Back to the games
Two games retired, and the front door got sharper. Overrated or Underrated and Tier List are gone, straight from the owner's full site review: two buttons is not a game, and a ranking screen you play once is not one either. Old links live on, the versus game's address hands you to Face Off and the tier page brings you home. And the home page greeting is now seven words instead of a paragraph: 100+ free games across every sport, all playable without an account, which has the added virtue of being exactly true.
New game: Gauntlet Draft, the draft mode. A formation is drawn and each of its eleven slots deals you five real players, a genuine star down to a bargain, in our own card frames. You keep exactly one per slot, no player is ever dealt twice, and then the cup begins: five knockout rounds against ever stronger invented opposition, rated 70 up to 89, with extra time and penalties when the ninety minutes are level. The run is decided entirely by the squad you drafted, so the same XI always runs the same gauntlet and every pick is the game. One shared daily draft for everyone, unlimited redrafts, 16 points a round survived and exactly 100 for the trophy, which even a perfect draft lifts only about one run in eight. This is the third and last of the three new games from the owner's review, all shipped this week. Run the gauntlet.
New game: Search and Discard, the squad building duel. Two managers, one shared pool of real footballers, both filling the same 4-3-3. Your search deals three players, you keep exactly one into a compatible open slot, and the other two are discarded from the whole game, which is the heart of it: a star you bin can never reach the other squad, so every search is a pick for you and a denial for them. Eleven keeps each, alternating, then both XIs play the same simulated 38 game season, derbies included, and the table decides. Play the CPU, which keeps the best fit and guards its scarce slots, or pass one screen between two people. The same two finished squads always settle to the same season, so the draft is the game. Start the duel.
New game: Sports Bingo, the pack opening bingo. A 5 by 5 card of football conditions, a goalkeeper, a Brazilian, someone worth 100M plus, and ten packs of five real players opening on a fifteen second timer. Nothing is marked for you: while a pack is open you scan five real players and tap every square one of them satisfies, and when the next pack opens the old one is gone for good. One shared daily card for everyone, an unlimited mode, and a CPU opponent with three tempers playing the identical card and packs on its own board, most squares after pack ten wins. Every pull is a real footballer from the same verified market data the rest of the site runs on, every card is checked at deal time so a perfect run can always black it out, and a blackout lands exactly 100. Open your first pack.
Club Manager: relegation is real now. So is promotion. The Premier League and the Championship are a genuine pyramid, and so are the Bundesliga and its second division: every summer the bottom three of the top flight really go down and the top three of the second tier really come up (two each way in Germany), decided by the actual final tables the game already simulates, never by dice. That includes you. Finish in the drop zone and next season is a real 46 game Championship campaign with a board demanding promotion; win your way out and you are back in the big league, though the Champions League correctly stays out of reach until you have earned it from the top flight. Promoted and relegated clubs get honest new expectations (a promoted side is told to stay up, not to win the league), Europe follows the divisions properly, the news feed reports every movement, and the whole thing is machine checked: ten seasons of yo-yo, every club name conserved, every board demand re-ranked, every calendar reshaped. The boards have said "Stay up. Avoid relegation" since the game shipped; those words finally cost something.
Club Manager: job offers come from chairs that are actually empty. The summer's sackings are decided the moment the season ends, and the job offers a strong finish earns now come from those exact vacancies first: the offer card names the manager the board is moving on from, and if it is a club at your own level in another country, that sideways move abroad is on the table too, which it never was before. Turn a vacancy down and the news feed shows who got the chair instead, because the offers and the managerial merry-go-round now read from one list instead of two coins. The classic calls from bigger clubs still come on top. Arc three of the manager rebuild; the permanent check drives thirty summers and proves every offer blurb names the right outgoing manager and every declined chair really gets refilled.
Club Manager: every other dugout has a manager now. Open any rival club and the dugout line names who runs it and how long they have been in the chair. Every name is generated (the game will never put an invented career on a real person), every league mate gets one the moment your career starts, and old saves grow theirs automatically. The summer turns them over the way real football does: finish in the drop zone or far below the board's expectations and the axe falls, roughly one chair in eight changes hands each season, and sometimes a manager sacked on one side of town walks straight into the vacancy on the other, which the news feed reports exactly as it happened. Take a new job yourself and the feed knows that too: the name you displaced, and who your old club appointed to replace you. A permanent check proves every dugout is filled, no generated name ever collides with a real player, every sack headline tells the truth against the record, and the churn rate stays believable. This is arc two of the manager rebuild; next the job market starts flowing through these actual vacancies.
Dialogs behave now, and the ticker got its pause button. The follow up the accessibility page promised, shipped the same day. Every pop up panel that predates our newer dialog system (the Soccer Career phone and training ground, the Stadium Tycoon panels, the confirm boxes) now announces itself as a dialog, takes keyboard focus when it opens, and closes with the Escape key. The cookie banner announces itself and receives focus the moment it appears, so its two buttons are one tab away instead of a whole page of tabbing away. And the live scores ticker has a real pause button beside the LIVE chip, an explicit stop that stays stopped until you press play, on top of the hold-still-under-your-pointer behavior it already had. The accessibility page moved these from "still working on" to "works today", which is the direction that list is supposed to move.
The accessibility pass: the site works for keyboards, screen readers and reduced motion, and says so. A full audit, then the fixes, all in one go. The skip link that jumps past the navigation now actually lands somewhere on every page (it worked on about a quarter of them before). The four newer Connect 4 boards are real buttons a keyboard can reach, each square announcing its clue pair, matching the soccer board that got this treatment first. Finishing a game is announced to screen readers instead of silently swapping the screen, and guess feedback speaks the words right, close and wrong alongside the colors instead of relying on color alone. Every search box, answer field and report form on the site now tells a screen reader what it is, from Search F1 drivers to Name the secret player. Turn on reduce motion in your system and the pulsing, spinning and confetti calm down everywhere, not just on the tiles that already behaved. The scores ticker pauses when your pointer or keyboard focus is on it. And there is a new Accessibility page in the footer that says exactly what works, what we check on every release, and how to tell us when something is in your way, with nothing on it that is not actually true.
The Sports Quiz Board has a proper address now. The game lives at douknowball.com/quiz-board, matching the name it has always worn on screen. The old address redirects there permanently, so every bookmark, share and search result keeps working, and your saved boards and streak history carry over untouched. Part of the same legal cleanup as the rest of this week: the site's addresses should be as much ours as the games are.
The legal and privacy pass: every promise on our policy pages is now true, and checked by machine. A full audit of the privacy policy, the terms, the cookie banner and the ad code, line against line. Ads are now explicitly non-personalized: we tell Google before its script ever loads that ads here come from the page you are on, not from a profile of you, and the privacy policy and terms say exactly that instead of the old personalized-ads wording. The bug report relay was disclosed (reports travel through an email relay service, now named in the policy alongside every other service the code actually talks to), the analytics description of IP handling was corrected, guest handles on leaderboards are explained, and creating an account now asks you to confirm you are 13 or older with the terms and privacy policy one tap away. Behind the scenes: a leftover environment file came out of the public repository, a vulnerable routing dependency was patched, the report endpoint now answers only our own pages, and a new permanent check walks the shipped code for every outside service it contacts and fails the build if any of them is missing from the privacy policy, so a future feature cannot quietly ship an undisclosed one.
Club Manager: name the manager in your dugout. A new last step when you take a job: name your manager, pick a homeland, a background (ex player, career coach, analyst or youth coach) and a preferred football, from gegenpress to parking the bus. The style sets your opening formation and mentality the way a founded club's identity does, and that is all it sets: no hidden ratings boost, the football stays the football. The homeland is real though, in the two places it should be: when a federation comes calling with a national team job it is now your own country's federation, and when you are between jobs the market knows which leagues know your name. Skip the whole step and the game is exactly the career it has always been, and every existing save is untouched. One hard rule, permanently checked: the name cannot be a real footballer's, because a real person's name on an invented career is a line this site does not cross.
Soccer Career: pick from eight eras, and the title races go worldwide. The career engine has modeled eight half decade windows all along, each with its own stars, giants and rivals, but the era picker only let you start in four of them. Now every window is on the menu: kick off in 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 or right now, and the world you land in matches the year. The season feed's title races grow with it: alongside the big five, your career now hears who won the Primeira Liga, the Eredivisie, the Scottish Premiership, the Brasileirao, the Saudi Pro League, MLS and the K League, each era listing the clubs that actually contested it, checked against the season records. MLS only appears from its real 1996 kickoff, and a 1990 career will find no MLS club offering a contract, because the league did not exist yet. Fourteen new clubs are playable across those leagues too, from Ulsan and Pohang to Columbus and Atlanta to Hearts and Vitoria. A permanent check pins all of it: every era reachable, every league list real, every founding date honest.
The profile page tells the truth, all of it. A stat by stat audit of everything the profile and the header show turned up fifteen ways a number could lie, and fourteen are fixed today. The big ones: viewing someone else's profile no longer shows zero games and a zero average next to their real points; your world rank is computed properly instead of silently vanishing past the first thousand players; the two different ranks on the site now say what they measure (all time versus today); Games Today counts games, not replays, and stops resetting at 8pm Eastern; a simulated season counts as one play, not sixteen; badge cards stop claiming zero of zero while they load; the stat that was honestly measuring time spent staring at your own profile now says so; and your streak is backed up to your account on every play, so clearing your browser no longer erases it. The fifteenth finding needs a database change and is queued. Every fix has a permanent check behind it.
Signed in players get full credit everywhere now. Yesterday every game started counting; today the plumbing behind the counting became one pipe. There used to be three separate score pipelines, and which ones a game fed depended on which internal helper it happened to use, so a signed in player could finish a Club Manager season and watch their flame streak, their points and their world rank not move at all. Now every finished game, all 120 of them, feeds the same recorder, which updates your streak, your daily count, your points and your best scores in one motion whether you are signed in or not. The permanent check got teeth to match: it runs the real recording code against a stand in database and demands that two finished games produce exactly two plays, the exact point total, and one ranked row, no more and no less.
Every game counts now, and the leaderboard stops being one name. An audit of all 127 games found fourteen that never recorded a finished play: the World Cup bracket, both bingo boards, the transfer streak game, all four Perfect Seasons, World XI, Who Am I, Alphabet Sprint, Clue Auction, Fantasy Draft, Stat Detective and the list quizzes. Finish any of those and it now counts toward your streak, your played-today number, and, where the game has an honest score, the leaderboard. Games whose only number would rank backwards (fewest guesses wins) deliberately record without a score rather than reward the worst run. A permanent check now walks every game on the registry to its code and fails the build if any game ever stops earning credit. And new guest names come from a sports word pool with over 1,600 combinations, so the board reads like a crowd instead of a wall of Ballers; if you already have a Baller name, you keep it, your history is under it.
