August 2026
40 updates shipped in August 2026 — 24 new features, 9 balance changes and 7 fixes. FM Worlds is worked on continuously and the worlds stay live while it happens, so everything below landed in seasons that were already being played.
Squad numbers, and the shirt he actually wants
Shirt numbers were in the data and printed in three places, but nothing in the game had ever written one — so a player wore whatever he arrived with, and two team-mates could wear the same number. You pick them now.
- Set a number on any player from the squad page. Hand over a shirt somebody already has and the two swap, rather than the edit being refused with no room to explain why.
- Numbers show on the tactics board — on the pitch, on the bench and beside the name on a team-sheet row — as well as on his profile, the club page and the press theatre.
- Every player has a shirt he would rather wear, taken from his real one wherever the game knows it. A new signing asks for it, settles for an alternative, or holds out — a marquee arrival has the standing to insist, a squad player does not.
- Missing out never drains morale on its own: every squad has a clash you cannot fix for both men. It shows up only as one more grievance on a player who is already unhappy for other reasons.
@mention a manager in the world chat
Chat has always coloured in anything that looked like an @name. That was the whole feature — the person you tagged was never told, so tagging them worked exactly as well as not tagging them.
- Type @ and the world's managers appear. Pick one and he gets an inbox card and a notification with the line you wrote.
- A mention is tied to the manager you picked, not to the text — two managers in one world can share a name, and it is what lets a full name like "@Alex Ferguson" highlight whole.
- You can never ping someone the message does not visibly name: the server re-checks the tag against the message as it was actually stored.
- Quiet by design rather than by a settings page — no ping if he is reading the chat right now, one per person per ten minutes, nothing at all if either of you has blocked the other, and at most three per message.
Install the app, and three more reasons it buzzes
FM Worlds has shipped as an installable app for months without ever offering to install itself, and its one notification was the fifteen-minute matchday signal. Both changed.
- "Install the app" now sits in Account Settings, with the honest instructions on iPhone (Safari has no install button for a site to press) and on Samsung Internet, whose install pipeline has been broken since March 2026 — there, it points at Chrome instead of failing quietly.
- Long-press the installed icon for Squad, Tactics and Inbox.
- Three new alerts, all of them moments you can act on and then cannot: a bid arriving for one of your players, a board warning, and a draw — cup, European or World Cup — telling you who you got the moment it is held. Draws previously told the feed and nobody else.
- A direct message buzzes once per conversation, not once per line, and the notification toggle now says when the hold-up is our server rather than blaming your browser for it.
A contract renewal costs something
"Renew all expiring" wrote three more years and nothing else — no wage, no negotiation, no cap check. Over two simulated seasons, every wage rise in an entire world came from a transfer, because no renewal anywhere ever cost a penny.
- The one-click renewal now pays each player what he is asking for, best player first until the wage cap runs out. Anyone it cannot fit is left alone and named, with his warning still standing — and the button carries the weekly price before you press it.
- AI clubs pay for their renewals too. They were re-signing entire squads for free for ever, which made them structurally cheaper to run than yours.
- Contracts no longer all expire on the same afternoon. Nearly every player in a new world was on the same two-year deal, so season two arrived with a tenth of the roster out of contract at once; terms are now spread by age, and existing worlds can be repaired without shortening anyone's deal.
- If a squad still falls below sixteen players, the board hands out one-year deals at existing terms to keep the club going — a floor, not a rescue. And a club that genuinely cannot field eleven now forfeits, instead of taking the pitch with nobody and winning.
Players keep developing past twenty-one
Development graded every season against a 6.9 average rating — a number the match engine does not actually produce. The real median is 6.58, so the median footballer in the game was being marked down, and every threshold above it was a band too harsh.
- Measured over a season of a 96-club world: one player of 579 aged 22–24 improved by a point, and none of the 708 aged 25–28. The development curve declared a growth rate that the gate in front of it never let anybody earn. Ordinary seasons now cost nothing, and steady improvement into the mid-twenties is reachable again.
