Club The job
You are the chairman, not the manager. The manager picks the team and runs the dressing room; you hire him, sack him, sign his players, build his ground, and answer to three constituencies who can all end you: the fans, the board, and the bank.
The board hands you a mandate — stay up, get promoted, keep wages under a ceiling — reviewed every few seasons. Pass it and the bar rises. In the lower leagues the mandate usually demands the climb; at the top it demands trophies. The review is fairer than it looks: an objective delivered in any season of the mandate stays delivered, near misses are noticed (two points off the play-offs is not the same as mid-table), and a first failed review with something to show for it earns a final warning — one more season on the same objectives. Fail again and you're out.
The week
Club President runs on a weekly ticker — 52 weeks a season, one press of ▶ Play the week at a time. A week might hold a match, two matches, a transfer window morning, a cup draw, a board letter, or nothing but the books.
- Match weeks go team news → the match → the full-time report → the week closes on the money.
- Window weeks open at the transfer desk — the phones ring before the football starts.
- Quiet weeks just close: costs leave, instalments land, the paper prints if anything happened.
Everything important lands as an overlay in order: board notices first, then the club's own paper, then the week's money, then anything else that needs you. Nothing is ever decided behind your back — every match is played, every score is real.
Matchday
Before kick-off you get team news and a Set-up card: formation, mentality (attacking / balanced / containing), and a one-tap 🔄 Rotate the squad that rests your five most tired starters when depth allows. Against a rival, a red banner warns you that form means nothing in these.
The match plays as a live ticker — every goal, card, crossbar and scramble, minute by minute. Fast-forward 2× and Quick sim ⏩⏩ are always there; the result is identical however you watch. Knockout ties go to extra time and named penalty kicks; two-legged European ties are decided on aggregate.
What a result moves
- Ratings and form — every player gets a match rating; the last five make his form, and form feeds selection.
- Condition — a match costs roughly 30 fitness. One game a week is sustainable; a midweek double-header is not, unless you've built the medical department to absorb it.
- Morale — wins lift the room, defeats cut, derbies cut twice as deep, and a benched senior gets grumpier every idle week.
- Money — home gates bank on the day: tickets, food, drink, hospitality, all scaled by your pricing and the size of the ground.
The money
The books breathe weekly. Broadcast and sponsorship money arrives as instalments (1/52nd a week); wages and running costs leave the same way; gates bank on matchday; cup prize money pays out when a run ends; the summer settlement only trues up what hasn't already landed — merit payments, parachutes, the board's bonus.
When your weekly money moves, the ledger names the reason: climbed four places (merit), a sponsor expired, promotion's TV cliff, a parachute beginning. Watch that banner — it's the story of your income.
The levers
- Matchday pricing (Stadium tab) — five tiers for tickets, food and drink. A flying team forgives high prices; a struggling one plays to empty seats.
- Operating posture (Finance tab) — run the club normally, lean (−7%), or on austerity (−15%). Cuts are real money and real consequences: softer gates, a grumpier dressing room.
- The capital desk — bank loans, a supporter bond, a broadcast advance, or selling a stake to private equity. All cash now, consequences on a schedule. Every loan can be settled early; the stadium debt can be paid down any time.
- Scaling down — closed stands cost nothing to run, unsellable contracts can be terminated by mutual consent (55% of the remainder, paid today), and the five-year projection on the Finance tab warns you which year the books go overdrawn.
The backers' confidence
The club's backers reward a chairman who turns up: every day you open a career, a small confidence payment lands in the reserves — sized to your club's own income, growing each consecutive day up to a cap in the first week. Miss a day and it resets to day one. It won't fund a signing, but it keeps the lights warm.
Transfer windows
Summer (July–August) and January. Outside them you can watch, list, and talk — and sign free agents, who belong to nobody. Every other deal waits for the window.
Buying
- The manager's list — two names the dugout actually wants. Decline a man you can clearly afford and the manager takes it personally.
- The scouting department — brief them by position; quality follows your chief scout.
