September 2026
53 updates shipped in September 2026 — 23 new features, 4 balance changes and 26 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.
Cups count with the board, and a coach's review after every match
The board judged you on the league alone, so a cup run did nothing for your job. Cup and European results now count — and every match report comes with a short coaching review.
- Board confidence now rises for knockout ties won, getting out of a European group and lifting a trophy, up to twelve points in a season, and early-season swings are gentler. Manager of the Month counts cup and European results too.
- After each match, a coaching panel gives three observations with a practical next step, plus feedback on every player who played, built only from what the match recorded.
- A new squad assessment, linked from the Squad page, sets out your squad's strengths, priorities and how well your saved XI fits, with notes on every player.
Players actually recover between matches again
On normal-speed worlds, tired players were barely getting any energy back between games — a starter who'd played two in a row could still be sitting on 82%. The small recovery trim we announced on the 16th had, in practice, all but switched recovery off. It now works the way it was meant to.
- The cause was a rounding trap: each world-clock tick earns less than one whole point, so it rounded to nothing and the gain was thrown away, tick after tick. Recovery is now tracked exactly, so a typical starter goes from 91 to about 95 after a day's rest, 99 after two and 100 after three.
- The tactics page now shows each player's fitness as it will be at the next kick-off, not how tired he is this minute, with a line saying which match that is.
- International friendlies no longer tire your squad out or hand out red cards — club friendlies already worked that way.
- Fast worlds now recover at exactly the nominal rate, which is slightly less than the old rounding happened to give them.
Signing in with two-factor authentication works again
If you'd switched on two-factor authentication you could get stuck at sign-in: after your password, the code screen bounced you straight back to the login form, so you never got the chance to type the code.
- The code prompt was sitting behind the very login gate it's meant to follow, so anyone without a live session went round in a loop. It loads as it should now — just sign in again.
- Nothing about your authenticator setup changed and nothing needs redoing. The code screen still only opens for someone who has just entered the right password.
An outbid manager isn't frozen out when the winning deal falls through
The moment a higher bid was accepted for a player, every rival bid was thrown out — and if that deal then collapsed, the seller was left with nobody and the manager who'd been outbid was shut out of a deal he had no part in. Rival bids are now held, not killed.
- A held bid can't be accepted and commits none of your money, but it stays alive: it shows on the player's page as 'Outbid' and on your Offers screen, you can still withdraw it, and it doesn't use up one of your incoming-signing slots.
- If the winning deal collapses, the seller drops to the next-best bid — automatically for an AI club, while a human seller simply gets the choice back and is never forced to sell to someone he didn't pick.
- If the winning deal goes through, the held bids are rejected for good.
AI clubs now sell a contested player — and stay within their means
A player at an AI-run club could sit unsold for weeks while bids piled up — one star drew dozens of offers, several well above his value, and never moved. Contested players now sell.
- Bids used to be decided one at a time on separate timers, and a bid that came due while a higher one was live was turned down to wait for the higher bid's own clock. On a busy player, higher bids kept arriving, so nothing ever closed. Now the first bid to come due settles the whole contest: every live bid competes and the highest one the buyer can actually afford wins.
- AI clubs also stop bidding beyond the budget on their takeover card. A club whose card read 'You'd start with €70.2M' had been putting a €160M bid on a striker; new AI bids are held to what the card advertises.
A manager a host removes can't just walk back in
Removing someone from an approval-only world only took their club away: the approval they'd been given stayed on file, so they could come straight back and pick another club without the host ever seeing a new request.
- Removing a manager now revokes their approval too. If they want back in they ask again and the host decides, exactly as for a stranger's first request.
- Everything else about a removal is unchanged — their career record is kept, and any live deals are cancelled with the other side told.
Equal-budget worlds: the pot belongs to the club, not the account
In a world where every club gets the same flat pot, resigning and taking a different club could leave you with that club's old value-based budget instead — one host found €11.9M in the bank where the world's pot was €150M.
- A club in an equal-budget world now gets the pot the first time it's taken, whoever takes it and however many clubs they've held before. A club that has already been given its pot still can't be paid twice.
- Value-based worlds are exactly as they were: cycling through clubs still can't mint you fresh money.