The ticker is a real bottom line now. Rebuilt to the owner's spec, the way the cable networks run theirs. A LIVE chip with the red circle sits on the left, and the strip carries that day's actual games and nothing else: one sport's box opens, shows its games, closes, and hands the wire to the next sport, looping forever. Before a game you get the matchup, its start time in your own time zone, and the sport. During and after, the score. Everything that used to share the strip with the scores, the site facts, the daily game plugs, the lines about your own saves, is gone. If nothing is on anywhere, the strip says so quietly instead of filling the gap with chatter. Prefer reduced motion and the whole board shows at once with no cycling.
Your created club knows what league it plays in now. Straight off an owner report: create a club in La Liga and the dashboard still talked about the Premier League and the FA Cup. The engine has known a created club's real league since the feature shipped, but the dashboard and three of its cards were looking the club up by name in the real-club lists, not finding it (created clubs are not real clubs), and falling back to the English league. All nine lookups now ask the save, which carries the truth, so a club created in any of the 20 leagues sees its own league name, its own cup, and the right line about European football. The permanent check creates a club in every league and demands each one resolves to its own competition. Also in this round, on the same owner list: the home page line that said "no sign-up" now says what is actually true, every game plays without an account, and the personal dailies checklist that appeared on the home page three rounds ago is gone again at his call.
Transfers Higher or Lower deals today's market, not 2018's. One of you reported "outdated info" back in July, and the chase led somewhere specific: the game's player pool was the one query in the whole site that never said which YEAR it meant. Our market values table keeps every player's value for every season back to 2004, so asking for the top 400 without a year hands back peak-year rows, and the game was showing players at old clubs with old price tags as if that were today. Both pools now read the current season snapshot, over five thousand players deep, so every card is a claim about now. And because the next query like this should not need a user to catch it, there is a permanent check that walks all 31 database calls on that table and demands each one name its year or be on a short pinned list of history games where every season is the point. Thanks to the reporter.
Missing XI: the Atalanta night is the real teamsheet now. Three of you reported the same puzzle in July, and the angriest report ("LW was literally the player") turned out to be exactly right. The 2021 Real Madrid and Atalanta second leg was stored here as the version everyone remembers, a 4-3-3 with Asensio starting on the left, and Asensio is precisely the man memory promotes: he came off the bench that night and scored the 84th minute goal. Madrid actually started a 3-5-2, with Vinicius up top next to Benzema, so if you answered Vinicius for the blanked left forward, you were right and the game was wrong. Rechecked against two independent teamsheets and corrected, and the whole file of 167 lineups now goes through a permanent check that pins this match against the sources, so nobody can ever helpfully change it back. Sorry, and thanks to all three of you.
Transfer Path: the hints tell the truth again. One of you reported a wrong answer on the Yaya Toure to Lamine Yamal puzzle, and you were right to. The hint said the two were a direct link because both wore the Barcelona shirt, but the game only counts players who were at the same club in the same season, and those two were twelve years apart. The hints were written before that rule and never caught up, so some pointed at links the game refuses and some promised one middle man where you need two. Every hint on all 902 puzzles is now worked out from the game's own rule, the stated minimum on every puzzle is the real shortest path, and the message when a link is refused says what it means: never at the same club in the same season.
Your dailies, ticked off, on the home page. If you have played any of the daily games before, the home page now shows them under the Most Played trio with a tick on the ones you have already done today, your streak on each, and a line saying how many are left. It reads the same streak record the flame in the top bar reads, kept on your device, no account needed, so it works for everyone. First visit, nothing shows: you get the games, not an empty checklist.
Soccer Career: the Ballon d'Or ceremony stopped contradicting itself. Two of you reported it from the footer button, three days apart, and you were both right: a nominee at your own club could be shown holding a Champions League your club never won, while the man next to him from the same dressing room held the league and the cup. Every nominee was rolling his own medals in private. Now a club's honours are decided once for the season, the same record the phone's feed prints, and every player at that club holds exactly those, your own season card included: if your card says no title, nobody at your club is champion on that stage, and if it says you won the cup, so did your team mate. World Cup and continental winners are the players from the nation that won it. And "the field" you are judged against for the fairest and best is the ten men on the shortlist, not a forward nobody saw at a mid table club, which had quietly cost a 43 goal league winner the award in testing. Measured across 1,465 simulated ceremonies: 5,766 medals that should not have been there before the fix, none after. Thanks to both reporters.
The Brownlow and the Dally M join the records shelf. Every Brownlow Medal since 1924 is on the Record Books now, 112 medals to 91 players, with the club and the vote count, the twelve tied counts listed in full (the 1930 count that took until 1989 to settle, the 2012 medal reallocated in 2016), and the war years left honestly vacant. Checked against the AFL's own history page and AFL Tables, which disagreed on two vote counts until AFL Tables' own detail pages settled both. It went straight into two games: Name Them All has a Brownlow Medallists list (how many of the 91 can you get, with Bunton, Reynolds, Skilton and Stewart worth one answer each), and Champ or Not deals Brownlow claims alongside the premierships. Rugby league gets the same treatment: every Dally M Medal since 1979 (47 medals to 34 players, Thurston four of them, the split 1997 season and the cancelled 2003 night left vacant) is on the shelf, in Name Them All and in Champ or Not. A quarter of the people who play here are in Australia, and the records shelf now has four footy tables to show for it.
You can put the site on your home screen now, and it opens like an app. Add to Home Screen on an Android phone or install from the address bar in a desktop browser and you get the mark as the icon, the name under it, and a window without the browser bars around it, with shortcuts straight into Soccer Career, Club Manager and the Face Off daily. iPhones already had the icon since the logo round; this is the file that tells everything else what the site is called and what it looks like.
New game: Face Off, a stats duel on a shot clock. Two athletes, one career stat, ten seconds to tap the one with the bigger number, and a rival in the other chair answering the same question at its own speed. A right answer is worth 100 plus 10 for every second you had left, so knowing it and knowing it fast are two different scores. Ten rounds across ten sports, never the same sport twice in a row, sudden death if it is level. Three rivals: The Rookie guesses the close ones and takes its time, The Pro is sharp, The Legend is fast and almost never misses. The daily duel is the same ten pairs against The Pro for everyone, once a day, so a score means the same thing to your mates, and Pass the phone puts a second person in the chair instead: same pairs, your own clocks, the cards hidden while the phone changes hands. Every number is a career total already on the site in a Higher or Lower game; nothing was made up for this. Play Face Off.
New game: Idle Arena, a proper clicker. Our three idle games so far have all been management sims with a museum, a club or an academy to run. This one is the genre the word usually means: tap a ball and a number goes up, spend the number on a squad that scores for you every second, and watch it run away. Eight archetypes from a 15 point Ball Boy to a Champion, each 15% dearer every time you sign one; fourteen upgrades, most of them unlocked by owning five of something; a trophy you can lift once a run has earned a million, which resets the run and pays a permanent 5% on everything; ten badges worth 1% each that never go away; and eight hours of half speed earnings while the tab is closed. Nobody in it is real, on purpose, so there is nothing to argue about except the number. Measured before shipping: a steady tapper lifts the first trophy in about sixteen minutes, and somebody who taps twenty times and then just watches gets there in about twenty. Open the arena.
Real scores on the ticker, and it looks like a broadcast strip now. The bar across the top of every page carries live and recent scores: MLB and the big European soccer leagues today, the NFL, NBA and NHL as their seasons open. A game in play leads the strip with a red dot, today's kickoffs follow with their start time in your own time zone, then the finals. Our server asks the feed every twenty minutes and writes what it gets to our own database; your browser reads that table and nothing else, so no third party sees you and if the feed is ever down the strip simply goes back to the site's own lines. The strip itself was redrawn to match: near black, the mark on the left, cards separated by thin rules, teams and scores in tabular figures. Every card links to that sport's hub.
A real logo, and the site finally looks like itself everywhere. The mark and the wordmark are drawn by a script from the letters of the name, so the icon in the browser tab, the icon on a phone's home screen, the picture that shows when a link is shared and the wordmark in the header are all the same design at every size, instead of four different guesses. The share picture used to be served from the host's upload bucket; it now comes from this domain like everything else. And the sitemap stopped re-dating every page whenever the header or footer changed, so a new footer link no longer tells Google that all 126 pages were rewritten today.
Every sport hub is one click away from every page, and you can change your cookie choice. The footer used to link the College hub and nothing else, so the soccer, basketball, football, baseball and hockey pages each had a handful of links pointing at them while College had over a hundred. All six are in the footer now. Next to them is a Cookie choices link that clears whatever you told the banner and asks again, because a choice you cannot take back is not much of a choice. The privacy policy grew to say everything it should about ads, your rights wherever you live, and the analytics we now use to see which games get played, all of which only ever loads after you press Accept.
Today's puzzle was being saved into seventeen pages and left there. Every page here is saved as a plain readable copy so a search engine can read it without running the site. Seventeen of those copies had that day's puzzle frozen in them, lineup and all, three of them with the date written into a sentence, which is fine on the day and wrong every day after. The copies are now taken three times with the calendar moved forward and only what stays the same makes it into the file, so a saved page can no longer say anything that stops being true tomorrow. On the way through we caught a much worse bug before it shipped: one build had marked every single page as not for search engines.
Nine pages we deliberately keep out of Google were quietly serving the home page instead. Some pages here are not meant to show up in search: your profile, the password reset, the two admin screens, and five games that were retired from the menus. Every one of them tells a search engine to skip it, but only once the page has finished loading. None of them had a saved copy, so what a search engine actually received at those nine addresses was the home page. That rule was right when it was written, because back then a page with no saved copy was blank and harmless. Then we started putting the home page's words into that blank page, for a good reason, and nine harmless addresses turned into nine copies of the home page without anybody touching them. It showed up in the Search Console data: one of those nine has been sitting in the "crawled, not indexed" pile since April, which is exactly what an address serving somebody else's content and saying nothing about itself looks like. All nine now answer for themselves and say skip me in plain HTML. Six of them had a real page to save. The three that need an account do not, so they get a short honest note instead, and the saving step now refuses outright to write a copy of one page under another page's name, which is a mistake this project has made twice before.
Thirty seven page titles were being cut off in Google results. A search result shows roughly the first 60 characters of a page title and puts a row of dots where it runs out. Thirty seven of the 126 pages here were over that, the worst at 73, so what a searcher actually saw was the game name trailing into nothing. Every one of them ended with the same fourteen character site name on the end, and taking that off brings all thirty seven under, the longest landing at 59. So the site name now comes off automatically, and only when it would otherwise cost you the end of your own title. It stays on the 83 pages where it fits, and it stays on the social sharing cards everywhere, because those have half as much room again and the name is worth more there than the last three words of a game title. This is a rule rather than thirty seven hand edits on purpose: a rule still applies to the next title somebody writes, and a hand edit does not. If a title is ever still too long once the name has come off, the check fails and says so, because that is a real writing problem and chopping a sentence in code is how you end up publishing half a word.
