Football Career Online is a football management game you play in your browser. You never steer a player with a controller. You pick the club, the squad, the formation and the instructions, and the match engine plays the football. A season is built to be finished: a group of friends can play one in an evening, or spread it across a week. This guide walks you through your first one.
Step one: choose how you want to play
When you start a new career you choose one of three modes, and the choice changes the whole season.
- Career hands you a real club with its real squad. Pick a mid-table side and you inherit its strengths and its problems, then rebuild with your transfer budget.
- Auction gives every manager an empty squad and the same budget. Players come up one position at a time and you bid for them, against friends, computer managers, or both.
- Magic Nights drops you into a historical European cup season, with the clubs, squads and format of that year.
If this is your very first game, Career is the gentlest start: you already have a full squad and can learn the screens before worrying about money.
Step two: the settings that matter
The host of a career makes the big decisions once, and they apply to everyone. The league is one of six: the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1 or Liga Portugal. The budget can be low, normal, high or a custom figure. The transfer market can be open all season, open only in windows, or switched off. And the career can last a single season or keep going for up to fifty.
Pick one season if you want a clean, competitive finish. Pick keep going if you want players to age and develop, an academy to bring through, contracts to manage and a club that changes over the years.
Step three: choose your club
Every manager picks a different club. The club list shows each side's strength, so you can see who the title contenders are and who is fighting relegation. A strong club is the easier ride. A weaker one makes every win feel earned, and the bragging rights are bigger.
Step four: set your team
Open Squad and look at the Formation tab. Your eleven sits on a pitch in your chosen shape, and you can tap any player to swap him. The rating on each shirt is what that player is worth in that position today, after fitness and form. A centre-back playing at left-back loses some of his value, and the pitch shows you how much before you commit.
Then open Tactics and pick a formation and four instructions: mentality, pressing, passing and tempo. Each one is a trade-off, not an upgrade. Read our tactics guide before you go wild with everything set to attack.
Step five: press Ready
Nothing happens until every manager has pressed Ready. Then the whole matchweek is played at once, including the games between computer-run clubs, and the table, statistics and news update for everyone together. You can un-ready yourself right up until the last person clicks, so there is always time to change your mind.
If your group wants to move faster, anyone can propose playing ahead: to halfway, to the next transfer window, or to the end of the season. It only runs if everyone agrees, and anyone can stop it after the current matchweek.
Step six: watch the right numbers
Three things decide most seasons.
- Fitness. Players who play every week tire. Rotate the ones in the red, especially in a run of fixtures.
- Form. A player's recent ratings drift his form up or down, and form feeds straight into how well he plays.
- The transfer market. A good signing in a window can turn a season. A bad one can sink your budget.
Step seven: the end of the season
When the last matchweek is played, nobody sees the final table straight away. The whole group watches Season Wrapped together: the derbies, the awards, each manager's finish revealed one by one, and the race for the title week by week. After that the season is saved to everyone's profile, with your record, your top scorer and your biggest signing.
In a longer career, the next season then begins: players age, young ones grow, the academy brings in a new intake and the other leagues buy and sell.
Where to go next
Once you have one season behind you, the rest of these guides go deeper: how to win an auction, how negotiations work, which tactics suit which squad, and how to beat the computer managers on the hardest level.