Have you decided if this game will cost? If so I will be buying this one.
I hope that you will have FIFA and MLS rules in the game. I hope that players can play through the MLS even if it is a made up league.

Thanks guys for your trust and encouragement, it really means a lot. I'm currently putting in about 8 to 10 hours a day to research tactics, work on the AI and whenever I have a break, I'm looking for extras, such as candidates for commentary voices. The reason why I am putting this much time into the project right now is that once things get back to normal, I won't be able to work as much on the game, due to my job. I'd like to do as much as I can until then. This was one of the reasons why I said in my first post that this is going to take a few years and I don't really have a release date yet. If things go well, the prototype can be ready by next year, but we'll see.

@crashmaster: No worries. Even if it's just designing a website, it's one less thing for me to do. I was serious when I said that everything counts We'll find something.

@cyco I think it is likely that the game will not be free, however, I would like to keep it at a reasonable price, something like 20 dollars if possible. The price of the first version really depends on the funding campaign, it might be possible that it's going to be released as freeware. Subsequent, hopefully yearly, updates will have a small fee, mainly to cover the new commentator additions and to compensate the hard work of the editors. This is really one of those projects that requires a lot of work, especially from a single developer (doing the task of 50 professional developers who are still working on the AI after 20 years or so in a mainstream game), and financially there's not much compensation as the cost of producing game content is very high.

For example, apart from the commentary cost, imagine that for every added national team, the national anthem, or at least part of it, should be included as well. No wonder I question my sanity so many times, haha.

Nothing is set in stone at the moment, and I am sure a lot of things will change by the time we have a final 1.0. But I am really looking forward to it.

I am not sure about the MLS rules at the moment, but I don't see why they cannot be added, especially if we decide to add the MLS league.

Hi there robjoy
As a crazed football fan who follows matches  every week and all the dramas every hour, I am very excited by what you're achieving and wish you the best, best luck.
I do however, want to point out a few things, that i'd be greatful if you take note of.
Some of the users here mentioned a few wrong things regarding how the football is played.
When a team is in control of the ball, 95% of the time they stay in a formation and go forward together in a very precise formation.
Let's forget the advance movements and individual qualities for a moment, and look at it in a very standard way.
Imagine if a team is playing in a 4-4-2  formation.
Now imagine the players standing in a rows of 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, and two attackers.
When attacking and also defending.  these players will move forward, and backward and try to keep the structure of the team as exact as they can, while looking at their team mates, and looking and the flow of the match.
This means:
1. attacking  Players will not follow each other, never. IF they do,, this means that the player who is following a team mate is out of position, effectively leaving his position  completely empty. However, at the request of a player, a team mate, who has the closest position, can come near for more support.
Note that this does not mean that a right fullback should not follow the right winger. because in a 4-4-2 formation, the right back keeps  a distance  behind the right back, so i guess you could call that a follow.
2. When defending and trying to get the ball back for your team, players start by marking other players individually and start by trying to keep being in front of the  attacking players, effectively blocking the way forward and as the opposing player attempts to deviate his movement to left and right, the defending player also does the same, blocking the way.
At any point, if the defending player finds himself chasing the ball, or chasing the attacker, this means that they have lost their mark, and have just failed at what they were tasked to do. however, when this happens it doesn't mean that they should not keep chasing, they have to track back and try to get the ball back, or the least, for the sake of keeping the formation, just in case the ball happen to  come back to his position.
3. Formations are very important in football and one of the major elements which decide the fate of the match. IT defines a team's weakness, It can let a player have a hard time dealing with two players, It can result into another player enjoy exploiting a position and driving at the opposing team at their weakness.
4. Formations are strickly followed by any player in the world, but depending on the tactics, players leave their positions to perform different duties. example,  Cristiano Ronaldo who plays in a left forward position, and usually drops into central forward to show individual qualities and become a target man for crosses and passes, or goes  wide to  be able to make the opposing team lose their formation and stretch.

Anyway I am an absolute football junky, I apologize if the post was too long. I don't mean to be rude to anyone here at all, just  was pointing out some of the very basics of football.
I do read lots and lots of  football analysis, news and articles, I follow players on and off the pitch. So please let me know if i could be of any assistance to your team.

Also, I had a suggestion, Now that you're plotting plans and deciding the fundamentals of your game, Please consider allowing the database to be editable by users, so we could update the rosters and or adjust player stats depending on their recent performance.

Updating player stats is actually one of the reasons why I'd like to release a new version every year, if possible. That is, of course, if I have enough new content.

Unless I absolutely have to, I will try to not break backward compatibility of the database, so people who only wish to update the roster without upgrading to a newer version can still do it.

I am getting so many requests to be able to edit in-game content that I am probably going to give access to the internal editors eventually. I will have to disable customizations for multiplayer games still, but I don't see why it could not work offline. Not to mention that dedicated people can also contribute to the improvement of the game, via new or edited content.

My personal opinion is that allow the community to edit the roster, this could  put an impact on your new releases each year, but this also means that people won't be forced to buy the game just for the roster update and it means that during transfer seasons we could update our favourit teams.
However, i do have another suggestion.
You could start like fifa and pes started. your first release doesn't have to come with  AI tactical orders, advanced movements or anything crazy like that. it could be just simple with very basic tactical choices, etc.

