to, you can use various graphic design programs to make it so that their kits and/or crests can be viewed by others. This is something I would probably not worry about for at least another couple of cycles, and you don't have to do it at all. But visual identity can still be conveyed even just by writing what colours they are.

Imperial Falston wear all-white with purple trim, very regal colours, very Anglatian colours, reflecting that identity.
Roschester Pride wear purple - a more vibrant shade than Imperial's trim.
AFC Mosstown wear apple green, reflecting ennui.

POWER LEVEL
How strong is the club? Strength obviously fluctuates year-by-year, as players arrive and depart, but power tends to stick. Good players would rather join a successful club, which begets more success. There's a correlation with a club's size, as well - it's a lot easier to be good if you have a huge swathe of a capital metropolis to recruit locals from and sixty thousand fans through the gates every week - but money is the main factor. RL is filled with examples of obscure sides in the middle of nowhere - Basiksehir in Turkey, Hoffenheim in Germany, Ludogorets in Bulgaria - bankrolled to relevance despite a tiny fanbase and no real history of success.

This is a lot less true in salary-capped, franchised leagues. When a powerful team wins the league, players will come looking for bigger contracts - and suddenly the same side no longer fits under the cap, and some are squeezed out. I don't actually recommend simulating a salary cap or keeping track of contracts unless you really like numbers, but it's just an example. Even then, though, there will still be sides that are more consistently successful, and certainly more famous.

In any case, you probably have some idea of what the big clubs are, and what the strong clubs are - which isn't a 1:1 deal, but most big clubs will be strong. Also, don't feel shackled to the whole concept of it being your first year in UICA. Your nation didn't start playing football the moment when they joined the Baptism of Fire, did they? And footballers need clubs. It can be useful in your RPs to talk about 'modern era' records, aka your first UICA-submitted league, but you can still make reference to sides being far, far older.

Imperial Falston are the powerhouses of the CYI League. It's a young league (in IC terms), so they aren't old as such, but they have a huge fanbase, a lot of money and an expectation of success.
Roschester Pride are probably not a title challenger, but they're still a respectably strong team that prides itself on bringing through youth. They're something of a selling club, though - Imperial often buys the best players that Pride bring through, securing Imperial's dominance and Pride's finances. They're a midtable club, but a particularly good batch of them could aim for the UICA places, and they're probably safe from relegation barring a freak result.
AFC Mosstown, meanwhile, are a small, derelict club from the middle of nowhere. Success, for them, will be escaping relegation.

STYLE
Including, but not only, the style mod. How does your team play? What is the game-plan? What formation does their strongest XI come out in against a standard opponent? These are of course subject to change year by year, especially with a change of managers. But it's good to keep a common thread between seasons and managers, and try and keep a core identity intact.

You don't have to publicise the style modifier, and it's a bit of an immersion-breaker. Nobody in real life looks at clubs and rates them on a scale of -5 to +5. My personal advice - though this is very subjective - is that, at least with NSFS style mods, it's best to stick to a range of -2 to +3. I haven't crunched the numbers, but I feel like an average of +1 will get you around a 2.8 goal per game average.

Imperial Falston are influenced by the attack-minded Anglatian style of play, and combined with their financial might, they aim to dominate the rest of the league both on the scoreboard and in terms of possession stats. Unlike some possession-heavy styles, they are actually trying to get the ball moving forward, though. They spend most of their money on forwards and creative midfielders. They will use a +2 modifier, and play in a 4-3-3 formation.

Roschester Pride are fun to watch as well, though they don't have Imperial's financial clout. They rely more on pace and power going forward, favouring a young and impetuous side, pressing high up the pitch and sometimes neglecting defensive signings. They will also use a +2 modifier, despite their different style of play to Imperial, but their more fast-paced, physical game lends itself more to a 4-4-2. This also contrasts against their more dour, defensive rivals, City.

AFC Mosstown do not have the budget to buy standout creative players, and if they somehow had one, they'd probably sell them to bulk up the spine of the team. They respect hard work and discipline, and consider any away point a good result, no matter how ugly it is. They get their goals by playing direct, route-one football, and have a good understanding of set pieces. Mosstown will play a dour 4-5-1 formation, and have a -1 modifier.

RIVALS
An easy way to add spice to your league is to add rivalries. Most of these in real life stem from proximity, 'derby' matches between clubs in the same city. But there's plenty of reasons for two clubs to hate each other. Often if there are two traditional giants of a league, their match will be something of a 'classic', and there may also be other political factors driving clubs against one another. Matches between rivals are instantly more important, generally more violent, and they'll only rarely (if ever) transfer players between each other. Expect someone who does make the switch to be called a snake or a Judas by their old fans, and perhaps not even accepted by the new - all great RP fodder.

