Two more ways to play — the Online league and Friends

For six months ManageFC has been a game you play alone: a private world, moved forward at your own pace. That is still the heart of it. But a club you have built over seasons deserves to be measured against other people's clubs too, and a game this long deserves a short way to play with friends. At the start of October we added both.

One club, three ways to play

The rule we started from was simple: you build your club once. The crest, the colours, the squad and the tactics live in your career, and the two new modes borrow them. There is no second squad to assemble, no separate market and no staff to hire — everything about your team is decided in the career, and the new modes are places to take it.

That is also why both modes open only once you have a career, and why nothing that happens in them is written back into your save. A bad night online never costs you points, money or players in your own world.

The Online league

Every manager's club takes part, exactly as it stands in its owner's career. The clubs sit in a pyramid of divisions of sixteen: one division at the top, twice as many in each tier below, and newcomers starting at the bottom. Within a tier, clubs are dealt into divisions by strength so that no division is stacked. The champion of each division goes up; the bottom two go down.

A matchday kicks off at 20:00 UTC every evening, for everyone at once. An hour earlier the team sheets lock: whatever squad and tactics your career has at that moment are the ones that play. The match is then revealed live, half by half, and nothing appears before its minute — so everyone in a division watches the same night unfold at the same time. Tables, the top scorers and an Elo-style rating update at full time, and every division champion goes into the hall of fame.

The design consequence we like most is that the Online league rewards the work you already do. The further your career has taken your club, the stronger it arrives.

Friends

Friends is the opposite idea: short, fair and social. One of you opens a lobby and shares its six-character code; everyone joins with the club from one of their careers. Squads are levelled to the same strength, so a long career is no advantage — the better plan wins.

You choose a format — a quick league, home and away, a knockout cup or last one standing, where the worst result of each round goes home — and the session runs itself. Each match is shown in two short halves with a break, every round plays out for the whole group at once, and between rounds there is time to look at the table, talk in the clubhouse chat and change your plan.

The plan is the interesting part. Before kick-off each manager sets a secret mentality for the start of the match and for when the team leads, is level or trails. During the match you have three touchline shouts that change the mentality from the next minutes on — and because the match is replayed from the same starting point, the minutes everyone has already seen never change. A whole session is capped at thirty minutes.

There is also a daily challenge: one opponent per day, drawn from another manager's career, the same for everyone. One attempt each, and the board ranks the winning margin.

What comes next

Both modes are free, and both are young. We are watching how people use them, and the next steps are already on the list — including public lobbies, so you can find a game when your friends are not around. The Online league and Friends wiki articles have the exact rules.