One photo, one player
Players who share a name could end up wearing the same face — three Wesleys on one photo, two Vitinhas fighting over another. That's fixed at the source, and the existing mix-ups have been cleared out.
- The photo matcher no longer guesses between same-named players: it uses the club to tell them apart, and where nothing does it leaves the photo empty. A missing face beats the wrong man's.
- A photo can now belong to only one player — a second player can't be given a face that's already taken.
- The mismatched photos were stripped from the master data and from every world. Those players show no picture until the matcher works out the right one, so expect a few missing faces for a while rather than wrong ones.
New worlds now open with the real free agents
Worlds were being built without the roughly 3,000 clubless players from the real-football feeds — so the Sunday youth intake had nothing to drop, and some real youngsters were missing from the clubs they actually play for.
- Every world that's created, reset or migrated from now on starts with them. In a real-squad world the ones tied to a real club begin in its squad; the rest wait in the free-agent pool.
- The pool arrives hidden and is released through the Sunday intake rather than all at once.
- Recently created worlds that had opened without them have been topped up too.
Fast worlds finally honour the host's kick-off time
A host on a fast world could set a kick-off slot — 8pm in their timezone, say — and every match still landed at whatever odd hour the fixtures happened to be generated at. The setting was saved and never used.
- On any world faster than normal speed, every fixture now kicks off at the host's first chosen slot in their timezone — one time a day, on purpose, so no club can be handed two games in under 24 hours.
- A world's very first season now respects the host's slots as well, even at normal speed.
- Existing worlds pick up the new time from their next season; fixtures already scheduled aren't moved.
Back threes and the 4-2-3-1 stop being punished
Players said back-three sides were 'way too weak' — 3-5-2 teams being battered 5-0 and 7-2. They were right: the match engine was misreading two kinds of shape.
- A 4-2-3-1 was being read as having one forward — its two wide attackers weren't counted in its front line. They are now, so it plays like the front three it is, and the 4-1-4-1, 4-1-3-2 and 3-2-4-1 get the same fix.
- A back three's wing-backs were never counted as defenders, so a 3-5-2 was judged as having three at the back where a real one has five once it defends. They now drop in, which lifts every back-three shape — the 3-5-2, 3-4-3, 3-4-2-1, 3-4-1-2 and 3-5-1-1.
- A side effect: leagues where these shapes are popular see slightly more goals per game; leagues without them didn't move.
Named roles now count in realism worlds
In realism worlds, picking a Playmaker, a Winger or a Stopper did nothing beyond a basic attack-or-defend tilt — the role was quietly flattened before the match. Roles now apply in every world.
- The effect is modest by design: on equal squads a Winger is worth about +0.05 points a match and a Box-to-Box about +0.04, and most roles mainly change how open a game is rather than who wins it.
- PlayStyles are still career-mode only, and AI clubs don't set roles — so this only moves managers who choose them.
Plans can hand over set pieces and change roles — in every competition
Your match plan can now say 'if my penalty taker comes off at 70 minutes, this man takes over' — and the role changes we added on the 16th finally work outside the league too.
- The instruction editor gains a removable list of role changes and a set-piece section scoped to whoever will actually be on the pitch when the instruction fires. Captaincy isn't part of it yet.
- Fixed: conditional roles only ever worked in league matches — in cup, continental and friendly games they silently did nothing. They apply everywhere now.
- Fixed: an instruction that only changed a role vanished when you reopened the planner, and was deleted on the next save.
Finding and joining a world is easier
Worlds that need the host's approval to join were invisible on the Discover tab — only fully public ones were listed. That's changed, along with a few small things that make worlds easier to find and enter.
- Approval-needed worlds now appear on Discover with an 'Approval needed' badge; you request a seat and the host decides. Invite-code-only worlds stay off the list.
- There's a new 'Player-owned' filter for worlds that players host, and every card now shows its World # so you can search by it.
- Got a world code from a friend? You can now type it on the front page before you've even signed in — you'll be taken through sign-up or login, and the join completes under the world's usual rules.
- Hosts now get a Manage button right on their club's card on the Play page instead of having to hunt for it.
Fixes to what the game shows you
A few places where the game was telling you the wrong thing — or too much.
