retired_JoshuaPetersen

Another thing has arisen in my fiddling with the editor. Club reputation seems to have a very high inertia within the game - that is to say that you can win the premier league with a team of rep ~6000, and your club's rep will not increase by more than 100 or 200 points (leaving you on a par with Blackburn, Portsmouth, Fulham etc). Surely if a team (especially one not fancied at the start of the season) wins the premier division, it's going to be instantly more attractive?
On a side note, reputation doesn't seem to track buying power (transfer budgets) - if somehow a team gets loads of money, inevitably players start to be attracted by the thought of big wages - or am I just missing its effect? It seems that buying big name players (if you can) improves club rep...
Equally, if players develop a huge reputation within a club, that doesn't seem to drag up the club rep - if (for example) you have two or three international regulars that develop from the youths they don't have much effect on rep unless you're bringing in other big players and winning trophies every year...
So how is club rep calculated and recalculated during the game?

Philco

Well I've noticed that if you have National PLayers on your team, or really really good stars (I was lucky and found a youngster that won the World footballer award after 3 years ^_^) Your club reputation goes up. Also,if you are a "low rep" team, it seems like you get a bonus for winning some of the major cups. How you relate to other managers and what they think of you, also plays a role. If you are a manager in WORLD CLASS. then of course your club will be more noticed and have a higher reputation.
In addition, you can cooperate with foreign clubs to gain a "foothold" in the nation or/and continent. This will also increase the reputation and help you obtain better players.
Publisity is always nice, Having a player win an Award (Young player of the month, player of the month, top scorer, best in league, football of the year etc) will always increase your reputation. Winning matches is also quite important
Also, with the youths not bringing the rep up. Are these players winning anything in the national teams, playing very well? anything like that? If the national team doesn't win anything, their reputation won't increase and neither will your club's.
By buying big names, you get publisity in the biggest media sources, and people will follow you. (player rep also affects club rep)

Hope that helped

retired_JoshuaPetersen

Yeah, it does, but what I think really concerns me, and the reason I use the word 'inertia', is that (for example) even if Chelsea finish fifth for two seasons in a row in the first couple of years, they still bid on and get really big players (Torres, Kaka as well in one instance) - so their rep isn't going down based on lack of Champo league and not challenging for the prem. If Sheff U (to take my example) do well over three years (eg finish 10th, then 4th, then win prem) their rep has gone up from 5600 to maybe 6300, even when competing in the Champo League (and getting to at least 1st knockout stage). Am I doing something else wrong? Is there something about Sheffield or the club itself that holds it back? We're even talking about a situation where I have artificially given us 80000+ crowds (which seems to have literally no effect on rep). I also notice that some players talk about playing for well-supported clubs when they're moving to a club with a lower average gate than the one they left!

Philco

For a clubs rep to go down, it would require embarrassing results. Finishing in the top half of the premiership will never make your rep go down.
Neither will not participating in the champions league. Chelsea will always have money and star players to attract the really big players such as Kaká, Torres, Toni etc.

Now, your club Sheff Utd, start with a low reputation, which can't be remotely compared to the 9800 that Chelsea has, this GIANT gap would pretty much be the main reason for you having a difficult time signing stars or keeping them.
Chelsea might recieve rep penalties, but they are pretty insignificant as long as they have their stars and their money. And lets face it. a deduction of 100-200 a year isn't exactly a lot for a club with a starting rep of 9800 =/

It's hard to make a club one of the better class, and would probably require you to win the ECC or something. And even then, you'd have to continue to perform well in both the league and the the ECC year after year. And while doing that, create friendships with managers and clubs. Make your own name more known, and keep pressing the Reject button when the big clubs are knocking.
As for the "well-supported clubs" take a look at your training plan and your coaches. They sometimes make the difference between a semi-supported club and a brilliantly managed club. You should also look at your training facilities and youth facilities, they are also important reputation wise.

I don't think theres a "limit" in the club so it can't grow. I just think it's reputation is far too low compared to the other giant clubs. FM2007 makes it quite hard to build a club from scratch...

retired_JoshuaPetersen

Cheers for the reply...

It's interesting how things change in the real football world as compared to the game - Chelsea now have a massive reputation in both, but the Chelsea of a couple of years ago, pre-Mourinho, if subject to FM2007's way of club rep changing, would not have been able to advance to the level they're at now. I've done a few artificial experiments (changing things in the database) and it seems to be the hardest thing to change...
The secondary issue to this is that Chelsea's attractiveness to players pre-Mourinho is based not on the trophies (because they weren't winning things) but on their financial clout, their ability to pay wages. Lots of the players they bought were top line but not considered world class at the time they bought them (Essien, Drogba for example), although of course clearly those players have developed massively both IRL and in the game.
I still maintain that the inertia issue (club rep refusing to go downwards) is a problem. Perhaps clubs should have a rating for this property - Chelsea are a big club naturally, but not a huge one, and if the wage money sugar daddy disappeared and no trophies arrived for two seasons, players would not sign for them in the way they do now, but they would in-game. One suspects that if that happened with Man U or Liverpool, the profile of the clubs would remain higher without the trophies or big spending.
It's quite a subtle point, but it makes it really hard to keep players: if you sign a high quality youngster, even if you then go on to win the prem and challenge in the knockout stages in Europe in front of 50000+ home crowds, they want to move to the underperforming-but-rich Chelsea.
If finishing in the top half would never make your rep go down, or even only slightly, it strikes me that there's an inherent bias towards the initially-big clubs within the game, because they have to be really rubbish to lose their high rep, and smaller clubs have to be really really successful to increase theirs.

Rant off, I suppose. It's one of those things that isn't crucial to the first few seasons, but starts to become very apparent after 4-5 years.