For a real life example, take Barcelona against Real Madrid. This is a rivalry so fundamental it seems like it must have been created by an RPer allergic to subtlety - Real wear all-white, Barcelona wear a cacophony of primary colours. Real are from the capital, Barcelona from a fiercely independent state. Real's identity is based around buying stars and winning at all costs, Barcelona's around a holistic, youth-based approach and winning with style. Real were the fascist General Franco's favoured club; Franco was known for repressing the Catalan region that Barcelona is a part of. They are chalk and cheese that just so happen to be the two most powerful clubs in Spain, and probably the world. No wonder they hate each other!

Imperial Falston is pretty much just disliked by everyone outside of their fanbase, as money-hungry giants unwilling to break their stranglehold on the league. Anyone in Ceynes tends to support their local club first and whoever's playing against Imperial second.
Roschester has two major clubs, Pride and City - who are a more traditional, conservative outfit than the energetic, grassroots-based Pride. The Roschester derby is known for flamboyant displays of banners and pyro, and only the occasional street riot.
Nobody really cares about AFC Mosstown enough to hate them.

SUMMARY
The main guiding principle in all of this is contrast. Trying to get people to remember every club you have is... hard. Can you honestly name every club in every league you semi-follow? So all you can do is make it as easy for your readers as possible, and that means making memorable, distinct identities based around core things. Just to get your foot in the door. I've put all these reasons above for why X is Y, but with our examples, what will really stick around is:

Imperial Falston: Big, rich, marquee focus, hated by everyone, strong Anglatian identity.
Roschester Pride: Decent, youth-based, attacking football, flamboyant fans, hates City.
AFC Mosstown: Small-town, struggling, poor, based around hard work and physicality.

Everything else is built on these foundations. That shouldn't discourage you writing long histories on what each club means, if that's what you're into - these are genuinely a joy to read. But that's a lot of information to absorb, and there's... a lot of leagues for people to keep track of. Find your core principles and reinforce them constantly.

But who plays for these clubs? And how Next time, we look at ROSTERS.

ROSTERS
It's all well and good to talk about clubs, but these matches aren't played on paper. Even when they literally are played on paper. There's still the business of the meat market, filling those clubs with the players that will help them to success. How can you talk about what happens in a game, or a season, or about a year's prospects, without discussing the players?

WHAT IS A [DEMONYM] PLAYER LIKE?
Compared to making 11-25 players for your BoF roster, filling a league is going to take more names, and a strong identity of what a player from your nation is like. In practice, pretty much RL countries have certain 'blueprints' for the players they produce, due to the environment, finance and culture.

Using IC examples: Nephara is a very grounded, professional environment, most of its players drawn from the working class, where hard work and strength of personality are valued above all. Players are encouraged to compete hard from a young age. Ceynes, being an offshoot, produces similar players.

Think about weaknesses as much as strengths, too.
Maybe physicality is emphasised over technique. A lot of huge strikers and defenders are produced, but maybe not so many creative playmakers.
Maybe your country believes largely in aesthetics over pragmatics, and would rather lose 5-4 than win 1-0.
Maybe your youth development is lavishly funded, with a focus on technique - but perhaps a tendency to over-coach players, and to lack competitive edge.
Maybe it's even something as simple as just people from your country tending to the short and lithe, which has obvious advantages and disadvantages. Pretty much any environmental factor can lead to inspiration.

NAMES
Establishing a coherent name scheme is important, though you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If everyone from your country just has bog-standard Anglo-Saxon names, that's perfectly fine. Similarly, if you like having an aesthetic of your nation being a hideous primordial soup of a thousand different cultures slammed into each other, that's fine too. But it's helpful to set those boundaries to help you build your brand and conjure up more names.

How do you get names? There's plenty of ways, and it depends on what's right for you. A lot of people take inspiration from name generators, like that on behindthename. My own approach is whenever I see a surname I like that fits into a Nepharim or Brenecian aesthetic, I note it down, slam a first name onto it and when I'm regenerating players or managers later down the line I have a pool to draw from. For some people, it's easiest just to come up with names on the fly. There's no right or wrong approach - though I would advise not being overreliant on name generation. It's nice when you need to come up with a block of new guys for whatever reason, like when you're first expanding your rosters from one stage to another, but if you use them for everyone all the time, pretty quickly the same names keep cropping up.