- 'Online now' was showing for people who weren't. It was judged from each person's last sign-in over a two-week window, so almost anyone who'd played recently read as online. It now uses real activity: someone is online if they've been seen in the last 90 minutes.
- The dashboard's Last fixture card hid league scores until you'd watched the match, but friendlies and cup ties showed theirs outright. They now sit behind the same Watch reveal.
- A taken club's cash balance is no longer printed on the club picker — it was the one place a rival's transfer budget could be read. A club you can take still shows what you'd start with.
- Finances now puts your wage budget — and the world's hard wage cap, where a host has set one — beside the weekly wage bill and FFP limit.
And a run of smaller fixes
Shorter ones worth knowing about.
- Clicking a world invite link could redirect to an unreachable internal address instead of fm-worlds.com. It now lands on the site, and so does the stale-session recovery link.
- On phones, the Loan fee and Option to buy fields on a loan counter-offer no longer garble into each other, and the world's Game Rules page no longer runs off the right-hand edge.
- If creating a world genuinely fails, you now get a clear message instead of the app-wide crash screen.
- Left and right midfielders can now be trained as wingers in development plans.
FM Worlds now speaks Indonesian
The whole game can now be played in Indonesian — a first, broad pass that covers the screens you actually live in, with more filled in over time.
- Sign-in, your squad, tactics and training, the transfer market, scouting, fixtures, live matchday and match reports all read in Indonesian.
- Switch language from your account settings; nothing about your worlds or saves changes, only the words on screen.
Two-factor authentication for your account
You can now protect your account with an authenticator app, so a password alone is no longer enough to sign in as you.
- Opt in from your account settings with any TOTP app — scan the code, enter a six-digit number, done.
- Entirely optional, and it only affects signing in; nothing inside your worlds changes.
Save your line-ups and switch between them in a tap
Set up a full tactical plan — formation, instructions, set-piece takers, the XI and everyone's role — save it under a name, and reapply it any time from the tactics toolbar. Keep a league XI, a cup-rotation side and an experimental shape side by side and swap between them in one tap.
- The line-up you're currently running is flagged as active, and re-saving under the same name updates it instead of quietly making a near-duplicate.
- Switching between saved line-ups holds up even when one includes a player you've since sold — his slot is refilled with an available player and the rest of your XI stays exactly where you put it, rather than shuffling out of position.
- The 'Active' marker always points at the line-up you're really playing, so you can tell at a glance which one is live.
Tell a player to change his job when the scoreline does
Your match plan can now change a player's role by situation, not just make substitutions — push a full-back higher when you're chasing a goal, or drop a winger into midfield to protect a lead.
- Set it alongside your planned subs: at a chosen situation, this player takes on a new role — and it applies to men already on the pitch, not only the ones you bring on.
- It rides on the same instruction plan you already write, so there's nothing new to learn.
Watch a penalty shootout called kick by kick
Cup and continental ties that go to penalties now play out as a real, named shootout in the match report — every kick, taker by taker, not just a final score.
- The report shows who stepped up, who scored and who missed, in order, and names the right winner at the end.
- It covers the domestic cups and both continental competitions.
Reset your private world to a fresh start
The owner of a private world can now wipe it back to day one — same clubs, same rules, a clean slate — without deleting it and rebuilding from scratch.
- Everything resets in place: squads, tables, transfers and the calendar all return to the starting state, and everyone keeps their seat in the world.
- For a community that wants to run the same world again from the beginning once a season has played out.
Host a private world through Patreon
Hosting your own private world is now a one-off through Patreon rather than something you had to save credits toward.
- A supporter tier grants a world to build and run for you and your friends, fulfilled by hand while the flow settles in.
- As part of this the old 250 free sign-up credits are gone: credits are back to being purely for scouting and opponent reports, not a currency for unlocking worlds.
No more mysterious multi-day gap between fixtures
Every tenth week, club fixtures quietly paused for an international break that never actually played — so your next match could sit nine or ten days away with nothing on screen to explain it. That gap is gone.
- Club matches — league, cup and continental — now run at a steady cadence with no scheduled empty week. If there's a wait, it's between real games you can see.
- Every world already in progress was corrected in place: fixtures stranded days out have been pulled back to their proper dates, so nobody has to sit through the old gap.