- The agents' shortlist & the free-agent market — out-of-contract players, no fee, and signable any week of the year — no window needed. Out of season the transfer desk leads with them.
- Deals are structured packages: cash, add-ons (roughly half ever get triggered — and then they cost you real money at the settlement), and sell-on clauses. Haggle the fee, then agree personal terms. Three rounds and talks die.
Selling
- Incoming bids carry a hidden ceiling — counter under it and they pay your price; insult them and they walk. Many first bids are deliberate lowballs: negotiating a try-on up is the game.
- Half of every sale goes straight back into your transfer budget. Transfer-listing a player quadruples the bids; loan-listing floors the loan offers.
- The budget is the board's sanction, not a pot of cash — deals pay from reserves when they complete. Petition the board to raise the sanction when you've earned the right.
Deadline day is an event: a late flurry of bids, one last trip to the desk, and then midnight.
Scouting
The 🌍 tab is a world map coloured by footballing culture. Hire a chief scout first — his quality decides how far the network reaches and how good the finds are. Then:
- Missions — send scouts to any country for 1–12 weeks. Longer stays find more; strong cultures grow better players; the airfare grows with distance (and shrinks with the size of your club). The reward for a real trip is the underpriced gem — and the raw 🌱 project: a teenager priced on what he is, not what he'll become.
- The ⚡ quick sweep — one week, three honest names at your level. The I-need-a-left-back-now option.
- The free-agent trawl — put an agent on the out-of-contract pool for depth, with the occasional forgotten gem.
- Contracted finds are frozen in the file until a window opens — found in October, signable in January. Free-agent finds can be signed the week they arrive, but they don't wait: leave them too long and they sign elsewhere.
Squad care
- Condition recovers weekly — faster with a physio, a medical wing and youth. Rotate before a double-header, not after.
- Morale is visible on the squad table (😠 under 40). Benched seniors sour week by week; talk to them, play them, loan them, or sell them.
- Everyone talks ⭐ premium — every player, the manager, every staff member opens a private chat. They know the results, they remember what you said, and a good word at the right moment shows up on matchday. Twice a month per person; flattery doesn't work twice.
- Bans: five yellows = one match, a red = two. Injuries scale down with your medical staff.
- The chairman's gestures (🎁) — a warm-weather retreat, watches, cars. One-off morale and freshness levers, priced to your division, with diminishing returns and a board that notices poorly-timed generosity.
The academy
A bare academy produces nobody — the environment is the story. The 🌱 office has four levers: the annual budget, centres of excellence in real local places, youth scouts in three age bands (volume, quality, growth), and the training-ground facilities that raise the development ceiling. The budget and the academy director lift how good the boys are when they arrive; once that is as high as it goes, everything else in the department raises their ceilings instead — higher potential across the intake and far better odds of a special one.
- Graduates arrive each summer. Rating follows what you built; a maxed setup produces first-team players, a starved one produces polite letters of release.
- ⬆ Promote a boy any time (no window needed); his wage conversation comes later, through his agent.
- Loans out are the pathway: borrowers pay most of the wage, the boy comes back sharper for real minutes, and you can recall him in a window.
The ground & the campus
Both build screens draw the real thing — stands thicken, cranes go up, the dome appears on the training fields.
- Stadium works: one crew at a time, paid up front, delivered on a schedule. Seats, hospitality, screens, the kop, the roof — capacity feeds gates, home advantage feeds results.
- THE NEW GROUND ladder takes any ground to 8k → 15k → 25k → 40k → 62k — each rung gated on your division and on actually filling the ground you have.
- The training campus feeds recovery, development and the medical bay. Money tight? Mothball a facility (reversible) or sell it off (final).
- Big grounds cost real money per seat to run — closed sections cut the bill when the crowds shrink.
Staff & the dugout
Seven departments, quality one to five stars. Slates rotate every few months; a ★★★★★ appears roughly once a career and only answers big clubs. Every star flows into the machine: coaching → the bench, physio → injuries, academy → intake, scouting → finds, analysis → the bench, psychology → shootouts, commercial → richer deals.