You're also more than welcome to take inspiration from your IC surroundings. If most of your guys are Italian, but you're right next to Brenecia, and you want to use that as an excuse to add some Celtic-Colonial English-style names to your pool, I'd be happy as a clam. People migrate! Especially away from Brenecia.

AGES
It's also very important to note down every player's age. One of the core factors of NSS is the flow of time, both internationally and in club terms. On the national stage, your Baptism of Fire heroes will probably be a markedly different group to your first World Cup qualifiers, who will in turn be a completely different side to your first World Champions, should you get that far. And on the club front, expect even more flux.

As a general rule, players tend to come through and be introduced to senior football between 17-20 (this will obviously be somewhat later if you have a collegiate football system of note), peak roughly between 25 and 30 (goalkeepers, centre-backs and large immobile strikers somewhat later, pacy, tricky wingers somewhat earlier), start to slow down in their 30s and retire around 35-36, unless injury forces them out sooner or they're particularly hardy. It's very rare for players to make it into their forties still playing, and these are usually goalkeepers. There are a couple of players IRL who managed to draw out their careers into their fifties, but one, Stanley Matthews, was from an era before sprinting had been invented, and the other, Kazu Miura, is pretty much still going only because nobody dares tell him to stop. Managers tend to retire in their 60s, and usually only manage ten years at their true peak, as tactics move on without them.

So okay, you have a 23-year old guy. Are they going to stay 23 eternally? While it's not unknown to have players age in 'real time', this tends to be stifling OOC - the same names in the same places for your entire time on this site - and faintly ridiculous IC, with players playing 18 World Cup qualifiers in maybe 20 days, having a World Cup every three months. The most common methods are to either age 1 year per UICA season (2 per WC), or 2 per UICA (4 per WC). Granted, UICA seasons and World Cups don't actually necessarily take place at a 1:2 ratio, but it's generally close enough.

DEMOGRAPHICS
Not so much about race; think more species. Yes, NSS is a wild and wonderful place in which the world's best goalkeeper for a decade or so was a cartoon pegasus. Gender's important, as well. Most of the best leagues around the multiverse accept players of any gender, though you are welcome to have a league that only accepts one gender. You may also choose to have a separate men's and a women's league and RP both, but keep in mind that only one of these is going to be relevant to UICA, and the other risks being perceived as vastly inferior without a significant body of RP to massage that.

The Ceyne Isles will take players who are male, female or anything in between. A 'two legs good, four legs bad' rule permits humanoids such as elves, satyrs or the Vloo of Cosumar to play, but ponies from the Equestrian States, for example, would have no place in the league.

KEY PLAYERS ONLY
This method is just to write down the most 'relevant' players for a given side. Internationals, stars, captains, veterans... two to five people who genuinely matter. Assuming you've entered an international tournament, you already have a starting point - everyone from that roster is a key player, and so will any foreigners you buy.

In the Ceynes roster, Imperial Falston already account for three players - the 29-year old rightback Tanya Landon, the 33-year old centreback Tomas Spearman and the 33-year old holding midfielder Shay Wilshire. Sexy? No, but as good a place to start as any. But Imperial are a glamorous side, and also, who will be credited for their goals? So we'll say they've got a 26-year old striker, Gideon Rowan, who is seriously knocking on the door of the national team and has been freshly poached off... Roschester Pride. And it's also nice to include their manager (or head coach, if that's the terminology you're more familiar with - there is a technical difference, but it's largely irrelevant for NSS purposes). We'll say it's a seasoned 59-year old, Cathleen Sharpe, whose acerbic temper with the press make her an easy target, and whose tactical acumen have helped reinforce Imperial's dominance. In the header to their section of the season preview, that might look like this;

Roschester Pride are, as established, a younger and more dynamic outfit. They also have a couple of international representatives - the 21-year olds Corsica Green and Crowley Mathers - and we'll say they have a clever winger and an acrobatic goalkeeper, too. Both of them youngish, both ripe to be sniped by a bigger club. Fitting in with the holistic approach, the manager, Theresa Wilhelm, used to be their reserves manager.

Even lowly AFC Mosstown have a player of international class, the experienced 32-year old striker, Joseph Luther. But as far as players who deserve notice, it's probably more going to be defensive players. We'll say they have a doughty defensive midfielder from nearby Brenecia (this isn't normally something you can just assume, but Brenecia's a puppet) who has some A-League experience, de facto making him one of the best players in the league, and a promising local goalkeeper, Rasmus Garrick. They might be weak by CSL standards, but they're still here, and not going down without a fight. The manager is weary 64-year old Arran Cohen, a seasoned campaigner between the top two tiers, but very much in his twilight.

