Xpert Eleven Book Published

A new book on Xpert Eleven has just been published, called Xpert Eleven tips, tricks and secrets: The unofficial insider’s Guide to winning’. It is available from the Amazon website as a kindle, ebook or in physical format. The author goes by the name The Secret Fantasy Footballer and they have been tracked down and interviewed.

My introduction to Xpert eleven

I joined as part of a newly set up private league, consisting of a bunch of guys who played football together. I took to it like a duck to water, got hold of Leftblank’s guide and after a couple of seasons in that league began to make sense of all the tactics and development strategies. That was about four years, joining just after the Development measure was changed from AF to DV.

Learning from the forums.

The co-incidence of my joining at the same time as the introduction of DV has more significance than was obvious at the time, and is perhaps the genesis of why I decided to do the guide. The change created a lot of confusion about the site at the same time I was trying to pick up the basics. This made it difficult to learn because when development came up in the forums the thread combusted into ‘it was better before’ outbursts.

This caused confusion as I had no idea what the previous development was, and whether it was better or worse was irrelevant to what was needed now – some clear advice/instruction on how to develop my players. It also meant that loads of old advice, both on the forums, in Xpert Daily articles/interviews and in Leftblank’s guide – all development stuff there was now obsolete, or was it? I had no way of knowing.

My way out of this confusion was writing my own notes on this, researching whatever I could get my hands on and combining it. From those early days I’ve continued to do this on areas of the game that I want to learn more about. After four years these notes and writings are scattered about the place, and I decided to do some cyber-spring cleaning and put them all in one document.

Decision to publish

Whilst sitting in a pub with a friend I checked an Xpert Eleven match on my phone. He was interested, I explained a little about the game and a lot about my notes and ideas to compile them together. The friend then suggested I send him this finished document and he’d look into publishing it as an ebook, something he’d just started doing and experimenting with.

With this development I asked permission from people whose words of wisdom were in the book. There is a sense of community between managers in the game, as shown by the way veterans give out loads of information and advice on the forums on a daily basis. Everyone I contacted was encouraging about the project and gave permission for their words to be used.

When my friend got the document he was knocked out by it, and decided it had to be a physical book as well. And so it was so.

How long did it take?

It took longer than expected to put it all together, a few months. One of the things that took time was going into the forums and the rules to check for accuracy, or to see if I could find why I’d written something down. Often I found more than I bargained for, great debates or discussions about obscure facets to the game new to me.

Special Qualities of the players was an area that really opened up when researching; fascinating stuff about injuries, and the lack of, to fragile players and similarly how little negative affect ‘mouthy’ has in regards to bookings. Managers have built up big databases of match-facts on areas such as these, and they found their way into the Guide - referencing the originator of the findings where possible.

Toward the end I was proof reading printed pages on buses, then getting home writing more till the early hours. Finally there was a point where the proof-reading caught up with the writing and that was that. The last bit, ‘The Long Game’ was planned to be longer, but when it came to it I thought everything had been said in the journey through the book to this point.

Sure a lot of the information in the book is available with a bit (a lot) of digging around the forum, but the grouping of all this information together in one handy reference guide gives it value.

Feedback

Feedback from buyers has been very positive, experienced players have learned things they never knew while less newer players are knocked out by the stuff on how to set tactics.

Guide contents and Iwe’s forum posts

The guide is divided into two sections and ended up 191 pages long. The first is called ‘First Half: Win The Match’ as it’s about tactics, players and training/development to help, uh, win matches. The second section is about team building and money management, the longer-term stuff, and is called ‘Second Half: Win the Game’.

Originally it stated with ‘Win The Game’ and it was going to be written in a more ‘high-powered’ motivational book approach but I couldn’t keep that up! There are fragments of that motivational-speak, for that reason, at the start of the Second section. Then I reversed the sections to address from the start the most common cry from the forums, “why did I lose this match?’ The answer almost always is tactical choices, so look at them first.

There’s an appendix consisting of two long posts from the forum made by Iwe in 2005 and 2007 which discuss and explain how player form is calculated and the reasons it rises and falls. This is included because whenever Xpert experts provide explanations of form on the site they inevitably refer back to these posts.

One of the nuggets of information I discovered was another post by Iwe, in the Swedish forum, about the tactical side of Xpert Eleven. This is reproduced and discussed in the guide but here’s a bit of it now, “there are many more dimensions in the tactical game…Hard Guard [Tightly Mark] and defense strategy are just two of about 25-30 points as the tactical game consists of. Some are more important than others and some are more subtle than others. And most of it is dependent on environmental factors. That is, a tactic that can be great if so and so is satisfied otherwise it’s marginally good.”

Once you think you’ve learned everything about the game, Iwe’s posts will give you more. I’m pleased Iwe gave his permission to use these and any of his words I wanted because they are the crux of the game and a comprehensive collection like this would be incomplete without them. Iwe was very supportive of this guide by the way, which helped a great deal.

Translations/follow ups

During the writing I tried to keep the writing bland, editing out any sayings, adages and idioms particular to the English language: I think ‘rule of thumb’ is the only that stayed in. The reason for this is to make it easier to be read by people who don’t have English as their first language, and also to make it easier to be translated. So right from the start foreign language versions have been considered; however no one has come forward to do this yet.

Follow ups are inevitable, but it what form it’s hard to say at the moment. I think it depends on which way the game develops and what players want from a guide.

There’s a Secret Fantasy Footballer blog with ruminations on aspects of the game that have either occurred since the publication or were too abstract/wishywashy to fit into it. A few days ago I posted about the unexpected difficulties in team building when you get emotionally attached to your players so can’t sell them when you should.

Developments and getting new managers

The merging of the Private League transfer markets has not so much shifted the goal posts as created a whole new playing field. Market prices, player values and Special Qualities are all being re-assessed and finding new levels; this has created an interest in those areas that maybe wasn’t so intense for many Private League game-players before.

Private Leagues are one gateway into the game, many people only stay in one private league never to discover the rest of the Xpert Eleven world. So mixing up their transfer-market - their only link to outside of their private league is interesting. I’d love to see this developed further, and be able to trace the player to their current club as can be done in the Official Leagues.

Facebook is the other gateway into Xpert Eleven; and it seems many join this way, get given an official team but quickly give up. Personally I think these new managers are given teams too far up the leagues; they are suddenly playing against experienced managers whilst trying to understand the basics. They get thrashed a few times, think they are no good and leave in frustration.

If only there was someway to reach these facebook entrants and show them the basics of the game in an easy to use format…like an ebook guide for instance. Which takes me back to the pub in Brighton when we discussed that very idea. The problem now the guide is published is reaching those players.

The future of Xpert Eleven

As it says in the conclusion of the Guide, when Iwe and his crew developed Xpert Eleven in 2003 they couldn’t have imagined people playing it over ten years later, and on such a wide array of devices which didn’t even exist back then. So trying to guess how it will change in the future isn’t something I often do – I suppose I’d like to see team movements between private leagues and more transparency in their transfer-markets, more logic to the Youth Academy and a lessening of the five-man midfield dominance.

But as even minor changes can have a drastic impact in a computer-based game I’m just happy when I log in that Xpert Eleven is still there, and the site hasn’t closed down.

Additional Resources

Where to get the book
The Secret Fantasy Footballer blog
Youtube Interview


For further information and updates:

On the facebook search on there for ‘Xpert Eleven tips tricks and secrets’ to locate the page