Esports Manager 2026 · public · first seen
This update is built around three things: watching a match, the bots who play it, and the transfer market that was quietly refusing to work. Full list below.
Statistics window between rounds. An HLTV-style overview of the map so far, with Rounds and Teams tabs, per-player cards with charts, portraits and real names under the nicknames, grenade and clutch tables, a kill feed with proper columns, and every round's result kept as it happened. Accuracy is counted from real shots fired.
Jump from the kill feed straight into the replay, with the camera already on the kill. Trade kills are counted, and deaths after the round is decided are no longer lost from the record.
A playback line under the match, in the manner of a demo viewer. The map so far is a row of round segments with the winner's strip under each, marked with every kill (headshots noted), plant, defuse, explosion and clutch, each with a tooltip. Drag the head anywhere behind the live edge and the match stops and shows that exact moment — bodies, sightlines, fog, the planted bomb — without re-simulating anything. Play runs it forward and hands the match back. Use the LIVE button, the << >> and 5-second buttons, arrow keys or Shift+arrows; the whole panel folds into a small tab and remembers your choice.
Choose the speed a live match opens at — x1, x2 or x4 — in the new Simulation section of Settings.
The dropped bomb is always on your radar when you watch the attacking side, as it is in the real game. It used to disappear into the fog with the man carrying it, leaving you to walk your own players past your own C4. The defending side sees it exactly as before: only while somebody alive can actually see it.
An abandoned map is finished properly by overtime blocks, and the round that decided it is recorded before you leave.
The LIVE button now reads LIVE in every language, and the button back to the statistics window is translated everywhere.
The scoreboard, the kill feed and the match log follow the playback head, so a moment held behind the live edge reads exactly as the live match read at that second, and the transport row steps round by round and names what you are looking at.
A flash held in the replay is the flash that was thrown. Blindness belongs to the recording now: a pause taken inside a flashbang used to leave every portrait washed out and every view cone colourless until the round ended, wherever you scrubbed to.
The fog of war switch answers inside a held moment. Turning it off during a replay shows the opponents at once, bodies and bomb alike, and a fog switched off under the replay no longer comes back on release and keeps an opponent hidden for the rest of the map.
The statistics window opens from the scoreboard as well, by an icon in the corner of the Tab table — and the icon is offered only where there is something behind it, not on an empty half-window and not twice on the end-of-map screen.
Academy matches can be watched. The eye was hidden on them and nothing else in the world ever opened one, so an academy fixture could not be seen at all. Your own unplayed match of that day is set aside while you watch and comes back untouched when you leave.
The men on the map belong to the round you are watching. Nicknames, faces and side colour are painted for the moment held under the playback line. A first-half round watched from the second used to hang the attacking club's names and photographs over the defending club's bodies, and sent one man's flash blindness to another man's panel. Everything goes back to the live sides when the line lets go.
The line above the match follows the moment too. Score, round number, the round clock and the bomb's countdown are read from the recording instead of from the match that keeps running behind it, and a goal-line change arriving while you hold a moment is kept and shown when you release.
No more kills through walls. A bot still remembers a target for the length of his reaction after losing sight of him, but from that moment it is a memory, not a sight: he holds the angle where he last saw the man instead of tracking him live, and the shot itself now asks whether the target is actually visible. Measured over a full Bo3: not one of 579 kills went through geometry, against one in 372 before.
Players stop staring at walls. When a bot held a position in a closed spot, the angle search kept handing him a direction into the nearest surface. Standing players facing a wall dropped from 25% to 8% over ten measured rounds, and a held angle is re-checked whenever he shuffles or repositions.
No more sightseeing on the way to a site. Alternative routes are only considered while they are close to the shortest one. Players used to take a visibly longer corridor on up to 39% of their movement legs; that is now 4–9%, while genuine route variety survives.
Bots check side passages as they move, stop when hit from somewhere they cannot see, and react to gunshots they hear.
Retakes are decided again every time a defender dies. A 3v5 that becomes a 1v5 now saves instead of walking the last man onto the site. A defender holding an AWP is worth staying for, a defence that split before the plant is no longer committed to a doomed retake, and on the pistol round the defence always retakes. When they do go, they rush in with two or more men up and spread over different entrances.
The wide peek is used where it belongs — site executes and small squads — and the player commits to it properly after the shot.
The buy queue shares money like a real team. A rifle now goes to a man carrying only an SMG from last round, not just to empty hands, and the poorest player is served first. A donor keeps his own armour and grenades unless giving them up leaves the man he is arming able to buy his own. With rifles out of reach, empty hands get a cheap SMG; pistols and shotguns are never given away. Force rounds keep their shape, and two team-mates can no longer race for the same dropped gun.
Overtime buys correctly. The winner of the first overtime round used to buy the plan meant for the round after a pistol round; it now makes an ordinary full buy with rifles and the AWP.
Players and furniture are solid. Men used to run through each other and through the crates at A on Dust. Head-on you stop; at an angle you slide along the body, as in the real game.
Routes no longer cross walls and props. Every link whose straight line passes through a wall, or through a crate, pole, barrier or pillar, is gone from all nine maps — over four hundred of them — and a path starts and ends at a point that can really be walked to. Both plant sites and every tactical point stay reachable; doors and ladders are untouched.
A dropped bomb lands where it can be reached, and it is picked up by walking over it. On Ancient, 156 of 6568 drop spots used to put the bomb behind a wall; now none do.
No defusing under an opponent's nose. A defender refuses to sit on the bomb while a living enemy stands within a dozen units with a clear line to him — beside and behind him counts, not only in front — and a defuse already under way stops: he gets up and fights. With no time left to try again he sees it through anyway. The ninja-defuse call is announced once per round per man now, instead of shouting every time he sits back down.
A waiting man holds his angle towards the enemy instead of covering the way he came in himself: on Anubis, attackers facing the arriving retake within 90 degrees rose from 49% to 70%. He also flicks his view off that angle every few seconds and comes straight back to it, one glance in four over his shoulder — the only way he can notice somebody standing behind him — and never into a wall.
The defence spreads out. A check point handed to one player is off the table for the next, and a man holds an angle no team-mate is already covering. On Ancient's B, two start points now sit on the site itself and one player watches down main, which nobody used to.
An attack two men up goes for the plant instead of sitting out the pause it drew while the round was still even — four against one used to keep creeping carefully.
An AWPer caught close can fight back. A scoped shot inside nine cells kept a flat sliver of its chance whatever the distance, and both snipers finished last on the board because of it; the penalty is graded by distance now. Nothing changes at range.
Riflers leave dropped AWPs alone. A man already holding a primary picks one up only if he is the team sniper or genuinely better with it; a man on a pistol still takes what he finds.
The defence stops standing still. Told to save, the men ran to their escape spot and stood there until the round ended — the call was issued once and nothing ever asked again. A lone survivor spent up to 84 seconds after the plant without moving; that is 18.6 now, with an order every 8-15 seconds. The defence also had no decisions of its own for half the round: the two defence rules the tactics screen has always offered — hold the positions, or collapse onto the site the team has seen or heard the attack at — were read by nothing. A defender already walking to the bomb keeps that walk when a save goes out on top of him.
The attack no longer freezes on one man who has not arrived. A single straggler kept five men standing for 43-78 seconds. Each man now carries a time budget for his leg, the plant and the defuse are exempt, and a team with the numbers to rush a site does not wait at all. Measured live, the longest stall fell from 80.4 to 23.2 seconds.
The attack spreads over a site's doors instead of filing in through one: each man takes the nearest entrance nobody was sent to, and on the site itself an on-plant spot nobody holds. On Mirage, doors used per order went from 1.00 to 2.00.
An AI club plays a real strategy for its half, picked once per club, map and side the way you pick yours on the half screen, and each round takes one of the tactics that strategy holds for the buy in hand. It used to fall back to the default tactic two rounds in three.
Sides matter in quick results too. The AI-vs-AI and Quick Result paths now know which side a team is playing, and each map's own bias towards the defence or the attack shifts the chance of every round for the side holding it — on a fresh map and on the tail of one you walked out of. Map winners are unchanged on average, since both clubs play both sides; what changes is how the score is shaped across the halves, as in real CS. Both the quick path and the 3D simulation read the same table, so they can never disagree about a map.
The live match and the quick result start from the same footing. Form, cohesion, a winning streak, prestige and map mastery shifted the chance shown over Play Match but counted for nothing when you watched the match yourself. They are one modifier now, read by the 3D match as well.
The chance shown is claimed less loudly. Measured over 2000 matches on a live save, the number itself is honest — series priced at 90% and above were won 96% of the time, and everything from 80% up won 94%. What was wrong is how cheaply the confident end was reached: 30 power points between two clubs was enough to be shown 80% over a Bo3, and that is what neighbours in the table are worth. It takes 43 now; matches priced at 90%+ fall from 23% to 17%, a top club against the bottom of the table drops from 0.97 to 0.95, and the weaker squad takes 34% of matches instead of 32%. Shown and rolled still come from the one calculation, so nothing about the honesty of the number changes.
Custom push and check points can be placed anywhere on the walkable floor, instead of within a circle around a handful of preset spots.
Multi-level spots are handled properly. The marker keeps its height when it snaps, a floor switch appears wherever a spot really has more than one level, and a point saved on the upper floor starts the round on the upper floor. On Nuke alone, 237 nodes sit close enough to another level for the old lookup to send a player to the wrong one.
Custom push points are shared out: a point taken by one player is off the table for the next, everybody still without a point takes the last one, and a split you drew is played as a split.
The rule actually fires now. The reach for a custom push point grew from 12 units to thirty cells, and when every point is far away a player goes to the nearest one instead of standing still. A check point is left alone when the nearest waiting player would have to cross the map to reach it.
A player you list for sale can now actually be sold. Both price floors that kept clubs away fall as the listing ages — within ten days rather than forty-five, holding at full strength for three days. Previously the caliber floor never fell at all: on a four-year save it alone shut out 268 of 330 clubs, so a star at a strong club could draw nobody for months at any price. Loans keep the full caliber gate.
Bids stay in your neighbourhood. A club more than fifteen places below yours never writes about your player however long the listing stands, while clubs above you are never limited. The window is measured against where the floors really stood, so a player no floor ever reached keeps the whole table open to him from day one.
Places are counted over real clubs. Academies are rows in the team list, not places in the table you read your rank from. Counting them in used to eat the entire window — for a manager low in the table a loan could be refused with nothing to show for it, with forty-five academies standing between him and a suitable partner.
A full club can buy your player. A club whose roster stands at exactly six may sign your listed man if he improves on what it has, and lists the displaced player on arrival like any other club.
The price hint tells the truth for a sale listing: the floor comes down with time. The "waiting does not help" wording stays where it belongs, on loans.
Loaned players are no longer offered for sale. A player you only hold on loan stops asking to be put on the transfer list — his profile screen said you cannot sell him while the chat offered exactly that — and the bench-sitting path no longer lists him silently at the nine-week mark. Loading an older save drops any loaned player left on the list, and an AI club can no longer buy a man his seller had only borrowed.
Your own academy stops writing to you asking to borrow your players, which used to burn the single guaranteed loan request of an 80–120 day window on a deal with yourself.
AI clubs keep one AWPer: a second is refused unless he is a clear upgrade, and then the old one is benched and listed.
Contract renewal talk fits the player. Someone at the club under a year no longer claims years of loyal service; he gets a newcomer's line instead, in all 21 languages. Time at the club counts from his last permanent arrival, so a veteran back from a loan keeps the veteran's line. Careers saved before this subject existed now get the renewal chat as well, instead of none at all.
Staff can be signed into an occupied post.
A player listed only because his contract was running out is renewed and taken off the market. The weekly renewal pass skipped anybody standing on the transfer list, so such a man hung there for months with his price falling — squad players slid to a fraction of their value in three months without their form ever dropping.
The listing markdown is 5% a week on every listing, instead of 7% and 15%, so the price floor is far further away than it was.
A free agent turning a move down no longer talks about a roster he does not have.
A club haggles up towards your price, not down away from it. Its first letter opened at 80% of what you asked, and every letter after that was recalculated from the player's market value — so conceding ground was answered with a worse offer than the first, and the talks broke on the third letter. A club that opened on your asking price now walks up towards it round by round and never offers less than it has already offered. Separately, a loan shortened in the talks no longer keeps the fee named for a long one.
An AWPer's hidden second role no longer counts. Nearly every sniper carries a second role in the data that the game shows nowhere: filtering scouting by Support handed back half the snipers in the world, and the hidden “support” quietly made snipers less likely to retire.
A tournament no longer empties itself on the way to qualification. With more clubs signed up than it seats but fewer than one and a half times that, the trim could never stop: it threw out every club it was allowed to touch, spared only your club and your academy, and the failure was swallowed silently — what you saw was a tournament quietly emptied.
A map outside the current pool is now named in red on the map training screen, instead of being told apart only by the pick/ban buttons it lacks.
The training window's tab underline follows the panel actually shown: when a squad shorter than five sends the map tab back to the coach, the highlight moves with it.
The "training matches are unavailable" line on the home screen reads as plain left-aligned text, and the absent players named in it are ordinary coloured links like every other name in the game.
The home rank board follows the clubs the world actually has, so a smaller imported database no longer breaks it and the lower block cannot repeat clubs from the upper one.
One consistent font size across the main menu settings window.
A player running the shipped database is told where the real teams and players are. An amber card sits on the two screens where you pick who to manage — under the search field on the team list, and under the logo buttons when you build your own org — with a button opening the game's Workshop page, where subscribing takes one click. It disappears the moment a set is subscribed, and it never appears for somebody already running one. In all 21 languages.
The tactics list keeps the sort order you chose instead of having it overridden by your custom tactics, and the win bar keeps an even height.
The sponsors screen remembers where you were. It was rebuilt on every tab switch and on every day tick, and the rebuild reset the tier filter, threw the list back to page one and cleared the selected sponsor — so reading a sponsor's task twice meant hunting him down again each time.
Labels that were blank in some languages are filled. The Transfer tab on the player and staff pages was invisible in ten languages — an empty label collapsed the button to nothing, so it read as missing rather than untranslated. The fog-of-war switch, the previous and next round buttons and the tutorial's “click anywhere to continue” were blank in several languages as well.
Saving is safer. The final step of writing a save could fail outright on Windows while a cloud folder, a backup tool or an antivirus held the file open. It is retried now, and the file being replaced is moved aside rather than deleted, so one complete save exists on disk at every moment.
Custom photos with unusual names work again. A photo key carrying a character no file name may hold used to throw during an ordinary screen redraw — and on the day tick that took the whole day with it. Photos already saved under such names are still found.
Music no longer floods the log. A track whose audio fails to open left the player walking its playlist fifty times a second — six thousand errors in six minutes from a single session. It now settles after one pass and retries every thirty seconds, so switching your audio device still brings the music back.
Face detection is more robust on cards without compute support and survives a failed readback instead of silently switching itself off for the rest of the session.
Old screens stop crashing new careers. A statistics view destroyed with its screen kept answering clicks through a shared event and reached for data that had died with it; one dead career's worth of listeners could crash every click in the next one.
A club with no crest draws its shirt on the sponsors and organisation screens instead of failing.
A contract or transfer letter whose offer is already gone opens without the offer body instead of failing on its price.
A workshop description prepared behind a closed panel no longer errors out under the item's title.
A Faceit player's biography now reads "win rate" instead of "win raet" — the typo stood in all 4239 imported biographies, on the profile screen you read most often. An assistant coach's "success raet" is corrected on the same pass. The player actually nicknamed raet is left exactly as he is.
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