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The first Forest Cup
A look back at the first Forest Cup Bilsa 2020.
How It Started
Football in Bilsa had been growing steadily. The local league was picking up pace, clubs were forming rivalries, and there was a genuine excitement around the sport that had not been there before. But local competition alone was not enough. The natural next step was to look outward, to test Bilsa against the best that Forest had to offer.
In 2020, I proposed a tournament with the most influential nations in the region. The tournament went largely unnoticed due to the lack of promotion, but some Forestians may still remember it.
Simulation
For a first attempt I built a simulator in Excel, which wasn’t the most reliable foundation for a football tournament. At the time it felt like a reasonable solution, a way to produce results with some logic behind them rather than flipping a coin.
The simulator pulled statistics from NationStates to calculate the probability of each team scoring. It worked but it was rigid, and it produced flashy and unrealistic scores, for professional football at least.
Below are some of the bracket results from each round. These graphics are among the few records that survived from that edition. I tried UCL aesthetics back in the day, that’s the reason of the background images too.
Quarter-Finals and Semi-Finals results.
Results
Coincidentally, the best team at the time lifted the trophy. It was not a surprise. They entered the tournament with the strongest statistics, winning by tight margins across nearly every round.
Ruinenlust became the first ever Forest Cup champion during what we could call an ‘amateur era’ and without the knowledge or consent of most of the nations involved.
Final Match.
This edition was never official. I did not have the approval of the majority of participants, and I am aware of that. But I believe it deserves to be mentioned and included as part of our history, as it was the catalyst for the creation of this confederation.
