Players now age like players

Open the squad list of any club in a real league and the ages tell a story: a cluster of players in their early twenties, a solid core in their late twenties, a few experienced heads past thirty, and almost nobody near forty. For a while, ManageFC's generated squads did not tell that story. Ages were spread too evenly, and a team could have as many 36-year-olds as 22-year-olds.

On 18 August 2026 we rebuilt age generation, and with it the money every club starts with.

A curve, not an even spread

New players are now generated between 17 and 39 using a curve that favours the younger end of the range and thins out steadily towards the top: the most common age is 17, and each year older is a little rarer than the one before, down to a small group of veterans at 38 and 39. On top of that curve, the very youngest and the very oldest players are generated with slightly lower ability, as you would expect at the edges of a career.

Free agents follow a similar curve that starts slightly later, at 18, because the open market in real football is where experienced players without a club end up.

Ageing matters beyond the squad list. Development in ManageFC is strongest in the teens and early twenties and stops after 30, while from 31 a weekly chance of physical decline begins. A believable age curve means believable careers: prospects worth waiting for and veterans worth managing, not a league full of players who never change.

Starting money that makes sense

The same day we replaced a patchwork of starting budgets with one consistent rule: a club's starting balance depends on its division and on the strength of its football nation. Clubs higher up the pyramid start with more, and clubs in stronger countries start with more than clubs at the same level in smaller countries.

For your own club, founded in division 3, that means a starting balance of 6 million in the strongest football nations, falling to around 2.7 million, 1.1 million or less in progressively smaller ones. Transfer budgets follow from the balance, so a richer club can spend more — but never more than a sensible share of what it has.

Update, 9 October 2026: new clubs now start in division 10, with a starting balance that covers the squad's wages for the first season.

Why this was the right time

Earlier, every club had started with the same flat balance, whatever its size. It was simple, and it made no sense: a division 10 club in a small country had as much money as a club near the top. Once worlds became private and seasons started to run for years, those distortions compounded. A believable economy has to start from a believable first day.

What we measured

Before calling it done, we built fresh worlds in countries of different sizes and checked the oldest player in each (39, as intended), the shape of the age curve, and the starting balances by division and country. We also checked what happened after a few seasons, which is where the real test of any economy lies — the subject of the money post in Under the Hood.

Next in the diary: a season is 245 days.