Join Copa America Today! And More News from the Imperium

January 22, 2098 |

Join Copa America!

The United Imperium will be hosting Copa America 2098, one of the most prestigious tournaments that the Beautiful Game has to offer. Teams from North and South America are all invited to compete in this official IFAPO tournament and it is a great way to gauge your team's readiness for the upcoming 2100 World Cup! To participate, simply send me your team's lineup in this format: 

Example: Position | Player Name | Player OVR | Player Age

The United Imperium National Team:

Lineup:
ST Folarin Balogun | 93 | 22
LW Christian Pulisic | 95 | 25 (Captain)
RW Tim Weah | 86 | 23
CAM Gio Reyna | 91 | 21
CM Weston Mckennie | 81 | 25
CM Tyler Adams  | 81 | 18
LB Antonee Robinson | 86 | 26
CB Walker Zimmerman | 85 | 34
CB Cameron Carter-Vickers | 89 | 26
RB Joe Scally | 77 | 21
GK Matt Turner | 88 | 29

Subs:
ST Ricardo Pepi | 82 | 20
CM Yunus Musah | 80 | 21
CAM Brenden Aaronson | 77 | 23
CB Tim Ream | 79 | 36
CB Sergino Dest | 82 | 23
LB Miles Robinson | 84 | 26
GK Zack Steffen | 79 | 28

Coach:
Manager: Erlan Holland | 80

National Anthem of TUI:
https://youtu.be/NSqVkuTegxY

Tactics: 
Formation: 4-3-3 attacking
High Press only when losing the match 
go aggressively into challenges
overload the box defensively
take advantage of counterattacks
Slow build-up of possession when winning the match

When sending in your lineup, please replace the current player names here with your own players and ratings. IFAPO does not strictly regulate the ratings but will investigate and take action against overpowered ratings. My recommendation is to build your team based on FIFA cards, but not to use icons or heroes. For example, in my lineup, I used a rising star Folarin Balogun card and a World Cup Pulisic card, as well as some base cards such as Tyler Adams and Joe Scally (these cards are all from FIFA 23 so they may be a little outdated tbh). If you would like to participate but don't want to send in an official lineup, we will auto-generate one for you, but do note that auto-generating will mean your team's lineup will be weaker than those teams that send in custom lineups in all probability.

If you want to follow Copa America, results will be posted live on the IFAPO Discord Server and match recaps will be posted in Ruddock Media and the official P&W RP server.

John Strombo's Notes:

The Rapture... Thing

It baffles pundits that major superpowers even considered investing in an underwater city 300 meters (almost 1000 feet!) below sea level. For context, at a depth of 200 meters, virtually no significant light penetrates the ocean. Beyond the base challenges of sustaining life where photosynthesis is nigh on impossible, creating a megastructure capable of withstanding 30 atmospheres (Dagger Company discussed the usage of advanced submarine metal alloys but neglected multiple massive problems with actually implementing it in the city including but not limited to the necessity of accounting for differences in Young's Modulus for the material depending on its fabrication, especially as it pertains to differences in shear and stress forces, different bracing needed to counter the different types of stress that a dome or other such structure would experiences versus the stress a submarine or seafaring vessel might undergo) of pressure in a highly corrosive environment (this is due to the nature of saltwater), being able to ferry people en masse to and from a city at an elevation where nuclear submarines and scientific vessels are the primary means of traversal, actually being able to construct anything when at a depth of 300 meters, tension cables (rather than actually fixed structures) are utilized to keep structures at higher depths afloat, the major flaws in its defense system, and a veritable compendium of other problems with the actual engineering of this project, there is the question of economic viability, and as a bizarre cross between a tourism town and a doomsday vault, this "project" does a dubious job capturing the incentives behind either idea. Even then, somehow magically solving all of these problems, there are massive environmental concerns, not just in terms of harm to the environment but also in terms of the environment hurting it (due to proximity to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, seismic and volcanic activity have the potential to become serious concerns for Rapture). Even seventy years of technological advancement since the start of Balkanization would do little to bridge the technological, economic, or environmental challenges that Rapture is set to face. This is to say nothing of the fact that the primary force behind this debacle, Dagger Company, has recently been classified as a terrorist organization by the United Imperium, Cruzeiro, and Soviet Federation for its use of biological weapons against civilians. 

