Running the Club

Matchday is two hours a week. The rest of management is the slow work: the buildings, the training pitch, the scouting network, the treatment room, and keeping the people upstairs happy. This guide covers what each of those actually does.

Facilities

There are three, each running from level 1 to level 5:

• Training Ground — multiplies the development of every player at the club.
• Academy — multiplies development for under-21s specifically, on top of the training ground.
• Medical Centre — cuts how often your players get injured and how long they are out.

The important and counter-intuitive part: level 3 is neutral. Levels 1 and 2 are penalties — a level 1 training ground actively slows your squad's development to about four-fifths of normal. Only levels 4 and 5 are a bonus. A club with poor facilities is not merely missing out; it is going backwards relative to its rivals.

At the top end the effects are large. A level 5 training ground and a level 5 academy together, with intense training, can more than double how fast a young player improves compared to a club sitting at the bottom of the scale.

Upgrades cost transfer budget and take real time to build, and both rise steeply: the first step is comparatively cheap and quick, the last is many times more expensive and takes months. Taking one facility from bottom to top is a very large chunk of a big club's budget. Money is charged when you start, and the level only rises when the build finishes.

Training

You set one thing: intensity. Your coaching staff run the sessions. It is a straight trade:

• Light — players develop more slowly, and recover condition noticeably faster.
• Balanced — neutral on both.
• Intense — about 20% faster development, and slower recovery between matches.

Because condition drives both performance and injury risk, intense training has a real indirect cost: a squad that recovers more slowly plays more matches tired, and tired squads pick up more injuries. Intense suits a deep squad in a quiet part of the calendar. Light is the right call during fixture congestion or an injury crisis.

Facilities and training multiply what a player earns — they never create it. A player getting no minutes develops nothing, whatever your training ground looks like.

Scouting

There are two separate scouting features and they do different jobs.

Player scouting

Send a scout out with a brief — position, maximum age, minimum ability, and a focus: players ready now, a balanced search, or wonderkids. Each costs credits and takes one to two weeks, wonderkid searches being the slowest and dearest. You can have three scouts out at once.

Reports are readable from the moment the scout leaves, but they are fogged: ratings arrive as a band rather than a number, up to six points either side, narrowing as his confidence grows. Two guarantees are worth knowing — the band always contains the true figure, and it never jitters, so reloading the page will not re-roll the estimate. A player's play styles stay hidden until your scout is at least half confident.

Results are ordered by the fogged estimate rather than the truth, so the ranking cannot leak what the fog is hiding.

The opponent report

Before a match you always get a free read on your opponent: their likely formation, their shape, a star rating, and whether they are stronger or weaker than you. Paying credits unlocks the rest for that fixture — zone-by-zone ratings, their danger man, their strengths and weaknesses, and a recommendation.

The predicted formation is not a guess: it is generated by the same code the match engine will use to pick their side. If the report says they will line up in a 4-2-3-1, they will.

Injuries and the treatment room

At most one player is injured per match. The chance is roughly 15% with a fresh side and 25% with an exhausted one, which is the clearest argument in the game for rotating a tired squad. Who gets hurt is weighted by condition and by how injury-prone the player is — a fragile player is around twice as likely as average, a durable one about half.

Injuries are measured in matches missed, not days, and the range is wide. A knock costs one match and is by far the most common outcome. At the other end, a cruciate or an Achilles rupture is season-ending — and about twenty times rarer.

• Minor — one or two matches.
• Moderate — three to eight.
• Serious — nine or more.

A player coming back from a long lay-off does not walk straight back into the side at full effectiveness. He returns short of match sharpness, and the longer he was out the worse it is — a player back from a season-ending injury returns at little over half condition and needs games to get right.

The Treatment Room lists who is injured and for how long, who is suspended, and who is fit but not yet at it. A stronger Medical Centre cuts both the frequency of injuries and their length — at the top level, roughly a third off each. It never prevents an injury outright, and it can never cut a lay-off below a single match.

The board

At the start of each season the board sets a target based on your squad's strength relative to the rest of your division. That target is snapshotted at the start of the season and not recalculated, which means selling your best players to lower expectations does not work.

Board confidence moves with your league position against that target and with recent results, and there is a grace period of the first several matches — they will not judge you on the opening weekend. At the end of a season you are either cleared, tolerated if you came close, or warned. Three warnings and you are sacked.

Some worlds add a house rule on top: finish in the bottom places of your division and the league dismisses you regardless of what the board thinks.

Overachieving has consequences too. Finish comfortably above target and a bigger club may come calling with a standing offer.

The press room

You face the media before and after matches. The questions are drawn from real context — the fixture, the run of form, the state of your squad — and your answers move squad morale, which feeds directly into results.

The one to take seriously is the unrest question. If a star is genuinely unhappy, you get asked about him on camera and you have three options: back him publicly, slap him down, or refuse the question. Backing him is the strongest outcome for the player and settles his grievance — but it creates a public promise. Play him for at least 45 minutes in the next match and you have kept your word. Say it and then leave him out and it costs you more than saying nothing would have, and the fans are told.

Slapping him down is good for the rest of the dressing room and bad for him. Refusing the question is deliberately the weakest option on average — but it commits you to nothing.

Credits and Gold

Credits are attached to your account, not a club, so they follow you between worlds. You get a batch free when you sign up. There are exactly three things to spend them on: sending a scout, unlocking an opponent report, and buying Gold.

Gold is a one-off purchase, not a subscription. It gives you:

• International management — take a national team alongside your club.
• The Assistant Manager — line-up suggestions and tactical advice.
• The Oracle — match prediction.
• No advertising, anywhere on the site.
• World hosting included, and the ability to write your own press answers rather than picking from stock lines.

That is the off-pitch half of the job. The on-pitch half is in the tactics guide, and how the squad you are building actually grows is in developing players.