- Football below the first team counts at any age, not just up to 21 — a 22-year-old who lost his place used to stop developing entirely, at the age most prospects are still finding one.
- It is worth strictly less than first-team football, and less the older he gets. Reserve football was previously counted at full value, so benching your best nineteen-year-old developed him faster than playing him. Playing him always wins now.
- A part-season in the side and the rest in the reserves is scored as one season of football rather than two, so playing a young player a little can no longer leave him worse off than not playing him at all.
The leader eases off once the game is beyond doubt
Reported as a 7–2 between two good sides. The engine has always claimed both teams wind down once a match is decided, and it only half did — it damped the chasing side's comeback push while the leader carried on at full rate.
- A side three or more goals ahead creates less. Only the leader: the side behind keeps trying, or a three-goal deficit would be hopeless rather than very unlikely.
- Measured over 22,800 matches: nine-goal games fell from 0.79% to 0.49% and one-sided routs from 0.46% to 0.30%, while goals per game and the champion's points total held where they were. It only touches matches that were already decided, so it costs nothing in who wins.
Every club plays its pre-season
Pre-season friendlies are scheduled for every club in a world, on purpose. Only human-managed clubs were ever allowed to play them.
- Measured across three pre-seasons of a 96-club world: 250 friendlies created, 13 played. The other 237 sat on the calendar unplayable for good, so AI squads started seasons having played no football since the last one while yours had five warm-ups behind it.
- Friendlies between two computer-run clubs record their score without writing a full match report and a rating for every player — that is thousands of rows per world for matches nobody can read.
The Almanac — a season, bound as one page
Every league now has a book of record: one address per season, with the champion, the final table, the awards and that window's biggest deals. Nothing on it is new — it just never had a home of its own before.
- Past seasons are frozen exactly as they finished — the same record the Honours page already kept, now given its own permanent page instead of living inside a tab only a manager in that world could reach.
- The current season reads live and says so — "still being written" — so checking back mid-season shows the race exactly as it stands.
- The Window: that season's transfers ranked by fee, buying and selling club both linked, so a division's summer is one scroll instead of a memory.
- No club or login needed to view it. A league's almanac is public, unlike the Honours page it grew out of.
AI clubs stopped bidding on the same target twice
Computer-run clubs could hold several live bids at once for players from the same selling club — one was found sat on four simultaneous offers into a single squad.
- The rule already enforced on human managers — one live negotiation per club at a time — now applies to AI buyers too, across a listed sale, an unsolicited approach and a loan.
- A club with several targets picks one at a time, the way a real director's office would, instead of spamming every seller with parallel paperwork.
The gate pays the crowd that actually came
Two numbers used to disagree with each other: the crowd shown on the match page, and the money the game paid the home club for it. They're now the same number.
- Every match's attendance — ground size, form, table position, who's visiting — is calculated once and saved permanently on that fixture, instead of being redrawn from a different formula each time someone opens the page.
- That saved crowd is what the gate is paid on: crowd × €20 a ticket. Measured, not guessed — modelled against every home fixture in the dev database to find the price that keeps total revenue roughly where it was, so this redistributes the money rather than inflating it.
- Stadium expansion earns its seats back at the turnstile, and form now has a financial consequence: a good run fills the ground and the bank alongside it, a bad one empties both together.
- It replaces a flat gate tied only to squad value, which paid the biggest clubs the same regardless of who actually showed up.
The Scouting Centre — a fourth facility
Scouting ran on flat numbers: ten names a brief, three scouts, the same wide fog whether you were a superclub or a fourth-tier side. It is now a building you invest in.
- Three separate curves. How many names a brief comes back with rises from ten to eighteen, how many scouts you can have out at once from three to five, and a fresh report's rating band tightens from six points either side of the truth to three.
- Level 1 is exactly the old behaviour. Investment buys an edge over the baseline and never the baseline itself — nothing every club already had has been taken away and sold back.
