Hello everyone. I have just formed a league in the Kicker Manager Game (PRO) for the upcoming 2015-16 Bundesliga season. There is no cost to join, and most of the work is done by Kicker; you just have to manage your team and pick a starting 11 each Spieltag. We have been doing this now for about a dozen years. There's no deadline for signing up, but if you can, sign up no later than August 4, 2015, as each participant will be assigned 13 players on August 6 (0:00 Berlin time; 6 p.m. US ET) and are immediately eligible to participate in the transfer window that opens on August 5. We can take a maximum of 18 players (first come, first served). To join, go to www.kicker.de. Clock on "Games" at the top, and then select Managerspiel PRO (or just PRO) from the dropdown menu. You will get the Managerspiel PRO homepage. Click on Managerliga, which you can find on the horizontal menu near the top of the page. From there, select Liga Betreiten. A search box comes up. Search forbigsoccer.com, and then join the league. Consider joining the fun. asic rules (assuming they haven't changed materially) are that on August 6, 2015, you will be assigned a team of 13 players and given millions in virtual cash. Your team is randomly assigned. Some of the assigned players are players that will never play a game, some are quite good. At that point, you can decide to keep some (or all) of your players, or sell some or all of them and receive cash for them. You can than take your stash of virtual cash and buy any unassigned player you want through an auction process. However, other players may also bid on players, so if you want someone, you'll have to make sure your bid is the highest (it's a blind bid process, so you don't know what other teams are bidding, although you will know if you have any competition for the players). No player can be owned by more than one team in our league. So if you want Lewandowski, you've got to be the highest bidder. I believe you need a minimum of 14 players (18 players maximum). There will be several transfer periods before the BL season starts August 14, 2015 in which you can purchase available players. Once the season starts, you can select your starting line-up from the players you bought/retained (which line-up you can change every week), and after each game, a new transfer period opens up, which allows you to buy or sell additional players throughout the season. There's a points system that is based on on the kicker rating system for players (and additional points for starting, playing, player of the match, goals, assists, red cards). Each week has a winner (the team with the most points), and there is a cumulative table as well to determine the overall champion. If we get 18 players, we can also do a head-to-head league (where you "play" one team each week, in addition to the regular competition, with the team with the most points winning and getting three points, just like the regular BL table).
Haven't done it in a while. I may take a shot - work is kind of busy, but I have fun with the Bundesliga.
Do join if you can, Panic. After the first couple transfer periods, I spend maybe 15-20 minutes a week picking my team and reviewing the transfer wire, and my teams, while not usually great, have been consistently decent, so the time commitment is pretty minimal if you want it to be. As an update, we have four players so far (I'm going to use BigSoccer user names if I know them, and failing that, team names from previous seasons, and failing that, first names): The Friendly Ghost (Halloweenies) Unclesox Stefan Wolfsburgh (Left Backs) Once you sign up, I receive a message on my Kicker account that you applied. I'm traveling a bit next week to NYC, but I anticipate that I will accept you within 24 hours of getting your message (you'll get a return message once I do). As I indicated, I'm going to accept the first 18 people who apply for the league. Once I accept you, you should login to your Kicker account, access the PRO game, click on "Mein Team" and name your team (that way others can see you and you can see others--until teams are named, I think I'm the only one that see you).
Double check if you would; I don't see you. Last time I was in NYC, I had to go to Hartford right after. Took Amtrak, which was easy and convenient. Asked the travel agency for the hotel closest to the Amtrak station so I could walk. It's snowing night of, maybe 8:30 p.m., so dark, and it had snowed previous days, so the sidewalks are slippery. Walk out of the train station and start walking and almost immediately run across a Holiday Inn Express (I actually recognized it; had stayed there a few years ago). But that's not my hotel. Walk a little bit further and see another hotel. But that's not my hotel. Took me a good 15 minutes to get to the hotel they reserved for me, and I had to cross some major highway to get there. Trinity College seemed very nice on my morning run, but I had to run through a pretty sketchy neighborhood to get there.
