Manager's Guide

What's actually in this game, and how to find it. Every section below covers something you can genuinely do — nothing here is aspirational.

Starting a Save

The New Save screen picks one starting club from a single shared world of 168 clubs across 8 leagues — the full English pyramid (Premier League down to League Two, with promotion and relegation) plus La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1. Every player is fictional, generated to roughly match that club's real-world reputation, with a few "hidden gem" wonderkids planted at lower-reputation clubs each save — nobody knows where until you scout.

European competitions run every season among the 5 genuine top flights — England's Premier League plus the other 4 countries — with real qualification into the Champions League, Europa League, and Conference League based on final league position, exactly like real UEFA competitions. You manage one club; every other club in the world, in every league, runs under AI control with its own real season and its own domestic cup — England's four divisions additionally share one FA Cup across all of them. Starting lower in the English pyramid doesn't give direct access to Europe, but working your way up to the Premier League certainly does.

Co-op lets a second real person share the save, managing a different club. See the Co-op section below.

Your Weekly Rhythm

Click Ready on your dashboard to advance the week. If your club has a fixture, it either resolves instantly (if you're not directly involved as the deciding factor) or hands you a live match to play through minute by minute — substitutions, injuries, and tactical changes included.

In a co-op save, the week only truly advances once both managers are ready — and if both of you have a live match the same week, each of you plays your own independently; the week won't move on until both are finished.

Squad & Tactics

Formation and mentality are set together on the Tactics page — five formations, five mentality levels from very defensive to very attacking. Changing formation rebuilds your lineup slots, so set it before assigning players, not after.

Individual player instructions — easy to miss, genuinely useful: each starting slot has its own Attacking Freedom (Stay Back / Balanced / Get Forward) and a Shoot on Sight toggle. A full-back told to Get Forward starts playing like a real wing-back; a striker with Shoot on Sight gets looked for ahead of a teammate with marginally better stats. Both require a player actually assigned to that slot.

Captain, marking, and set-piece takers are all set from the same Tactics page — man-marking a specific opponent, and designating your penalty and free-kick takers.

Any slot left empty auto-fills on match day with your best available player for that role — it's fine to leave gaps, but deliberate picks give you real control.

Transfers & Scouting

Making an offer to another club works differently depending on who you're bidding against: an AI club resolves the bid immediately; a human co-op manager's offer sits as a genuine pending decision on their own Transfers page until they respond.

Free agents, loans, and youth transfers each have their own page. A player's contract has to actually be renewed before it runs out — AI clubs get an automatic renewal for their important players; human clubs don't. If you don't act during the warning period, the player simply walks for free when their deal expires, the same as it would in real football. Check contract lengths on your Squad page regularly.

Scouting narrows down a region's players through your scouts' familiarity with that area — the more familiar, the more accurate the reports. This is also the only way to find the hidden gems planted at lower-reputation clubs each save, since their true potential is never visible from stats alone.

Competitions

Domestic league and cup run automatically all season. Cup draws are unseeded — any club can draw any other.

European competitions qualify each of the 5 top flights' best finishers into the Champions League, Europa League, or Conference League the following season — and how many spots each league gets isn't fixed. Stronger leagues earn more total European places than weaker ones, the same way real UEFA coefficients work, so which specific clubs qualify shifts over time as leagues rise and fall. The group draw is genuinely seeded: real strength pots mean two heavyweights can't land in the same group by chance the way a fully random draw would occasionally produce.

International management is a separate career path from your domestic club, reachable once your manager reputation clears a threshold — check the international page for current eligibility. Once you're in charge of a national team, tactics work exactly the same way domestic management does: your own formation, individual player instructions, and captaincy, not just an autofilled squad.

Reputation & Finances

Winning matters financially, not just for bragging rights. A cup, a European trophy, or the league title itself all bring a real, tier-scaled boost to your transfer and wage budgets, plus a reputation bump — bigger for European silverware than a domestic cup, and bigger still for a club that wasn't expected to win it. A club that already dominates its league sees a modest bump from winning again; a genuine underdog's win transforms their stature far more.

Reputation also drifts from sustained form, trophies or not. A club that consistently finishes well above what its reputation implies will slowly climb over several seasons; a big club that keeps underperforming its own billing will slowly decline. One good or bad season barely moves it — this reflects years of form, not a single result.

Board confidence and job security respond to how your finish compares to the board's stated ambition for the season, not to results in isolation. A relegation-threatened finish for a title-chasing club hits confidence far harder than the same finish would for a club only ever expected to survive.

Co-op

Two managers can share a save, each running their own club. A few things behave differently than solo play:

• The week advances only once both of you are ready.
• If your clubs are drawn against each other, the match goes live for both of you — each of you controls your own side's substitutions, and either manager can advance the match to its next segment (this doesn't wait for both of you, so whoever's ready to move on can). Whatever substitution each of you has queued up for your own team goes on the moment the segment next advances, however that happens to get triggered. An injury on your own side pauses things for a substitute; your opponent can't resolve it for you, and you can't resolve theirs.
• A transfer bid between your two clubs behaves like a real human negotiation — it sits pending until the other manager actually responds, not an instant AI-style resolution.
• Because either manager can advance a shared live match at any time, the usual "runs on its own every couple of seconds" autoplay is turned off for these matches specifically — you'll see a manual Continue button instead, so you always have time to actually queue a substitution before the segment moves on.

Things Worth Knowing

• A club's transfer and wage budgets are capped to a generous multiple of what its current reputation would naturally support — sustained success can meaningfully outspend the baseline, but not without any limit at all.
• Every club is guaranteed at least two senior goalkeepers, checked and topped up automatically at the end of every season — including a club you've just taken over after being sacked.
• If you're sacked, the job center only ever offers you real domestic clubs — national team management is a separate, dedicated path with its own eligibility rules.
• Getting a new job after a sacking is a fresh start with whatever squad that club already has — check contracts and tactics immediately rather than assuming the previous manager set things up the way you'd want.