What’s new

Your players now decide whether they want to stay. Until now anyone would re-sign the moment the money was right; from this version a loyal man may agree to less than he asked for, and an ambitious one who is unhappy with his minutes may turn down exactly what he asked for and run his contract down instead. Offering more than he asked genuinely helps, and asking again with the same terms will get you the same answer.

Matches now look like the basketball they are meant to be. Games run at the pace a 40-minute European game actually runs, so scores come down from the high hundreds to where a real league sits, and free throws and shooting stop being unrealistically kind. Your coaches use their timeouts, and your best players get the minutes their ability earns. Every player keeps every rating he had; what changed is the league around them.

Your phone can tell you when something happens. Turn on notifications from the notices screen and your club will reach you when you are not looking, with the unread count on the app icon. Nothing about your club leaves this server to do it, and turning it off is a switch in your own browser.

You can write to another manager. An envelope sits beside the bell in the header, and a message is plain text and emoji -- no links, from anybody, at any age. You can block someone: they stop being able to write to you, they are not told, and it does not touch anything either of your clubs does on the market.

Games stop running away. A team that opens a comfortable lead now eases off at both ends the way a real one does -- it takes the air out of the ball and gives minutes away, and the side chasing scores more freely against it -- and the further into the game it is, the more it shows. Nothing happens inside six points, and nothing at all in the first quarter. What changes is the shape of a season: fewer twenty-point beatings, more games still alive in the last minute, and tables that stay closer together. Every result already played stands exactly as it was.

A manager can end a contract early. Releasing a player costs half the wages you still owe him, capped at one season of them, and the whole of them for a man who arrived in the last week -- so buying somebody and letting him go again is never the cheap way out of a deal. The cost is on the button before you press it. He leaves as a free agent any rival can sign, you cannot sign him back until the season is over, and you may not release anybody if it would take your squad below the minimum. Nothing about existing contracts, wages or squads changes until you do it.

The machine buys information too. An AI club now decides what it does not know and pays to find out, at the same weekly rates a manager pays, ranking targets by what an answer would be worth and how much it could change. Cautious clubs buy more scouting than reckless ones, because uncertainty is worth more to a department that discounts what it cannot see.

Scouting can be bought. A club can point its department at a player or at a whole roster for a number of weeks, pay for it every week, and get back a report that narrows what it knows about that player from a wide band to a tight range. How many places a club can look at once now depends on what it spends on scouting rather than being the same for everybody, and how good the answer is depends on the department. Nothing about existing players, matches or results changes.

Contracts can carry a release clause: a figure any club may pay to buy a player, with no say from the club that holds him. The term belongs to the player rather than to the club: the lower it is set, the less wage he asks for, because what it buys him is a way out. A contract with no clause is priced exactly as before, so nothing already signed changes. The man still has to agree terms with whoever pays it.

Clubs run by the game now put a price on their own players before answering an approach: they part with a player for a fee eight per cent above their own valuation, and turn down anything below it. A manager selling a player is never bound by that number, and may accept or refuse any offer. Nothing else changes: no match, table or result is affected.

Nothing about the game changes here. A new part of the transfer market, the record of one club approaching another about a player, is added to the list of what the game keeps and what it removes when somebody deletes their account: it is kept, because it is half of a conversation the other club took part in and can still see. No rule, match, table or result is affected.

Contracts can be renewed. A player whose deal is inside its last two seasons can be offered new terms. You choose the length, he names his price, and he can say no. An agreement does not change what you pay today: the current contract runs to its end and the new one starts the moment it stops, so a man you keep never reaches the free-agent pool at all. The AI clubs renew on the same terms and through the same conversation, once a week, keeping the men worth more to them than anybody they could sign instead. Nothing about a match, a table or a result changes.

Promises start to be judged. Signing a free agent can now name a squad role, franchise player, starter, rotation, bench or prospect, and a role above what the man's standing already implied is a promise the game remembers: fourteen days later it checks the minutes he actually got. Keep your word and he warms to you; break it and he takes it badly, worse a second time, and your next promise to him is worth nothing for a month. Roles also cost honestly: a player asked to carry more asks to be paid more. Squads whose contracts name no role, which is every contract signed before today, are unaffected.

Nothing about the game changes here. The squad screen's new desktop table remembers which columns you chose, and the record of what the game keeps when somebody deletes their account now covers that choice too. It is deleted with everything else. No rule, match, table or result is affected.

Reputation starts to move. A player's standing has always been meant to follow his career, minutes played, form, titles, awards, and until now it never did: everyone kept the reputation he was created with, and new players all started at the same middle value. From this season the update runs once every off-season, and a new player's starting reputation follows his ability. Reputation feeds what a player asks to be paid, so big names now cost like big names: slowly, a season at a time, because a name is meant to lag ability. No match, table or result changes on the day this arrives.

Nothing about the game changes here. The world's own bookkeeping is tidied on a schedule: the tick engine's run log is kept for fourteen days and then cleared, and the database's match-archive storage is checked every night, with an audited repair for the one thing the check can find missing. No rule, match, table or result is affected.

Nothing about a match changes here, and nothing about a table or a result. The match viewer sends about a third less data to your phone, so a replay starts sooner. It now records a player's position half as often, because the viewer moves him between those positions rather than jumping him from one to the next. What you see on the court is the same match, drawn the same way.

Wages start to rise. If a contract was signed with an annual rise, that rise is now actually paid: at the end of every season each contract's weekly wage goes up by the agreed percentage, once. Until now the rise was something you could negotiate over and nobody ever received. This changes what your squad costs you over time, so a deal that looks cheap in its first season may not be cheap in its fourth, and a club that fills its wage bill to the cap today can find itself over it after the summer. Contracts signed with no rise are unaffected, and no match, table or result changes on the day this arrives.

Nothing about a match changes here. Contract talks gain a limit: a club gets four offers before a player stops listening. The court the match viewer will draw is also settled in this version. Its markings and proportions, which decide nothing and are only drawn. The rest is bookkeeping: which records the game keeps when somebody deletes their account. No rule, match, table or result is affected.

Contracts start to mean something. What a player asks for is no longer a fixed rate for his rating: he has an opinion about the money, about how many seasons he wants, and about the minutes you are promising him, so two players of the same rating can now cost very different amounts, and the difference tells you something about the man. A contract can also name a squad role, and a player who has one expects those minutes rather than whatever his place in the pecking order implies. Squads with no roles on their contracts, which is every squad today, are unaffected.