Welcome to: Theory of Football.com, where we simulate football theories for your enjoyment!

In this theory, ‘The Ultimate One-man Team’, we will simulate a league with 26 teams consisting of just a single player, but cloned 20 times to create a starting eleven and bench of just that player! The clone teams will then play a full season against each other. The season will be simulated 10 times and all the results will be added up for one ultimate league table.

Settling the debate once and for all: Which player is the ultimate one-man team player!

Enter our competition below and have a chance to win a copy of Football Manager 2020!

The following players are going to battle it out in 10 seasons. Some Legends, fantastic all-round challengers, specialists, and one or two for the memes:

Cristiano Ronaldo

Lionel Messi

Johan Cruyff

Alfredo Di Stéfano

Ruud Gullit

Ronald Koeman

Franz Beckenbauer

Lothar Matthäus

David Alaba

James Milner

Steven Gerrard

Sergio Ramos

Clarence Seedorf Dirk Kuyt

Yaya Touré

Vidal

John O’Shea

Xavi

Azpilicueta

Roberto Carlos

Kevin Großkreutz

Wayne Rooney

Zlatan

Virgil Van Dijk

Gary Breen

Jamie Carragher

Will you guess the ‘The Ultimate One-man Team’ ranking correct ? Please read the following terms carefully:

– ‘The Ultimate One-man team’ is a simulation performed in Football Manager 2019. We have created 26 teams and added 20 clones of each player to the team.

– Every ‘One-man team’ will play the other teams 2 times per season. The season will be simulated 10 times and all the results will be added up for one ultimate league table. The top 10 of that ranking is what you will need to predict.

– Only one entry per person is allowed, this will be checked and duplicates will be disqualified.

– The winner will be the one participant who predicts the Top 10 of the ultimate league table. There are two tiebreakers in case multiple people guess the right Top 10. There can only be one winner.

– The price for the winner will be the latest installment of the Football Manager series, which should be released later in 2019, likely named ‘Football Manager 2020’. The price will be transferred to the winner as a gift on Steam.

In the event that no new Football Manager game will be released in 2019, an alternative Steam game will be sought by ToF.com and the winner, of a similar monetary value of the original release price of Football Manager 2019. This is in no way negotiable if a new installment in the Football Manager series is in fact released in 2019.

– The competition will run until August 15th, 2019

– This competition is in no way affiliated with the Football Manager series or Sports Interactive

– Check out some of the reasoning behind the rules, and the initial line-up as decided by our community. Unfortunately, we had to scrap two teams due to the match schedule giving issues with competitions larger than 26 clubs. Neuer and Akinfenwa did not make the cut. (They were both last in most of our test runs)

– There is still a possibility that we will run into issues with the simulation setup after the predictions have already been made, even though we tested it over 20 times already. So there still may be changes to the rules or configuration. We will try to limit the impact on the results as much as possible but note that the will be no correspondence regarding the results of the competition.

Some additional details:

– Every team has an above-average AI manager, this manager does not have a preferred playing style so he should be a good fit for all the teams. Unfortunately, we can’t prevent the manager from being fired t h roughout the season. We have tried to prevent this in many different ways like giving the manager a superb relationship with the board or arranging a future transfer for the manager, but we still see that underperforming teams start firing their coaches around January, half a year in. These coaches will be replaced with the likes of Mourinho, Zidane, and Conte by the AI.

– Every team has 3 below-average keepers to not influence the results too much, as was decided by our community polls.

– The legends Beckenbauer, Koeman, Matthaus, Di Stefano, Gullit, and Cruyff did not have FM attributes for obvious reasons, so we took some community created players, matched them with their FIFA legends stats, and then created them in the FM editor. None of the legends have a higher current ability then Cristiano or Messi except Cruyff.

All the other players have the attributes from their best season (on paper). Some of them, like Ramos, have actually better attributes right now than in their statistically best year, so we gave them their current attributes.

Before filling in the form, make sure to follow us on Facebook or Twitter and /r/FootballSim on Reddit, to join the discussion and stay up to date on this and other simulations!