- One knock-on effect worth knowing: seasons are now a touch shorter, since those empty weeks were padding the calendar — about four months at normal speed rather than nearer five.
The app no longer freezes when you tap a link in a pop-up
Opening a player or manager profile pop-up and tapping a link inside it could freeze the whole app until you reloaded. Fixed — along with a second round of the same on friendly booking and a couple of other panels.
- Links inside those pop-ups now behave like any other: they take you where they should and leave the app responsive.
- It hit touch devices hardest, where the pop-ups come up most.
Bookings now follow who's actually on the pitch
The match engine could book a player who'd already been substituted off, while the man who replaced him could never pick up a card at all. Cards now track the eleven actually playing.
- A yellow or red goes to whoever is on the pitch at that minute — a substitute can be booked, and a player who's off can't.
- It also cleaned up a knock-on that had left phantom sendings-off in some already-played match reports.
Two fixes for loans
Loan deals got more dependable at both ends of the table.
- A borrowing club can now ask that the parent club can't recall the player early, so a loan you build a season around can't be pulled out from under you.
- A player listed for loan who happened to be rated 82 or higher used to refuse every loan regardless — his own listing is now respected and he can actually go out.
Transfer windows temporarily open everywhere
Transfer windows are switched off across every world for now, so you can buy and sell whenever you like instead of waiting for a window to open.
- A deliberate, temporary step tied to the fixture-schedule change above: window dates are worked out from the match calendar, and with that calendar just adjusted we would rather leave trading open than gate it on dates that were in flux.
- Everything else about the market is unchanged — budgets, listings and negotiations all work exactly as before — and windows will return once things have settled.
A few numbers tuned across the market and the calendar
Small, deliberate adjustments to how the world paces itself — none of them change what you can do, only the timing and the edges.
- AI clubs now decide on your transfer bid within 24–48 hours rather than up to 72, so deals move along faster.
- Daily fitness recovery is a touch lower, so a midweek cup tie is still felt in the legs two days later — squad depth matters a little more.
- Continental qualification is now judged on a club's best 24 players rather than the size of its whole roster, so a strong first team counts for what it should.
More control for the people who run private worlds
A few more levers for hosts shaping how their world plays.
- Cap how many under-21s a club may hold, and how many it may sign in a season, to keep youth-stockpiling in check.
- Turn off board sackings independently of the finish-bottom relegation rule, so you can soften one without the other.
- And when a bid is refused because the buyer's senior squad is full, the message now says exactly that — under-21s don't count toward the limit.
A cleaner match to watch and a clearer table to read
A handful of presentation fixes across the league table and the live match.
- League tables show the traditional full columns at every screen width — scroll sideways for the form guide rather than losing columns on a phone.
- Match commentary uses real club names from your data pack, and colours each line by side so home and away don't blur together.
- The 2D match dots are smaller and calmer, and the man on the ball stays visible in a crowd instead of getting lost.
And a run of smaller fixes
Shorter ones worth knowing about.
- A release-clause signing now serves the same settling-in transfer lock as any other arrival, instead of being sellable straight away.
- A new signing whose shirt number clashes with a team-mate is renumbered automatically rather than doubling up.
- A matchday backlog can no longer flatten a whole squad's morale to the floor, and injury and suspension letters now stay behind the same no-spoiler window as results.
- Swap deals are named publicly and flagged in the digest, and the away-recap card can be dismissed.
Three new playstyles — and every style tells you what it does
The Style menu had six presets and not a word explaining any of them. It has nine now, each with a one-line description of what it actually does to your team — and the three new ones were chosen by simulation, not by name, because they genuinely play differently from what was already there.
- Tiki-taka, Wing play and Route one join the list. Tiki-taka strangles a slow, deep opponent but is undone by a quick press; Route one is the simplest answer to a side that presses you high; Wing play trades central control for more shots and crosses — and more space at both ends.
- Every style, old and new, explains itself: hover it in the menu, or tap the (i) beside Style, and it says what it does and who it beats.
- Two more candidates were tried and dropped because the match engine played them exactly like presets you already had — a name is not a tactic.