STARTING XI
Personally, I feel as though the Key Players Only approach is limited, at least for a top flight. If you want to ease your way into things, it's a starting point, but by nature it tends to be limiting and discourage change. Having a Starting XI encourages change, because it highlights weak points in a team that you might look to strengthen in a transfer window, and gives a bigger-picture view. You might also want to include a 'Notable Reserves' feature in case there's anyone notable (aka, anyone whose name has ever come up before) that isn't a usual starting XI. Also, keep in mind that 'starting XI' is just whoever's going to be there assuming form, fitness and tactical changes. Realistically, every side is going to switch things up, bring on substitutes, and try and blood young local talent - it's just that by taking the Starting XI approach, you don't need to regen whatever garbage backup 28-year old right midfielder is going to get three starts and none goals a season before vanishing from the top flight next season, because ultimately, they don't really matter.

So let's bulk out our three examples some more, and take the time to add the formations we settled on in the Identity stages. You might also like to add squad numbers! I like squad numbers. A lot. Probably to an unhealthy degree. To cut a long history short, teams used to just give the numbers 1 through 11 to whoever was on the pitch, and this is still how it works in some amateur leagues today. But nowadays, professional sides give all their players numbers at the start of the season. Generally, senior players will wear 1 through 30, and anything higher than that is for academy products promoted to fill gaps. The best will usually be in that 1-11 range. This used to just be numbering all of your guys from back to front and right to left, but because of how tactics have developed, modern numbering systems tend to be a lot more chaotic. The English tradition started with the two defenders (yes, I know) being 2 and 3, but two of the midfielders, the guys wearing 5 and 6, were eventually pushed back between them. Three of the five forwards were in turn pushed back into the midfield. Hence, the English tradition is that players in a 4-4-2 will be numbered 1; 2, 5, 6, 3; 7, 4, 8, 11; 9, 10. You are, of course, welcome to do whatever you want. This is also a good place to mark out a 'captain', a senior player expected to provide leadership to their peers. When in doubt, just throw it on an old guy who's been there for a long time.

FULL ROSTER
Screw it, maybe you just want to list every senior player at the club. My strong personal recommendation would be not to do this in your first season. Build up to it first. Also, this is definitely something to have alongside a Starting XI! You don't want to make other players just guess which 11 of your 23-25 listed guys are the best.

That said, this comes with several advantages. When you want to drop one player for one reason or another, you have a ready-made replacement with an actual history to step in for them. Often, you can set up a succession within the club - if that 33-year old striker doesn't cut the mustard, but you like the looks of her 23-year old backup, that solves itself. And that can extend to the national team, as well, if you generate an 18-year old with a great name and can start shaping their career from the very beginning, with a view to bringing them through the ranks to start and eventually grooming them for national selection. It is, however, a lot of work, and cuts somewhat into your freedom of movement. See how you feel about Starting XIs first.

THE INEXORABLE MARCH OF TIME AND HOW TO FIGHT IT
So you score your first season. It goes great! And you've submitted it and all that jazz. So what comes next? Let's take that Imperial roster and age everyone up by a year.

Oof. You know, Longman's not looking so hot. It's probably time to scrub him off entirely. And a 32-year old winger, well, Imperial can obviously look to improve on that... and Shanna Quarterstaff, well, on reflection I think I stream-of-consciousnessed in too much of the recent focus on RL guy Sean Longstaff and I just kind of want to yeet her out into space now. So, okay, scrub those off the list and we're left with... no left winger. So either we generate a new one (likely the backup from last season, only now given a name), promote the backup (if we have a full roster, which, again, I recommend working your way up to) or turn to the transfer market. Imperial like buying players. So maybe they poach Rutger Margetson off AFC Mosstown, who were probably relegated. Or maybe, well... it's a big wide world out there, isn't it?

The transfer window opens every UICA cutoff. It's currently closed, but when it reopens after your first season, here is a FAQ for using it. viewtopic.php?p=35260662#p35260662

Next up, we start looking into FORMAT. How do we turn what you've got into a product to be read and adjudged?

FORMATTING
This one kind of got out of hand.

THE CHALLENGE IS TO MAKE PEOPLE CARE
Here is a league table.