Every page was describing the whole site instead of itself. Each page carries a short blurb that search engines and social sites read, and every one of the 126 pages here was carrying two of them: the site wide one first, the page's own second. A reader takes the first one it finds. So Google was being handed "How deep does your sports knowledge go" for Footle instead of "Guess the mystery soccer player in 8 tries", and every share of every game on Facebook, LinkedIn or X showed the same title, the same blurb and the same picture no matter which game you shared. Ten tags were doubled up like that on all 126 pages. This is the same fault we caught last week on one tag and fixed only that one, because the checker that found it only looked at that one. There are now 126 different descriptions across 126 pages, where before there was one repeated 126 times, and the checker counts tags instead of merely looking for them, which is the whole reason nine rounds of checks never noticed: presence was exactly what was true the entire time.
Every page now starts loading a second sooner. Each page here is saved as a plain readable copy so a search engine can read it without running any code, and those copies deliberately contain no file names, because file names change every time the site is rebuilt and a copy pointing at last week's file is a copy that never comes alive. The cost was that each page had to go and find its own code: load a small script, fetch the home page, read the file names out of it, then finally start. Measured on a phone on mobile data: the page itself arrives at 591 milliseconds, and the first byte of styling does not start until 1,878, three round trips later, on a document the browser has had complete the whole time. The file names are now written into those copies while the site is being built, which is the one moment they are guaranteed correct. Measured after, three runs each way: one less request and the page is usable 1.2 seconds sooner, 14.5 seconds down to 13.3 on a slow connection. Worth saying how the first attempt went, because it was worse and only measuring caught it: writing the stylesheet in the ordinary way made the browser wait for 158KB of styling before showing anything at all, which pushed first paint from 0.74 seconds to 2.86. Trading two seconds of seeing the page for one second of using it is a bad trade, especially on a page whose whole point is that the words are already there. The styling now downloads without blocking, so both numbers are good, and there is a permanent check that fails if anyone ever makes that trade again. The old find-it-yourself script is still in every page as a fallback, doing nothing, so a build where this step did not run behaves exactly as before.
A stopped clock was being saved into 90 pages. Every page here is also saved as a plain copy so a search engine can read it without running any code. Ninety of those copies had the daily countdown baked into them, frozen at whatever second the copy was taken: "Next puzzle in 22:04:46". It is wrong a second later and meaningless by the time anyone reads it, and it is exactly the kind of dated thing those copies are supposed to keep out. It had a second cost nobody could see: it made every saved copy different on every run, so each batch of changes carried ninety files of pure clock noise that hid whatever had actually changed. The countdown is now marked as live, using the same mechanism that already keeps real world fixture dates out of those copies. You still see the clock. The copy a machine reads leaves it out, which is honest, because that copy cannot tell the time. Re-rendering the same page twice now produces the same file byte for byte, which it did not before.
Caught before it shipped: every page was about to tell Google it was the home page. Each page carries a tag saying which address is the real one for its content. Nine rounds ago we added that tag to the home page, which was right, because the home page is the one page here that is not saved as a plain copy and had no other way to say it. What nobody noticed is that the tag stayed on every other page too, underneath each page's own. So 126 of the 134 pages we ship were carrying two of them, the home page's first and their own second. Google ignores contradictory tags like that, and anything reading the first one is being told that the privacy page, Soccer Career and everything else on this site is the home page. It never went live, because it was sitting in the batch that has not been pushed yet. It was found because a checker that reads the page exactly the way a search engine does had been unable to run at all for months, and fixing that was the first thing it reported. Every page carries exactly one now, its own, and there is a permanent check that counts them rather than just looking for one.
The empty ad boxes are gone. Seventy two pages here had a slot that said Advertisement above a blank rectangle, and on most visits nothing was ever going to appear in it. Two perfectly ordinary things caused that. If you have not accepted cookies then the ad script never loads at all, which is deliberate and is not changing, so there was nothing to fill the box. The site also used placeholder slot IDs, so even with the script loaded the answer came back empty. Those placeholders have now been replaced by the verified responsive unit used on the game pages. The box waits for an actual answer and takes its space back when nothing is coming, and the word Advertisement only appears when there is genuinely an advertisement underneath it. The space is still held while the answer is unknown, because that is the thing that stops the page jumping under your thumb mid sentence, which was the good reason the box was there in the first place. There is a permanent check now covering the whole advertising setup: the verification tag, the ads file, that the privacy policy still says what it has to say about cookies and how to opt out, that the four pages a reviewer looks for all still carry real text, and that an empty slot can never again call itself an advertisement.
Soccer Career was making you download a whole different game before you could play it. Every single person who opened Soccer Career was pulling down the entire Club Manager engine and Footle's player list first, and none of it does anything until you retire and take a job in the dugout, which most people never reach in a first sitting. One line caused it. The career engine asked for the manager job market, the job market asked for Club Manager, Club Manager asked for Squad Deal, and Squad Deal asked for Footle's data, so the whole chain came along for the ride. Measured on a mid range phone on mobile data, three runs each way: it used to be 2,807 KB and 17.5 seconds before the Begin Career button existed, and it is now 2,207 KB and 14.5 seconds. Same game, 600 KB lighter, three seconds sooner. The job market is fetched when you actually walk toward the dugout instead, and the game starts pulling it in the moment the retirement screen appears so it has arrived before you choose. If it somehow has not, the screen says the phone lines are still connecting rather than showing you an empty offer list, because an empty offer list means nobody wants you and that is not something to say to somebody by accident. There is a permanent check on it now that fails if another game ever gets attached to this one again, and it names the guilty file. Being straight about the rest: the page is still heavy, and the remaining weight is Soccer Career's own, the real squads and the real international pools. That is a different job.
Eight retired game addresses were quietly handing Google a copy of the home page. When a game here gets retired its address stays alive and sends you somewhere useful, and that is what we thought was happening for eight of them. What was actually happening: asking the live site for one of those addresses returned the home page, byte for byte, with nothing anywhere in it saying the page had moved. Nine addresses, one identical document. The redirect was real but it only existed in the code that runs after the page loads, so a person got sent along fine while a search engine reading the raw page had no way to know a redirect was there at all. There is also a file in this project that has looked like it handles exactly this for months and does nothing at all on our host, which we proved with the one rule in it that could not be mistaken for anything else. So each of those eight addresses now has its own small page that says it moved, names where it went, links there, and carries the tag that points a search engine at the destination. Driven through a real browser afterwards: all eight land on the right page with the site working and no loops. Three new checks keep it that way, failing if a retired address ever goes back to serving the home page, if one redirect ever points at another, or if anything on the site starts linking into one.
Every page except the home page was 32 pixels narrower than your screen. On a phone that is eight percent of the width, just gone, and it had been that way for weeks. Here is what happened. Each page is saved as a plain readable copy so a search engine can read it without running any code, and that copy carries a few lines of styling so the text looks like the site for the split second before the real page loads. Those few lines put a 16 pixel border around the edge of the document, and nothing ever took it off, so the actual site loaded inside it and stayed squeezed. Measured on the live site at a 390 pixel wide phone: 358 pixels of usable width on every page except the home page, which is the one page that is not saved that way and was the only one at the full 390. The border now sits on a wrapper that the app throws away the moment it takes over, so it lasts exactly as long as it is useful. All 121 pages re-saved. Why nothing caught it: every layout check here hunts for content wider than the screen, because that is what makes a page slide sideways under your thumb. This made everything narrower, which no check was looking for, and it only surfaced at all because the browser sweep learned this week to open pages that are not games, and on the leaderboard the squeeze was finally enough to shove the Log In and Sign Up buttons off the edge.
Every big sport has its own page now. There are 113 games here and, until this week, exactly one page that gathered any of them by sport, and that one had been shipping empty. Everything else lived on the home page or nowhere. So there are six sport pages now: soccer, basketball, football, baseball, hockey and college. Each one holds every game in that sport, split into the long sims and the five minute puzzles, with the daily ones flagged, and each links on to the others. That covers 81 of the 113 games. Two things worth saying about how it was done. The smaller sections, Formula 1, tennis, golf, NASCAR, combat sports and Aussie rules, got nothing on purpose. Fourteen games between the six of them means a page over two or three games, and a thin page is the exact problem these are meant to solve rather than a way to have more of them. When one of those grows, it gets a page. And every number on every one of these pages is worked out from the actual game list as the page loads, never typed in, because a hand typed count is a count that goes wrong the next time a game ships, which has happened here before. Also, all six are drawn by the same piece of code, so the next improvement to one of them lands on all six.
This page was quietly losing its own biggest entries. Every page here is saved as a plain readable copy so a search engine can read it without running any code. The thing doing the saving threw away any single piece of text longer than about 1,200 characters, which was there to stop one giant element swallowing a whole page, and it was working exactly as designed on everything except this page. The entries you are reading are long by nature, and the longest ones are the biggest features, so the saved copy of What's New had 106 of its 112 entries: the Soccer Career squad card, the full browser inspection and the search visibility pass were all missing from the version Google gets. The rule is about shape now instead of length. An element that wraps other elements is still capped, because that is the thing worth guarding against, and a plain paragraph or list item keeps its text. All 112 are there. While we were in the same few lines: a link sitting inside a sentence was being written into the saved copy twice, once flattened into the sentence and once again on its own, 161 times across the site. Links stay where they were written now. Nothing about the live site changed, only the copy that machines read, which is the copy that decides whether any of this gets found.
The College hub was empty, and it had been for a long time. The page at /college promised every college football and college basketball game in one place and listed none of them. It was looking for two categories that have never existed under those names, so it found nothing, and it said so out loud: "All 0 college football and college basketball games in one place", with nothing underneath. Worse, last week we put a link to it in the footer of every page, which pointed the whole site at an empty page. It now has all six college games, split into the two long program sims and the four daily puzzles, with links on to the Record Books and the leaderboard. Two things stop it coming back. Category names are now checked when the site is built, so asking for one that does not exist fails the build instead of quietly returning nothing. And a new check reads the finished pages the way a search engine receives them, failing if a page that promises to gather games does not link every one of them, or if any page tells a reader it is empty. Our old link check could not have caught this: it counted every link on the page, and the menu and footer alone passed a page whose body was blank.
Soccer Career: every transfer offer tells you where you would actually stand. A club wanting you is not the same as a club playing you. Every offer card now says where you would slot into that club's real squad and who would be ahead of you, so the choice stops being about which badge is biggest. Arsenal want you and you would be fourth of six forwards behind Gabriel Jesus, or Brighton want you and you would be their best on day one. Same rule as everywhere else in this game: where we have no honest data for that club and season there is no line at all, never a guess, and it changes nothing about the offer itself.