Defending deep finally protects a weaker side
A quiet flaw sat under every tactic: the levers only changed how open a game was, never who was likely to win it — so sitting deep merely lowered the variance, and low variance lets the better side's quality tell more reliably. An underdog parking the bus took FEWER points than one throwing everyone forward. That is the opposite of how football works.
- A deep, compact block now denies a stronger attack the space it needs, so the favourite's quality edge converts far less cleanly — the one lever that deliberately shifts the odds rather than just the openness of the game.
- Measured across thousands of matches: a clear underdog now takes more points defending than playing open, and it is the best approach of all once the gap is wide. Two evenly-matched sides are unaffected — there is no edge to deny, so it is never a free win.
- It is a trade, not a cheat. You concede less, but you also create less: you are playing for a 1–0 or a draw, not a rout.
Set your ticket price — pack the ground or cash the gate
Your first real lever over a matchday: a per-club price for home league games. Price it cheap and you fill the ground; price it dear and you earn more from every seat you sell.
- It's asymmetric and bounded — no price on its own forces a full house or an empty one. Glamour, form and the league table still decide who turns up.
- A full house lifts the home side a little (nothing under about 80% full, scaling to a small edge at capacity) — a nudge, never a decider. It favours underdogs, who can pack a small ground cheaply: atmosphere over gate money is a genuine choice.
- Every club starts on the old flat €20, so nothing in your world changes until you actually re-price.
Your tactics now count in every competition
A handful of things you set on the tactics screen were quietly ignored once a match kicked off outside the league. They aren't any more.
- Set-piece routines apply in the cups, Europe and friendlies too, not the league alone — and your designated penalty taker steps up in a shootout while your chosen corner taker whips the ball in, instead of the engine always picking for you.
- Match reports show only the substitutions that actually happened: a planned "bring him on if we're behind" that never triggered no longer appears as though it did.
- The formation on your tactics screen is the one your team takes the field in — even for a brand-new club that never saved a setup — and a planned mid-match switch (go 5-3-2 at 70') is now fully applied, not half.
- The 2D match viewer plays your real instructions — mentality, pressing, width — instead of a fixed "wide attacking" for every home side.
List a player, and the whole world can come calling
In an open world, putting a player up for sale used to draw bids only from clubs in your own divisions. Now the wider world's clubs — the real teams a world carries outside its leagues — can come in for him too.
- A capped, re-rolled sample of outside clubs joins your league rivals as potential buyers, so a listed player can attract a suitor from further afield. Affordability still decides who can actually afford him.
- Hosts keep control: a new world rule turns outside bids off, and a closed-economy world blocks them anyway — so "closed" now means closed in both directions.
A transfer market that shows everyone
Two things reported on the market, both fixed.
- The "All Players" market now lists players at external-pool clubs — real clubs your world carries outside its own divisions — instead of quietly hiding them. Search already found them; now the market does too.
- Player search gained a Position filter (CB, RB, ST, and the rest), sharing the market's own position sets so the two always agree.
More control for the people who run worlds
A batch of controls for hosts of private and community worlds.
- Cap the age and the overall of players your managers may sign — both are now dropdowns on the host Manage page and the admin console (they were enforced before, but you couldn't change them after the world was made).
- Hand a world to someone else: transfer its ownership to another account by email, username or id — for a community that migrates in and passes the finished world to whoever runs it.
- Owner-approval hiring: when it's on, a manager moving to a vacant club applies for it and the host approves or rejects on the Manage page, instead of the seat filling itself.
Contract talks stop backfiring
A report from a manager whose star seemed to demand more every time he opened talks turned up two things the negotiation screen was doing wrong — both of which punished you for using it.
- A player will never take a pay cut, so the screen says so up front and won't send a lower offer — instead of accepting it, refusing, and docking his morale for the asking.
- Re-signing a player no longer makes him immediately want a raise on top. With years still left on his deal he asks for the going rate for a player of his level, so a man already on it will extend on the same money rather than ratcheting upward with every new deal.
- The wording is honest now: it tells you when he simply wants the going rate, and a rejected lowball no longer claims he's "unsettled" when nothing is actually wrong.
Finances, schedules and crests — the smaller fixes
A round of smaller things reported across the game.