- Sharpness deliberately stops short of certainty. Even a perfect network opens at three points either side and only closes to an exact figure when the scout finishes the brief, so the real decision — bid early on a wide band, or wait and pay more — survives.
Financial fair play, and the ground that pays for it
Your wage bill is now capped by what the club can actually sustain — its broadcast money plus its stadium — and the stadium is finally something you can grow.
- The cap is TV money for your division plus a rate per seat. Further down the pyramid the TV term shrinks and the ground dominates, so expansion matters most to the small club trying to climb.
- Enforcement is narrow on purpose: while you are over the cap, incoming players are blocked. That is the whole penalty. It was calibrated against every squad in the game, so a prudent club never notices it — what actually goes over is deliberate star-stacking.
- Stadium expansion is the lever. Pick a tranche, pay up front, wait out the build, and the seats land when it completes. One project at a time, and no cancelling — concrete does not un-pour.
Team of the Week, head-to-head records, and the Golden Boy race
Three additions to the honours pages, all of them things a season was already producing but never showing you.
- A Team of the Week for every league round — the best eleven of the matchday.
- Head-to-head records between managers, so a rivalry with a specific person has a scoreline attached to it.
- The under-21 Golden Boy race, with a change of leader announced while it is happening. It is judged on exactly the same bar as the senior awards, so the player leading the race is the player the honours page eventually crowns.
Shop by position, and follow a player out of the market
The transfer market got the two controls it was missing.
- Filter by the position you actually need instead of scrolling past everyone who plays somewhere else.
- Follow a player straight from the market and he stays with you after you have moved on, rather than having to be found again.
Data packs keep themselves current
A pack loaded from a link now follows its source instead of quietly going stale.
- Auto-update was treated as off unless explicitly switched on — so any pack saved before that setting existed could never update again, and nothing ever told its owner. A corrected name, a new player or a real transfer could sit undelivered indefinitely.
- Checking is now cheap rather than re-downloading the whole pack every time, so a pack can be checked often without wasting your bandwidth.
One development screen, not two
Training and the under-21 page were two screens showing halves of the same job. They are now one.
- Training intensity, development plans, and every young player's ceiling, progress and form sit together on one page.
- The navigation lost a tab rather than gaining one.
One live deal per club at a time
You can no longer have two bids sitting in the same director's inbox.
- Negotiating is a conversation with a club, not a form you can submit in parallel — running two at once is how you end up committed to two signings you can afford one of, and it reads as spam from the other side.
- Free agents are unaffected. There is no club being negotiated with, so the rule does not apply.
Data packs learned where players actually play
Naming got a great deal closer to real football, without the game itself ever shipping real-world names.
- Every player's real-life club can now be added to an existing pack in place, so you do not have to rebuild a pack to bring it up to date.
- Real transfers are synced in from Worlds Wiki, which means a pack can keep pace with an actual transfer window.
- Pack club data now comes from the master roster rather than a spreadsheet, and club badges that were never going to load are dropped instead of shipped as broken images.
The Medical Centre upgrade charged you for the wrong building
Clicking Upgrade on the Medical Centre took €10m and started a Training Ground build instead — resetting any training upgrade already under way.
- The facility had been added to the page without being added to the action behind it, so its cost, its build time and its level cap all quietly fell through to the training ground, and the Medical Centre's own level could never be raised at all.
- Fixed. The Medical Centre now upgrades the Medical Centre, and does what its effect line has always claimed.
The press room ignored your data pack
Press conference questions came out with generic names no matter which pack you had loaded, while every other screen on the site used your names.
- A presser about your star striker referred to somebody you had never heard of, which rather undercut the point of the room.
- Questions now resolve through the same naming everything else uses.
The youth team, where you actually look for it
Your academy players are now a real section of the squad rather than a separate screen you had to remember existed.
- The club page carries the youth team, and the squad splits four ways: full squad, first team, youth, and players out on loan.
- Youth status is its own thing, separate from a player's squad role — a kid can be in the youth team and still be first-choice.
- The match engine refuses to field a team of children: you cannot name a side without enough senior players, so nobody can farm youth minutes by fielding an empty first team.
