How it works

Two games

Clubs is the original: a club and a decade, and you draft from whoever they had. National teams swaps the first reel for a country, and you draft from everyone it capped in those ten years — so a spin gives you Italy in the 80s rather than Juventus in the 80s.

The season is the same either way, and so is everything else, with one exception: in the national-team game the club-spine chemistry bonus does not apply. Every man in the XI shares the shirt, so paying out for it would be paying out for having chosen the mode.

The Daily Treble

One puzzle a day. Everybody gets the same eleven club-and-decade cells in the same order, so the only thing that separates two managers is who they drafted out of them. It has its own board, and at midnight UTC the day is replaced and the board goes with it — there is no archive to catch up on.

It is always the clubs game at normal: fourteen clubs, five decades. One puzzle has to mean one board, and a difficulty picker would either split the board three ways or rank an easy draft against a hard one.

You still get one club re-spin and one era re-spin, and where they take you is fixed with the day — spend a token and you land on the same cell everybody else who spent one there landed on. A stop takes one token, not both. If a re-spin has nowhere to go you keep it, exactly as in the ordinary game.

Unlike the ordinary game, the eleven cells are dealt before you draft, so it is possible to strand yourself — fill all three midfield shirts early and a squad of midfielders is no use to you. That is the puzzle. What cannot happen is a day that was unwinnable before anyone touched it; every day is checked, with both re-spins, before it is published.

One scored run. The first attempt of the day goes on the board. You can play it again as often as you like afterwards — the puzzle is more fun the second time — but those runs are practice and say so.

Difficulty

Difficulty is not how the season is scored. It is how big the pool behind the reels is, and the clubs and decades are ordered by how strong the pool says they are:

• Easy — six clubs, three decades. Almost every spin is a side you would want.
• Normal — fourteen clubs, five decades. Big names are likely; you build round a few of them.
• Hard — every club, every decade. Most spins are a mid-table side in a lean year, and the treble has to come out of that.

Each difficulty has its own leaderboard, because an easy XI and a hard one are not doing the same thing.

The draft

Two reels: a club and a decade. Spin, and you may draft anyone who played for that club in that decade — into any shirt they can actually play. Eleven spins, eleven shirts, 4-3-3.

What the reels give you, you take. There is no spinning again until you like the look of it — once the reels stop you draft from that club and that era, and the only way out is a re-spin.

You get exactly two re-spins for the whole draft: one club re-spin and one era re-spin. A club re-spin holds the era still and moves the club; an era re-spin does the opposite. Spend them on the shirt that matters, because they do not come back. If a re-spin has nowhere to go — no other era for that club still has anyone who can fill an open shirt — the reels stay put and you keep the re-spin.

The reels only ever land on a club and era that still has someone useful in it, so you can never be stranded with a shirt you cannot fill. No player twice.

A player who can wear more than one shirt lights up every shirt he can wear. Click the one you want on the pitch — which is the only way to say which centre-back, since both wear the same name — or use the buttons under his name. Escape puts him back.

The season

Your XI then plays three competitions:

• The league — 38 matches. Beat three title rivals to the line.
• The cup — five rounds, one leg each, penalties if level. The classic treble killer.
• Europe — an eight-match league phase, then two-legged knockouts and a one-off final.

Matches are decided by your attack against their defence, sampled as goals. Win all three and it is a treble. Two out of three is just a good season.

Why there are no numbers

Every player does have four ratings — finishing, creativity, defending and physicality — weighted by the shirt he is wearing. You never see them, and they are not sent to your browser either, so there is nothing to look up mid-draft. Draft on what you know about the player. You find out whether you were right at the end of the season, like everyone else.

On top of the four numbers:

• Chemistry rewards a spine from one club and a core from one era.
• Balance punishes a hole. A side that is all attack loses the league in November.

The odds

The season you watch is one season. The odds replay the same XI two thousand times, so you can see whether a treble was your side or your luck.

About the data

The pool is drawn from Wikidata: players across 307 clubs and 106 national teams, over seven decades. Which club and decade a player belongs to is a matter of record; the ratings are this project's own judgement, and are meant to start arguments — which is also what orders the clubs and decades behind the difficulty settings.