The founder's guide

⚒️ Your club

You found one club — name, colours, crest — and it's yours for good. It starts in Sunday League III, the bottom of eleven tiers, with 150 coins, a squad of eighteen and a pitch with a rope around it. The summit is the Champions ladder.

The important thing to understand on day one: the game runs on a real clock. Buildings finish in real minutes, hours and eventually days. Player ageing and development advance only when you play matches. The league season is drawn fresh every day and settles at midnight UTC. You don't grind Clash of Clubs in one sitting — you drop in, play your matches, start a build, collect what's waiting, and come back.

Everyone you meet is either a 👤 REAL club — another person's save, playing exactly as they built it — or a 🤖 BOT filling a seat until a real club arrives. Every opponent is labelled, everywhere.

🌱 Your first days

A new club gets the rookie boost for its first 72 hours: double match pay and every build finishes in half the time. Use it — upgrades you start in the first three days are the cheapest time you'll ever buy.

• Play your first match straight away. The button is right there. Match pay plus your home gate is how everything else gets funded.
• Start a build before you log off. The crew works while you're away; an idle crew is wasted real time.
• Come back tomorrow. The daily reward grows with your streak, and a fresh league season is drawn every day.

🏗️ The campus

Six buildings, ten levels each, one building crew — you queue one project at a time, and a building under construction still works at reduced capacity.

• 🏟️ Stadium — capacity, home advantage and prestige. The gate at home matches is a big slice of your income.
• 🍔 Catering — more coins per fan on matchday. Needs a stadium first.
• 🏃 Training ground — players grow faster, and higher levels raise your daily match limit from 3 towards 11.
• 🎓 Academy — produces new young players on a clock; higher levels produce faster and better.
• 🏢 Club offices — unlock staff hires who pay coins every hour into the till.
• 🛍️ Club shop — more coins per hour. Needs offices first.

Costs roughly double each level, and build times stretch from seconds at the bottom to days at the top. Prestige — earned from building levels and staff — fills your ground on matchday and raises the quality of what the academy and the market offer you.

Passive income lands in the till, which fills for 24 hours and then stops until you collect. A daily visit never wastes a coin.

👤 The squad

Every player is generated with a face, an age, a foot, six attributes and a potential. The squad holds up to 22; you need 11 to field a team.

• The XI picks itself into a 4-2-3-1 unless you set your own lineup on the Squad tab. A player out of his natural position plays below his rating — a striker in goal is a disaster, a winger at full-back merely a risk.
• Young players grow when you play matches toward their potential — faster under 21, and faster with a better training ground. A 17-year-old with high potential is the best asset in the game.
• Players past 31 slowly fade. Sell the veterans a season before you have to.

Ageing, development and your squad cycle

Every 20 matches you personally play adds one year to every player in your squad and academy. League, cup and friendly matches count, including wager matches you play. Offline time, deadline simulations and away games hosted by another manager do not advance your players. Listed players are outside your squad and do not progress until they join a squad again. Transfers preserve birthday progress.

• Under 21: fastest growth, up to their potential. At level 1 training, a starting player earns about one rating point per seven matches; at level 10, about one per two matches.
• Ages 21–24: continue developing towards potential, at a slightly slower rate.
• Ages 25–31: stable ratings. At 32+, players lose roughly one rating point per 25 played matches, to a minimum of 30.
• Match involvement matters: your starting XI receives full development, reserves 50%, and academy players 60%. Training-ground upgrades multiply growth; they do not accelerate ageing or prevent decline.
• Plan ahead: check “Next birthday” on player profiles, bring youngsters into the XI and replace veterans gradually. Players are not automatically retired or removed.

Existing players keep their current age, rating and progress when this system begins. There is no retrospective ageing. Academy arrivals, construction and club income still follow real time.

⚽ Matches & the daily limit

You get 3 matches per day — league, cup, friendlies and accepted challenges all count — resetting at midnight UTC. A bigger training ground raises the cap toward 11.

Match packs add 4 matches to today's allowance. They come from the daily reward (every third day of a streak), the weekly chest, inviting friends — and the pack shop, where coins buy one at a price that doubles with each pack bought that day. A splurge, not a subscription.

Home matches pay a gate on top of match pay — stadium size, catering and prestige set it. Win, draw or lose, every competitive match pays something.

