The dressing room, and knowing when to start over

The last week of September 2026 was a lesson in the difference between building something well and building the right thing.

A dressing room on the dashboard

The dashboard is the first screen you see when you open your save, and after the redesign rollback we wanted it to feel like arriving at your club. So it gained a 3D dressing room: lockers with shirts hanging in them, a bench, towels, and your squad in kit.

The kits are painted from your club's real colours, with your crest on the chest. On the back of each shirt is the player's position — goalkeeper, defender, midfielder or forward — rather than a squad number, because squad numbers do not exist in the game yet and we did not want to show a detail we had made up.

We went through several rounds on it. The first version was technically correct and looked flat. The difference, in the end, was not more detail but art direction: lighting, materials and the way the room is framed. The figures were rebuilt as properly modelled people rather than simple shapes.

Then we built a building

Encouraged, we went further. We built a walkable club building: a corridor you could move along, with rooms behind doors — each door leading to a page of the game — and a tunnel where your starting eleven walked out towards the pitch. It worked, it was tested on desktop and phone, and it went live.

Two days later, we took it down.

Why we knocked it down

The building was well made, but the idea was wrong. A corridor with doors treated the stadium as one more room off to the side. In football it is the other way round: the stadium is the building. The dressing room, the tunnel, the offices, the club shop — they all live inside it.

Polishing a corridor would have meant polishing the wrong concept. So we removed it completely and started again from the stadium itself: the ground you already know from the stadium page becomes the building, and the club's spaces will be placed inside it.

What stays

The dressing room stays as the hero of your dashboard. The figures, the kits and the stadium are the foundations of the rebuild. Nothing was wasted except time — and two days is a cheap price for not spending months on the wrong idea.

The lesson

It is tempting to keep something because it works. The better question is whether it is what you meant. When the answer is no, the earlier you start over, the cheaper it is.

Next in the diary: rewriting the guide and wiki with real numbers.