What can you glean from this? Really. I mean... it seems to me that a club caled Valletta is good. And Balzan is pretty good. And Lija are terrible. I guess it's pretty rad that Floriana chalked up the best goal difference in the league and only lost four times but are still stranded in midtable. And... that's... about it. Unless you are Maltese, you probably don't really care about what you're seeing here, and your life is not going to be significantly changed by the knowledge that St. Andrews stayed up in the 2017/18 Maltese Premier League despite scoring the fewest goals in the league.

Now watch this video. Hope you like dance music, the original soundtrack got taken down through a copyright claim, but I digress.

Notice how things are actually happening. Same clubs! Same country! But suddenly there's a narrative. There's excitement. Apparently Birkirkara, in the yellow and red, are in the centre of these a lot. I like Birkirkara now! I'm glad they managed to come fourth now. Maybe next year they'll even push Valletta for the title.

The results are the results. The video - the fluff, the jazz - it can't happen without the skeleton of the results to sustain it. But it is, in the end, nothing more than that. And, look, there's nothing wrong with just wanting to have a domestic league as something to check off - you have a big country that is good at football in the WCC, it makes IC sense for them to have a league, so you phone something in just to have some names to send to CH just to have a place your guys come from. Genuinely there is nothing wrong with that. But those guys probably aren't still reading this tutorial.

This section is about making people CARE.

THE SEASON PREVIEW
So, you have your names, or at least an idea to get to them. You don't necessarily need to write anything up before slamming results down on the page. But for people reading along, it's going to be really hard to write about your clubs and how they play football without having access - so it's usual to have a season preview to let people get to know your clubs and their expectations. What you establish here, you'll reinforce throughout the season; repetition is the key.

The preview is where you really start to showcase what those clubs are about. You have the reader's attention, but nobody has the focus to take in everything at once. So you have to get your foot in the door with the people who matter and the things you want to stick in the mind. If you mention your hotshot striker, Silas Slamdown, once in a roster, he'll blend in the crowd. But if you put Silas Slamdown in the roster, mention they just bought hotshot striker Silas Slamdown, say their big threat going into the season is Silas Slamdown and then repeatedly credit goals throughout the season to Silas Slamdown, people aren't gonna forget Silas Slamdown. Granted, do have some sense of moderation - it's not the best look to have an obvious 'RPer's pet' character - but on the whole, repetition is the key.

Using the framework from the Rosters post, here's one I prepared earlier. It's not one I prepared earlier; I slapped it together in three hours. But it establishes visual and historical identities, lists relevant figures, and outlines the realistic chances of the season. It's probably going to take more than a season for individual clubs to stick in someone's mind, and that's okay. Repetition is, after all, the key.

RANKINGS
So now you have to figure out how good each club is. But how to communicate this to the scorinator? This is going to depend to some degree on your personality, and to personal preference. A lot of people don't want a say in their rankings - they want to base it on numbers, one way or another, whether making a formula where past results cough up a club's approximate strength - like the KPB rankings for the WCC, or indeed the coefficients of UICA - or rating individual players on their ability out of 5 or 10, then using that to evaluate clubs as a whole, which is how me and Apox ranked our sides against one another when we ran a joint league for a while.

Me, though, I'm not great with numbers. I lucked into a pretty reliably good way of making rankings work with my initial guess and I haven't had to deviate much since. I just set my max rank to 100 and array the clubs of a given league from a range, usually between 100 and 40. Sometimes an especially good club will weigh in at a 105 or 110; yes, without changing the max rank from 100 (this might not work in xkoranate). Sometimes an especially weak club will be a mere 30 or 35, and an almost certain relegation. I used 25 as an occasional floor for a while until I had a team go through a 0-3-27 season which was really funny at first but then just kind of got sad. For the most part, though, 100-35 or so will produce results with a fair degree of variance, a fair few shocks but, for the most part, final results that can be explained.

SETTING IT ALL UP
If you're using NSFS, your league should look something like this. As far as tiebreakers go, I recommend having goal difference and goals for as one of them - whether you want this to be higher- or lower-priority than head-to-head is up to personal preference.

If you aren't using NSFS... well, this is going to assume xkoranate largely works the same way for leagues. Xkora is almost universally considered the best way to scorinate competitive tournaments between users, because the numbers are fairer (don't ask me, I don't know why) but for my money, NSFS' quality of life and interface make it superior for domestic leagues, and especially cups.

Got it all set up? Good. SAVE. It's going to be a whole lot easier setting this up again next season if you already have your league framework saved, season-by-season.

