Until August 2026, a ManageFC season followed the calendar year, and fixtures were spaced a fixed number of days apart. It sounded tidy. In practice, larger leagues ran out of calendar before they ran out of matches, seasons dragged past the new year, and the end of a season — promotion, relegation, prize money — sometimes never arrived at all.
On 19 August we redesigned the season from scratch.
One matchday a week
The new rhythm is the one every football fan knows: one league matchday per week. A sixteen-club division plays a double round-robin — every club home and away against every other — which makes 30 matchdays. They fit into a season window of 245 days, a little over 35 weeks, leaving room for cups, continental nights and a proper winter break.
When a season ends, the next one begins after a short gap, timed from the last league match rather than from a fixed date, so that no world ever gets stuck between seasons.
How we tested it
A new calendar is easy to draw and hard to trust. We created a fresh world and played five full seasons by skipping time, checking each one: every season lasted 245 days, every league played its 30 matchdays at weekly intervals, and every transition into the next season completed cleanly.
The bug the test found
The five-season run turned up something unrelated to the calendar but just as important. League tables were ordering clubs correctly by points on screen, but the stored position of each club — the number other parts of the game read, such as the AI deciding whether it is in a relegation fight — was not being updated after each match. It simply stayed in the order clubs had been added to the league.
We fixed it so positions are recalculated after every match, added a safety check at the end of each season, and corrected the positions of every existing table in every world.
What changed for you
- Seasons feel like seasons. Thirty matchdays, a winter break, an ending that always comes.
- Money is easier to read. The weekly finance pulse runs 35 times a season, so a wage of 20,000 a week costs about 700,000 per season — a number you can actually plan around.
- Promotion and relegation always happen. The bottom five go down and the top five of the division below come up, with no play-offs. The full rules are in the league structure article.
Next in the diary: stepping into a live match.
- 15When registration broke — a post-mortem
- 16Players now age like players
- 17A season is 245 days
- 18Stepping into a live match
- 19One crest, everywhere
All 38 parts
- 1Why we're building ManageFC
- 2The first version — a world that ran on a clock
- 3Two-factor authentication for anything that touches money
- 4Why we deleted our battle pass
- 5Why ManageFC is English-only for now
- 6The inbox is the heart of the game
- 7Substitution plans, set-piece takers and a proper Christmas break
- 8The pivot — from one online world to a private world per save
- 9Rebuilding the game around private saves
- 10The bug that made time stand still
- 11Build your own world — 211 countries, up to 40 leagues
- 12Your money, your units — currencies and expense periods
- 13A security review in June
- 14A quieter month under the hood
- 15When registration broke — a post-mortem
- 16Players now age like players
- 17A season is 245 days
- 18Stepping into a live match
- 19One crest, everywhere
- 20From eight minutes to eighty-four seconds
- 21Recalibrating goals and morale
- 22Every word on screen, checked
- 23We audited our own website — and deleted what was not true
- 2415,000 matches to answer one question — do tactics matter?
- 25AI clubs finally choose their tactics
- 26Why you start in division 3
- 27The day the league tables froze
- 28Crises scaled to your division
- 29Half the game is played on a phone
- 30We redesigned the whole game — then rolled it back
- 31A stadium that grows with you
- 323D where it helps — the season rail and the tactics board
- 33The dressing room, and knowing when to start over
- 34Rewriting the guide and wiki with real numbers
- 35A new front door, and a blog
- 39ManageFC 3.0: why we closed the game, and what we rebuilt
- 40Your club's mailbox: everything that happens reaches you
- 41Objectives, a head coach and the end of a season
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