- Stadium and facility upgrades now show up in your season finances. They were charged to your budget but never written to the ledger, so the Income / Expenses / by-category breakdown never counted them.
- A club's schedule now shows friendlies and their results alongside the league games, on both clubs' pages — under the same no-spoiler gate as everything else.
- Migrated worlds show real club crests: teams that came in as plain lettered discs now pull their verified badge, so Everton, Lazio, Valencia and the rest finally look right.
The Awards Gala — voted by the world, not computed by it
Every other honour in FM Worlds computes itself — the champion is whoever has the points, the Golden Boot whoever has the goals. Asked what to build next, the community's own pick was the one honour that doesn't: three awards, a shortlist frozen the moment the season ends, and 48 hours of sealed voting before a staged ceremony reveals who won.
- Manager of the Season, Signing of the Season and Upset of the Year, each with a shortlist of up to five names — a Signing needs five appearances to even make the list — carrying faces, crests and, on a signing, the fee he cost.
- Too small a world gets an honest panel verdict instead of a hollow one: fewer than three voters, or fewer than two human managers for Manager of the Season specifically, and a panel decides it rather than reporting "100% of managers voted for…" when that means one man's opinion.
- The ceremony plays out category by category and stays on your gala page to replay for good. Every winner is written into History and into that division's almanac.
- First galas fire at each world's next season rollover.
Green or Gold — a second switch beside the theme toggle
Light or dark has always been a personal choice. Now so is the colour — trophy gold or the classic pitch green — in the top bar and in Profile → Display.
- Repaints the whole game, not just an accent stripe, and either colour works with either theme: gold reads as a deep bronze in the light theme rather than clashing with it.
- Saved to this device independently of the theme itself, so a gold phone and a green laptop are both correct answers.
Worlds of nations — every country runs its own real league
The world builder offered one shape: a single country's pyramid. Picking several nations without a separate checkbox used to silently build an all-English pyramid instead and call it a success — that was "Worldwide" itself, and every blend template that promised a continental mix.
- National leagues: pick your countries and each runs its own real top flight side by side, no promotion or relegation between them, tied together above by the continental competitions. Up to six nations at once, any one sized up to 24 clubs, the combined world capped at 120.
- Custom worlds get a full division composer: lay out each division on its own — a super league blending several countries into one table, a mixed structure of some blended and some single-nation — and choose whether the tiers link into one ladder or stand apart.
- The silent English-only fallback is refused outright now, not guessed — a multi-nation world has to say which shape it is.
- League tables stopped shading a relegation zone in leagues that don't relegate anyone; the red zone now follows that league's own real count, not a hardcoded three.
Rosters track real football — a second, faster source
Master already converged its squads onto Worlds Wiki every week, correctly — and, measured on production, uselessly: 4,435 of 19,320 players matched, 3,925 of those already agreed, and one week's plan proposed zero moves while master still had Anthony Gordon at Newcastle.
- A second source now feeds the same sync: soccerwiki.org's own club-by-club squad pages, a site edited daily rather than rebuilt once a year.
- New worlds open with players at their real, current clubs — Salah at Trabzonspor on day one, not wherever he was when master was last rebuilt.
- A real-life loanee now arrives as an actual loan — playing for the borrower, owned by the parent, home the moment this world's first season rolls over — instead of a permanent move with nothing that ever sends him back.
Market polish: pills obey the sort, and the auction tells the truth
Two small things on the transfer market, both reported by players. Clicking a column header on Wonderkids or New Arrivals used to just flip the arrow — the pill's own order won regardless, silently sorting Wonderkids by potential, a stat realism worlds don't even show you.
- A clicked header now overrides the pill's curated order; leave it alone and best-prospects-first / newest-first still applies.
- The market list, the shortlist tab and the player's own page all called this a "youth intake" even on the days it wasn't only youth. All three now say "Auction — Sunday" and explain the sealed-bid wait honestly.
The Sunday intake — 24 names a week, not 215 at once
Every clubless prospect used to hit the market the instant he arrived, with the feed landing new ones continuously — the pool held 215 concurrent youth auctions at once, all unfamiliar names. Nobody scouts 215 players, so nobody bid on any of them.
- Arrivals now wait in an unlisted pool. Once a week — Sunday, UTC — each world posts 24 of them with a four-day window that closes Thursday, announced on the feed like any other news.
- Prospect prices stopped being a photocopy of each other: every top-flight arrival was worth exactly €2,500,000 on exactly €10–12K a week, a flat fallback standing in for real data the source simply doesn't have for that age group. Each one now draws his own figure and wage from a spread around that same baseline.
- The player's own page stopped promising a free transfer his sealed auction doesn't offer — it now says "Youth auction — sealed bidding" and gives the real closing time.
- An auction nobody bids on returns to the pool for free and comes round again in a later week's drop.
The tutorial teaches the game now
The first-session rail was five links and no explanation, and it only ever appeared for a club with no result yet — a fact about a brand-new world, not a brand-new manager. Taking over an established club mid-season meant never seeing it at all.
- Seven steps that explain the world clock, your starting XI, the press, Matchday Live and your first signing before sending you anywhere — each teaching the actual mechanic, not just where the button is.
- It shows up for the manager now, not the club: gated on your own first fortnight in the job, or your first three matches, whichever is longer. Taking over a running club still gets you the walkthrough on day one.
- It still asks before it starts, and remembers your answer. Replay it any time from the How to Play guide.
Every imported player is who he really is
Reported from a live world: a bid confirmation for "Felix Bauer" — a player no squad, table or profile has ever called that. He is Max Dowman. An optional argument that was supposed to protect a real player's name had been silently omitted at sixty-one call sites across eighteen files.
- One shared function names a player now, and a test refuses any hand-rolled pairing outright.
- Old messages had frozen a stale or wrong name at the moment they were written; the reader now prefers a player's current name over whatever was baked in at the time.
- A compile-time check now covers sixty-nine call sites across the tokenizer and the search, so this class of bug can't reappear.
- An imported player's real name now shows everywhere he appears — every world, every page, search and notifications included — with or without a data pack of your own.
370 clubs get their real crest
Badges were matched to a public database by club name alone, first result wins — so AS Monaco wore a basketball club's crest, Hamburger SV an ice hockey team's, and two more clubs a badge that belonged to someone else entirely. A badge that loads looks like a badge that's right, so nobody had noticed.
- One shared rule now decides a club's crest, and refuses anything it can't prove — wrong sport, wrong country, a name that doesn't fully match — rather than risk a confidently wrong badge.
- 370 clubs that had no real crest at all now do, each checked by a person against the image rather than trusted blind.
- Corrections live in one file every pack builder reads, so a fix reaches the pack you've already loaded rather than waiting on a rebuild.
Prospects get their real country, birthday and face
Measured on production: 580 of 962 imported prospects had no birthday at all, freezing them at their arrival age forever, and 536 had no photo. Most of the rest showed a legal citizenship instead of a footballing nation — 70 of them "United Kingdom" — which the flag lookup didn't recognise.
- "United Kingdom" now resolves to England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland wherever the source data says which, with the flag that actually matches.
- The 962 already-imported prospects were repaired in place, by the identity that ties one real person to every copy of him across every world.
- Photo hunting is now fully automatic from two sources, checked in the background as new prospects arrive rather than waiting on someone to run a script.
Friendlies show up where you'd actually look for them
Pre-season friendlies are scheduled and played for every club, but the dashboard's last-result card only ever read the league table — so a manager who'd played five warm-ups still saw "No matches yet."
- Your last friendly now fills that card when it's genuinely the more recent result, or when there's no league result yet at all.
- It's tagged "Friendly" with a line saying it doesn't count — friendlies never touch your form, your table position or anything your board judges you on.
Four small things that were annoying
Smaller than a section of their own, each reported the same way — obviously wrong the moment someone hit it.
- The resign button is now a small link off to the side, instead of a full-width strip a thumb could hit by mistake reaching for "Open club."
- The squad-role dropdown visibly waits until a change has actually saved, instead of looking the same whether it landed or is still queued.
- The email confirmation link now lands on the login page — it had been redirecting to the server's own internal address instead of the site.
- The worlds hub lost its stat strip and neon glow, in favour of the plain style the rest of the game already uses.
New here? The game guides explain how all of this fits together, and the FAQ covers the short questions.
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