TIME TO SCORE!
Alright, so I have the Ceynes Super League set up. How many matchdays would I like to scorinate? NSFS asks me. This comes down to how many posts you want to break your season down to. The league is going to come to 33 matches in all, and I'm going to break it into three posts - so I'll want to score my league in batches of 16, 16 and then 1, for the finale. I always recommend making the final day its own thing, so you can make it nice and special.

And now we're looking at this. Whew, Wyndham cannot score for beans. Okay. That's great. Now you're going to want to take this brick of text and put it into a GoogleDoc or an Evernote or whatever word processor you want to use. I strongly strongly strongly strongly strongly recommend never drafting up anything in NS itself. It goes down constantly and doesn't autosave, and there's so many horror stories of people just closing a tab and losing everything, this goes for WCC stuff too. Write stuff on word processors, then paste it into the thing. Okay. Soapbox moment over.

Now that you have these results in a word processor - worry about formatting them later - Save League In Progress. Not Results. That just makes a text document that will be useless to you unless you also save league in progress. Then hit done, cancel league creation and Continue League In Progress on the main menu. Open the thing you just made.

Then take that baby for another spin. From here, you don't have to close out and save and re-open again; you can just score for 16, then 1, right after one another... just make sure to always copy and paste all your results somewhere.

THE CUP
Most leagues have Cups, because small clubs want to take a shot at big clubs, and big clubs want more silverware to fight over. The Cup is where the game reaches its most primal form, 11 v 11 under the same rules, no matter the disparity in quality; where heroic David v Goliath performances are the norm. Sometimes David knocks Goliath off his perch. Sometimes Goliath annihilates David 13-0. Either way, it's a good day out for the neutral, and a breath of fresh air from the league. I covered most of the basics in the Structure section.

For the Ceynes Cup, 12 on its own is a really awkward number to try and turn into a factor of 64. Is... that what the term is, I don't know, I haven't taken a maths class since 2010. If this was a serious nation, though, you could easily have a top tier of 12 and then a second and third with 10 each, no staggered entry - boom, that's 32, done. For these purposes I'm going to fudge it - say there's preliminary rounds for all clubs below the top tier, and that there are four survivors which I will choose arbitrarily - and, hey presto, 16. To reflect the openness of the Cup, I'm going to rank the top six CSL sides by league performance 100, the bottom six 75, and the four randoms 50.

The result looks something like this. You almost definitely want to randomise any rounds in which new teams are entering, you may or may not want to have any particular rounds take place over two legs, you probably want your final to be on neutral ground. It's fairly intuitive. Keep in mind there's a known bug with the NSFS Cup feature - do not scorinate before you save. Save, scorinate, get your results, then cancel out. Otherwise weird things happen.

So, you have your league scored, you have your cup scored, and if applicable you have your results from international tournaments such as UICA, the Cup Winners' Cup or a regional tournament like the AOCL, CdC or CEdC. You have your results. How do you turn this into a video? We'll be going over two basic methods, which you can adapt or frankenstein however you like into whatever you decide you want to write. While it's important to keep your readers hooked, ultimately this is about what makes you happy to produce every two or three months. And don't worry about settling on something that will last the test of time - you can change elements in and out freely, to find what does or doesn't work for you. That goes for previews as well.

THE SEASON REVIEW
A review is when you score the league and take a few stops along the way, looking at what's happened, what the state of play is. Who is at the top? Are they the kind of giants you expect, or is there an underdog fighting at the top table? Are there big teams struggling away from the top? Who's at the bottom? Is anyone dominant? Or, for that matter, notably abysmal? What players are making a name for themselves, and which have been utter busts?

You'll probably also want to at least link the individual results under a spoiler, just for anyone who's curious. Look through them yourself; maybe there's one or two that stand out, or a particular run of form that's made a given club good or terrible. The final result should be a few paragraphs to just put that league table into some kind of context.

If you're already feeling overwhelmed by the world-building and the preview, I recommend you start with a review format.

MATCH BY MATCH
This is the more intensive approach, and takes more effort both to write and to absorb as a reader. You'd best sink your hooks deep. But this is also a deeply rewarding method of RPing your league, one that can let individual storylines flourish, and really pull your readership into the world you've created. This one is for the grognards.

Here's an example of how to put narrative into a bunch of results. Compare these results to a glance at the season review a couple of matches before, and to what we know of the sides generally.

