Substitution plans, set-piece takers and a proper Christmas break

Most matches in ManageFC are played while you are doing something else. That is the point of the game, but it raises an obvious question: how do you manage a match you are not watching? In mid-May 2026 we shipped four answers at once.

Substitution plans

Before a match you can now write down to five substitution rules. Each rule names the player coming off, the player coming on, and a trigger:

• a minute — bring the winger on at 70;
• a scoreline — if we are losing, if we are winning, if it is level;
• the player's condition — replace him if he is tired;
• an injury.

Rules can only fire in the second half, between the 46th and the 89th minute, and the engine executes at most one planned change per team in each five-minute segment, in the order you wrote them. Anything your plan does not cover falls back to the engine's own judgement.

When we tested the first version, a rule set for the 47th minute fired in the 47th minute. It is a small thing to celebrate, but it is exactly the kind of small thing that makes the game feel trustworthy.

Set-piece takers who take the set pieces

The tactics screen gained named takers for penalties, direct free kicks and corners from each side. The important detail is that the taker you name is the player who shoots: the engine uses his finishing and technique to calculate the chance, rather than picking any attacker. In our first test run of 30 matches, every one of the 34 set-piece chances for the home side was taken by the named player.

You can also choose a routine for corners and free kicks — short or to the far post, direct or worked short — and the routine changes both how often the set piece becomes a chance and how good that chance is. The set-pieces article in the wiki lists exactly what each option does today.

Press conferences that sound different

Press conferences used to ask the same question every week. We rewrote them in English with two to four variants for each topic — your form, your league position, the next match — and added an optional fourth question when the context calls for it: a key injury, a hostile board, a striker in form. Asked three times in the same situation, the press now opens in three different ways.

A winter break

The calendar had a three-day pause at Christmas. Real football pyramids stop for longer, and the short pause made seasons feel mechanical. It now runs from 22 December to 3 January — thirteen days without league matches. League matchdays are scheduled from Monday to Saturday; Sundays stay free for continental competitions.

Why these four, together

They share a theme. Each one lets you make a decision before the match that the engine respects during it. That is the heart of a time-skip management game: you are not a player-controller, you are the person who prepared the team.

A day later we started planning the change that made this style of play the whole game: the pivot from one online world to a private world per save.