🏆 The league

Every day you're placed into a fresh division of eight — real clubs at your tier, with bots filling the empty seats — and a full seven-fixture round robin is drawn. The season settles at the end of the UTC day.

• You play your home fixtures, and your away fixtures at bots. Your away games at real clubs are played by those managers — one result, both clubs see the same score.
• Anything unplayed at the deadline is simulated, with the absent side weakened. Playing your own fixtures is always better than letting the deadline do it.
• The payout lands at the deadline: prize money by finishing position, a bonus per win, a big bonus on promotion, and a parachute payment if you go down.

The bottom two tiers promote the top three and relegate nobody. From Regional League up it's the real thing — two up, one down — and the payouts scale hard with altitude.

🥇 The cup

Ten cups climb from the Grassroots Cup to the Immortals Cup — each a three-round knockout (quarter-final, semi-final, final at a neutral ground), and each trophy won unlocks the next cup up. The opposition gets stronger every round, and cup ties never end level: extra time, then penalties. A cup you have already won pays a little less with each repeat trophy — the real money is always the next cup up the ladder.

Every round pays on the way through, a beaten club still takes a share, and the winner's trophy goes in the cabinet for good. Lose and the run is over — a fresh draw waits after that.

🎓 The academy

Once built, the academy produces a young player on a timer — hours apart at level one, much faster at the top — and holds a few graduates until you collect them. Quality rides the academy level and your prestige.

Most graduates are squad players. Some are the future of the club. The ones you don't want are sale stock — a young player with growth left always finds a buyer.

💱 The market

One central market for every club in the game, in two halves:

• From real clubs — listed by other managers. Buy one and your coins go to them.
• Agent listings — the game's own stock, refreshed every hour, priced around your level.

Listing a player removes him from your squad while he's up for sale. If nobody buys in three days he comes home. You can run six listings at once, withdraw any time, and tap any card on the market for the full picture — attributes, growth headroom, and whether the asking price is a bargain or over the odds.

💰 The money

Coins come from, roughly in order of size:

• The league settlement — position pay, win bonuses, promotion money.
• Matchday — match pay every game, the gate and catering at home.
• The cup run — every round pays.
• The daily reward — grows every consecutive day (up to six), with a match pack every third day. Miss a day and the streak resets.
• The weekly chest — ten wins in a week opens it: coins and two match packs.
• The till — shop and staff income, ticking every hour, capped at 24 hours until collected.
• Player sales — the big one-off cheques.

Coins go on buildings, players, staff, wager stakes and packs. There is nothing to buy with real money — the clock is the only currency.

🤝 Friends & wagers

Every club has a six-character club code. Add a friend by code — or beat a real club in the league and add them from the full-time report.

• Wager matches — challenge a friend for a coin stake. They accept or decline within 48 hours; the stake is capped at a quarter of the poorer club's coins, so nobody gets farmed. Stake-free matches for bragging rights play instantly.
• Head-to-head records are kept forever.
• Visit any friend's campus and see what they've built.
• Invite links — anyone who founds a club from your link gets a match pack, and you get coins and two packs. You become friends automatically.

📊 Leaderboards

All-time and weekly boards, filtered to the world, your country, or just your friends. Weekly points come from playing and winning — the board resets every Monday, so a big week counts wherever you are on the ladder.

💡 Ten tips

• 1. Never leave the crew idle. Start a build every time you log off — real time is the resource.
• 2. Play your league fixtures before midnight UTC. An auto-simmed absence plays weakened.
• 3. Protect the streak. The daily reward compounds; thirty seconds a day keeps it.
• 4. Training ground early. It grows your players AND raises your daily match limit — the only building that gives you more football.
• 5. Buy age, not rating. A 19-year-old at 48 with headroom beats a 31-year-old at 52 with enough matches and training.
• 6. Sell before the fade. Move players on around 30 while they still fetch a price.
• 7. Sunday League is a sandbox. Nobody goes down in the first two tiers — experiment there.
• 8. List, don't quick-sell. 40% now versus full price in a day or two. The player comes home if unsold.
• 9. Collect the till daily. It stops filling after 24 hours — everything past that is coins you never earned.
• 10. Add every real club you beat. Friends mean wagers, visits and a country board worth topping.