The Mechanics of Manager Reputation: An Introduction



Introduction

As I have been unable to find anything concrete on how manager reputation increases in this forum, I have decided to dedicate this thread to the underlying mechanics of manager reputation.

To do so I will be using FMM to explore hidden variables in the game, so if anybody doesn't want to know how these variables work you should stop reading now.

Hopefully an understanding of how the mechanism behind the partially hidden attribute "manager reputation" will be a great help to Career players, who want start on the bottom of the food chain and eventually winning the CL with Real Madrid (or something like that) plan their career, and/or help them develop an understanding of what will be required to be eligible for a manager job at a certain club.

Basics first...

Manager Reputation is a partially hidden attribute in FM. If you read your own manager screen you can see your reputation described as one of the following:

1. Unproven
2. Regional
3. National
4. Continental
5. World Class

AI managers cannot be Unproven, they are either of Obscure or Local rep instead.
These labels are actually simple categorizations of a hidden variable called Current Reputation that goes from 0 - 10000. These labels also depend on the nationality of your current or last played league, so you can have unproven reputation in England and change to national reputation if you take a job in Malaysia without your reputation actually changing.

The game engine differs between "Home Reputation", "Current Reputation" and "World Reputation".
As I understand these Variables "Home Reputation" is your reputation with teams of the same nationality as you (Possibly secondary nationality as well, needs testing). "Current Reputation" seems to be a short term variable and as mentioned it governs your ingame reputation label (among other things that are not quite clear at this point). While I think "World Reputation" is your reputation with all clubs excluded from the "Home Reputation" category, I'll admit I am not yet completely certain of how it works.

When you apply for a job the game compares your reputation to the clubs reputation and if your reputation is equal or greater to that of the club you might get the job. Which of the two reputations the game uses for this comparison depends on your managers nationality. If the club has the same nationality as you the game uses "Home reputation", if not it uses "World reputation" (Testing implies that it's not actually quite this simple, updates will come). When you apply for a national job your chance of getting it is a function of Current and World reputation combined.

Your starting reputation scores depend on your starting difficulty. These scores ranges from 0 to 10000 and are completely independent of nationality, age or Starting Club. The difficulty levels give you the following scores:

1. International Fotballer, "Home Reputation", 8000, "World Reputation", 4000

2. Professional Fotballer, "Home Reputation", 6000, "World Reputation", 3000

3. Semi-Professional Fotballer, "Home Reputation", 3250, "World Reputation", 1625

4. Sunday League Fotballer, "Home Reputation", 1500, "World Reputation", 750

5. Automatic, This one depends on the reputation of the lowest playing league in your game. Values range from 500, 250 (Lowest league in the world) to 9500, 4750 (Spanish First). It's completely independent of nationality, age or Starting Club. Proven by testing.

To give you some reference Man Utd has a starting reputation of 9250, Q.P.R. has 4750 and Scarborough has 1750.

As I said before these values fall into different categories in-game, Unproven - World Class, depending on what country you currently or last played in. Starting as a Sunday league footballer I would have Unproven reputation in England, Regional in Norway and National in Malaysia at the start of the game. Just try starting three managers with each of these nationalities and you will see that it's true. Reported reputation values in FMM is the same for all three though. If now my Norwegian manager got the job of Malaysian team Melaka his reputation label would change from regional to national, without any value change in FMM, and this label would stick with him when he resigns until he gets another job.

The important thing to draw from this is that your in-game label depends on your current, or last played, league. A national reputation in England is worth more than in Malaysia. This seems to be linked to the nations reputation, but exactly what variable governs it is not of great importance as long as we know roughly how it works.

Reputation can change after every match

Testing has shown that the outcome of every match you play, even friendlies, can change your manager reputation either positively or negatively. The amount of reputation change you get depends on what the game predicts your chance of winning the match is.
My first preliminary draft at an equation looks like this:

"Predicted goal difference" - "Actual goal difference" = "change in reputation" Given the win is greater than predicted for the favorite, or the outcome (Win, draw loss) better than predicted for the opposition.

It's not actually this simple, but this equation will give you the general idea. It means that the favorite team has to win by more that a certain goal margin for their manager to gain any reputation, if they win by less nothing happens. If they don't win, their manager will actually lose reputation, so it pays to live up to the expectations. Alternately, the outcome has to be better than predicted for the opposition for their manager to gain reputation, but even a draw will see them gain. The size of these increases or decreases depends on the match odds. The more unlikely the outcome the bigger the reputation change. The game predicts the result based on each clubs reputation and home advantage, and sets the odds accordingly.

It follows from these observations that winning many matches with a low reputation club, against more reputable clubs, is a relatively quick way to gain manager reputation. This also holds true for friendlies, so you can use this to your advantage by planning these accordingly. If you need to generate cash for your club, and thus play friendlies against big teams, it might be a good idea to let your assistant handle the match (unless you think you can win or draw the match of course.), as you will not lose reputation if your assistant loses the game. Alternately you can play away games against teams you expect to beat to build your own reputation (+morale), the more reputable the team you beat the bigger reputation increase you get.

It also follows from this that the players you should prioritize first when spending your transfer budget are Strikers, Goalies and Central defenders, in that order. The reason for this is that you absolutely need players who knows how to score and players who reduce the amount of goals you recede, as every goal counts towards your reputation. Somebody else can tell you what stats these player should have, but I find that exceptional Pace and Acceleration (Off the ball helps a lot too) are key for strikers in the lower divisions.

If you want to start low and increase your reputation fast get a national job as soon as possible. Most international matches are probably worth up to 20 times more than friendlies to your reputation.