Play to the Whistle- A Caribbean Story Inspired by Football Manager (PART TWO: The Caribbean Mega League- Let the Podcast Begin!)

Play to the Whistle

A Caribbean Story Inspired by Football Manager

PART TWO: The Caribbean Mega League- Let the Podcast Begin!

Okay we're back in the action and after explaining the origins of my fictional football venture during Part One, I will now attempt to take you into the world of the game as I walk through the first few weeks of the Football Manager campaign, the development of the early "Play to the Whistle" scripts and the recording of the vocals coming from two guys who live over one hundred miles away from each other.

First up, let's play some FM20

To ensure that the story of Tom Meadowcroft, my good friend from the West Country, is told in the best and most natural way I decided to put him in charge of Dominican Republic side Republican Rabbits, one of the teams that has a large pool of players, in hope that the AI controlled club would have a good chance of success over this twenty-two match campaign and although I didn't want to impact the results too much, I did want to still be involved in the actual playing of the game and so instead of just simulating all of the results I decided to take on the challenge of managing Jamrock Juniors. Whilst Jamtastic would have a pool of almost 600 players to choose from for the 25-man squad, Tom's Rabbits team would have only 200- but that did include quite a lot of South American golden oldies who were bound to be head and shoulders above the likes of most players in the league. In comparison, St Kitts & Nevis would only have a pool of 41 players to pick from meaning that Moko-Jumbies FC was possibly at a disadvantage to some of the other teams.

The Jamrock Starting XI are all valued at £80k to £100k which is a strong CML side

In order to give the league a feel of true realism (and very much the nerd factor!) I went all out from the start of the season by setting out a clear guideline of how the weeks would go both in and out of the game itself. The first step, as you'd expect from any full-time league, was to establish a ranking system to try and predict who was expected to finish where. I won't spoil it for you at this stage, but out of the twelve teams I categorised their expectations as "Top Four", "Mid-Table" (5th-8th) and "Bottom Four" and of my predictions five of them were correct come the end of the season. Not bad considering I don't know too much about the likes of the Aruban league or the Bermudan top tier!

One thing I could be certain of was that this is the best real footballer name ever!

With the teams picked through a six hour draft, the squads analysed and the clubs ready to go, the next step was to get stuck in to the first round of fixtures in which my Jamrock Juniors kicked off with a 1-2 defeat at the Levi Roots Arena, Tom's Rabbits side opened with a strong win versus Redonda Rockys and the small-fry Moko-Jumbies FC side beat Ajax Oranjestad of Aruba. Once I had the first set of results there was work to do so that I could gather the information I needed for the game's outer world. First up, I wrote up a mini review of the week's action so that I could recall how the week went when I came back to my script. Then, I created a "Team of the Week" excel sheet which in the future would be used to compile a "Team of the Season" just like in the real leagues.

I told you it was nerdy!

Now that I'd created a structure for my league, I decided to whip up a quick website to display some of the magic, but more importantly www.pintoffootball.co.uk/fictionalfooty would act as a place for my Podcast to live alongside some of my other mental footballing ventures. Give it a visit if you like obscurity at its finest!

Anyway, on to the creative bit and I began to start writing the script for week one of the "Play to the Whistle" story. As mentioned before, Tom would be the play's protagonist and the opening weeks would see me conduct a scripted interview with him at the end of the matches. Think 'Match of the Day', but with no holds barred.

Now we're cooking

Once we'd sat down and recorded the first session over Facebook Messenger from Stafford and Severn Beach respectively, I did a bit of editing and added in some sound effects, before releasing it to the world using Buzzsprout. The following weeks would be a rinse and repeat process to ensure that it works well before we move on to bigger and more exciting episodes which will include everything from matchday commentary of a match all the way through to an interview on an imaginary flight from Bermuda to the USA. It's bound to be an exciting project and hopefully one that will grip the audiences from start to finish. Although the episodes are generally between five and fifteen minutes long, the content will hopefully offer a good blend of humour and general interest in this fictional league made on one of my favourite games, recorded by some of my favourite people. At time of writing I am seven weeks into my website match reports, four episodes into "Play to the Whistle", three months into the Football Manager campaign and god knows how many hours into the creative elements of the whole thing. Safe to say that I'm absolutely loving it so far, even though it is an ever growing beast that you'll get to find out more about should you wish to tune in to the poddy. Tune in for more madness by listening to the Podcast, give me a follow on Instagram to see some of my wacky club badge designs, or check out the website for a heap of other things that I'm up to!

It did start as a basic idea, I swear!