Time

Time in the multiverse is fluid, means different things to different people, and runs at different speeds depending on various factors. Either or both the place where you were born and the place where you live may affect how quickly you experience time and/or how quickly you age.

There are many ways of measuring time. Below are some examples.

Forum time
"Forum Time" is the only technique of time measurement that is constant and can be relied upon to always run forwards. In this system, the multiverse was created on November 20, 2002 and is around 18 years old. Detractors of Forum Time state that the idea that the universe itself is younger than most of its inhabitants is stupid.

Real time
Real time uses the same rate of time advancement as "Forum Time", except with the date of the multiverse's creation being set further back to a point dependent upon the author's personal belief system and/or understanding of science. This has the advantage of the dates of events and the ages of characters being constant, which makes for more stable worldbuilding and removes the possibility of a situation where a player can be simultaneously 27 and 33 years old.

This system works extremely well in sports which have competitions happening at a pace similar to their real-world counterparts, such as cricket, rugby, and motor racing, but problems can arise when events happen more frequently than in real life; a football/soccer team running on real time would have players playing fifteen to twenty 90-minute matches on consecutive days, three times a year, which some people regard as unrealistic.

Original ordinary calendar
Both "forum time" and "real time" can be expressed in terms of the original ordinary calendar, or OOC. This method of datekeeping is the most convenient because it maintains an shared standard despite differences in the actual passage of time in the multiverse.

One month = one year
More common in ancient history than in the modern day. For a detailed description of the system see above, but multiply by a number between 28 and 31. Which number this is depends on whether you prefer Greg or Julian.

2/1 system
The 2/1 system maintains that there are two years per international cycle and one year per domestic cycle. Many sporting nations use this system, and its ubiquitousness throughout the sporting world is its own strength. It also ensures that interesting footballers remain interesting for a longer period of time.

The downside of this system, aside from no two nations being able to agree what the current year is, is that international cycles and domestic cycles are not linked to one another in any way and often travel forwards at different speeds. The domestic cycle even stopped entirely one time and had to be rebooted with a different operating system.

Audioslavian/Starblaydi roleplay time
A/SRPT was stumbled upon accidentally by the two nations it’s named after and both like to pretend it is somehow more realistic than the above 2/1 system.

In reality, ASRPT is exactly the same as the above technique but twice as slow. The advantage that both Audioslavians and Starblaydis are both in the same year is rendered moot by the fact that literally every other nation in the multiverse believes it’s a different year. Furthermore, so counter-intuitive is the idea that a domestic season might last two years that the very notion has put a stop to domestic football in Starblaydia entirely.

Koto time
"Time" is a dance music track released in 1989 by the group Koto and written by the Dutch composer Michiel van der Kuy. It provides no basis for a system of temporal progression in roleplay, but is rather catchy.

Temporal
The notion of two years passing between World Cups (or similar) is advantageous in that it allows for a realistic aging of sports personnel, but in some cases can create difficulty if 2015 and 2065 have the same levels of technology, or are bizarrely similar in other ways besides people's ages. The approach taken by Candelaria And Marquez at one point is to continually keep the "present day" fixed, while pushing the date of the nation's emergence into international sport further and further back into the past with each passing cycle. This can lead to temporal paradoxes if the aim is to eventually synchronize one's Baptism of Fire with a long-forgotten historical crisis; whether this is a bug or a feature depends on one's point of view.

Technological
Some nations choose to match current RL technology levels with whatever year their country is in, and retroactively push technological levels backwards. For example, a World Cup 19 RP written in 2004 may include a character listening to hip-hop on their minidisc while texting their friend on their BlackBerry, while a text reporting that event, written a decade later, might change the facts, instead reporting that the character was listening to jazz on the wireless while writing a telegram.

"damn forrins, comin' over here, stealin' our women, takin' our jobs, 'avin' two birthdays a year"
Although this is not the universal rule - and it is always possible to agree something else at the time of the transfer - generally, players transferring abroad age at the rate used in their home country. For example, if you age using the 2/1 system (see above), and one of your clubs buys an Audioslavian goalkeeper, that player would age more slowly than the rest of that club's squad. It is generally wise to keep note of how old your foreign players are and update accordingly, checking with the player's home nation as needed - some sports, such as soccer, use shared spreadsheets for a coordinated international transfer window, and these have a useful section on what each nation's understanding of time is to allow for double checking.