- Promoting and demoting between the two is gated on age, and never touches a player you have loaned out.
Mismatches stop turning into routs
A strong side playing a weak one was producing scorelines that football does not produce. The engine now compresses the tail.
- Big favourites still win most of the time — the change is to how often that win becomes a seven-goal humiliation.
- Underdogs keep a real chance of a result, which matters in a world where the club you are hammering is run by a person.
A player's attributes matter again — career worlds
The match engine had been reading nothing but a player's overall rating. In career worlds it now reads the attributes that each part of the pitch actually runs on.
- Your defence is judged on defending and physicality, your midfield on passing and dribbling, your attack on shooting and pace. It is a blend, not a replacement — roughly 70% who he is, 30% what that zone needs.
- So two strikers with the same overall are no longer interchangeable: the quick finisher and the slow one now produce different afternoons.
- Goalkeepers are never blended — their six attributes are outfield-typed and would say nothing useful about keeping goal. They keep their own save layer.
- Realism worlds are untouched and simulate exactly as before.
Loan deals you can actually structure
Listing a player for loan stopped being a yes-or-no and became a set of terms you negotiate.
- Attach an option to buy, and optionally turn it into an obligation once he has made a set number of appearances. An obligation only binds a human borrower — a computer-run club will not accept being tied down like that.
- Decide how much of his wage the borrowing club covers, anywhere from all of it to none. Useful when you want him gone but cannot move the salary.
- Demand a level of game time, and you are told if the borrower does not honour it.
- Choose whether he is allowed to play against you. Off by default.
The press room became something you can watch
Press conferences are now a broadcast rather than a form: a set, a camera, captions, and questions with consequences.
- Around sixty questions in rotation, so a season of pressers stops repeating itself.
- If one of your stars is unhappy, you get asked about him on camera — and your answer settles it or makes it worse. Backing him publicly only holds if you then actually play him.
- The room stops asking about a match while that match is still being played.
Every AI club has a manager with a name
The clubs you play against are run by someone specific, and that someone is stable across the season.
- Each computer-run club gets a consistent named gaffer instead of a blank seat, and a data pack can name him too.
- Two bugs went with it: a cast that was too small for large worlds produced duplicate managers, and an overlapping name pool meant a small fraction of gaffers read as placeholder players.
The real English pyramid — 20/24/24/24/24, named
English worlds are now built from real division membership rather than guessed from squad strength.
- Divisions were previously derived from how good a squad looked, which put the wrong clubs in the wrong leagues. They now come from actual league membership, kept current by a sync that validates or refuses.
- 119 clubs across five tiers, with real division names and real sizes, available as a world template.
- New clubs arrive with their grounds and badges, not just a crest-shaped hole.
Players age on their birthday
A long-standing freeze: players without a date of birth never got older, so squads quietly stopped ageing at all.
- Ageing now runs off real birthdays, and a player's market value moves with his age instead of standing still.
- The existing squads that were frozen have been backfilled, so careers progress as they should from here.
A 24-club division finishes a week later, not five
Bigger divisions were stretching the calendar out of shape. They now play midweek properly.
- Twenty-four-club leagues play Tuesday and Saturday plus Thursday, so 46 rounds add about a week to the season rather than five.
- Cup Sundays and continental Wednesdays are untouched, and no side is ever asked to play on a one-day turnaround.
- Two related money and fitness bugs went with it: a season now costs exactly a season in wages whatever its length, and rest recovers on the world's clock, so a fast world no longer leaves an ever-present starter permanently exhausted.
AI clubs stopped bidding money they never had
Computer-run clubs were making offers their finances could not cover.
- Bids are now checked against the bidding club's actual budget, which makes the transfer market behave like a market.
- The board also stopped passing judgement on your league position after the opening weekend, when the table means nothing.
The Medical Centre stopped being decoration
The Medical Centre had sat in the database since facilities existed, marked reserved, copied between worlds and read by absolutely nothing. It now does two real jobs.