Two pages nobody could find are now findable. Mapping every link across all 122 pages a search engine can read turned up two that had zero links pointing at them from anywhere on the site: the College Games Hub and the World Leaderboard. Both were listed in our sitemap, which tells Google the address exists, but nothing on the site argued they were worth visiting, and that is exactly the shape that gets a page discovered and then never indexed. Both are in the footer now, so they are one tap away from every page, and there is a permanent check that fails the build if any page ever becomes unreachable like that again.
More real sport on the ticker. The strip now knows about the NHL season opener, NBA opening night and next February's Super Bowl, on top of what was already there. Same rules as before: two independent sources per entry, no results and no predictions, and it goes quiet rather than stale when the list runs out.
Six game pages stopped scrolling sideways on small phones. A full site sweep at a 320 pixel screen found the Connections games and the NBA grid were wider than the screen they were on, so you could drag the whole page left and right. The cause was one shared piece: every game on the site draws its title through the same component, and a long single word like CONNECTIONS at that size with wide letter spacing measured 352 pixels inside a 256 pixel space, shoving the entire document 64 pixels past the edge. Titles now start smaller and step up, and multi-word titles wrap instead of shoving. Nothing changes on a desktop or a tablet. Measured at three screen sizes before and after, and the sweep went from six findings to one.
Soccer Career: when a club gives up on you, it names who you were behind. The release and transfer list screen already showed you the exact facts it decided on. Where we have the real squad for that club and season, it now adds one more line: where you finished in your position queue and the name of the man in front of you. It changes nothing about the decision itself, which is deliberate, because that decision was tuned against measured outcomes and a new line of evidence is not a new reason to drop you.
Soccer Career: you can see the squad you are actually in. The question that decides your whole season is who is ahead of you, and the game used to answer it with a projected number of games and no names. Now there is a card on your season page showing the real squad at your real club that season, your position queue with you slotted in at your rating, and the name of the man directly in front of you. Sign for Arsenal in 2023 as a striker and it tells you Saka, Gabriel Jesus, Martinelli, Trossard and Nketiah are ahead of you. Join Real Madrid as a winger and it is Mbappe and Vinicius. 450 club seasons from 2016 to 2026, and a tile for the full squad. Two things to know. It changes nothing about how the game plays: the same forty careers were played twice, once with the card consulted every season, and every stored number came out identical. And it shows nothing at all rather than guessing, so a club or a season we do not have honest data for simply has no card, because there is no honest way to invent the squad of a real club in a real year. The club names are mapped by hand, one line each, because the data also contains Arsenal Tula, Queens Park Rangers and Liverpool FC Montevideo, and a near match would quietly fill your dressing room with the wrong club.
Soccer Career: your international teammates are real people now. Get called up in 2023 and the team sheet next to your name is the squad that actually existed: Bellingham, Saka, Rice, Ramsdale, Luke Shaw at left back and Reece James at right back. Brazil gives you Alisson, Vinicius and Bruno Guimaraes. Japan gives you Kubo and Mitoma. It covers 2016 to 2026 across 533 national squads and more than twelve thousand players, all pulled from the same market value data the rest of the site's real players come from, with each man's rating on the same curve so he is the same player here as he is in Club Manager. Three rules keep it honest. Nobody appears for a country his own record does not say, so nationality is never guessed from a name or a club. Everyone plays where he actually plays, so a right back gets the right back shirt rather than the next spare one. And past 2026, or for a nation whose data cannot fill a shape, it goes back to generated players, because nobody knows who will be good in 2045 and pretending otherwise would be making people up.
The ticker knows what is actually on. The strip across the top has always been about this site: which dailies are fresh, how many games there are, how your own saves are doing. It now leads with real sport. Champions League draw day, the US Open main draw, Monza, the NFL opener, the Wild Card round, World Series Game 1, with the date worked out from your own clock so it reads "tomorrow" or "in nine days" wherever you are. Two rules run it. Every entry was checked against two independent sources before it went in, and where the two disagreed the disputed bit was dropped rather than picked, which is why the Champions League line gives you the date and says nothing about the city. And when the list runs out the strip goes quiet about real sport rather than showing you something that stopped being true, because a hand kept calendar that ages into nonsense is worse than no calendar.
Soccer Career: money in your own currency. Everything was in euros for everybody. Pick your currency at the money panel and the whole game follows: your wage slip, your net worth, transfer fees, the shady end of the lifestyle shop, and the numbers inside every event and every consequence you are choosing between. Eight currencies to start with. Two things worth knowing. Nothing under the hood changes, so your save holds exactly the same numbers either way and the balance of the game is untouched, which is checked by playing the same forty careers twice in different currencies and comparing every stored figure. And the conversion is the European Central Bank's published rates for one stated day, not a live feed, so a converted screen always tells you which month it was converted at rather than pretending to be today's rate.
Soccer Career: the club gets a say now. Until this week you could rate 5.9 across six games and the summer would still open with "no clubs have made an offer, your club wants to keep you", which is the one thing that never happens in football. Play badly enough for long enough and the club now makes the decision for you. Three things go against you: league games well under what your rating should be getting at that club, a season average at or under 6.3, and sitting more than three rating points below what the squad expects. Two of those is a bad year. Three is a verdict, and the screen prints the exact lines it was built from, so a release can always be traced back to your own season card. If you are 23 or under at a big club they send you out on loan. If your contract is nearly up, or they already tried to move you on last summer, they tear it up and you are a free agent with worse offers than you are used to. Otherwise you are transfer listed, and you can refuse to go, which costs you a season of reserve football: a quarter of the minutes, eight league games at the absolute most. Walk out of the door, on loan or on a transfer, and the freeze does not follow you.
Soccer Career: six things you told us were wrong, fixed. The international tile was showing the qualifying group when you were already at the tournament, so it now leads with your actual group stage table, your position in it and how many go through, with the qualifying road one tap away instead of gone. The team sheet was mirrored, which put right wingers on the left and the holding midfielder in the wrong place, so the shape now reads the way a team sheet reads. A net worth in the red printed as a strange number of thousands and now reads minus 1.34 million like it should. The second passport offer never said which country was asking, so it now names the nation, tells you where it sits in the world next to yours, and actually switches who you play for if you take it, and it only turns up when you have barely been capped, which is the only time a switch is really open to you. And your own name was being cut off at the top of the page on a phone.
Soccer Career: a bad injury is a chapter now, not a stat line. Tear a knee or snap an achilles and the season stops. The scan comes back, the medical team gives you a number of weeks, and you decide how to come back. Rush it and you are playing again in about 60 percent of the time, which is real matches and a manager who notices, but roughly half the players who do that break down again, and every shortcut leaves your body permanently easier to injure for the rest of your career. Follow the club plan and you lose the full time and take the honest toll, but you walk back in whole. Or pay for the specialist and your own rehab team, which costs actual money out of your net worth and gets you back closest to the player you were. Your career remembers every serious injury it came back from. The three roads are checked against each other on every build, so the trade can never quietly stop being a trade.
New game: Hall of Champions, and it is an idle one. You run a sports museum, and every single exhibit in it actually happened. Buy the oldest Super Bowl and the plaque tells you who won it, who they beat and by how much, because the exhibit list is read straight out of the same audited record books the rest of the site runs on. Nine hundred and nine real champions across ten wings, from an 1889 English title to this year's. Visitors pay admission every second, admission buys more history, every tenth exhibit in a wing doubles that wing, finishing a wing hangs a plaque that pays forever, and the doors stay open while your phone is in your pocket. It is the third idle game here and the first built on real history rather than generated people. In World and Olympic Games.
The full inspection ran, and it caught a real crash. Our browser test fleet (the set of checks that loads every page like a person and plays it) ran end to end today, and the biggest catch was in Rebuild Challenge: tapping Sign on certain players crashed the transfer market on the spot, every time, thanks to a one character math slip that could point a bidding war at a rival who does not exist. The same slip was quietly making those players get fought over too often and bid on too cheap. All fixed, and a signing can never be eaten by a missing rival again. The rest of the haul: the flickering highlight on Missing XI and Missing Five no longer dims the words inside it while it pulses, the hidden value question marks in the transfer Higher or Lower and the little tap hints in Budget Builder are properly readable, screen readers now hear every reveal box in Guess the Career and every square in the NBA, NHL and MLB grids by name, three guess boxes announce what they are for, every link on the Record Books page is a proper thumb sized target, and two games (AFL Higher or Lower and the brand new Silverware Sort) had their bottom of page guides showing placeholder copy because of a missing one line registration, now restored.
New game: Silverware Sort. Everyone knows the Yankees lead baseball. The game is whether you know what comes after: five teams from one competition, a shuffled pile, and a ladder that wants them stacked most titles to fewest. Two tries per board: your first submit locks the rungs you got right in green, then you rearrange the rest and answer for keeps. Three boards a day across nine competitions, from the Super Bowl to the NRL, one point per correct rung, and the reveal always shows every real count so you leave knowing the actual cabinet. Two honesty rules run the whole thing: every count is counted straight out of the same audited record books behind our Record Books page, and no two teams on a board are ever tied, so there is always exactly one right order (which is why an AFL board will never deal Essendon, Carlton and Collingwood together: all three sit on 16 flags). In World and Olympic Games.
The reveals got receipts. All week we completed the finals tables (every runner-up, every series, every score, every venue), and now the games teach from them. Get a Champ or Not claim about the Super Bowl, NBA, World Series, Stanley Cup or WNBA and the reveal no longer stops at who really won: it tells you who they beat and by what, "They beat the Denver Broncos 42-10" style. And Who'd They Beat now closes every Super Bowl question with the full almanac line: numeral, score, and the stadium as it was named that day with its host city, so a right answer on the 1993 question reads Super Bowl XXVII, 52-17 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA. Every one of those lines is checked against the record on every build, and the two games are checked against each other so they can never disagree about a final.
The Record Books know where every Super Bowl was played. Every Super Bowl row now carries its host city next to the venue, state included so nobody pictures the wrong Glendale. The municipality is era-accurate the same way the stadium names are: games at the Miami Gardens site file under Miami until the city incorporated in 2003 and under Miami Gardens after, XIX sits in Stanford (the two big references disagree on that one, so we checked the game itself), and LVIII is Las Vegas, the address the stadium itself uses. All 60 checked against two sources with every disagreement settled row by row, and the checker now pins the era boundary so it can never quietly drift.
The Record Books grew a Venue column, and the games point at the books. Every Super Bowl now shows the stadium as it was named that day, Tulane Stadium and Cowboys Stadium included, with the scrape's times-hosted annotations cleaned off the names. And the three quiz games built on this history (Champ or Not, Who'd They Beat?, Name Them All) now link straight to the Record Books, so when a question stumps you the receipts are one tap away.
Every NCAA title game, scored. The Record Books men's basketball table now shows who lost every championship game and the final score, all 87 of them back to Oregon over Ohio State in 1939: the triple overtime 54-53 of 1957, Texas Western's 1966 statement, NC State 54-52 with the dunk at the horn, Villanova's near-perfect 66-64, Virginia's overtime redemption, right through Michigan 69-63 over UConn this spring. Champions were already verified; now the other half of every scoreboard is too.
Every WNBA Finals MVP is on the books. The Record Books WNBA table now carries the Finals MVP for all 29 championships, from Cynthia Cooper winning the first four straight through Emma Meesseman's 2019 (the only one won off the bench) to A'ja Wilson's pair. Every name checked against the matchup list that already agreed with our verified winners and losers, then against the history itself. That completes the WNBA table on every column, same as the other four finals.
Soccer Career: the armband is a career now. Club captaincy used to be a one-off event that bumped two stats and was never spoken of again. Now it is earned and it is yours to keep or lose: put in the seasons at one club (age, tenure and standing all count, leaders and academy kids get the nod sooner) and the manager hands you the armband, with a ©️ next to your club from then on. It never travels: transfer away and it stays behind with an honest line about it, go on loan and you hand it over, decline at 33 and beyond and there is a dressing room send-off instead of a quiet delete. Every stint that lasted a season leaves a line in your trophy cabinet saying where and for how long, and yes, you can earn it again somewhere else. The dressing room vote can still surprise a young leader early, and both roads lead to the same armband. Old saves are untouched.
New game: Who'd They Beat? History keeps one name per year, and this game is about the other one. We give you the champion and the year across five competitions (Super Bowl, NBA, World Series, Stanley Cup, WNBA) and you pick who they beat in the final, from four options that are all real beaten finalists, so the traps are cruel: the 1995 Magic show up as an option on the 1994 Rockets question. Ten finals a day, same set for everyone, and the reveal teaches the series result. Only possible because this week's work verified every runner-up back to 1903 baseball, 1915 hockey and 1947 basketball, right down to the last ten WNBA series scores which went in today. In World and Olympic Games.
Every NBA Finals, World Series and Stanley Cup Final now names the team that lost it. The Record Books gained Runner-up columns covering all 80 NBA Finals back to 1947 (Chicago Stags to the 2026 Spurs), all 121 World Series back to 1903 (the Black Sox, Buckner, all of it) and all 110 Cup Finals back to 1915, Pacific Coast challengers like the Portland Rosebuds and Edmonton Eskimos included. Each row was checked three ways before it went in: an independent list, our own verified winners and series, and the history itself. The checking earned its keep, catching the sources telling six separate lies between them: a wrong 1948 NBA winner, a 1995 World Series that supposedly ended in five games (it went six, ask Tom Glavine), and Cup listings that printed the clinching game's goal score as the series result. Nothing lands in these tables on one source's word.
The Record Books are open. All week we have been checking our champion tables season by season against the official record, and that work deserved more than a quiz answer key, so it is now a page you can read. The Record Books (linked in the footer) lists every champion year by year across ten competitions: every Super Bowl with its score and MVP, NBA champions back to 1947 with every Finals MVP, the World Series since 1903, the Stanley Cup since 1915, the WNBA with every beaten finalist, college football with its split titles carried per selector, college hoops, the English title, and both Australian codes. Where history is odd we keep it odd: seasons that were never played are missing on purpose, and stripped titles stay vacant with a note saying why. Each table links straight into the games that play on the same history.
Champ or Not grows a Hard mode. The regular fakes pull any winner from a competition's whole history, which a sharp fan can smell from the era alone. Hard mode, on the Unlimited tab, is crueler: the fake winner really did lift that trophy, within about three seasons of the year on the card. "The Penrith Panthers won the 2020 premiership" is exactly the kind of lie it deals now (they won the four either side; 2020 was Melbourne). Still never invented. A measured year of hard sets puts 99 percent of fakes within three seasons, with the rare exception being stretches like the Dragons' eleven straight, where there is literally no other nearby winner to borrow.
The NRL joins the records shelf. Every top grade rugby league premier since 1908 is now on the site, and it went straight into two games at once: Name Them All gets its 28th list (every club to win the premiership, under the name it wore at the time, so Eastern Suburbs and the Sydney Roosters are separate answers), and Champ or Not now deals league claims as its tenth competition. The history is handled the way the record books handle it: 1997 counts both premiers because the game genuinely split that year (Newcastle in the ARL, Brisbane in Super League), and 2007 and 2009 are deliberately absent because Melbourne's titles from those seasons were stripped and stay vacant, so no quiz here will ever teach them. All 117 seasons checked against two independent records, with the famous numbers landing exactly: Souths on 21, St George on 15 with the eleven straight, Manly and the Bulldogs on 8.
New game: Champ or Not. Ten claims about champions, one at a time, and every one of them sounds right. The Bulls in 1994? The Islanders in 1982? Leicester in 2016? Two of those happened, and your job is calling which. The fakes are the cruelest kind we could build honestly: every team named is a real champion of that competition, the lie is only ever the year, and the reveal always names who really won. Nine competitions in the mix, from the Super Bowl and the NBA to the English title and the VFL/AFL flag, all reading from the same record books we spent this week auditing season by season. Ten claims a day, same set for everyone, unlimited mode when ten is not enough. Lives in World and Olympic Games.
Name every VFL/AFL premier, and the whole records shelf got an audit. The List Quiz's 27th list is for the footy crowd: every club to win a flag since 1897, under the name it wore at the time, so South Melbourne and Sydney are separate answers the same way the Minneapolis Lakers are. All 129 seasons were checked against two independent records before shipping, and the famous counts hold: Essendon, Carlton and Collingwood on 16 apiece. While building the checker that guards it, we audited every list the quiz serves against the record and repaired the tables behind the finals lists (Stanley Cup, World Series, NBA, WNBA), whose unused columns carried scrambled scrape data waiting to bite a future feature. The answers you see were always right; now the shelves behind them are too, and the 2026 Stanley Cup is on the books.
The college football champions are the real champions now. While building a permanent check that no College Grid square can ever be impossible (every square on all 75 boards is now verified against 28,000 real draft picks, the Heisman list and the title history), we found our national champions table was badly corrupted: it claimed USC won the 2005 title that Texas famously took in the Rose Bowl, listed Ohio State as the 2006 champion when Florida beat them in the title game, credited Iowa with 1985, and was missing about half the real winners entirely, including Texas, Penn State, BYU and Clemson's 1981. Rebuilt season by season from 1981 through Indiana's first ever title this January, every row checked. The List Quiz's "name every national champion" now has the right answers, six more schools among them.
G'day: the site's first footy game. Australia is our second biggest country and until today the menu had nothing for you, so here is AFL Higher or Lower. Two goal kicking greats side by side, from Gordon Coventry booting 1,299 for Collingwood before World War Two to Buddy Franklin's 1,066, and you pick who kicked more career goals. Ten rounds, streak bonuses, a shared daily plus an unlimited mode with a hard setting that serves up the close calls. The pool is sixty legends and every total was checked against the all time records before shipping, with only retired players included so no number ever moves under you. Sits in its own new Aussie Rules section. More footy games to come if this one gets played.
The dugout is a real job now. Retire in Soccer Career, take a manager's job, and until now every season came back as a coin flip and an adjective: maybe "mid-table", maybe a trophy out of nowhere, maybe sacked at random. Now the season is simulated like the rest of your career: your club and the real clubs at your level play out a full league to a points table you can read, with your W-D-L line, and everything follows from where you actually finished. Champions means you topped the table, promotion means you finished top two down the pyramid and go up WITH your club instead of teleporting to a random one, relegation can go two ways (a board that keeps faith or a sack on the spot), and the sack only ever follows a finish a real board would act on. There is a proper cup run every season too, giant-killings included, and titles and cups won from the dugout now sit in your trophy cabinet next to the ones you won in boots. Your record matters: a manager with silverware measurably finishes higher, so building a reputation over seasons is the whole game.
Grade the Transfer is back from the dead, with a cleaner deck. The game builds its transfer list from a big historical query, and that query had quietly grown past the database's time limit, so the page was timing out and loading empty. While rebuilding it as a fast stored table we found two data problems worth fixing properly: exact duplicate transfers, and a nastier one where different real players sharing a name (Brazilian one-name players especially) got merged into one impossible career, which invented transfers that never happened. Every fabricated or ambiguous case is gone: 759 real graded transfers remain, each one a move that actually took place, and the crowd vote for a transfer can no longer mix in votes for a different player with the same name. The years are right now too: cards used to date a move by the buyer's first recorded season, which ran a year or two late (Neymar's move to Barcelona showed as 2015), and every card now carries the year the player actually left, checked against the famous moves and locked in by a test. On top of that, the same daily-shuffle bug we fixed last round turned out to live in four more games: Grade the Transfer could only ever show 81 of its cases, Ball IQ kept drawing its questions from the same dozen clues per difficulty, Emoji Guess served the same 3 easy puzzles all year, and Mystery Box circled half of each rarity pool. All four now use the proper shuffle, measured over a simulated year, and a permanent check makes sure this class of bug can never ship again anywhere on the site.
Overrated and Tier List actually rotate now. A while back one of you told us the same names kept turning up, and you were more right than we knew. We measured a full simulated year of both games and found the daily picker was quietly broken: the maths it used to spread players across days was losing precision, so Overrated or Underrated could only ever reach a quarter of its 600 player pool and Tier List an eighth, and 17 days a year the tier list dealt exactly yesterday's board again. Both games now draw from the same properly mixed shuffle the rest of our dailies use: measured over the same year, they reach essentially the whole pool, never repeat a day, and turn over almost the entire board every single day. The two games still never share a player on the same day, and that rule is now enforced in one place instead of two files trying to stay in sync. Budget Builder got a check of its own while we were in there: every daily board demand is now proven winnable inside the budget in all three eras, which caught one that was not (the 90+ star demand was mathematically impossible in the 2015 and 2007 markets, where money was smaller and no player rates that high, so it now only appears in the Today market).
A broken save can never take a game down again. Saves live on your device, and a bad update or an interrupted write can leave one mangled. So we built a test that loads every game on the site with its saved data deliberately wrecked six different ways, and one game failed it: the World Cup bracket could crash to a blank page if its saved picks were damaged, taking your whole bracket screen with it. Fixed: it now clears anything unreadable and starts you fresh instead of dying. Every other game on the site already survived all six kinds of wreckage, and the test now runs with the rest of our checks so no future game can ship without passing it.
Soccer Career: loans, and an honest word about your minutes. The transfer window now tells you straight how much football your club is planning to give you next season, about X to Y league games, and that projection comes from the exact same maths the season is simulated with, so it cannot sugarcoat. If you are young, under contract and the answer is "not much" at a big club, the loan window opens: clubs further down offer you a season of real football, your contract and wage stay put, and the record books mark the year honestly as a loan. Under the hood two long-standing quirks got fixed too: the big club training boost used to apply in full even if you never played (it now has to be earned with minutes), and your development used to react to last season instead of the one you just played. Play well now, grow now.
New game: Wonderkid Factory. Our second idle game, and this one grows people instead of grandstands. You run a youth academy: scouts bring kids through the door, coaches grow them toward a ceiling only better scouts can read, and the whole game is deciding when to sell. Fees pay extra for a kid with room left to grow, that promise fades through his early twenties, and at 24 he walks out free. Sell your stars on deadline day for half as much again, move the academy up through six regions, and every reputation star you earn is yours forever. Every kid is generated, so no real footballer ever turns up in your dorms. It sits in the Soccer section, saves on your device, and keeps working at half speed for up to eight hours while you are away.
You can actually read the site now, everywhere, and use it without a mouse. We measured every word on every page against the contrast bar accessibility guidelines set, and a lot of quiet grey text plus a few loud buttons came up short: the main green button printed white on green at under half the required contrast, and one World Cup group was drawing its own headings in a colour you could barely see at all. All of it is fixed, by raising only the brightness of the words so every page still looks like itself. Keyboard players get a real deal too: every page now draws a visible ring around whatever is focused, and a hidden skip link jumps straight past the menu to the game. Screen readers now hear every square on the Connect 4 board and every score box in the World Cup predictor announced properly instead of silence.
An iPhone pass, and a daily puzzle bug it caught. A lot of people play this site on a phone, and most of those phones are iPhones, so we went looking for the things that work in one browser and quietly break in Safari. One was real: Minefield worked out which day it was by formatting the date into text and reading it back, which is a shape Safari can refuse outright. That would have left the daily board unable to build at all on an iPhone. It now reads the date properly, and produces exactly the same puzzle it always did. Alongside that, every busy page was checked at phone size for anything hanging off the side of the screen (nothing does), the daily board was checked to actually deal, and every control inside a page now has to be big enough for a thumb, which caught a link we shipped last week at half the size it should have been.
You can manage your country in Club Manager. Win enough at a big enough club and your national federation calls, and you can hold both jobs the way a real manager occasionally does. Club football carries on exactly as it is; the country only plays between seasons. The tournaments are the real ones, with real qualifying groups and the actual slot counts each confederation gets, run on the same international engine our Soccer Career has used for months. What you bring is a small edge rather than a magic wand: a top manager makes his country meaningfully more likely to win a tournament, but the players still decide most of it. Win one and it goes in the same cabinet as a league title. Fail to qualify for a tournament your country should have reached and the federation moves on without you.
Getting sacked is a chapter now, not the last page. In Club Manager, losing your job used to end the save: one screen, a share button, start again from scratch. That is the one moment a manager game should never end on. Now the sack puts you out of work with your record intact, and clubs start calling. The offers are real clubs from the real pyramid with real briefs, and what you get is what you earned: trophies and title finishes open doors, relegations shut them, and the size of the club that just let you go still counts for something. Waiting is a genuine decision, because every week without a job cools the market and the job you hold out for may be gone when you finally say yes. And it can never dead end: sit out long enough with nothing on the table and somebody down the pyramid will take a chance on you. Take a job and you start next season there, with your cabinet, your record, and a board that has its own ideas about what counts as success.
Club Manager clubs have shirt sponsors now. Whenever your club has no deal, the Finances desk puts three offers on the table, and they are three genuinely different bets rather than three numbers: the biggest guaranteed cheque with nothing riding on it, a smaller one with a serious bonus for winning the league, or the smallest locked in for four seasons with a little extra for a top half finish. The money goes into the same kitty as everything else, one payment a season, and the bonus arrives at the end of the season that earns it. Offers scale with the club you are actually running: a giant is worth several times a promoted side, Europe is worth a third again, and a trophy cabinet counts. Leave for another job and the deal stays behind, because it belonged to the club and not to you. Every sponsor is invented, checked against the real companies that sponsor real clubs, same rule as the players.
No invented player anywhere on the site wears a real person's name. Last week's fix covered the two generators behind soccer careers. This one covers all ten, every engine that invents a player, checked by multiplying out every name each can possibly produce and comparing the lot against every real player the site ships. Four more real people turned up: the youth academy could hand you a kid named after two real footballers, the hockey front office could list a real goaltender as a free agent, and the new international pools could produce a real South African international. All fixed. The era world filler was the interesting one, because it already refused any name matching a Club Manager player and was simply blind to everyone else: five names it could still produce belong to real people on other parts of the site, and those are now blocked by name. From here a new generator cannot ship without being checked.
A full search-visibility pass over every page on the site. We went through all 124 pages and made sure each one either earns a place in Google and can be reached from inside the site, or says plainly that it does not want one. Four things came out of it. The games retired over the last few months kept working links but were in no menu and no sitemap, so the only way to land on one was a search result with no way onward; they now tell search engines to skip them while still working for anyone with an old bookmark. Profile and password reset pages were quietly indexable and are not any more, and the admin screens are closed off properly. The College Games Hub, a real page listing every college game, was linked from nowhere at all: it is in the sitemap now and reachable from the College Sports heading on the home page. And the biggest one: the write-up block at the bottom of every game page used a second page-title heading, so around forty pages were telling Google they had two titles. That one taught us something on the way. The obvious fix, demoting it everywhere, would have been worse, because 82 of those pages have no headline of their own and would have ended up with none at all. So the block now reads the page it is on: it steps down where a game already has a title, and provides the title where a game does not. A sweep of all 115 submitted pages in a real browser confirmed exactly one heading each, and nothing looks any different.
Your national team screen shows the actual starting eleven. The Squad screen in Soccer Career used to answer the question with a rank, a number of places and a score, which told you where you stood without ever showing you the team. It is a team sheet now: eleven men in a 4-3-3, front line to keeper, each with his shirt, his name and his rating, and your own card lit up in gold when you are in it. Miss out and you still see the eleven that went without you, with the man keeping you out named underneath. One more thing came out of building it, and it is worth saying plainly: the ten teammates are invented, and while writing the generator we audited the one that already existed and found it could produce seventy six real footballers' exact names, plus four more in the career rivalry system. A generated player has never been allowed to wear a real person's name here, so both generators now draw from pools whose entire combination space is checked, name by name, against every real player on the site. Nearly five thousand invented names across thirty four naming traditions, zero of them belonging to anybody real, and the check runs on every build from now on.
Stadium Tycoon got a boardroom, and selling up finally has a decision in it. Every sale now pays legacy points: one for the sale itself, plus one for every division that ground climbed. Cash out the second the bar fills and you bank one. Push the ladder to The Summit first and you bank ten. Spend them in the new Legacy drawer on eight permanent perks that survive every future club: Boardroom Sway (+10% income a level, up to half again forever), Rolling Investment so the next ground opens with money already in the till, Deep Roots for a faster fanbase, Veteran Payroll so every staff member earns more, a Steady Dressing Room that keeps half your win streak through a defeat instead of losing it all, an Away Day Deal that lifts idle earnings to 80% for 12 hours, Stadium Voltage that charges Matchday Hype two minutes quicker, and Gold Polish that stretches the golden whistles. The whole board costs exactly 100 points, so it is a long game with an actual end. Anyone who already has reputation stars gets a point for each one, automatically, on the next visit.
Playing now counts the moment you play. The header's games-played number has always moved when you finished something with a score, which quietly meant nine of the biggest sims never counted at all: the four Front Office games, the four My Career games and Stadium Tycoon. Fixed sitewide. A played GM week counts, a played career season counts, and the idle game counts once per sitting on your first real action, a tap, a purchase or a hire, however long you stay. The lines we held: loading a page is never playing it, creating a career is not playing one either, and none of these marks carries a score, so leaderboards and best-score tables are exactly as before. Club Manager and Soccer Career already worked this way; now the whole site does. Verified by counting the actual requests a real browser sends: one per played week, one per played season, one per idle sitting, zero for just looking around.
Every player wears his real flag, and the market filters by nation. Club Manager's transfer market grew its last missing filter: nationality, with 132 real nations drawn from your own world's market and a live player count next to each. Every real player on the market and in your squad now carries his real nationality's flag. The detail we sweated: nationality is resolved inside each era separately, because a name is not a person. The 2010 world's Aaron Ramsey is the Welshman at Arsenal; today's is the English midfielder; each wears his own flag in his own world. Made-up academy players honestly get no flag at all. All 6,262 real players across the four worlds are covered, checked name by name against the same market data everything else runs on.
Release clauses, and the contracts desk finds the wall. Club Manager renewals are a real negotiation now: re-sign an expiring player at his full ask, or 12 percent cheaper with a release clause written in at 1.5 times his value that day. The clause is a live exit door, not flavor text: any club can pay it, the trigger chance follows how much of a bargain it has become as he grows, a met clause cannot be rejected or blocked, an ignored one executes itself on deadline day, and the only way to delete one is a later full-price renewal. The desk lives on the Squad tab with every door you have granted in plain sight, bargain warnings included. And an honest confession: the contracts screen was built months ago and never wired into the page, so re-signing was impossible this whole time while deals quietly ran out. Fixed, tested in a real browser, sorry about your free-transfer departures.
The GM faces the press room. All four Front Office games (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) now put you at the podium: an introduction presser the day you take the job, the champion's podium if you win it all, the accountability scrum when you miss the owner's ask, and the trade question after a headline deal in a steady year. Every answer comes in three registers, measured, candid or bold, and moves your trust upstairs for real, with the bold answers genuinely gambling. The big ones go further: promise a repeat at the podium and next season's mandate ratchets a tier harder, ask the room for patience after a collapse and the bar softens, at a small cost, because ownership hates hearing smallness. Quiet mandate-met summers stay quiet, no filler pressers.
The 2015-16 era gets Serie A. Club Manager's Leicester season now runs three leagues: Italy joins England and Spain with all 20 real clubs of the 2015-16 Serie A, from Juventus chasing a fifth straight Scudetto (Dybala newly arrived from Palermo, Pogba still in Turin, Vidal honestly gone to Bavaria) to Higuaín's record-chasing Napoli, Totti's Roma with Džeko and Salah newly in, and little Carpi in their one top flight season. That's 60 real clubs and nearly 1,100 real players in that era, every one at their real 2015 age and value, with the famous summer moves applied across all three leagues and the thin squads honestly marked.
GM trades became real phone calls. In all four Front Office games (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB), proposing a trade no longer gets a flat yes or no. The other GM answers like a person: a fair swap gets the handshake, a close one gets "add a pick and we are done", a stretch gets "he is off the table, but we would move THIS man instead" naming a real player, and an insult gets the dial tone. You can stand firm exactly once per call, and it genuinely gambles: hold leverage (a young piece, a partner thin at that position) and they blink, push a weak hand and the price goes up, sometimes killing the deal. The trade finder still exists for lazy afternoons.
Croatia joins Club Manager. The SuperSport HNL is the twentieth real league: Dinamo Zagreb fresh off their 26th title with Livaković back home in goal, Hajduk Split on the other side of the Eternal Derby, Rijeka rebuilding after the sales that followed their own title, and Rudeš up as the promoted side. That makes 20 leagues, 330 clubs and over 3,600 real players, with the thin small-club squads honestly marked as partial like always.
The home page wakes up as you scroll. Game tiles now rise into place section by section as they enter your screen, each grid in a quick stagger, once, and never again on the same visit. Search results stay instant on purpose, nothing moves for people who ask their device for reduced motion, and no tile can ever be lost behind the effect: the curtain only decorates the entrance.
The GM verdict got its moment too. All four Front Office games (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) now stage the season's end instead of printing it: the champion line slams in, ownership's verdict lands a beat later, the playoff results walk in one by one, and if YOUR roster won it all the card pulses gold under falling confetti. The rule is strict on purpose: confetti belongs to the GM whose build won the title and to nobody else, a good grade is not a parade, and a firing gets one honest shake and a grey card, never a celebration.
Every career season gets its curtain. In all four career games (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB My Career), playing a season now opens a staged reveal instead of dumping text in a feed: the year slams in, the team result lands with the weight it deserves, winning it all pours confetti, and the season's story (the camp battle, the awards, the pressers, the body holding up or not) walks in line by line in the order it happened. Losses stay quiet on purpose, a suspended year gets a deliberately muted card, and the stat line is your true final from the first frame, never a number counting through values you did not put up.
Denmark and Switzerland join Club Manager. Two more real leagues: the Danish Superliga (FC Copenhagen's Champions League regulars, Brøndby's derby, AGF the reigning champions) and the Swiss Super League (Basel's trophy room, Young Boys' plastic-pitch fortress, Thun the surprise champions, and Vaduz playing over the border from Liechtenstein). That makes 19 leagues and 320 clubs, every squad built from real market data, with the thin small-club squads honestly marked as partial.
The press room opened in every career game. All four career sims (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) now have a press that actually watched your season. Win it all and you take the championship podium. Collapse and you face the accountability scrum. Change teams and the new city wants its introduction, ride the bench and a beat reporter asks the role question, win MVP and the trophy interview follows, play into a contract year and the future question never stops. Every presser is three answers: the safe one, the honest one, and the fiery one, and the fiery one genuinely gambles, sometimes the clip runs all week and the city is yours, sometimes it runs all week for the wrong reasons. That completes the whole Club Manager playbook, roles, press, talks, market and boards, across every sport on the site.
The depth chart reached the ice and the diamond. NHL and MLB My Career got their version of the chart, with the sport truths kept: no rookie goalie walks into a number one job on draft capital alone (backup goalies get their honest twenty-odd starts), fourth-liners play every night on half the ice time, bench bats get pinch hits and spot starts, long-relief arms wait for the phone, and relievers are exempt because the bullpen ladder already lives in whether you are the closer. Same camp battles, same stakes, same rule that a ring-chase signing can cost a mid player his spot.
Nobody hands you the job any more. NFL and NBA My Career grew a real depth chart. Top picks open as starters, everyone else opens behind an incumbent whose level matches the roster, and every offseason is a camp battle: close the gap and you take the job, decline hard and a starter can lose his. Backup seasons are honest spot duty (quarterbacks hold clipboards, second units get bench minutes), they wear on your morale and your fame, and the free agency choice just got sharper: signing with a stacked contender can cost a mid player the starting spot, so the money, the ring odds and the role are now a real three-way call. NBA Sixth Man of the Year finally goes to actual bench seasons. Old saves are untouched, you were the starter all along.
Every game page now points you somewhere good next. The little "more games" links at the bottom of each page became a proper block of six tiles, and the picks are smarter: games from the same sport, one from the next section over, and a couple of surprises from across the site, chosen the same way every time so you can find your way back. Under the hood this means every single game on the site is now reachable from every other one by following those tiles, which is as good for people who wander as it is for search engines that do the same.
The GM games got owners, and owners get impatient. All four Front Office sims (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) now hand you an ownership mandate the day you take the job: a loaded roster is told to win it all, a mid one to make the postseason, a bare one to hit an honest win number, and the ask resets every offseason from where your roster really stands. The hub shows your trust upstairs (0 to 100) and a live read on whether you are on pace, season end brings a graded verdict, and a championship buys years of peace. Miss badly for long enough and you are fired, the save ends, and you take another front office. A defending champion is never asked for less than a deep run. The GM chair finally has stakes.
Free agency got real in every career sim. All four US career games (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB My Career) replaced the old two-button contract call with an actual market. When your deal expires you now get a window of competing offers from real named teams, each with its own salary, contract length and roster quality, and the roster number is the exact strength your next seasons simulate on. Contenders lowball you because they can, rebuilds overpay because they must, and you can push any offer for more, once. Push a weak case and the offer can vanish, but your own team never walks away, so a career can never be stranded without a deal. Works in the throwback eras too, sealed to era teams and era money.
Austria and Greece join Club Manager. Two more real leagues: the Austrian Bundesliga (take Salzburg's machine, Rapid's crowd or Sturm's champions) and the Super League Greece (Olympiacos, Panathinaikos, AEK and PAOK, one of Europe's angriest title races). That makes 17 leagues and 296 clubs, every squad from real market data, with the small-club squads honestly marked where the records run thin.
Manage 2005-06. The era picker reaches all the way back to Ronaldinho's Ballon d'Or season: Mourinho's back to back Chelsea, Henry's Arsenal, Gerrard fresh off Istanbul, a 17 year old Messi on Barcelona's bench, and Michael Owen arriving at Newcastle. All 40 clubs of that Premier League and La Liga, over 740 real players at their real 2005 ages and values, that summer's moves applied both ways, and the boards even call the second European prize by its right name, the UEFA Cup. This is as far back as the records honestly reach, so there is no invented 2000 era and never will be.
Manage the Leicester season. Club Manager's era picker now offers 2015-16: the real Premier League and La Liga of the year Leicester won it at 5000 to 1. All 40 clubs, over 760 real players at their real 2015 ages and values, with that famous summer's moves applied: Sterling and De Bruyne newly at City, Pedro at Chelsea, Vardy, Mahrez and Kante at their honest pre-title level, MSN at Barcelona. The era's giants rate like the legends they were, prime Messi and Ronaldo above anyone in today's game, and it is a sealed world: nothing from 2026 can leak in, and there is no Conference League because it did not exist yet.
Every career sim has a throwback era now. All four US career games grew an era picker on the create screen. NFL My Career can start in 2005, with the Raiders in Oakland, the Chargers in San Diego and the Rams in St. Louis. NBA My Career can start in 2003-04, the 29 team league with the SuperSonics still in Seattle and no Charlotte yet. NHL My Career can start in 2006-07, with the Thrashers in Atlanta and the Coyotes in Phoenix. MLB My Career can start in 2004, the Expos' last Montreal summer. Every era is a sealed world checked against the real season records: old franchises, old money, and your whole career stays inside it.
Found your own club in Club Manager. The picker grew a fourth option: create your own club, in any league, either era. Name it, build your crest from scratch (six shield shapes, six patterns, your colors, your initials), name your ground, and pick your backing: 15, 40 or 90 million. Your club takes the league place of the division's weakest side, starts with a squad of 24 generated players (all honestly marked), and then you buy real stars off the real market to climb. The boards stay honest about it too: 90 million in the Eredivisie gets told to win it, the same money in the Premier League gets told to survive first, and the create screen quotes your board's demand live while you build.
You can manage in 2010 now. Club Manager's era picker has a real past season: the 2010-11 Premier League and La Liga, all 40 clubs, over 800 real players with their real 2010 ages and values. Take prime Messi's Barcelona with Xavi and Iniesta, Cristiano's young Madrid with Kaka and a just-signed Ozil, Rooney's United, or try keeping Blackpool up. It is a sealed world too: no 2026 wonderkid can leak into your 2010 market, and there is no Conference League because it did not exist yet. Club Manager also covers 13 leagues and 270 clubs today, with Portugal, Scotland, Turkey, Belgium and the German second division all playable.
New game: Stadium Tycoon. Our idle game. You run a tiny club's matchday empire: fans pay you every second, a live toy match pays crowd-sized bonuses for every goal, win streaks light a flame that multiplies everything, and nine upgrade tracks take you from a fence with two benches to a ground that hums. Charge up Matchday Hype and press it to double everything for a minute. It even earns at half speed while you are away, and when the club outgrows its ground you can sell up for a permanent Reputation star and do it all again, faster.
Boards talk like boards, and the site celebrates like a stadium. Club Manager boards now demand the actual prize: win the league, reach the Champions League, avoid the drop, never "finish top 6". The second and third biggest clubs in a league want the title too, exactly like real life. Full time got proper drama: the verdict slams in, scorers roll through in minute order, wins pulse, trophies pour confetti. And every game on the whole site now throws confetti when you win, each with its own fall.
Profile cleanup: the favourite game picker now lists every game on the site instead of an old partial list, and the Fav Sport stat uses real sport categories (and simply hides instead of saying "General"). We also verified the stats pipeline end to end against the live database: points, leaderboard rank, recently played and best scores are all recording correctly.
Club Manager got a proper home screen. No more one long page. Your club home is now a dashboard of boxes (Board, Inbox, Calendar, League, Cups, Manager, Treatment, Rival watch, Market, Cabinet) and tapping one opens its own screen. The rival viewer is in: tap ANY club in any table and see their full squad, values, ratings, form and standing. And switching mentality on the tactics screen finally looks like something: your outfield line visibly pushes up for attacking or drops deep for defensive, with a little surge animation on every switch.
Your players now text you. Club Manager grew a dressing room with opinions: benched stars demand starts (promise them and then bench them, see what happens), unhappy players threaten moves, and the group chat energy is real, from a Lamborghini in the training ground fountain to a teammate whose podcast episode one is titled "Why My Manager Does Not Understand Football". Every player now carries a full stat line too: appearances, goals, assists, cards, clean sheets and an average match rating, plus a season calendar showing your recent results and what's coming, byes included.
Club Manager went worldwide and up to date. Nine leagues are now playable: the big five with their real 2026-27 lineups (Coventry, Ipswich and Hull are up, West Ham went down, Schalke are back), plus the EFL Championship, the Saudi Pro League, both MLS conferences and the Eredivisie. 186 clubs, over 2,900 real players. And the squads now reflect the summer window we all just watched: Lewandowski at Chicago Fire, ter Stegen on loan at Ajax, Griezmann at Orlando, Morgan Rogers at Chelsea, Tonali at Spurs. We verified the window move by move and stamped every squad screen with the date it reflects.
