Development banks progress instead of gambling on it
A season of football used to end in a roll of the dice: either your prospect gained a point or he did not, and a season that fell just short counted for nothing.
- He now earns experience toward his next rating point, and the remainder is never rounded away — it stays with him and carries into the following season.
- Because a point is exactly 100 experience, progress reads as a percentage. You can see he is 62 of the way to 87, rather than wondering whether the year counted at all.
Players notice when they are not playing
A concern level that builds from a lack of game time, separate from the match-to-match morale number, and running in every world.
- Six steps: happy, minor concern, concerned, very concerned, major concern, and wanting to leave. It is checked a few times a season rather than continuously.
- Each squad role carries its own expectation of how much football it should get, so a key player and a rotation option are not held to the same standard.
- Meet his target at a checkpoint and he recovers a step — giving him minutes genuinely walks it back. It is slow on purpose: roughly a season of neglect to reach the top.
- At the top he hands in a transfer request, is listed at his value, and you are told about it.
Training intensity: speed against freshness
Your assistant runs the daily sessions. The one thing you set is how hard they are — and it is a genuine trade rather than a better-or-worse choice.
- Light develops players more slowly but keeps the squad fresher between matches. Intense is roughly a fifth faster and leaves them recovering more slowly.
- It stacks with the Training Ground, so a strong facility running intense is a large multiplier — and a poor one running light is a very small number.
- The cost of intense is not only fatigue: a squad that recovers more slowly plays more matches tired, and tired squads pick up more injuries.