- Fewer injuries, and shorter lay-offs when they do happen — up to about a third off each at the top level. It never prevents an injury outright, and it can never cut a lay-off below a single match.
- Level 1 is the treatment room every club already had, and the screen says so rather than advertising "0% fewer injuries" as though it were a feature.
- Coming back from a long lay-off now costs match sharpness. A knock returns you at nearly full condition; a season-ending injury returns you at little over half, and you play your way back over the following weeks.
Your own news stopped being buried by the press
The dashboard feed was showing one thing: press. Your €20m signing was not making its own front page.
- Press generates a headline and a reply per fixture, which at scale meant the newest items in a world were all press and nothing else.
- The mix is now capped to one press voice per club, and your own club's news is guaranteed a place — so a signing, a result or a trophy is what you see when you log in.
Game Worlds: a lobby you can actually shop in
Choosing a world became a real decision instead of a list.
- Search, filters and sorting, plus which worlds your friends are in and which are busiest.
- Every world tile states its mode, its rules, its free spots and its manager count up front.
- Private worlds get house rules that bind, and building one is a step-by-step flow rather than one long scroll.
Substitutions understand the flanks
A right midfielder is like-for-like for a right winger, and the bench now says so.
- Left and right are real to the engine — a player on the wrong flank is penalised — and the substitution screen marks genuine like-for-like swaps in green.
- National teams plan matches the way clubs do, with the full plan rather than plain substitutions.
Decide what kind of player a youngster becomes
Development plans: pick a direction for a prospect — Poacher, Target Man, Playmaker, Ball-Winner, Attacking Full-Back and the rest, offered by position.
- A plan never makes him grow faster. Speed is still minutes, form, age and facilities. What the plan decides is which play style he earns when he crosses a development milestone.
- That matters because play styles are not decoration in a career world — they carry real weight in open-play scoring, set pieces, assists, card risk and goalkeeping, and they feed the role he is known by on his profile.
- So "I developed him into a playmaker" ends up true on the pitch, not just on the page.
Click a player's name, read his real career
A player's name on his profile is now a link out to his real-world record, and his page carries the real career to go with it.
- Clicking the name opens a search for him on Transfermarkt in a new tab.
- His profile gained a Career tab with his real-life move history sitting alongside what he has done in your world.
- It only appears when you have a data pack loaded. Without one the name on screen is fictional, so searching for it would turn up a stranger — and a generated player has no real-world counterpart at all.
- The link is built in your own browser from your own pack, so the real name never appears in anything the server sends.
Every club got its real ground
Stadium names, capacities and founding years were backfilled for the whole database, so a club page finally says where the club actually plays.
- Capacity is not decoration — it drives matchday income and attendance, and it is now the input to the wage cap that arrived later in the week.
- Sixteen clubs the source data had wrong were corrected by hand against Wikipedia rather than shipped wrong.
Real player photos, from a source that actually serves them
Player faces now come from a source that actually serves them, replacing image links that had quietly gone dead.
- The backfill covers every real player rather than only the playable leagues, and it replaces broken links rather than merely filling in the blanks.
- Getting there took a run of unglamorous fixes: searching by common name instead of legal name, transliterating accented and Scandinavian spellings, and handling players who go by one name only.
The official real-names pack builds in one command
The pack that gives you real player and club names went from a manual assembly job to a single reproducible build.
- Full spelled-out names rather than initials — Lionel Messi, not L. Messi.
- Photos and stadiums are folded into the same build, so one pack covers naming, faces and grounds.
- It builds on the server from production data, which is what makes keeping it current realistic rather than aspirational.
Retirement removes the player, but keeps the career
When a player retires he now leaves the game properly instead of lingering as an unsignable ghost in every search.
- He is removed at the end of the season he retires in, so you cannot find or sign someone who has hung up his boots.
- His history stays: results, match events and season statistics survive him, which is what club records and the Hall of Fame are built from.
New here? The game guides explain how all of this fits together, and the FAQ covers the short questions.
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