Building a side from scratch

In XpertEleven one of the hardest things to do is start a brand new team from scratch. You typically get an absolute bunch of rubbish. There are certain important things to do whne taking over a brand new side:

• Money management/generation is extremely important
• Get rid of all the dross
• Sell some better players to raise funds
• Buy a few investment players
• Buy mentor players

Money Generation

Basic cash generation in X11 is quite straightforward. Collect your 1m sponsorship money each week and writing a press release of 250+ characters each week will give you an extra 200k on Tuesdays.

Money management

When you have very little money and very few useful assets it is very key to not squander funds.

50k win bonuses help form. Any more is more than you can afford.
Tactics reports cost 35k each - probably give those a miss for a while
Your 1.2m/week income can probably enable you to train 10 players effectively. To err on the side of caution maybe only have 6 the first season who are being developed/trained.

Get rid of the dross

Some players contribute nothing to the team. They have no value. Training them well for 2-3 seasons will still see them with no value. They don't positively age the team.

One of the first things to do with any new team is identify these players. Any player under 27 needs assessing. If they have value it is almost certainly worth transfer listing them to raise seed capital for new players. Anybody over 21 who has no <7 skill and <100k value needs sacking as soon as possible.

Buy investment players

Teams are built from quality youngsters and at the start you can't afford quality. Your initial plans should be to buy players who can be sold in 2-3 season to generate more income. Realistically you want maybe 6 of these kinds of players so that you can afford to train them effectively and get a good CR.

As a simple rule you will want 17/4 vanilla players or 18/4 players with 1+ outfield SQ. By outfield SQ I mean a SQ that adds to the player's valuation so quick/heading/GI/SP/FK. The other visible SQs are all great but won't help the resale value and without an outfield SQ an 18/4 path player will be hard to sell for profit. As you are poor right now it might even be best to avoid evaluations and probably look at <250k per player.

19/5 players with a SQ can be good investments too and I wouldn't worry too much about teamwork at this stage.

Ideally you want to train these youngsters and aim for 15+ AF and 16+ DV on them each season - more if possible.

Buy mentor players

Teams don't perform effectively or get maximum possible ME/DV from each game unless their average age is between 25-29. There is a bit of leeway on that before it becomes a problem but you ideally want each part of a team to be >23.5 AA.

Players will also benefit if there is an older, more skillful, player in their team part. Generally you want to look for players who are 4-5 bars better than your youths and old enough to make the AA viable. typically you should be aiming for around 6 mentor players - a keeper, 2 defenders, 2 mids and a forward.

Working through the maths you are probably looking for 30/9 type players which should be pretty cheaply available (significantly under 500k). Get what you can with your budget.

Running the team

Field a mix of the mentor and youth players to keep your average age viable. I rarely/never train my mentor players as I don't care if they develop and if their skill drops significantly I buy a new player the next season.

You will probably have placeholder players you are unable to sack from the team - no problem just don't waste match experience or training money on them.

After 1 season you may be in a position to afford to buy 2-3 more youngsters and then you can do some effective substitutions to gain extra ME across the team.

After 2-3 seasons some of your players will start to have accrued value and can be sold to fund a 2nd generation of youngsters. This intermediate level will be covered in another post.