Ok, so regarding positioning
Your initial thinking is perfectly correct. In football, the teams arrange in a formation literally in front of each other, and they keep moving back and forth, in formation, as the ball moves between the two goals
To give you a even more perfect image, Imagine two teams of 4-4-2 facing each other off, in the middle of the pitch. Barcelona vs real madrid
At the back of barcelona's line, there are 4 defenders, and in between those 4 defenders, are the two  real madrid attackers.
in the middle of the pitch there are four banks of players facing each other, and let's imagine that they are both in the same formation, so this means that each midfielder is facing the opposing team's midfielder.
and finally, at barcelona's attack, they have two attackers facing four madrid defenders.
Now, these guys are standing in a formation in the middle of the field. Imagine that real madrid starts an attack.
The entire structure that i described begins moving towards barcelona's goal. Now you can imagine the two central defenders of real madrid are in the center of the field, just a little bit inward towards barcelona's goal, the left and righth defender's of real madrid are pushed higher, and you also can imagine that the two barcelona's attackers are standing  near the two central defenders of real madrid, just close to the center of field, ready to shift the gears forward when the balls comes bouncing back.
So, one thing to note from this
Both teams never, never stay separated from each other! they arange in perfect formation and stick to their markers, so that's why both teams move from goal to goal together.
There are exceptions for this.
1. a forward peals off and remains in the other half of the field.
2. defenders stay bak and don't participate in attack.
and ETC.

As you can imagine, when the formations are different, things begin to look confusing at first, But this is one of the sweet things about football. suddenly important players begin doing important things. suddenly the right side of real madrid begins creating hell for barcelona for an entire half.
This is when AI becomes useful so it arranges the teams automatically into a formation and we as video gamers enjoy playing football cause you can do  different things with different formations.
So to answer your question, the AI has to respect the ball first, and see where it is. If real madrid is attacking and the ball is near barcelona's box, then the right winger of real madrid is actually  standing  just outside the box, to the right or somewhere around that area, and heck even their fullback is further ahead, but i can explain that later.

This is very interesting to read, and it is incredibly useful. I will have to make slight modifications, but based on what you explained, I think Fifa and PES did the right decision to make a formation database.

If I whipped up a quick formation database editor, do you think people would contribute formations? I essentially need a defense and an attack formation, for example for 4 4 2, 4 3 4, 4 3 2 1, etc.

It would make my life a lot easier, because then I could just send players to their destination depending on whether a team is playing defensive or offensive. The editor would be a grid, where you could define a position for the 10 field players for both attack and defense and of course name the formation, so nothing really fancy.

Besides this, players would still have their instructions, for example as a forward stay on the left wing position, wait inside the box, etc. Furthermore, you would be able to overwrite the built-in formation via moving players back and forward in-game.

You just shortened development time by about a month or two, thank you very much!

For international matches, I think the dimensions are from 64 to 75 meters for the goal line, and 100 to 110 for the touch line. We could go with something like 70 and 105 for the grid, we could always change dimensions and convert the existing data later, if we need to.

Writing a simple editor is not a big deal to me, so whatever's comfortable for you will work. What we need are just player numbers and positions, for example p1 5, 5 for the left defender, meaning 5 meters from the touch line and 5 meters from the goal line when defending, etc. This is what the editor would save in a file as well. If you think this would be easier to define in a grid-based editor, I'll create one.

The nice thing about the formation database is that you can literally position everyone the way the formations normally work. For example, because you positioned the defenders apart, the opponent forward will be able to stay in-between as needed.

Thanks once again, this information is indispensable and I definitely see why mainstream games would do it this way as well.

Regarding marking players, I think assigning the closest opponent as your marker is a good idea, so it can change dynamically, but I am also open to ideas in this area if you feel we can do something better.

Edit: I forgot to add, regarding attack formations, we only need to define those if they differ from their defensive counterparts, as otherwise I can just instruct the players to move forward. By the way, I am also planning to add a feature to the pause menu, where you will be able to review the entire pitch, in case you would like to determine the starter formation of your opponent, etc.

I could also help with sounds. I have over 1 tb of them and new ones get purchased or downloaded every few months depending on what the clients need. I can also possibly find a few friends that could do commentary.

@hadi.gsf Yes, I meant this exactly.

So in the case of 4 2 3 1, this would be something like:

p1 5 5
p2 25 5
p3 45 5
p4 65 5
p5 5 25
p6 65 25
p7 5 50
p8 35 50
p9 70 50
p10 35 70

In defense position. Defenders are 20 meters apart, on the 5th meter of the pitch in front of the goal keeper. The next row has the two midfielders on the left and right side. The next row has the three players and the one forward is in the middle.

This is probably not correct, so I am just trying to illustrate the representation. Then, p1 and p4, the two backs move up, so there would be an additional row with just those two players, probably at 5 45 and 65 45, if I understood your description correctly.

But if it is easier, we can do this via the editor, or you could just describe the changes after the initial, defensive setup.

What is important is the actual positions on the pitch, because these will be the positions where all the players move to when there's a kickoff, after a goal, etc. The moment you get the ball, players will have their attack formation instructions to move to.

This reminds me, do I remember correctly that players are not allowed to stay on the opponent's third, or on the midfield, when they have a kickoff? For example after they received a goal. Because this would mean that they would need to move back to defend, only to change into attack formation the moment the kickoff is happening, since it is very likely that they are still in control afterwards.

As always, I am open to suggestions, in case this approach is flawed. Thanks again for your help!

@techmaster20 Thank you very much for your offer. I feel that we're not going to have issues with sounds at the moment, but I will keep you in mind. Everything counts, no matter how small or big the help is, because I can focus more on the coding part, and if there is a project where this counts, it's definitely going to be an audio remake of football

You guys are great!