Fewer tables, more football

A football club is not a spreadsheet, but for most of its life ManageFC looked like one. The squad was a table. The transfer market was a table. The league, the statistics, the staff, the scouting results — tables, all of them. They were accurate and complete, and they made every club look the same.

At the end of October we set ourselves one rule for the whole game: wherever you choose something, you choose it from a picture. A player from a pitch, a country from a map, a club from the league, a winner from a podium. The numbers stay; the picture is the way in.

Players are cards now

The squad, the transfer market and the scouting results all show players as cards. Each card carries the position and the ability on top, the player's face in his club's shirt, the flag, the age, the preferred foot and his character, then the money and the contract.

Behind the player sits his club's crest, large and faded, at an angle — so a glance along a row tells you where everyone comes from. A free agent has no club, so his card carries the ManageFC mark instead.

A card opens a dossier that slides in from the side, with everything the old table row had and more: the best attributes, the contract and the history. The staff page uses the same cards and the same dossier. We did not want a hundred styles in one game; we wanted one style that you learn once.

Maps, pitches and podiums

• Scouting starts from a world map. You pick a country by clicking it, the regions follow the football confederations, and a pin marks every mission you have running. The position you are looking for is picked on a pitch.
• The league table is a set of strips, one per club, with the crests in a rail. Opening a club shows its card, including your head-to-head record against it.
• Training shows the weeks in order, and who trained where on a pitch.
• Statistics, the cup and the awards put the winners on a podium.
• The match report draws each team's ratings on its own half of the pitch.
• Finance shows the season's money as a flow — where it came from and where it went.
• Injuries start from a body you can click, and the academy lets you drag a youngster up into the first team.
• The stadium shows your level on a ruler, with the next steps in sight.

Every number stayed

A redesign is the easiest way to lose something a player relies on. Before a page went live we checked it against the old one: every figure, every date and every action still had to be there. Where the old table had a column, the new page has the same number — usually bigger, and next to the thing it describes.

Every page was also checked on a phone, where half of our players play. Cards wrap, the dossier fills the screen, and the maps and pitches can be tapped with a thumb.

There is more to do, and some pages still have lists where lists make sense. But the game now looks like football first and accounting second, which is the way round it should always have been.