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.
Three setups, and the trade is deliberately even — none of them is the right answer:
Since both sides of the trade move together, what actually decides it is variance. A louder game is a less predictable one, which is what an underdog wants and what a favourite does not. Attacking when you are outgunned and sitting deep when you are the better side is the shape of it. Every AI club picks a setup too, so this is a tactic rather than an advantage.
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.
The seed fixes the whole order in advance. Spin three lands on the same club for everyone playing that seed, so a respin does not reshuffle the wheel — it moves you one place further down a queue everybody is standing in. Spending one costs you the club you skipped and your position, which is what makes the decision interesting.
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.
Choose Play with friends to start a room. You pick the league, era and settings; everyone plays whatever you choose. Send round the six-character code or the invite link — a room holds up to eight of you. If nobody joins within fifteen minutes the room closes.
You start the game whenever you have enough people; two is the minimum. If you forget, it starts on its own five minutes after the first person arrives, so a room is never left waiting on somebody who is not coming.
Once it has started, everyone picks a formation and drafts on their own. You all draft from the same wheel — one sequence of clubs, dealt out a spin each in turn, so no two of you are ever offered the same club at the same moment and nobody is racing anybody.
Everyone has five minutes to get an eleven in, counting from the moment the room starts, and the clock is on screen throughout. Run out and the rest of your side is picked for you automatically and entered as it stands — so one person wandering off never leaves everybody else waiting. Anyone who has closed the page by then is simply dropped, and the season kicks off without them.
When the eleven is settled you choose how they play, then wait for the rest. You cannot see anyone's team, shape or tactics until the season has been played.
Everybody then takes a slot in the same league, which means you all meet each other home and away like anyone else. Those fixtures are picked out at the end, along with where the humans finished relative to each other. Everyone sees identical results — the whole season is worked out from the seed, so there is no version of it where the scores disagree.
Hard mode is the exception, and stays at two. Taking turns on one wheel, with a clock and the ability to steal your opponent's last pick, are all rules about the other player; there is no sensible version of them at six.
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: