No more waiting for the next Online season

The Online league runs in seasons of about a month. When a season starts, every manager whose career can field eleven players is drawn into the pyramid, and from then on there is a match every evening at 20:00 UTC.

Until this week, that draw was the only way in. A manager who created a career the day after it — or whose squad reached eleven players a week later — had no place in the season. The Online screen told them to wait for the next one, and to watch until then. On the first of November half of the league was waiting: 215 managers had a club ready to play and nowhere to play it.

A new door, every hour

Now the game looks every hour for managers who could play but have no place in the current season. They are drawn into new divisions at the bottom of the pyramid, up to sixteen clubs each. The clubs are dealt by squad strength, the same way the main draw does it, so no new division is stacked.

Their first match is the next evening at 20:00 UTC, like everyone else's, and there is a match every evening until the last day of the season. When a division is small, the round robin simply starts again from the top, so nobody has an empty evening.

The first draw seated 216 managers in fourteen new divisions. Today every manager whose career can field eleven players has a place in the season.

Three small rules

• Nobody plays alone. A manager who is the only one waiting is drawn as soon as one more new club arrives. A division of one would have no matches, so we never make one.
• The table counts. A new division is a real division of the bottom tier. Its champion goes up when the season ends, like any other bottom-tier champion.
• Then the full draw. At the end of the season every club, old and new, goes into the draw for the next one.

What you need

Only a career with at least eleven players. Your Online club is your career club: the squad and the tactics it has when the team sheets lock, an hour before kick-off. There is no second squad to build, and nothing that happens Online is written back into your career — a bad night costs you no points, no money and no players at home.

The Online league wiki article has the full rules, and Two more ways to play explains why both modes borrow your career club.