We redesigned the whole game — then rolled it back

Some of the most useful decisions in a project are the ones you reverse quickly. In September 2026 we spent two intense days redesigning the look of ManageFC from top to bottom, and on the third we put the old look back. This is why.

The redesign

The idea was sound on paper. The game's interface had grown screen by screen over many months, and it showed: inconsistent spacing, decorative emoji everywhere, colours that meant different things on different pages. So we built a proper design system first — a palette, a typographic scale, a set of reusable components and a new set of icons — and then started applying it, page by page, beginning with the squad screen.

The new squad screen was cleaner by every measure we had. A real table with every player's position, age, wage and condition. No decorative emoji. A lighter page that loaded faster. Over the next day we applied the same system to a first batch of pages, gave the game a new logo, and made each club's own colours appear in a dozen places across the interface.

The squad screen, before and during the redesign

The problem

When we stepped back and looked at the redesigned pages together, they were tidy, consistent — and they did not look like a football game. They looked like business software: tables, numbers, neat panels, very little atmosphere. All the information was there; the feeling was gone.

A football management game is not only a spreadsheet with a ball in it. It needs stadiums, crests, kits, light and motion — the sense that there is a club and a crowd behind the numbers. The redesign had optimised the part of the game you read and starved the part you feel.

The rollback

On 21 September we restored the previous look across every page we had changed. We did it carefully: every page was compared with how it looked before the redesign, and the result checked page by page.

We did not throw everything away, though. While redesigning, we had found and fixed several real problems in how some screens worked — a scouting action that did not send its proposal correctly, a "release player" button that used the wrong request, an inbox that did not always mark messages as read. All of those fixes were kept on top of the restored look.

The new direction

The rollback was not a return to standing still. It gave us a clearer brief: less text, more image, more motion, a stronger identity — and 3D where it genuinely helps you understand your club. In the following week that brief produced a stadium that grows with you, a 3D tactics board and a season calendar you can see at a glance.

What we learned

A consistent interface is not the same as the right interface. We should have built one complete page in the new style, looked at it honestly next to the old one, and decided then — before applying it to anything else. Since then, every visual change starts with one page, judged by eye, not by a checklist.

Next in the diary: a stadium that grows with you.