Rebuilding the game around private saves

Turning one shared world into thousands of private ones sounds like a design decision. In practice it is a long, careful job: every club, player, match, transfer and message in the game has to belong to exactly one world, and nothing may ever leak from one world into another. Between 15 and 17 May 2026, with the site showing a maintenance page, we did it.

Giving every piece of the world an owner

The first step was to teach the game which world each piece of information belongs to — clubs, squads, fixtures, cups, training, finances, news and everything else that makes up a football world. Before touching anything, we kept a complete copy of the shared world exactly as it was, so that nothing could be lost.

The hard decision

Our first plan was to split the shared world into individual saves, one per manager, built from each manager's existing club. It turned out to be much harder than it looked. A club is connected to its players, its fixtures, its opponents, its cup draws and its history — and many of those connections point to other managers' clubs. There is no clean line to cut along.

On 17 May we made the call: the old world would not be carried over. Every account, login and manager profile was kept. The shared world itself was retired, and managers were invited to found a new club, in a world of their own, through the new-save wizard.

We did not take that lightly. But a half-converted world, full of clubs pointing at opponents who no longer existed, would have been worse than a fresh start.

Making mistakes impossible

With the old world retired, we made one rule permanent: nothing can be stored without saying which world it belongs to. The game now refuses it outright. A mistake that could once have quietly mixed two worlds now stops immediately and visibly, long before it can reach a player.

The rest of the game

The same weekend, every screen and every feature of the game was adapted to the new model, so that each one shows and changes only the world you are playing. Features that only made sense in a single shared world — global chat, public friend lists, open leagues between strangers — were removed or reshaped.

What we learned

Two lessons stayed with us. First, decide early what you will not carry over — we spent two days designing a split we eventually abandoned. Second, make the important rules impossible to break, rather than relying on everyone remembering them.

The first days in the new worlds were not smooth, though. Players pressed the button to move time forward and nothing happened. That is the next entry: the bug that made time stand still.