Join us if you can (or maybe you already have and I'm not recognizing the user name). We used to do an Interactive league, too, but once PRO came out, the interest in Interactive really dwindled. The two big differences between the interactive game and the pro game are: flexibility and player ownership. In Interactive, you pick your team at the beginning of the season and, except for some limited transfer options at the Winterpause, you're kind of stuck. With the PRO game, you have the ability to adapt or adjust weekly to players who fall out of favor, or who are transferred, or who are injured, by selling them and picking up someone else. In interactive, more than one team can own a player; in PRO, you've got compete with other teams for players, since only one team can own a player. So, first thing I do is identify guys that I want, my must haves, my core players, and I set out to buy them. That's really no different than Interactive. If you pick a crappy team at the start, it will be tough to rebound (although you at least have that possibility--a handful of years ago, I was at a wedding in Wyoming when the transfer period opened--poor planning by me--and missed the first couple transfer periods--by then, the players were pretty well picked through--I probably spent more time messing with my team that year, and I never rose above mid-table--but I won a bunch of weeks, as the team I put together was pretty much feast or famine). Second, don't miss the first transfer period if possible (see story above). Third, in terms of bidding for players, if you really want someone, you may have to overpay, because there will be competition for that player. Fourth, you also need to identify cheap players (players on lesser teams or new players that don't have a track record yet), because you won't have enough money to buy a team full of top players. Last year I took a flyer on Roman Burki and he was a top points earner, especially compared to more expensive GK's. I also had a couple Augsburg guys that were cheap but got me good points. Fifth, you have to be able adjust on the fly, selling players that aren't working out for you and buying players who have been unexpectedly good. The more teams in the league, the harder it is to do that, but on the other hand, even a slight improvement makes a big difference. There are different philosophies to team building, and the great thing about this game is that there is not right way or wrong way. Last year, the top three teams each seemed to have a different approach: The team that won last season did so almost entirely on the back of some prudent second-half-of-the-season pick-ups. particularly Bas Dost, who it picked up right around the time he got super hot. The second placed team had a lot of really good players from the beginning, but they weren't particularly deep. The third-placed team had Thomas Muller and a bunch of average guys, but had a very deep team. Some teams only roster the minimum, some roster the maximum. Some rely on a few great players, others have no great players but have 18 guys who get points each week (the former win weeks more often, or so it seems, but it tends to be feast or famine, while the latter don't have spectacular weeks but consistent point getters). Some teams focus on offense. Others focus on MF. Not too many teams focus on defenders, but I know I always try to have a couple defensive midfielders, because they tend to be steady (although not spectacular) points getters. Some like to focus their efforts on acquiring players from a specific team, and others have 10 or 12 teams represented on their rosters. In some years I basically acquired all the strikers from one team, and in other years I've had four different strikers from four different teams, and quite frankly, I'm not sure I've seen a difference in terms of points. But bottom line, it is just like Interactive--pick a team using a strategy that you think is going to get you the most points.
@The Friendly Ghost I already joined. My team name is Theodemar. My teams in interactive have always been pretty good, especially last season when I got it right with almost every first team player. My only concern is the bidding. Is it wise to always offer more then the market value? And how much? Do the bench players automatically swap for those who didn't play after the matchdays?
One person's thoughts: You can tell if another player was bid on to the right of the player, where it shows a number. If no one has bid on the player, there's zero (or no number--I forget) next to player. If there's a number of 1 or more, that means you have company. If the number is zero, and you bid, then there will be a #1 next to the player, indicating that there is now a bidder (you). If that number goes to 2 or more, there are more bidders. My first bid is usually at or a little below player value if there is no other bidder. If there are bidders, I decide if I really, really want the player. If I do, I'll bid over, and usually by a decent bit (say for a player valued at 4,7 million, I might bid 5,2 million. It's rare that I lose a player I really, really want with that strategy. If I don't really, really want the player, but still like him, I'll make a bid, but it will be much closer to his value. Sometimes I win that player, sometimes I don't. I'd probably put it at 50/50. I should point out that some players will delay bidding until near the close of the transfer phase, so as to lull you into thinking there's no one else interested in the player (there have been times when I've gone to bed as the only bidder and then woken up to see that I didn't win the player). And if it isn't clear from the above, you can make multiple bids on a same player. So you can start low, and if there are multiple bidders, react accordingly by raising your bid. Note that if you don't win a player, you keep the money you bid on the player, so there's really never a downside to bidding. However, I don't think you can bid on more players than you have roster spots. So for example, I think you are allowed up to 4 forwards. Let's say you have 2 forwards, and want to bid on more. You can't bid on more than 2 at a time. If you try to bid on a third player, it will tell you you have have to sell someone else. Thus, you can't bid on a player if your roster is full and then decide to get rid of someone; it's the other way around--you have to get rid of a player and then bid. For lesser players, a bid at or below value will almost always get you the player. In my experience, I probably win about 75% of the players I bid on in the first few transfer phases. Once we're in season, unless it is a new transfer or an unknown player who suddenly has been thrust into a starting/starring role, a bid at or below value is most often enough to get the player. I can't give you a good feel for how often you'll win players if you bid significantly below their value because that isn't a strategy I employ. Bench players do not automatically swap (like in the Classic Game), so you have to manage your team week to week. If you start a player who doesn't play for whatever reasons, you'll get zero points for that position. Like in the Interactive Game, you can switch formations--3-5-2, 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 4-5-1. One last point. You get assigned 13 players randomly on August 6. Your first job is going to be to decide who, if any, you want to keep. Sometimes, you can get assigned some really good players (not the top players, who are never assigned, but some good mid-level players--I'm not sure how Kicker does it, but my guess is that if your value is a certain number or higher, you won't be part of the random assignment), and there have been times where I have immediately sold all 13 players that were assigned to me. But as a general rule, there's usually a few useful players in that group that you decide to keep. Hope this helps. As an aside, we're up to 9 teams, as Bryan from last season is back.
That sounds right. I don't think anyone has ever gone back-to-back. There may be a players who has one more than once, but my memory is bit hazy on that--at one point, BigSoccer had four leagues going on: PRO, Interactive, Classic, and a BL2 interactive.
If i'm looking at this calendar right. There are multiple transfer phases starting 28 July... something like 6 of them, even before we are allocated players on 6 August?? What is the point, if we don't have any players
It depends on when the league founder decides its league should start. I chose August 6 so that: (a) people would have enough time to join and that no one got an unfair head start; and (b) there would be enough transfer phases before the season. We're up to 12 players with Patrick back from last season and Eisenfuss back after a couple seasons off. Still six slots open.
Hi all, just founded a team and want to join the league. I've played some comunio some years ago and had average placements most of the time (will never buy Kuranyi again!! ) @Panic: oh these foals will rise in value now be aware