Club Manager transfers are a real game now. Clicking a player opens an actual negotiation: the selling club sets an ask, you lowball, haggle or meet it, and their patience runs out if you insult them. Rival clubs jump into your deals and start bidding wars, and they will close YOUR deal if you dither. About a third of players carry release clauses you can just pay for an instant signing. You can take two players on loan per season. AI clubs slide bids for your own stars into your inbox, and rejecting them can sour the player. Plus a Latest Transfers feed sortable by biggest fees, and a manager career card with your record, biggest win, worst defeat, priciest buy and best sale.
Club Manager just got its biggest upgrade ever. Every single club in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 is now playable, 96 clubs total, each with its real 2026 squad, ages and market values (yes, Lewandowski is at Barca). Pick your nation, then your league, then your team, and confirm without ever scrolling. The board hands you a proper objective list like a real manager game: league finish, a cup run, Europe, finishing above your rival, a goals quota, all graded live and at season end. The transfer market now carries nearly 2,000 real players at their actual market values instead of inflated made-up fees, opposition goals come from real scorers, and the cup finally tells you which cup it is.
Every multi step game now follows one rule: after you tap something, the next step appears in view on its own. Fourteen games got the treatment, from Soccer Career's ceremonies to the Banker's offer in Squad Deal to the week results in the Dynasty sims. No more tapping a button and staring at nothing while the result renders below the fold.
Player Stock Market got a second way to play: Names only. The classic game hides the names and gives you the numbers. The new unlimited style does the exact opposite, you see exactly who everyone is and none of the values, so you are buying purely on reputation. Find out whether you actually know ball or just know prices.
College Grid went from 15 puzzles to 75. It used to repeat every fifteen days, so if you play daily you had seen every board four times over. Now it runs eleven weeks without repeating, with 26 new programs, the Pac-12, five new awards (Thorpe, Doak Walker, Outland, Butkus, Conference Player of the Year) and new angles like Pro Bowler, Super Bowl winner, Played Two Sports and Transferred Schools.
One College Grid board was impossible to win. An old puzzle paired Oregon with National Champion, and Oregon has never won a national title, so that square could never be filled. Once every fifteen days the daily was unwinnable through no fault of yours. Fixed, and every one of the 75 boards is now checked so all nine squares have real answers.
All five career games are now done. NHL My Career got the last mega round, about 200 additions: five positions (C, LW, RW, D, G) with 17 archetypes, 90 new offseason crossroads, 49 things to buy, and your face on the create screen. Wingers split into left and right, the blue line got a puck mover, and goalies got a workhorse who starts 65 games.
NHL My Career has a dirty side too: an envelope on the bench with a bounty in it, a twelve year contract whose tail years everyone knows you will never play, a doctor in Europe with a suitcase, a man who pays to know the starting goalie an hour early, and a junior agent holding paper you signed at sixteen. Six new awards as well, so a shutdown defenseman finally has something to chase: Rocket Richard, Art Ross, Selke, Jennings, Masterton and Comeback Player.
MLB My Career got the mega treatment, about 200 additions. Eleven real positions (SP, RP, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, RF, DH) with 33 archetypes, and relievers finally have their own line with saves and holds instead of pretending to be starters. Catchers, shortstops and designated hitters all hit differently now, and each position falls off at the age it actually falls off.
MLB My Career has a dirty side built from the sport's own history: a camera in center field and a trash can behind the dugout, something on the glove worth 300 rpm, a clinic in Florida that beats the testing panel, tipping pitches to a man who likes first innings, and an academy that takes a third of a teenager's signing bonus. The commissioner's office tracks all of it.
Eight new MLB awards too. The game only had Rookie of the Year, All-Star, MVP and Cy Young, so a glove first shortstop or a lights out closer could play fifteen years and win nothing. Added Gold Glove, Silver Slugger, batting title, home run crown, ERA title, saves leader and Comeback Player.
NBA My Career got the mega treatment too, about 200 additions. Five real positions instead of three buckets (PG, SG, SF, PF, C) with 15 archetypes, so a Point God and a Paint Beast live completely different careers. Build your face before the draft, 90 new offseason crossroads, and 43 new things to buy across seven aisles.
NBA My Career has a dirty side as well: take the under on your own rebound totals, fake a load management injury for a bettor, coast through March for lottery odds, or take the agent advance nobody is supposed to mention. The league tracks it all, and an indefinite suspension costs you a full season.
Scoring got a realism fix in NBA My Career. A 78 rated guard was averaging 27 points a night and an 88 was averaging 37, which is a top ten season in league history. Now a solid starter lands around 17, an All Star around 25, and only an all time scorer having a career year gets near 38.
NFL My Career got the same treatment Soccer Career just got, about 250 additions. Five new positions (tight end, linebacker, corner, edge rusher and kicker) each with their own real stat lines, their own awards and their own aging curve, so a shutdown corner and a franchise quarterback are completely different careers. You build your player's face before the draft, there are 90 new offseason crossroads, and 43 new things to buy across seven aisles.
NFL My Career has a dirty side too. Sell the real injury report to an offshore book, put money in the bounty envelope, take the program the league cannot test for yet, or let your agent skim your signing bonus. League security tracks all of it on a hidden meter, and at the top of it is an indefinite suspension: you lose the season, the money gets seized, and one rebuilding team calls with the minimum.
Also in NFL My Career: progression is much slower now (1 to 2 rating points a year instead of 2 to 4), and interception numbers got fixed. A 95 rated quarterback used to throw 12 picks a year, which no elite passer does. Elite seasons now land around 8, average starters 13, bad starters 17.
Soccer Career got the biggest update in the site's history: over 400 additions in one go. You now build your player's actual face before kickoff (skin tone, hairstyle and colour, beard, boots, accessory, and a signature celebration that gets described every time you score), and that face follows you onto the Ballon d'Or stage and into your retirement. The club that raised you now always offers you a first team deal, so you can finally spend a whole career at your boyhood club, and they can call you home again later.
Soccer Career also got a dirty side. Betting syndicates, bent officials, transfer kickbacks, offshore accounts, a nightclub that launders money, even buying Ballon d'Or votes. Every dirty choice heats up a hidden investigation meter, and if you stay hot too long: dawn raid, trial, prison, and a comeback from three divisions down. There is always a way out if you want one.
More of everything in Soccer Career: 95 new clubs across 5 continents, 66 new flags, 47 new things to buy in three new shop aisles (Flex, Family, and a Shady aisle that only appears once you have something to hide), 109 new life events, 20 new newspaper stories, and 6 new animations including confetti on trophy nights. Progression is much slower now too, so hitting world class is a decade of work instead of three good seasons.
Two Soccer Career bugs killed. Winning the World Cup used to break the game completely: the celebration buttons crashed and there was no way to continue, so your best moment was a dead end. It now has a proper winner's speech with four real choices. And the Ballon d'Or can no longer snub you: goals were capped so low in the voting formula that a 45 goal season could not even get nominated. Post the best season in the world and the trophy is yours.
The whole site got dramatically faster. Everything used to arrive as one giant script before the first game could load; now each game ships as its own small piece, so first loads are about 85 percent lighter and pages you have visited open instantly. Lost visitors also get a proper 404 page now, one that points you at the good games instead of a dead end.
A big correctness sweep on the dailies. Eight games that quietly flipped their puzzle at the wrong midnight (UTC or your local clock) now all roll over at midnight Eastern like the rest of the site, and NFL Career Path's daily finally locks when you finish it instead of handing you a fresh run on refresh.
Honest scoreboards everywhere: the NBA, MLB and NHL grids no longer refund your wrong guesses when you reload mid-daily, Baseball Career's final clue pays the 100 points it always advertised, the last hint in Missing Five and Missing Nine actually unlocks on your final guess, The Medal Games' seventh clue now reveals the athlete's initials instead of charging you for nothing, Baseball Connections stopped claiming 4/4 groups on a loss, Mystery Box shows a real error screen when packs fail to load, and Sports Millionaire's Ballon d'Or questions now work for everyone.
Rebuild Challenge got a full rebuild of its own. Budgets now scale with the club (65M at modest clubs up to 200M at giants), you flip one of ten fortune cards after hiring your coach, you commit your sales BEFORE the market opens, and the board deals a third demand tied to the club's identity. Superclubs want a galactico. Small clubs want the books balanced. Miss one and they sell your best player.
Conquest's Daily Challenge is now the real deal, in all four sports. Every player gets the same date-seeded season (same map, same fixtures, same results), so scores are finally comparable. One scored run per day, streaks if you keep showing up, and a share line built for the group chat. Free Play stays unlimited.
Soccer Career got a life. Pick a personality (Showman, Ice Cold, Hothead, Professor, or Enigma), sign an agent (or let your cousin handle it, good luck), and live through 40+ new off-pitch storylines: cursed boots, lookalike scams, pet pigeons, podcast feuds and more, all with real consequences for your career. Smoother animations on the big moments too.
Real guides on every game page. Every single game now has a proper writeup at the bottom of its page: how to play, the rules that matter, an example run, strategy tips, and an FAQ. No more guessing what a game is about before you click in.
New About, Contact, and What's New pages (you are reading one right now).
A Report a bug button in the footer of every page. Reports land straight in our inbox with the page attached, so fixes happen fast.
Sign in got a full overhaul: instant signup with no email confirmation wait, Google sign in, and a working Forgot Password flow. Your profile now shows Games Today and Days in a Row.
The biggest content drop yet: My Career modes for NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL where you live a whole player career, Front Office GM sims for all four leagues with real rosters and cap rules, Conquest imperialism maps for NHL and MLB, CFB Dynasty and CBB Dynasty college sims, a deeper Soccer Career with new story arcs, Club Manager with real leagues, and Budget Builder v2.
Quality of life: poll results show your vote instantly, the home page remembers your scroll spot when you come back from a game, and hundreds of small copy cleanups across the whole site.
A big honesty pass on answer checking. The grid and board game validators got much stricter, so nonsense answers stopped sneaking through as correct.
Retired a batch of games that were not fun enough and fixed old favorites instead. Rarity Round came back with its scoring bug squashed and the board reveal it always deserved.
Verified lineup data across the Missing XI family and loaded big new puzzle batches into the grids and Connections games.
DoUKnowBall launched with the first wave of daily soccer games. It has grown to eleven sports and over 100 games since, and it is still growing.
What's New
The running log of what changed around here, newest first. We ship a lot. If something looks off after an update, hit the Report a bug button in the footer and we will get on it.
August 2026
July 2026
Spring 2026
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Privacy Policy Terms of ServiceAll team names, competition names, logos and trademarks are property of their respective owners. DoUKnowBall is an independent fan project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the NFL, NBA, UFC, NHL, MLB, FIFA, UEFA, the Premier League, the English Football League, LaLiga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1, the Eredivisie, MLS, the Saudi Pro League, the IOC, the NCAA, F1, the PGA Tour, NASCAR, the ATP or the WTA. Player names and statistics are used for identification and commentary only. © 2026 DoUKnowBall
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