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Classic Spanish League

Are you bored (not to say sick) of the Spanish league (not to say modern football in general)? Do you miss those times when powerful teams still had to break a sweat in order to earn their points against the underdogs? When there were barely a couple points separating the champion and the first team that got left out of European competitions? When matches were played Sundays at 17:00 (at least in Spain they were) and you could catch decent highlights of them all on TV afterwards, instead of sleazy non-news and blokes shouting nonsense at one another? When no one had advertising on their ass or had to wear kits boasting turd brown and neon fuchsia stripes? Well, introducing a mod that will catch your fancy! Here's what's in it:

Name: Classic Spanish League.

Link: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1917851650

Icon: Who'd be better than Naranjito to represent this mod? He's everyone's favorite World Cup mascot. There's no middle ground: You either love him, or love to hate him. Either way, you love him!

Teams: This is where the real meat is. I've kept the default league structure the game has, but since celebrating classic football is what we're going for here, I've redistributed the teams based on all-time standings from the top two divisions, up to the end of the 2014-2015 season). Obviously, I had to remove several teams and replace them with others. To each of them I gave its official name, the best version of their crest that I managed to cook up with the in-game editor (trying to be faithful to the version thereof that was current in the early 90s and keep as much of the default crest as possible, provided it was reasonably well done) and an as-faithful-as-possible recreation of their early 90s kits (home, away and keeper's, you can't even begin to imagine how hard this was, there is much less graphic material from that time available online than you'd expect). Teams are ranked by points earned in the top Division up to the 2014-2015 season (and by points earned on the second-tier division if they had never played in the top division by then). Defunct teams are excluded from the mod, but for the eight best ranked defunct teams I included a currently active team from the same city to play on the lowest division (the exception being cities that already had a team that had earned a higher spot, and the city of Burgos, which has two teams that both played in the top division, went defunct and were later reestablished). For these cases I tried to pick the team I considered most representative, or the one ranked in the higher division by season 2014-2015. I selected the teams long ago, so I may not remember why I left out this or that team, but I assure you nothing was done on a whim. I didn't modify any players, I love for them to be random. That way the mod is fully time-proof (New!: I've altered team strengths so as to try and achieve a more realistic effect. I intend to do the same for all other leagues in the game and upload them as I get the time to do so. Regarding this measure, all criticism, whether positive or negative, will be welcome as long as it's constructive. If you'd reather play with the default team strengths, you just need to copy them back in using the default league as a template).

Flag: The default one from the game. Why make our own lives needlessly harder?

Tournament names: I went with what you'd expect for the top two tiers in Spain, but since it's impossible to reproduce the Segunda División B (Spain's third tier), as it's broken in four groups, I've decided to go straight to Third and Fourth. For the cups I went with real names (classic names, no leagues of champions, thanks so much), but I allowed myself a little silly joke with the "YUEFA" Cup so that no European federation can accuse me of wrongfully using their name (yeah, I know I should have done the same with the team names in that case... Look, I found the "YUEFA" bit funny, and since this is my mod, it's staying and that's about it). I also translated the tournament names to the languages I know (sorry, I don't speak Korean or Turkish, nor many others; maybe some day). And yeah, I'm keeping the joke in the translations.

Climate: Boy, I worked myself to death with this one as well... I created seven different subclimates based on real climates present in Spain (there are more, but there are no teams from those areas in the mod) according to the Köppen classification (I won't explain what that is, check Wikipedia like I did). I've assigned each team the relevant one based on their city's geographical location and I tried to adapt each climate's features to the game's weather system by extrapolating real data from the Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (Spanish State Agency for Meteorology, yeah, I've got too much time in my hands). Although devs recommend for the maximum chance of "unusual" weather to be 20%, I brought it up to 30% in some cases so as to make the climates easier to differentiate. It's a shame that in order to include a minute chance for snowfall you have to bear with snow traces on the stadium for the whole month, but well, other than that, I think this looks rather good.

Faces: I tried to introduce some diversity based on current population data, but since 1% is the minimum, I couldn't really fine-tune it (since, of course, every new variant introduced took a whole percent point away from the Spanish face set, and it wasn't a good idea to take too much).

Names: I got around 5000 real surnames in, based on data by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (Spanish National Statistics Institute). But since they provided them in a spreadsheet without any special characters whatsoever (shame on them!), I had to go through the whole list trying to put the accents and diaereses where they were due and fix capitalization. Lots of fun. For those surnames for which accented and non-accented variants exist, I just had to make a choice. Sorry if I left out your own. I couldn't verify the special characters for languages I don't know, but I did remove a few patronymics or surnames that were (or seemed to be) strictly intended for females. I also duplicated some of the most common names in the list so that they were more frequent, up to a point. The real ratio of, for example, people named García for every person named Soteras is 1465 to 1, while the ratio in this mod is 20 to 1. Realism is cool and all, but we don't really want a team with 15 Garcías.

And that's all, in a nutshell. I hope you enjoy this as much as I hope to enjoy it myself.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Seriously?!
A: Yup.

Q: Is there a reason for you not updating the mod beyond season 2014-2015?
A: Yup.

Q: Can I use your mod as a starting point to make my own?
A: Yup, as long as you don't do anything stupid, such as (but not limited to) charging for it, claim full credit or giving me credit for stuff I didn't make. And it'd be nice if you mentioned me and/or said thanks, but it's not like it's compulsory, I understand some people are just shy.

Q: I've noticed a mistake in the shade of green you used for this or that kit, or in the percentage you assigned to the chance of rainfall in this or that climate. May I let you know so that you'll fix it?
A: Yup, as long as you understand that it'll be for me to decide whether I implement your suggestion (which I'll appreciate either way) and when. And also that you better have some proof to back it up, it won't do to tell me that in the 1991-1992 pre-season Zaragoza played a game in green shirts and blue socks and that your cousin saw it and told you all about it.

Q: I'm fed up with your antics. Can I just stop reading and go play already?
A: Yup.