In reality this question is very hard, if not impossible, to answer. Can a club winning the Champions League consider itself the best in the world? It's hard to accept it, especially if that team loses in domestic competitions. On top of that there are teams from other continents, and the Club World Cup lack in prestige and, therefore, its winner cannot be considered the best team. There are also numerous club rankings but they fail to provide the ultimate answer as well.

Things are different, however, in FM Live, because a ranking is the best way of determining the quality of our team. It includes all the world's teams and is regularly updated at 1 A.M. Therefore it precisely reflects our position in world's football as well as our progress within the last 24 hours. Each manager receives an information whenever his team's position changes. It is not clearly stated what causes those changes, but after a while it's easy to conclude that these are mainly results. It's worth to notice, however, than two wins are never equal, hence defeating a better team gives us more than defeating a weaker side. Just like in real life.

Apart from the general rankings there are two more weekly rankings and youth rankings. The former is strictly connected with the awards that are awarded every 7 days. It is when the last week's best teams gets a hundred thousand pounds and a Team of the Week title. The same amount of money is awarded to a team that moved up the highest number of places in the general rankings, and the award is called Mover of the Week. Being on top of the youth rankings is not rewarded in any way except for the satisfaction of having the best young players in the world. It can also be a very helpful piece of information to the other managers who, for instance, are currently looking for a bunch of young players to guarantee a long-term success for their club or wish to find a parent or a feeder club. Club affiliations are present in the game, however, they are not recorder anywhere, but since we compete with other humans we can simply make an agreement.

Back to the topic. The arrows in the rankings indicating whether a team moved up or down since last update would be insufficient to follow a club's form. Therefore graphs are available, not only of our own but of any other team as well. The rankings position is displayed in the game in many different contexts, so we can easily revise our chances of winning a competition or a given match.

In addition to rankings position there is another factor determining our club's stature, namely its reputation, which can be anything between one and five stars. How is it calculated? That's another question with no official answer, but this time it's far more complex. Reputation is affected by the position in the general rankings but also, most probably, by things such as bank balance, club's age (i.e. the time passed since the club was registered) and reputation of individual players. Nevertheless, reputation can be very surprising, as two totally different clubs several hundred positions apart with one of the managers having not been active in the game for a week can have the same level of reputation. You can get mad, or amazed, or simply ignore it. And that's the best option – treating the reputation only as an addition to more reliable rankings.

The club keeps on winning trophies, moving up the rankings, and developing its reputation, and breaking some records along the way. FM Live provides us with a screen with a list of those divided into first and youth teams matches, both competitive and friendlies (using extended records we can not only see the best but also the worst results), but also give us additional field for comparison with others. I'm talking about achievements which many things are considered as, e.g. first goal, first hat-trick, winning a competition, matches without losing or conceding, etc.). If we manage to accomplish any of those pre-set assignments we get a notification, and the achievement is added to our profile where we can also see the number of managers who managed to achieve that goal.

I've already said that a team winning either the Team of the Week or Mover of the Week award gets a hundred thousand pounds. Slightly less money can be won in another competition, namely a href="/obrazki/jakubkwa/road_to_fm_live/goal_of_the_week.jpg" class="newsroom_link" rel="lightbox[galeria]">Goal of the Week. These are respectively 50, 30 and 20 thousand pounds for the clubs the players who were first, second or third play for. As opposed to a regular version of Football Manager where the computer decides about the final results, in FM Live these are decided by the users themselves (although the computer still plays a big part as it chooses the five nominated goals) by means of voting. But there'll be more info about it in the next and final part of Road to FM Live series.