- Courses: send someone away for a few weeks and they come back a star better — far cheaper than hiring the finished article.
- Headhunters call — good staff get offers. Meet the number (permanently) or let them go.
- The dugout: sack the manager and it costs a year's severance; the market is tiered by your standing. Retired club legends re-emerge as managers — appointing one of your own is worth real goodwill.
Cups & Europe
- FA Cup — non-league clubs enter at the qualifying rounds, the EFL at Round One, the top two divisions at Round Three. Every round survived accrues prize money; the cheque clears when the run ends. At non-league level a good run is a season's budget.
- League Cup — all 92 league clubs. FA Trophy — non-league only, and very winnable.
- Europe — finish top five for the Champions League, 6th–7th Europa, 8th Conference, and both domestic cups pay a Europa place. A 36-club league phase, then two-legged knockouts and a one-off final. The other clubs from your own league who qualified are in the field with you — nobody from home who didn't — and you can't draw a countryman until the knockouts. European nights pay 25% richer gates, and UEFA pays as you go: the league-phase money lands when the phase ends, then each knockout round's fee when the round is decided.
The pyramid
Seven divisions, 160 clubs, and it all moves — promotion and relegation run top to bottom every season, play-offs are played (never simmed), and other clubs rise and fall over the years on their own projects and crises.
- Five countries, each with its own shape. England's seven divisions, Scotland, Germany, Spain and Italy — every one with its own cups, its own European places and its own economics, chosen when you take the chair. Spain and Italy also run reserve sides (a giant's B team) in their lower divisions: they can be promoted, but never into their first team's division. Italy's third tier is three regional groups — each sends its champions up, and their runners-up meet each other in one play-off for the last promotion.
- Promotion transforms the books: the TV cliff from the National League to the Premier League is roughly ×450.
- Relegation triggers parachute payments and automatically reprices your sponsors down; the wage bill is yours to shed — sell, loan out, terminate, close the top tier, drop to austerity.
- Sponsorship follows success: Europe, titles and a growing trophy cabinet all raise what the market pays for your shirt.
Staying in the chair
- Watch the board number — results move it, wage-ratio breaches erode it, and letters arrive before coups do. An unread red-spine letter is never good news left unread.
- Watch the trough, not the balance — the five-year projection names the year you go overdrawn. Fix it two windows early, not two weeks late.
- The mandate is the scoreboard — check the Records tab; the review doesn't care about your excuses, only the objective keys.
- Post your run to the club leaderboard — every club has an all-time board (the 🏅 button on the club-picker, or the gold card on Records and every season report). The score is open maths: seasons pay by finish and division, honours pay a bounty, and any run on the board can be opened to read its full record. Posting also pays a small publicity bonus into reserves — once per newly completed season, sized to your club — so post after every season and collect it.
- Potential ratings are your backroom's estimate, not a promise — the head of analysis, first-team coach and chief scout sharpen the read. Only three ★★★★★ heads see a player's true ceiling; below that you're shown a range, and ranges can flatter.
Ten tips from sacked chairmen
- Hire a chief scout in week one. Everything downstream of the transfer market improves with him.
- Open contract talks the season before the final year — the early-renewal premium is cheaper than the free transfer.
- Counter every lowball. The hidden ceiling is usually near the player's true value.
- Rotate before the double-header. A 70-fitness starter is worse than his fresh understudy.
- Half of every sale returns to the budget — selling one saleable star can fund a whole rebuild window.
- Don't decline the manager's request while visibly rich. He knows the books, and the dressing room hears about it.
- Domestic cup prize money pays when the run ends — a cup run is a loan against your own elimination. Budget for the season, not the round. (European money is the exception: it lands stage by stage.)
- The academy pays in year three, not year one. Start building it the day you arrive.
- Promotion with a lower-league wage bill is the richest position in the game. Resist the urge to triple wages in August.
- When relegation hits, act in the first window: terminate, sell, close the top tier, go lean. The parachute is a runway, not a salary.