First thought is that Freeport Sharks, who were oh-so-recently ruling the roost, get hammered 4-1 by New Rozelle. That's a nice, juicy scoreline. In fact, reading ahead, you notice that Freeport are about to go on a pretty dismal run of form. Find runs of form as you go, and remark on the patterns you see. Obviously, though, IC nobody knows that the Sharks are about to go into a slump - but this is a fat, juicy result for New Rozelle. Are the Sharks choking? Why has their defence gone to hell? Who's scoring the goals for New Rozelle?

Also, at the bottom of the table, Wyndham and Meade both pick up decent away points against midtable sides. Look at Mosstown's 2-1 defeat at home to giants Imperial - on its own, that's a pretty respectable result. In context, it's a point dropped in the race for survival compared to their peers. So mention that, too. Maybe also mention that Imperial kind of had to work hard for that win. Also, hey, four draws from six games? That's kind of a lot. Individual details like that aren't a bad thing. But what else is here besides league position? Oh, right. Shrove vs. Shroveshore - yeah, a derby. A high-scoring one, too. Maybe it didn't even devolve into bloodshed and fan riots, which is always a classic arc to liven up low-scoring derbies. There's plenty to squeeze a par from out of that, and then move on to the next; you'll be done with the season in no time.

Granted, not every matchday has so many results with immediate relevance. These are the matches where you really get to talk about individual events happening - really cool goals, tempers flaring, rumours swirling off the pitch, crazy red cards. These are important, too - it's not all about cold, hard results, but about making your league fun, vibrant, energetic. These are also, realistically, going to be the only chances for midtable sides to shine. Finding that balance is hard, but you'll get there.

Regarding other tournaments, you might choose to interweave writing about them with the rest of the league, or you might sequestre them into its own sections - or you might ignore them entirely until the finals. I'd recommend at least writing something about them, though. Some of your best moments and narratives are lurking in your Cup, and RPing the results of international tournaments is a great way to really feel a part of the wide world of NSS. Just be mindful not to contradict any RPs your opponents may have written first on the same match!

Of course, every matchday comes in a greater context. Beyond scanning the raw results looking for notable runs of form, good or bad, towards the end of the season teams are going to start to lock themselves in for relegation, UICA or the title. Tracking results on the fly is something that xkoranate apparently does better than NSFS - but even without the aid of that, you can backtrack through results and see when certain outcomes were mathematically assured. If you're very lucky, everything's going to come down to the very end...

THE GRAND FINALE
So you have almost everything done - just 90 minutes remain. Traditionally, the last round of every league's fixtures are played simultaneously, to avoid teams settling for mutually acceptable results and screwing over others. This has the added side benefit of having a ton of drama. Your final post is where you milk the hell out of it. Also, you get to focus on the finals of your Cup and, if applicable, any other tournaments - your big chance all season to really focus on an individual match, WCC-style. And at the end, it's always nice to throw out some awards for top performers. Wrap that all up with your entry form to the UICA and that's done and dusted.

This guide, though, is not. We're going to be closing with a FAQ that should hopefully address anything the rest of the guide did not.

MISC FAQ
When does UICA happen, in-character?
According to common convention: if you're familiar with real-life football, it's similar to how the various Champions Leagues work there, happening across the season. That said, if you'd rather treat it as a whole block of events that happen before your league season, you're entitled to do that.

Can I at least get a hint as to how to schedule leagues/cups/international tournaments alongside each other?
There's no strict global calendar you have to adhere to. Here's what I use for Brenecia and Nephara.

You've vaguely mentioned the difference between the popular scorinators. Where can I take scorination questions to people who know what they're talking about?
Here.

What happens when I'm about to miss a cycle?
So the cutoff's in two days and you're panicking. But there's plenty you can do in that time. If it's not your first season, you already have the infrastructure to score another season with minimal changes. If you have a free hour, you can score the season, format the table, and at least throw up a couple paragraphs of season review.

Of course, as always, RL comes first. If you are absolutely swamped or don't have access to your scorinator, you get one cycle to resubmit your old clubs. I would strongly recommend you RP this as 'the season happened, but just happened to have the same teams finish at the top' - it's a hell of a coincidence, but it beats your players twiddling their thumbs for a year.

What happens when I do miss a cycle?
Sometimes sh!t just happens. I've missed a cycle myself, not for any OOC reasons apart from just missing the cutoff post. For IC purposes, I do believe it's best to assume a league season still happened in that time, but that its submission to UICA was thrown off by off-field factors. Match-fixing scandals, corruption or autocracy in your FA, bureaucratic screw-ups, fan trouble, financial issues - any of these could be a reason to not have been able to submit to UICA despite a league that on the surface functioned fine.

