If I had invest all my money in stadium, I would never promote that year to 4th division, and I would have to deal with atendances between 700 and 1500 for a pair of years.
I noticed that after my first arena upgrade that my attendance rose, even though I did not sell out before the upgrade. Meaning the % did not rise, but since I had a higher total seats, I sold more seats. This would mean that the attendance formula, to some degree, take (or at least took) into account the total size of the arena. The income will not come so soon in for instance Spain as in a smaller country, but it would come sooner than if it was not built at all, because when you have star players with a total salary of 200k (or an average of 10+) and you only have 5050 seats to offer, losing potential income.
The default maximum income for a starting arena is 65750$
Your first matches
1232, 772, 1656, 1439, 2464, 2499 and 2234
gave you an average attendance of 1765 (about 35%). Given the seats were distributed evenly you would have an income of 35% of 65750$=approx 23000$ + 50000$ for a total of 73000$ the first 4 weeks. It is no doubt lower than your average small country starting team (approx 20-30k lower), but it still does not negate the importance of building arena. As you mentioned (in my first quote from you) if you had invested all your money in stadium, you would never promote that seaon to 4th division. But you would have had 73000$x5=365000$, turned into bleachers (at 50$ each equals 7300 seats) with an income potential(based on starting average prices) of 148750$ ((4500+7300=12800$)x10=128000$)+(450x35$=15750$)+(50x100$=5000$)), Split into the 35% income you would earn approx 52000$= 29000$ more and over twice your starting income(except the 4 week supporting cash). It would take less than 4 weeks to earn back the invested money, less than 12 weeks with the worst attendance percentage you have recorded, some more if you consider the attendance is not linear. But still, you have the seats as a solid foundation to be able to afford more expensive seats like lower tier and courtside seats to make your team more secure from losing attendance since the bleachers are the seats most heavily affected by losses. Arena upgrades was on a wild wide scale race forcing teams that wanted to stay competitive in the future to build arena no matter what, resulting in the implementation of caps on arena we have today. By doing this they prevented the income to differ more between countries focusing only on arena on the upper scale of arena sizes. One of the main reasons was to support different possible tactics to succeed. On the lower end of arena however, it is an cornerstone for any team, And I can not stress the importance of building enough seats. I am not blaming anyone of beeing stupid or choosing "the wrong" tactic, but in retrospect we see that focusing heavily on arena gave many teams a head start. And I am not saying teams have neglected arena, but perhaps underestimated it slightly.
Last edited by Svett Sleik (U21-Scout Norge) at 2/1/2010 1:47:47 PM