National Teams on Footballidentity

Finally! New National Team functionality is not far away from being released on Footballidentity! Sure we are fully aware that this is something that the community has been wanting for a very long time but being the small development team that we are we have always had to prioritize our focus in order to find the best way forward and in order to lay a development roadmap that also allows us to finance the project. Now, we are very excited to announce that a first version of the National Team functionality will hopefully (if everything goes according to plan) be launched in 4-5 weeksfrom now.

The first version of the National Teams will contain functionality that will allow FIDA’s to appoint national team managers and for the managers to select their team. It will also contain some basic National Team pages as well as functionality for running matches between national teams (connected to simple tournaments). The first version will however NOT include advanced functionality for scheduling matches; this will be part of the functionality called the Tournament Center which we will implement in the future. So match-scheduling will have to be a more “manual process” to begin with but the new National Team functionality will include everything necessary to hold for example a World Cup.

Once we have released the National Team functionality and it is working appropriately we plan to initiate national teams in two tiers:

- National Teams
- U21 National Teams

Preparing for National Teams (NFIDA)

Since this release is not so far away we are sending you this message in order to inform about these upcoming changes but more importantly also to strongly recommend the National FIDAs to start preparing for this release. As we see it there is really nothing stopping FIDAs from starting to appoint national team managers, communicating their appointment and letting them start their work by evaluating the footballer material in their nation and maybe even contacting them to see their interest in playing for the national team.

There are some important limitations to know about when it comes to how managers and footballers (from the same user) can attend National Teams:

- National Team Managers must be of same nationality as the National Team/NFIDA
- One user can only be manager for one national team at once (so the same user can not have two managers being managers in the normal National Team and the U21 National Team at the same time.
- One user can only have ONE character in the same national team at once (so a user can not have multiple footballers or a footballer and a manager in the same national team, he can however have one footballer/manager in the national team and one footballer in the U21 national team)
- A manager can be national team manager AND manager for a league team at the same time

It is up to each National FIDA to decide how they want to go about appointing the national team managers but there are some minimum requirements that must be followed. Please read up about those requirements here: https://forum.footballidentity.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=173254

Please note that we believe there is currently nothing stopping National FIDAs from starting this process right now! National Team functionality is only some weeks away and the sooner the NFIDA get the team managers in place the better they will be prepared when the first national team tournament is to be initiated. We hope that the IFIDA organization (under a new IFIDA President that we hope can be appointed soon) can organize and maintain the first ever FID World Cup in a not so distant future. Please remember to take into consideration that there will be two available National Teams (one normal National Team and one U21 National Team).

So what’s up with the Tournament Center?

The national team functionality is a first step of the tournament center one can say. The full version of the tournament center will include a lot more structure for how to create tournaments as a user, a team or as a FIDA, including tournament pages etc. and matches/tournaments in the Tournament Center will be created using FID Credits connected to the FIDA that initiates or attends the tournament (and it will also be possible to attach FID Credits as award to the winning team or Nation/FIDA). However, as long as all the National Team tournaments are handled using the more manual scheduling process the matches/tournaments will be free and will not carry any FID Credits cost.

Once the National Team functionality has been released and is fully working we intend to continue working on the full Tournament Center functionality but since it is so much more advanced it will take some time before we will see it released.

We hope that you are all just as excited as we are about these news! From our perspective we can honestly say that we can’t wait for the first World Cup to become a reality!

Best Regards,

International FIDA

Here follows some important information about how National Team managers are to be appointed:

It is up to each National FIDA to decide how they want to go about appointing the national team managers but there are some minimum requirements that must be followed:

- There must be an application period during which managers can apply to become a national team manager for a specific national team. This period must be AT LEAST 1 week long and the application period must be clearly communicated to all users in that nation. Of course if the NFIDA have their own favorites when it comes to who they want as manager for a team there is nothing stopping them from contacting those managers and ask them to apply for the job.
- There must be a Poll in which the manager is decided for a specific national team. The poll must follow fulfill the following criteria:
- Only managers who have applied to the National FIDA for that specific national team can be included as an option in the poll.
- All managers that has applied should be entered into the poll but if there are more than 10 applicants then the NFIDA (the NFIDA organization through its president) will have to select 10 candidates to be entered into the poll.
- The poll must be limited so that full members from that nation can vote only
- The poll must run for at least 1 week. 
- The poll must also be clearly communicated to all users in that nation when poll starts.
- The result of the poll will decide which manager gets the manager job at that specific national team BUT the NFIDA will have the possibility to influence (if they wish) the poll result. The NFIDA (the president of the NFIDA but hopefully in collaboration with his or hers FIDA organization) is allowed to add 25 % of the total votes onto one of the poll options at the end of the poll. As an example; let’s say there were 100 votes in total in a poll. There were two manager candidates and Manager A got 40 votes and Manager B got 60 votes. In this case the NFIDA can give 25 votes (25% of the total votes) to Manager A and give him a total of 65 votes and thereby he would be appointed manager for that national team.
- If a poll ends in a draw (same amount of votes for 2 or more managers) then the NFIDA (president) will have the final decision in their hands to choose between one of the managers with the highest amount of votes.

These limitations and instructions will be added to the FIDA Framework on the IFIDA Members Forums.

Please use this topic to discuss and ask questions related to national teams 

https://forum.footballidentity.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2608567#post2608567