In terms of how this will affect your rank, you won't be crippled. In five seasons, the 'missing' cycle will polish out, and you're still capable of holding onto a top 32 place and a solid reputation. In Nephara's case, I feel missing a cycle early on actually helped ground the league in the 20s for a bit, allowing me to build it up and steadily grow it to make sure that when it did advance up the rankings, it was worthy of that.

My league was meant to be garbage but now it's good, how do I justify it?
If you RP your league very skilfully as a struggling backwater, your league will get a high RP bonus, and that will help you rise up the rankings. The better you RP about being terrible, the less terrible you'll be. This does mean that, barring some exceptional cultural factors, it's unlikely to make much sense to still be a semi-professional operation when your league's in the top 32.

That said, there's a few mitigating factors that can explain overachieving UICA performances. Most obviously... your midtable sides aren't the ones doing much in UICA. You can establish an overclass of two to five genuinely strong sides who have all the money and influence, while everyone else is garbage and scrapes around picking up free transfers. What also helps explain the results is that your overclass can probably afford to rest players against weak local sides and put their full attention on international matches. Alternatively, if your country is small and poor but you have no objection to splashing big in the transfer market, you could RP that you have loose ownership laws that encourage huge investment by club owners, and patch over the inferior quality of local players by making it rain in the transfer window. It might be infeasible, most of the time, to have a league top-to-bottom full of losers - but if you want the aesthetic, you can at least have it be a crumbling wreck outside the face it shows to UICA.

Does my league have to abide by the FIFA rules as written? Should it have VAR?
As long as it's recognisably football, it flies. You don't have to abide by dumb garbage like VAR or people being booked for taking off their shirts. How far can you push the envelope? Well... so far I've never seen UICA throw out a league for 'not recognisably playing association football', but better safe than sorry. But cut some of the fat, if you want.

Should I base some of my teams or players on RL ones?
No. Obviously, you can and naturally will take inspiration from what you see in the real world, but if you just copy over things wholesale, that comes off as lazy and, worse, an immersion-breaker. Granted, there are only so many names out there, and you might accidentally wind up copying someone from RL - I generated a promising young striker called Lukas Rashford maybe six months before promising young striker Marcus Rashford burst into prominence IRL, it happens - and I'm not saying you should sweat that. Nobody's going to call you out if your big city rivalry happens to be nouveau riche in sky blue against a traditional powerhouse in red. And there's always room for a bit of power fantasy - what if your crap local team IRL was actually good? But just... do more than file off the serial numbers.

Okay, but do we generally assume the 'real world' to exist?
No. There isn't a Real Madrid looming somewhere in the background that can be interacted with - we have our own world, our own giants, our own history. Of course, nobody is regulating this, and nobody is going to ban you from UICA or the Transfer Window or whatever if you say you have some German players on the books. But it doesn't make for great RP fodder, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have this other world in the background we can see but never interact with.

Is power in UICA as tightly focused as it is in UEFA?
Thankfully, no. Unlike in real-world club football, where four leagues tower above pretty much all the others, here things are more even. Even a side outside the top 32 can occasionally muster a serious upset, and provided the RP is there, it won't take long for them to reach that top 32 and get their second CC place. Most people are comfortable putting quality players in well-RPed top 32 leagues, and by then you're probably looking at fairly respectable UICA showings year-on-year. It's very hard to reach the pinnacle, and very competitive - but being respected, having quality, getting your foot in the door to sign great players? That doesn't take too long.

Should I make my own domestic newswire thread?
If your league RPs are just one or two posts a season, I think you can get away with just posting them in the Newswire. If they're longer, I do recommend making a threat to put them in. You still do have to submit in the Domestic Newswires thread - link every RP you write into your entry post to ensure they're graded. CH has more than enough to do without chasing up other threads in their own time.

Okay, so I've done my league. Do I need to do anything special to enter UICA/other tournaments?
Nope! Post your entry form - outlined in the OP - to every tournament you want to to, all in one. Make sure, of course, that you can see that teams have actually done enough to qualify for these on sporting merit. Your best teams go into the Champions Cup and into your regional tournament; your next-best teams to the Globe Cup; your Cup champions into the Cup Winners Cup.

And with that, I think we're done here. Whether you wanted to do everything from scratch, or just wanted to look for inspiration going forward, I hope there was something here that could help. Looking forward to seeing you all in UICA next season!