By David Marsden · Hamburger SV

Fancy a bigger club? How vacancies are filled now

Every season a few of Top 100’s biggest clubs need a new manager. Someone leaves Soccer Manager, someone resigns, someone isn’t reappointed. Then the question everyone asks is who gets the job, and why them?

Until now the honest answer has been that the admins talked it over. That usually produced sensible decisions, but it was never clear how, and it made it easy for anyone who missed out to suspect favouritism. So appointments now follow a published process too, in section 3.2 of the rules.

1. Vacancies are published

When a club becomes vacant, we publish it with a closing date for applications. At the end of the season, the bottom-three review comes first, so that every vacancy is known before applications close.

A caretaker can run a club in the meantime, but being caretaker gives no advantage in the appointment.

2. You apply, in order of preference

Current Top 100 managers apply by naming the clubs they want, in order. Applying for just one club is fine: plenty of managers would rather finish a project than move up. Managers from outside Top 100, including Top 100 Regen, are considered for any club still vacant after that.

You apply in Manager Portal, under Appointments: tick the clubs, put them in order, and add a note if you like. You’ll get a notification when vacancies open, and you can change or withdraw your application until it closes.

Manager Portal, Appointments. Example clubs.

There are only three reasons you can’t apply:

• you’re still in your first season at your current club;
• you’re serving a transfer ban or another open sanction;
• you’re not a Gold member. Every Top 100 manager must be, just as every new manager joining must be.

A bottom-three finish doesn’t rule you out, and neither does applying for a club several divisions above your own. Both are weighed in the score instead.

3. Every applicant is scored for every club

Each applicant gets a score out of 100 for each club they apply for:

A few points worth knowing:

• Results are judged against squad strength. Finishing 8th with the 15th-best squad counts for more than finishing 5th with the best.
• Record at the club’s level depends on the club. Seasons in Division 1 count for a Division 1 job; for a Division 3 job, seasons in Division 3 or higher do.
• A season you took over part-way through never counts against you.
• Activity matters. That means entering competitions like the Youth Cup and World Club Cup, trading with other Top 100 managers rather than only with outside clubs, building your squad, helping to run Top 100, and being part of the community. A club in Top 100 is more than a squad, and managers who make the game world better for everyone else get credit for it.
• So does focus. Managing in a dozen game worlds leaves little time for any of them. Up to three game worlds in all, Top 100 included, earns full marks for focus, and each one beyond that costs a quarter of a point (of 2).

4. Matching managers to clubs

The scores guide the decision; they don’t make it on their own.

Each applicant is matched with the club they most want that is still open, and the highest score among those is offered first. Then we repeat for the clubs left. If you move, your old club becomes vacant and is filled in a further round the same way, which is how one big vacancy can lead to several moves.

If two applicants for the same club are within five points of each other, the admin team votes, and each admin records a reason. Those reasons are published with the decision.

5. Everything is published

For each vacancy, we publish the applicants, every score with its breakdown, and the decision. If the decision departs from the scores, we say why.

Published decisions at tournaments.smtop100.blog/appointments. Example data.

That is the point of the whole process. Nobody has to wonder why someone else got the job: the reasons are there to read.

What about the Manager Panel and community votes?

We looked at adding a public confirmation vote and decided against it for now: appointments shouldn’t turn into popularity contests. A Manager Panel may come back in future through Manager Portal accounts. For now, the scores are published, the admin team decides the close calls, and the reasons are public.

The rule itself is section 3.2, and every change is listed in the rules’ change record.

Rule 3.2 in the Top 100 rules (the scoring table follows it there).

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