This simulation has been on our list for a while! It’s quite unlikely in real life, but we really wanted to find out what would happen if the Asian and American leagues and cups switched their reputation with Europe’s. Perhaps a massive match-fixing scandal could cause something like this?

We simulated this theory for 100 years and this is what happened!

What we asked ourselves

What will be the short term effect if the Asian Champions League and Copa Liberatores have the reputation of the current European Champions league? Would players flock overseas for prestige or would their club’s reputation and high salary make them stick around?

have the reputation of the current European Champions league? Would players flock overseas for prestige or would their club’s reputation and high salary make them stick around? What if Brasil and China become the biggest leagues in the world? Will this trickle down and increase the quality of youth and let us enter a new era of South-American dominance on the world stage?

Will China finally qualify for the world cup?

How did we simulate this

The concept is quite simple. All the European competitions and cup’s reputations have been decreased to 2 stars at most, with the current big leagues like England and Spain having 2 stars, semi-big leagues having 1,5, etc. etc…

The league reputation from Asian and North/South American leagues have been increased to 4,5 stars at most, with China, Brazil, and Mexico having the highest rep.

We also made the Copa Libertadores the biggest cup in the world, with the Asian Champions League, Asian Nations League and Copa America following closely behind.

Basically, we made it very unattractive to play in Europe, but we didn’t touch the club’s reputations as we wanted to see if the club’s rep would increase/decrease naturally.

Download the database from our steam workshop and try yourself!











The first 5 years

Things didn’t kick off as exciting as we might’ve hoped in the first 5 years, we don’t see any massive superstars moving to the other side of the world.

There is still some surprising transfer activity though. Kai Havertz makes a 74m move to Chinese Huaxia Xingfu in 2022. Usually an unlikely transfer for a 24y old German, but not anymore as China is one of the most exciting leagues in the world now!

Furthermore, we can see that a lot of players are moving back to their home countries, or staying there in the first place since Europe isn’t that interesting of a move anymore, Casemiro is a good example.

Another thing we see is that the MLS clubs are getting a lot more young foreign players as opposed to being a retirement league.

As we hoped, the clubs within the most popular leagues are also turning into the most popular clubs worldwide, with Gremio, Corinthians, and Tigres forming the top 3. FC Bayern, PSG, Benfica, and Napoli are the only European clubs still in the top 10!











20 Years

20 years in and the world has completely changed. We don’t see the national teams getting much better yet but on a club level, the tides have completely changed.

The two best players in the world ‘Laurin Spork’ (yeah, really) and ‘Marcelo Pasini’ both play for Corinthians, which would now be the most prestigious club if not for Al-Ittihad from Saudi Arabia (which is now the retirement league, paying a ton of cash for 30-year-old foreigners).

We now see more or less an even distribution of the world’s top players between European and Brazilian clubs.

China is now attracting so much talent from abroad that they eventually become naturalized Chinese which allows Chinese clubs to have more (originally foreign) players in their starting 11!

On a country level, we see that the vast majority of Mexican and Brasilian players now play in their home country, with the exception of clubs like Man United splashing cash every now and then. The rich European clubs remain rich!











50 years in

A Mexican playing for Al-Ahli is now the best player in the world, who would’ve thought. Furthermore, we still see a big influence of European giants like Man City and Barcelona, which is interesting because their competitions are still only on a 2,5-star rep at most.

The major clubs are now a nice mix of Brazilian, Saudi, Korean and Mexican, with Gremio still topping the list (not surprising as they won the Copa Libertadores 8 times in the last 10 years!)

Finally, we also see some influence of the increased reputations in the World cup: Ecuador, Brazil (3x), Mexico and Argentina have all won the cup since 2018!

Asian countries are also doing much better, with a lot of them in the top 50 of the world.







100 years!

The US and Australia have won the world cup…

We didn’t believe it either, but the US has actually won the world cup! And Australia too! Other than that we continue to see a South American dominance with Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay in addition to the countries who already won it. Almost every S-A country has now won the World Cup in the last 100 years!

On a club level we see a lot more Asian clubs in the top 20 though, but overall still a good presence of both continents. What we don’t see is any European club in the top 100, it looks they still have not recovered from their poor league reputation. PSG is now the biggest European club with 4 stars (and are still writing fat checks)!

Before we end this write-up we still have some more good news , China has finally made it to the world cup!!! Even to the quarter-finals!

I hope you enjoyed the read, see you next time!









