<h2>TinyUtopia Football Manager: Super Slam Soccer Edition</h2>
<h4>by A. Johanna DeNiro</h4>
(set: $team to (either: "Accelerate United", "FC Xenofeminism", "Emancipation AFC"))
You are the football manager for (print: $team), nicknamed the (either: "Red Gryphons", "Darkwikis", "Green Poets").
The club doesn't accept corporate sponsorship on their kits, and it is cooperatively fan-owned. It also keeps ticket prices to a minimum. The club also has a strict policy of open inclusion and anti-harassment.
You have big dreams. But first your fledgling club has to start on the 6th level of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_league_system#Promotion_and_relegation_rules_for_the_top_eight_levels" target="_blank">national football pyramid system</a>: with high enough placement in the league, you'll be able to be promoted to the league above you for the subsequent season!
Let's start the [[inaugural season]]!
(set: $grounds to (either: "Stardust", "The People's", "Dragonfall"))
(link: "The Bug-B-Gone")[] National League South, Sponsored by (link: "Bug-B-Gone")[No One. (Your Successful Boycott of This Pesticide Drove It from Sponsorship)]
*Stadium*: Your home venue, (print: $grounds) Park, seats (random: 5000,8000). It used to be a razed chemical munitions plant that your club cleaned and renovated.
The pitch is rather poor but you have to start somewhere, right?
*Players*: The players come from the surrounding graylands and brownlands and crumbling tenements and refugee camps. They are hungry for more.
(link: "Play the Season Out")[It's a tough battle, but: you win the League! [[You receive promotion!|5thtier]] In your first season as a club! Amazing!]
[The Hyundai National League]<shout| (click: ?shout)[is renamed simply The National League after the other teams put pressure on league offices in solidarity with you.]
*Scouting Report*: This is the last of the leagues on the liminal space between amateur and semi-pro. You and your players, with the support of the club's owners--that is to say, the fans--vote to have all employees receive a living wage.
*More Scouting*: Abandoned (either: "shoe", "ball bearing", "glazier", "hat", "electronics") factories outside the market towns. Floodlights. Rain. Long van rides crisscrossing (either: "Kent", "Bedfordshire", "Durham", "Shropshire", "Tyne and Wear").
*Players*: You begin a youth academy at the park grounds. They help out with the community garden.
(link: "Play the Season Out")[Tense defence. You win a lot of close matches and manage to win the league!
[[League Two|4thtier]]
The Football League--who runs the next three tiers above you--seek to block your entrance into League Two. But you and the team are not having any of it, and eventually they accede.]
(set: $striker to (either: "Sparrow", "Ocelot", "Lamb"))
SkyBet League Two(link: "*")[ (Sky plc--of which Rupert Murdoch owns a controlling stake--preemptively sue you for "defilement against capitalism and free enterprise". You manage to win the suit but it drains your resources in trying to remove them from sponsorship.)]
*Stadium*: (print: $grounds) Park is the heart of a small commune at this point. You have the funds to upgrade the seating to (random: 10000,13000).
*Players*: Your star striker from your youth academy, (print: $striker), comes out as genderqueer. As they are promoted to the senior team, both the Football Association and the Football League seek to bar their participation, but an impassioned speech by $striker sways the League and the FA. They provide 22 goals in your campaign.
(link: "Play the Season Out")[As your youth academy players, especially $striker, start taking more important roles, you become an offensive juggernaut and gain promotion yet again!
[[League One|3rdtier]]
Now it's getting interesting!]
SkyBet League One(link:"*")[ (Fucking SkyBet. "We have a number of self-help tools to help you manage your gambling." Since they are league sponsors, you are forced to wear their patch but your players always change the "B" to an "N" right before gametime.)]
*Players:* You develop sister club relationships with several clubs in Eastern Europe, southeast Asia, and Africa. Rather than the shady contracts and the ruthless dealings that most larger European clubs have with predatory scouting networks in the developing world, you build up these sister clubs as hubs of self-sustaining economic development and education, first and foremost, beyond any other exchanges of football talent.
Your network grows. The larger clubs come knocking--$striker is offered a contract by (either: "Bayern Munich", "Manchester City", "Juventus", "Real Madrid", "Paris Saint Germain") with a transfer fee of 15 million Euros.
Both you and $striker refuse.
*Scouting Report*: Apple trees. 5,000 free meals delivered a week from the $grounds gardens. Millwall FC becomes so impressed by you that they change their nickname to "The Rainbow Lions."
(link: "How About This Season?")[$striker becomes one of the rising young stars of the lower leagues. You fight tooth and claw to achieve first yet again! Wow!
[[The Championship|2ndtier]]
You couldn't be more thrilled!]
SkyNet Championship (This year you just decide to roll with a full critique of authoritarian crony capitalism--Rupert Murdoch seeks an injunction to prevent you from playing out your season...but he overplays his hand by eavesdropping, bribing UEFA and FIFA, and a series of thinly veiled threats against you personally in the media. You're kind of shocked that the civic institutions exist to hold him in contempt and strip him of his assets, but they do. Game on!)
*Stadium*: $grounds Park receives yet another expansion--this time as a combination of a housing development subsidized by your ticket sales and communal endeavours, and extra seating that holds (random: 25000,40000). When the stadium is not in use, the pitch is used as overflow housing to anyone who needs it.
*Players*: Your youth academy becomes one of the sterling examples on the continent. This time, (either: "Bayern Munich", "Manchester City", "Juventus", "Real Madrid", "Paris Saint Germain") tries to snatch away $striker with a jaw-dropping 50 million Euro transfer fee. They also throw in a free Mercedes and a free private jet.
$striker, however, has no plans to leave. He tutors math at the academy in his off-time.
(link: "And This Season?")[The Championship is one of the most cut-throat league in the world; clubs outdo each other trying to get a spot in the most lucrative league in the world.
But you win the league, and promotion, rather handily.
[[The Premier League|premier]]
Wow.]
(link: "Barclay's")[] Premier League(link:"*")[ (Actually at this point, Barclay's preemptively abdicates sponsorship of the Premier League. In addition, the only kit sponsors allowed in the league are nonprofits and co-ops. This does not make the vast array of offshore betting sites, car manufacturers or petrochemical companies with large multinational footprints particularly happy. But you don't especially care.)]
*Players*: $striker has a season with 30 goals! With their deft touch and tenacity, they take the league by storm.
The rest of the team is well-organized at back, and they play with (either: "reckless abandon", "pure tenacity", "unmistakable fire") throughout the entire season.
The players, as well as those from sister clubs around the world, take turns between playing for the team and organizing in communities.
*Scouting Report*: "We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. Likewise, suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, the call to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the few -- a violent particularity of exclusivity -- ultimately entailing catastrophe for the many. Refusing to think beyond the microcommunity, to foster connections between fractured insurgencies, to consider how emancipatory tactics can be scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain satisfied with temporary and defensive gestures." (<a href="http://laboriacuboniks.net/20150612-xf_layout_web.pdf" target="_blank">Xenofeminism manifesto</a>)
(link: "And How Does the Premiership Treat You?")[The megaclubs with petrodollars throw everything they have at you, and you brace for the worst of it. When they've done that, you climb the league table, win by win, and by early May you have clinched the league title!
[[Congratulations]]
]
<h1>YOU WIN</h1>
<h2>TinyUtopia Football Manager: Super Slam Soccer Edition</h2>
(made for TinyUtopias jam on 4/16/16. Thanks to those who inspired it)