OOC Note: In this next paragraph, I mention pre-Balkan and pre-Balkanizations a lot. This is because I am comparing the cost of everything to current GDPs, build times, defense budgets, etc. However, this wouldn't make sense in a 2090s era unless I added the pre-Balkan modifier. For simplicity, I assumed favorable conditions and assumed when Dagger says 250 billion as an initial investment, he is talking about 2024 USD, which is generally the IRL benchmark off which most nations calculate their GDP and other such economic data.

The estimates of 10-15 years for construction and 250 billion dollars in cost are wildly inaccurate. Large projects such as stadiums typically take a few years to build (for example, Chase Center in San Francisco took seven years to build, and that was in the pre-Balkanization era). Note that these stadiums are built on land and generally have existing infrastructure to back them up. Not to mention that there is an economic incentive for their continued use, and they reliably can turn a profit. It cost around 5.5 billion dollars to build SoFi Stadium (again in the pre-Balkanization era) but the project is very profitable, as it brought in 114 million dollars per year to the venue (before even accounting for the profit it brought to the sports teams and performers which worked in the arena!). Now, a city of the size the Dagger Company claims to want to build is on par with Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Assuming that everything is state-of-the-art (as they claim, and as would likely have to be the case in order to even survive in the city!), we can extrapolate the cost of building a city of this size to be approximately 100 billion dollars, on land. Seems reasonable enough, right? After all, in the pre-Balkan days, the former US military spent over 800 billion dollars on its defense. Investing in the building of a city that needs more money to be built than double pre-Balkan France's defense budget. Of course, now, we are building underwater. When building underwater, we can assume costs to be anywhere from two to ten times more expensive than the cost of building on land, depending on the depth in the water. Since we are at a point in the ocean where light is barely able to reach us and it is extremely difficult to build physical structures anchored to the seafloor at this depth, we can safely assume that at minimum, the project would be ten times more expensive than usual, before we even account for all the additional functions, transportation costs, and design decisions that must be taken to ensure survival at such an altitude, which will heighten the cost even more. Ultimately, the cost of this city which has a population of 80,000 inhabitants and no realizable ROI to speak of will be easily upwards of one trillion dollars. As for the length of time it takes to build? A decade is highly generous. It takes around 5-10 years to build a stadium. Again, extrapolating (we will assume for simplicity that all infrastructure can be built in the same time frame for now) to underwater building based on the fact that oil wells take 18 months to build, while oil rigs take around three years to build, we recognize that the same underwater stadium would take 10-20 years to build. Recognizing that in reality, it takes much longer to build a city from scratch than it does to build a singular stadium (due to needing to build infrastructure from the ground up), we can roughly assume it would take anywhere from 30-60 years for the city to be built, and even longer than that for its operators to break even on operation cost (keep in mind at that point they still wouldn't have recouped their initial losses from the investment) and in reality, this project would easily take 150 years or more to be financially worthwhile. Keep in mind that is only if the economic incentives work out in the way that Dagger Company anticipates them to do so, and in reality, the project is likely to never be economically worthwhile without GodRP or financial fraud.

TL;DR: The long and short of all this is that a terrorist organization is asking nations to invest in a project that will likely cost trillions of dollars over the course of multiple decades of construction and this project likely will never give its backers a return on their investment.

OOC: The city of Rapture is based on a city of the same name in the Bioshock series. The justification for Rapture's creation was flimsy at best, if we're being perfectly honest and obviously elements of realism were absent because its a video game. It should be noted that in the games, Rapture falls into civil war and almost all of its population dies off. A good chunk of the remainder turns into "Splicers", essentially genetic mutants.