Automatic generation of league matches for a season

Using import export feature

Like every data-driven application the sections in FootballManager are linked between each others – so import / export are RAW. Let’s say you have created Team A and Team B in the application, when you use the export you can see that team A and B has its own ID So Team A has an ID of “1” and Team B an ID of “2” and so on… the same goes for players, locations, sponsors, etc.

When you now create a game and select Team A vs. Team B on Location X and do an export of this you will get an excel with the following information:

Home Away Location kickoff Sponsor

1 2 1 2021-06-06 14:00 99

The game table only contains the raw values of these data. So best practice  (and what I’ve done so far) would be:

First create a demo team in FootballManager and export this, you will get an excel sheet with two rows (header and demo team info) checkout the excel and fill in all your teams into this excel  row by row, do not set an ID (leave the id column blank - its autofilled).

In general you can ignore columns for id,created,modified,hits,access,ordering, and probably others too… most of them will be auto generated when you do something in FM with this teams. The only thing you should not forget is to always set an unique alias – this is important for the joomla system.

Then Import this excel into FM via footballmanager > teams > import (top menu)

Now you have your teams and you can do another export to have an excel sheet including the ID’s (so yes export the whole list of teams now to have a cheatsheet for the task below)

<<< From here on it could be important for you >>>

Now do the same with events – create a demo event and export this to have a blueprint of the needed data. Fill in all the required data directly in excel &nbsp;row by row – game by game. So when Team B plays vs. Team A you will enter the ID’s for this teams.

Alternatively you could copy / paste your schedule into this sheet and move the columns to the right place - then bulk search and replace Team Names with ID’s (or when you know how to do it let Excel do this for you with mapping – Do you remember, you have the Id’s in the exportet (cheat)sheet from above. The only thing you have to worry about is the “date formatting” of excel. Dates has always to be database like yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. I know it sounds like a lot of work and yes with 600 teams or more for example its a lot of work, but keep in mind: next year you only have to worry about the schedule table itself, all the teams are already in the database. And when you ha some Excel Know how its easy to do such bulk changes for data.

Thanks for your reply.

I’m working with 3 leagues of 20 teams so that is 380 games per league per season to set up. It's a lot of work and easy to make mistakes.

I did figure out that using the excel sheet saves some time. I actually installed the dj-league extension, added the teams there, automatically generated the whole season, which gave me the same team id’s. I then copied these to the excel sheet and uploaded it.

It’s a bit confusing to manually finish the setup, but save a lot of time.