Which is the greatest football team of all time? That is the question that FootySimulator Gold attempts to answer. Using the same system that FootySimulator uses to calculate rankings, FootySimulator Gold has gone back through the archives and created rankings for the great English club sides of the past. Subscribers to FootySimulator International or Club FootySimulator will be able to play their own head-to-head matches and groups for over 70 of the greatest English club sides of all time. In addition, FootySimulator will be running virtual tournaments featuring these sides in an attempt to answer the question "Which is the greatest football team of all time? ". Details will be published on the Virtual section of the website in due course.

Teams longlisted for consideration were as follows: 1. all Champions 2. strong teams that came close to winning the league with a high points total. 3. teams that won one of more trophies while performing strongly in the league. There have been well over 100 seasons of English League football so to get the list of teams down to a manageable level required some aggressive filtering. Not every team that has won the Championship can be labelled a great team. This is FootySimulator Gold not FootySimulator Silver so the aim was to narrow this down to the best of the best. The first criterion used to narrow down the list of possible teams is a fairly straightforward one. A rule of thumb in modern football is that, in order to be competing for the title, a team requires 2 points per game. So we selected only teams meeting this target under the current scoring system. Each qualifying team had their FootySimulator ranking calculated using exactly the same rules as currently - with one exception. There would be no weighting for how recently the games were played. The ratings are more sophisticated than simply dividing the number of goals by the number of games and the principles can be applied to teams in different leagues and eras. Each team was issued with 4 rating values, an attacking and defensive rating for home matches and another pair for away matches.

The next stage of filtering was to list the teams in chronological order and compare them with their neighbours. Where any team encountered a rival team within 5 years (earlier or later) which had superior ratings for all 4 values, that team was eliminated. After all, how can a team claim to be the best of all time when another team was superior by every available measure. This filter saw off a number of teams including several champions, most non-champions and even some European Cup Winners. This exercise gave the first pointers as to which were the super-elite clubs, i.e. ones which were responsible for eliminating so many of their neighbours. Particular carnage was caused by Preston and Sunderland teams of the late 19th century, the Liverpool sides of 1979 and 1988 and the Chelsea team of 2005.

First up FA Cup results were factored into the ratings. The FA Cup ratings incorporated the strength of the opposition, based on the league they were playing in. The filtering process was repeated and a few more teams were whittled out. The next step was to factor in European performances. Ratings were calculated on the same basis as the domestic model, with weighting on the strength of opposition. This stage of the process ensured that teams which had performed strongly in Europe were rewarded by stronger ratings. This allowed a further purge of teams, as certain strong teams were able to wipe out yet more contenders. This stage of the filtering identified two "golden ages" of English club football, one in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the other in the second half of the 2000s. Finally league cup ratings were applied, on a similar basis to the FA Cup but with a subtle difference. For most of the League Cup's existence (prior to 1978 and also since the advent of the champions league) top teams have not taken it seriously. The challenge was to reward teams who did well in the competition without over-punishing teams like Manchester United and Arsenal who have fielded severely weakened teams in the past. The solution was to weight the League Cup ratings only 50%. Once these ratings were added another filter was applied eliminating all teams where a rival team within a 25 year radius was superior in all 4 respects. Finally, to prevent the saturation of teams from Liverpool and Manchester United, a team could be eliminated if 2 other sides from the same club within 5 years were superior in 3 out of 4 of the metrics.

74 teams remained after all these elimination filters. These are the teams that will be available in the first phase of FootySimulator Gold. A further series of elimination criteria has been used to determine the competing teams of the FootySimulator Gold Elite Cup.