The first version — a world that ran on a clock

The first ManageFC was a single shared world. Every manager's club lived in the same universe, leagues followed a fixed calendar, and the game decided on its own when matches were played, when players trained and when the transfer market moved. You logged in to find out what had happened.

In early April 2026 we started that world's second season. The new season worked. It also showed us a few problems we had not seen coming.

Every match at midnight

The first one was almost funny. When the new fixtures were drawn up, every match in the world was scheduled for midnight — tens of thousands of games, all at the same minute. For a manager in Europe that meant your match was played while you were asleep, and for the game it meant the whole world's football arriving in a single burst.

We fixed it by giving each league its own kick-off slot, spread from late morning to the evening, with the cross-league competition in an evening window of its own. When the next season was drawn, we counted: more than fifty thousand matches, none at midnight.

AI clubs that crowded out the players

The second problem was quieter. Every day the AI clubs made their decisions — transfers, contracts, line-ups — all at once, and at peak times they used so much of the game's capacity that real managers had to wait. We had the AI work through its decisions a few clubs at a time instead. It sounds slower; in practice everything felt faster, because players no longer queued behind the computer.

Routines that collided

Several weekly routines — player development, squad dynamics and the AI's daily decisions — were all set to happen at the same moment on Sunday nights. We spread them out across the evening and gave the AI its day off on Sundays.

Cutting a dependency

At this stage, some scouting reports were written by an external text-generation tool. It was slow, and when it was unavailable the reports simply failed to appear. We replaced it with reports written from our own rules and templates. It was the first time we took a decision that later became a principle: the game must run on its own, without depending on a service that can disappear.

What April taught us

Looking back, none of these bugs was the real lesson. The real lesson was the shape of the game. A world that runs on a clock has to be kept alive around the clock, and every manager has to fit their life around its timetable. We kept fixing symptoms for another month before we changed the thing causing them.

That change — moving from one shared world to a private world for each save — is coming up in the diary. First, though, two other things happened in April and early May: two-factor authentication for anything that touches money, and the day we deleted our own battle pass.