This one is about a question the game never asked before: why should a good player stay at your club of all places?
From strength 65 a player looks at what your club has. Nine demands, rising from the medical department to the players' lounge. Between 65 and 78 it is soft: every unmet demand costs you nine percent in wages. He still signs, just for more money. From 79 no amount of money helps.
Before this, a fourth-tier club with enough cash could sign a world-class player and put him in a dressing room without a treatment table.
It also applies to the ones already there. A player above 65 loses a quarter of a morale point per week for every unmet demand. That is deliberately slow: at worst it takes more than twenty weeks before he wants to leave (a reserve loses 1.2 points a week just from watching). And anyone who grew past strength 78 at your club while you built nothing will not renew.
The answer to those demands. Four departments and five facilities that act on injuries, fitness and development. The tab sits in Training and opens once you have built a training ground or a fitness centre.
The simulation has been re-measured in many places, against coordinates rather than against gut feeling.
Matchday now shows key scenes at one fixed tempo: every goal, every attempt, set pieces with the build-up that led to them, red cards and injuries. The four speed settings are gone as a result. Pause, tactics and skip remain.
There is a theme editor with a live preview. Surfaces, corners, effects and all four button states can be set, along with the colour ramps for strength, potential, fitness, form and morale. Your own themes travel to other people through the Steam Workshop, and subscribed ones arrive by themselves at startup.
The mods page has been reorganised: themes, game worlds, sponsors and installed mods in four areas instead of one list. The blue and gold theme that ships with the game is new, and every screen now carries the same page header. League, cup and European cup sit under one shared entry.
Top-tier clubs end up swimming in money, and that needed addressing without wrecking the lower tiers or ruining a relegated club.
The backroom team costs upkeep, scaled to what the league pays out. A top-tier club now spends 18% of its income on staff outside the squad.
The "foreign market" was a crutch that made players disappear from the world when AI clubs could not find a buyer for them. Abroad now pays half price.
Playing time drives development. Sixty percent of the conversion from potential into strength depends on whether someone actually plays. Before, the third-choice keeper and the regular starter grew at the same rate. Hoarding huge squads of young players pays off less now.
The pre-season and winter break have become a weekly plan where you make every decision. Before, you were locked in there and could not reach the transfer market even though the window was open.
Watchdogs now guard the game at startup, there are local crash reports and a safe-mode launch. Plus improved translations.
Tell me what you notice.