You draft eleven players by spinning a wheel, then find out how far they get across a full 38-game season and a European knockout cup. A run takes about five minutes.
Pick one of Europe's top five divisions — the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga or Ligue 1. This is the league your side will compete in. The English, Spanish and Italian leagues run 20 clubs over 38 matchdays; Germany and France run 18 clubs over 34.
Three pools, and they change the game a lot:
A slider sets the span of seasons the wheel may land on, anywhere from the full range to a single year. Leave it wide and consecutive spins will hand you a 2015 side and then a 2023 one; a typical drafted eleven ends up spanning six or seven different seasons. The league you actually play in uses the most recent season inside your era.
With prime mode on, every player arrives at the best rating he ever achieved in the dataset. You still draft the 2016 Leicester version of a player at Leicester — club, season and position are untouched — he simply turns up at the level of his best year. It applies to the AI clubs too, so it changes the flavour more than the difficulty.
Five to choose from: 4-3-3, 4-4-2, 4-2-3-1, 3-5-2 and 5-3-2. The shape decides which eleven slots you have to fill, and each carries a real trade-off — a back five defends better, a front three attacks better. No formation is a free win; the balance is checked automatically so that none finishes more than a few places above another on average.
Two modes, chosen before you start:
Hit spin. The wheel lands on a club from a particular season and offers five of its players. Take one, then choose where he plays. Repeat until your eleven is complete.
You get five respins per draft. These are the main lever you have: the wheel decides which club you get, and skipping a weak one is how a good drafter closes the gap on the elite sides waiting in the league. An auto-spin switch will spin for you after every pick if you would rather not click.
Chemistry rises when your eleven shares nationalities and clubs. It is deliberately a small bonus — enough to tilt a close decision, not enough to decide a season on its own.
Your side takes over a club slot in the league and plays a full double round-robin. Every other club fields its own real squad, so you are the outsider trying to gatecrash a real league — Real Madrid plays Real Madrid's players. Matchdays tick past with your league position updating live, and the run-in slows down as the table is decided.
At the end you get your finishing position, points, goal difference, and your squad's top scorer, top assister, player of the season and clean-sheet count.
The top four in every league qualify — twenty teams, seeded by league position so all five champions are top seeds. Seeds 1 to 12 go straight into the round of 16; seeds 13 to 20 come through a play-off round first.
Each round shows the draw before anything is played, so you can see who you would meet next. Ties are a single leg; level after extra time goes to a penalty shootout, with conversion rates affected by the opposing goalkeeper.
Every run is driven by a seed — a short code that determines the wheel, the shortlists, how all the AI clubs draft, and every match result. Because of that, two kinds of link are possible: