Esports Manager 2026 · published · build 24932372
Also added default tactics to Cache.
The Workshop is in the game. Browse, subscribe to and publish community content straight from the main menu — no external tools needed.
Three set types are supported: Images (logos and photos), Tactics and Databases.
Publish your own database. Any EMDB.gg database you have built can be uploaded to the Workshop in one click.
One-click cleanup. Your own published items can be deleted directly from their card.
A built-in manual explains what each set type does and how to prepare it.
Databases from EMDB.gg are picked up automatically, and only one Workshop database stays active at a time, so your career always knows which world it is in.
Fixed: a subscribed set that had already been removed on the Steam side no longer confuses the game — the game's own state wins.
A subscribed database set now takes effect on its own — no manual applying.
Updating an item Steam no longer holds republishes it as a new one, fixing uploads that failed forever after deletion.
Stale subscriptions are dropped, tactics of unsubscribed sets are removed, and publishing opens My Items on your new upload.
The academy is no longer a background system. It is now something you run.
Sign youngsters directly into your academy — on both permanent deals and loans, up to the age of 23.
Promote from the squad screen. Call a youth player up to the first team straight from his card.
The whole academy trains, and every academy member is paid a wage.
Academy costs come out of the operational budget, so youth development is a real financial decision.
Close the academy if you want the money elsewhere.
Keeping a player in your own academy is now treated as an internal move, not as a transfer.
The AI no longer manages your academy behind your back.
Academy sides no longer auto-fill with staff.
Every academy screen is fully translated into all supported languages.
Academy players can be sold and loaned to other clubs, never traded inside your own club.
Staff are kept out of the academy, and the academy squad has its own heading.
The academy squad recovers physically and mentally, and recalling a player from vacation carries a morale penalty.
The academy budget warning is shown in the game language.
Every map in the pool has been reworked visually:
Outlines — geometry reads clearly at any zoom level, so you always know where a wall ends and a site begins.
Atmosphere — fog, lighting and depth tuned per map.
Color grading — each map now has its own identity instead of a shared flat look.
Skyboxes — proper skies on every map.
Full mouse camera control — orbit, pan and zoom freely while the round plays out.
Follow the play from wherever you want instead of a fixed viewpoint.
Field of view — players now have a real vision cone. If it isn't in their FOV, they don't see it. Flanks, off-angles and backstabs finally mean something.
Extra pathing routes — pathfinding got additional paths, including new approaches when executing onto a site. Attacks no longer funnel down the same lane every round.
Timings & decision making — reworked reaction windows, hold timings and when a player commits, rotates or backs off.
Shooting effects and tracers — you can now read a firefight visually: who is shooting at whom, from where, and how it's going.
Flashbangs — flashes are in, with proper blind effect on the players caught by them.
The sim AI now buys like a real CS2 team: armour comes before the gun — no more bare rifles or AWPers on a pistol with full utility. Weapons are picked down a price ladder; the pistol-round winner buys rifles and SMGs, the loser saves.
A sniper short of his AWP takes an SMG and a cheap vest and keeps the rest banked. The Desert Eagle is a sidearm again instead of filling the rifle slot.
Force buys are capped below rifle prices, and a lost pistol round now correctly leads to an eco.
Every weapon uses its real CS2 armour penetration value instead of a flat one-half. Armour wears down as it absorbs hits, and damage now actually drops past a weapon's effective range.
Helmets are destroyed together with the vest — a helmet bought once no longer protects forever. The bomb blast is reduced by armour like any other hit.
After winning the pistol round, the whole team buys helmets — no more bare-headed players on the follow-up.
Portrait frames — player portraits got proper frames across the interface.
A batch of bug fixes.
Plenty of small improvements all over the game — the kind you don't notice individually, but feel together.
Switch your team's map pool through a dedicated interface.
A new in-game letter announces map pool changes, and it is pinned so that you do not miss it.
The letter now shows the contents of the map pool directly.
Tier 3 and Tier 4 events are back-filled into careers created before those tiers existed.
Double-elimination playoffs and group stages have been added, with proper bracket views and improved stage visuals.
Fixed random stage generation, and reworked the Swiss stage logic.
Tournaments now handle the case where not enough teams qualify.
Tournament access is limited by your team's ERS rank — you only see events you can realistically enter — and the Tier 3 invitation email has been fixed.
The round award goes to the damage done, not to whoever touched the bomb.
The home banner announces the tournament MVP of a closed run.
A top-20 place stays off the profile until EMTV announces it.
An AI organisation and its academy no longer both register for the same tournament.
New starting map pool, every map in the rotation, and the pool is saved.
Group-seeded playoff view, tournament status in the row, and reworked playoff and final-list emails.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 descriptions rewritten, Tier 3 and Tier 4 added.
Clutches are recorded correctly in the simulation.
The ERS change in the match result popup is fixed.
A full Statistics tab on every tournament page.
Sub-tabs have been replaced by a cleaner dropdown, crowded chart labels have been thinned out, and axis labels have been made readable.
Players are ranked by depth of run as well as by rating.
Each map now appears only once on the charts, with repeated results averaged instead of duplicated.
Removed dead "show more" buttons that led nowhere.
The match award is now open to players from both teams, and a tournament award is never left empty.
The year-end Top 20 has been reworked: it is scored across the full season, with team success split according to each player's actual contribution.
The transfer price premium for honours is now weighted by the tier at which each title or MVP award was won — a Major counts for more than a small event.
The live match now records real detail: flash assists, grenades thrown and money spent per round.
The quick-result path now produces honest numbers too. Entry kills were never being recorded and clutch statistics did not match — both are fixed.
Impact rating has been re-centred on the corrected data, with the damage weight lowered so that kills are no longer paid for twice.
Per-round damage is now rolled per player and follows the kills of that round, instead of using a flat share.
MVP now follows a single rule across the live and quick paths, and the map MVP is stored with the map.
Match odds have been reworked into one shared series calculation.
Language cohesion has been reworked — region and language-pair affinity now shape squad chemistry more sensibly.
Home advantage added: a club playing a LAN event in its own country gets a real boost. Until now, where an event was played meant nothing.
Fixed odds day-caches not resetting when a career is created or loaded.
Redesigned pre-match window: line-up cards, sliding head-to-head history wings, team state bars, home-advantage badges and a venue row.
A caster now predicts the match in the pre-match window, alongside each team's ERS ranking.
Squad state bars are each coloured by their own value, instead of always reflecting the physical one.
The match details window is now headed by the tournament, its crest and its venue, with a clickable tournament name; online events read "Online" instead of showing an empty venue.
Empty map rows are dropped from the match details layout, and the popup's text has been re-aligned and enlarged.
The analysts panel is hidden when your squad is incomplete.
The negotiation ban has been cut from a year to three months, with expired bans swept daily so that a club never stays hostile longer than it should.
Players from AI teams cannot be bought within 6 months after they joined to avoid chaos multiple transfers frequncy.
If you hover over the transfer list price that you put player in - you can immediately see if the price is too high to have some offers. This helps you to understand how much market is actually willing to pay.
A club's asking price no longer climbs mid-negotiation. A quote now expires after two weeks, and a refusal caused by the squad minimum says so.
Contracts can now be as short as three months — the offer window used to refuse anything under six while promising otherwise.
The first negotiation round no longer praises an "improvement" that never happened.
Wages are computed the same way for you as for the AI.
The contract screen no longer reports a negotiation that never took place.
A wage demand is quoted inside the chat message and paid exactly as asked once agreed, and a single demand is capped.
The organization page now shows a club's full transfer history: the achievements header is a drop-down switching between Achievements and Transfers — every arrival, sale, free signing and departure, coaching staff included, newest first.
Fixed an endless transfer negotiation for a player who had gone free agent mid-deal: sellerless bids are refused, stuck offers are cleaned up daily, and the bid window now explains the refusal.
A rival's freshly signed player can no longer be bid for from the context menu — and the game now tells you why the club won't sell, instead of silently dropping the bid.
You can no longer reassign the role of a player you don't employ. The scout reads free agents' attributes like any rival player, and his report names free agents again.
Clubs no longer dismantle a squad that has just won them a trophy, and no longer sell the player who has just had a standout tournament.
Top-club players no longer leak down to far weaker clubs.
An agreed transfer falling due inside the pre-Major squad freeze is now held rather than lost, and is no longer counted against itself.
The AI signing cooldown now survives a restart, so the AI no longer signs player after player after a reload.
A borrowed player can no longer be released by the club that owns him.
Loans: AI clubs now offer bench players out on loan; a loan listing no longer reads as a sale anywhere in the game; and loan listings show a loan fee in the transfer list, which can be sorted and searched.
Every route that tried to buy or list a loaned player is now refused with a reason.
A listing price is honoured exactly — including zero — and the AI never bids above it.
How a player left a club is now recorded in his transfer history.
Your watchlist is saved with your career.
Quick search and a record counter have been added to the transfers window.
The tournament lock banner hides once a transfer is no longer pending, and the whole tournament warning block hides properly instead of leaving a stray label.
A star released by a big club now holds out for a club of his own level. His demands ease week by week, so he never drops straight to the bottom of the table and never rots unsigned for half a season.
A club no longer lets a player it still wants walk away for nothing.
A club keeps a player it has just signed for a full year before anyone can take him.
A rich club's wage floor no longer decides what a new signing asks for.
Borrowing a strong player costs real money, and a broken loan is priced by what was actually paid.
Clubs of six can lend out a substitute, and every AI loan is cut to the contract behind it.
A player is held to the wage he named in the chat when he renews, and the reply confirms the raise as done.
The wage a signee is judged by is the wage he was quoted, and a negotiation can reopen on its own terms.
A bidder is told the player is already sold instead of newly signed.
The scout no longer offers players who are only out on loan.
A listed player stays on the market until somebody enquires, and you are told when his price is the reason nobody does.
The transfer list keeps the order you left it in.
A player stays at his club until the deal already agreed for him lands.
A club stuck below five players can sign again and call up its own youngster.
The AI world now grows and ages instead of standing still. Rival rosters develop over the years.
Every player has his own peak age, and growth fades after it.
A player's own talent — not his coach — decides how fast he develops.
AI clubs no longer drop below five players in the run-up to a Major.
Retirement announcements now roll daily from a yearly chance, instead of arriving in monthly clumps.
A departed specialist's training plans are dropped instead of being paid out forever, and the training card shows the plan of the current specialist — not whoever held the job first.
Training rates are now displayed correctly in every language.
An academy staff member whose job the club already covers is released — with a letter explaining it.
A retired player who becomes a staff member keeps his custom portrait.
A player stays quiet about retiring for four months after re-signing, not only after arriving. A player at your own club won't announce retirement in the run-up to a Major you're playing.
Generated players and coaches now get a face that matches the country they come from.
A newly generated free agent starts with little fame, instead of arriving famous.
Staff market value now depends on the man, not on his club.
The board now actually fires you when it should — dismissal had been disabled by a leftover development switch.
AI clubs now rotate their roster weekly: a clearly stronger bench player gets promoted into the starting five — with guards for sick or unhappy players, the IGL, and ongoing tournaments.
The board's cancellation letter names the staff member and his post, and never shows a raw internal role value.
PR now has a monthly cost, a career ceiling and a say in your board bonus.
Scout reveals are gated on rounded effective skill, so what the scout shows matches what you see.
A physiotherapist can no longer wipe out an injury instantly.
Base camp equipment bonuses apply only to your own players — the attribute tooltip used to credit opposing players with your gear.
Old saves in which a staff hire had taken a same-named player's slot are repaired on load.
A long-serving club icon is not for sale at any price while his deal has more than a season to run.
Every new club is staffed from the same list the monthly refill uses, so clubs no longer start without a coach or a physiotherapist.
A staff member with no nickname is shown by his real name in the compare picker.
Talent now decides how far a career goes, not only how fast it starts.
The whole world develops by the same rule as your own squad.
A player climbs back out of a bad run instead of carrying it for the rest of his career.
A good physiotherapist takes a real share off a long injury, and an injury ends on time for a player who left the first team.
Young players now come from the countries that actually play the game.
Potential now means the maximum value of the rating that a player can get.
The gap between two clubs is now measured in places, not in points that shrink over time. Across four simulated years the world's total ERS falls heavily, which quietly broke every comparison built on absolute point values; wages, prices, prestige and access checks now all read the table position instead.
Rank and ERS points are separated by a bullet instead of a comma, so that the two numbers no longer read as one.
A player's profile now shows what his career has actually won: podium places, tournament MVP awards and year-end Top 20 finishes, each as its own decorated cell with the tournament logo, a badge and the year — with a gold frame for a Major title.
Purpose-drawn medals replace the old plain gold ring, which looked identical for first place and for seventeenth.
The strip is ordered the way a career is told, and is never shown with nothing on it.
A year-end Top 20 placing now arrives as an award card in your mail, with a commentator explaining why the player finished where he did — a hundred written lines across all languages.
Player biographies now scroll instead of shrinking to fit, with room to breathe under the date of birth.
A right-click shortcut menu on any person, anywhere in the game.
Scouting rework: a quick-filter bar for players and staff, standard green and red buttons on the filter windows, and the whole page rebuilt for consistency.
Every dropdown in the game now uses the dark menu style, and dropdowns no longer steal keyboard focus.
Open a club's staff list straight from its page; both header shortcuts explain themselves on hover.
A role medallion is shown next to every secondary role in the player dropdown.
Star captions on the players tab now match the stars that are displayed.
The contract tab's wage chart is captioned as wage history in every language.
Tooltips are kept inside the screen — hovering near the bottom edge used to push most of the tooltip off it.
The scene stays dimmed while another popup is still open.
New and updated team logos, and new Lurker, Sniper and Support role icons.
Fixed: the loading warning no longer shows a squad-limit line it never meant; the tutorial points at players the shipped database actually contains; a club name already in use in the world is now rejected; and the map list scrolls correctly.
Set two people side by side and compare them, with both spider charts shown together.
Scouting filters stay as you set them when you leave the page.
Every chat line takes the gender of whoever writes it.
An unranked team is called unranked instead of showing a huge number.
A link stays clickable when its label is cut to fit the row.
The winged rank frame is gone from the player pin on the sim map.
Talk window scrolling, the training card and team invite eligibility are fixed.
Scouting filters redesigned.
New player photos and team logos.
The version corner shows database, tactics and images in one line.
Localization fixes across the board.
English text left inside localised emails has been translated.
Simplified Chinese has received the missing transfer and loaned-player sale block lines, closing the last gaps in the dialogue packs.
A fix to an email's wording now reaches a career already in progress — the text catalogue used to be frozen inside the save.
A new DRAFT5 news outlet, and every outlet now signs its own news emails.
Post-tournament PR offers were broken and have been restored, with honest wording in their emails.
Many missing localisation strings added across the academy, map pool, tournament and staff screens.
Fixed a crash when a finished tournament could not read its stored data.
Stored match, tournament and map data is now cleared when a career opens, instead of relying on something else having done it.
Women in a custom database are no longer turned into men on every load.
Monthly backups work again.
Duplicate texture loading is prevented.
Starting contract dates use the in-game start date.
Skirmish teams are matched within 24 rating points of each other.
Fixed engines staying subscribed to the calendar after being replaced — a slow leak that built up over a long career.
Fixed a crash on a match day with no manager club.
Save compatibility is now guarded by an automated snapshot check, so a broken save format cannot ship unnoticed.
Updated the default database.
Created faked database of the players, use custom ones from the most popular contributors.
You can now set prize pool of the tournaments.