⚽️ Season 16: Back on the Touchline

Over the last few months, a lot of work has gone into improving how new managers discover and start playing Footium. That work is now showing real impact!

A revamped sign-up experience, alongside features like Friends Leagues, helped bring 650+ caretaker managers into the game last season, 50%+ increase our previous record. That’s a meaningful step forward, and a credit to the work happening across marketing, onboarding and infrastructure.

The focus remains on making the caretaker experience clearer, reducing friction around season rollover, and improving the path from signing up to actively managing a club, alongside a number of quality-of-life updates and new additions.

📅 Season 16 Dates

Pre-Season Begins: Thursday, 12th February

First Matches Kick Off: Thursday, 19th February

✨ TL;DR - Season 16

🧭 New Caretaker Homepage: A clearer onboarding hub with simple objectives to help new managers get started faster.

🚀 650+ Caretakers: New sign-up flow and Friends Leagues helped onboard over 50%+ our previous caretaker record last season.

🔁 Caretaker Continuation Flow: Clear options at rollover to continue managing, upgrade to ownership, or start fresh.

🛠 No Maintenance Mode: The game now stays accessible during season rollover, with only brief action limits.

💵 USD Pricing: Starter bundles now paid for in USDC instead of ETH.

👤 Owner Profiles: Set your manager name and link a verified email, adding more personalisation with more planned for this feature over time.

🌍 New Nation: Colombia: Colombia joins the Footium player pool, adding more variety across squads and leagues.

🪙 Legendary Auctions Return: Legendary Auctions are back during pre-season, offering another chance to compete for legacy changing players.

📌 Team Focus Update: A short update at the end of the article on where development is currently focused and what that means going forward.

🧭 New Caretaker Homepage & Signup Flow

Towards the end of Season 15, we introduced a new Caretaker Homepage, and in Season 16 it becomes a core part of the caretaker experience from the start.

The homepage acts as a central hub for caretakers, helping guide new managers through the game with:

• Clear objectives to work through
• Simple prompts around what to do next
• Direct links to key actions and features
• A daily reward claim

As part of this, the Caretaker Homepage also introduces a daily claim mechanic. Each day a caretaker logs in, they can claim a free coaching session, encouraging regular check-ins and helping managers engage with core systems early.

While this is an important step for onboarding, it’s also a foundation we plan to build on more broadly. The structure behind the Caretaker Homepage opens the door to future objective-based systems, progression prompts and daily engagement mechanics that can extend beyond caretakers and into the main game over time!

Alongside this, new caretaker managers now enter the game through an improved sign-up flow. Rather than being assigned a random club, new managers are shown a small selection of clubs, complete with players, badges and colours, and can choose the club they want to manage.

Once selected, they’re dropped straight into their trial with that specific club, allowing them to start managing immediately with a squad they’ve actively chosen.

🛠 Season Rollover Without Maintenance Mode

Historically, season rollover required a period of maintenance mode where the game was fully inaccessible. We know a lot of you were not massive fans of this… 😅

From Season 16 onwards, maintenance mode is no longer required. The game will remain accessible during season rollover, allowing managers to log in, view their club and explore the game as normal. This also means that new users can now sign up during rollover, rather than being blocked by a maintenance screen. Over the last two days, we’ve already seen new managers enter the game during this window, which was previously not possible.

There may still be short, early-morning windows where certain actions are temporarily unavailable while rollover completes, but these are limited and no longer block access to the game entirely.

This change reduces disruption at one of the most important moments in the season cycle and makes rollover feel significantly smoother.

🔁 Caretaker Continuation Flow

Season 16 introduces a clearer continuation flow for caretaker managers during season rollover.

Previously, caretakers whose clubs became unassigned could be left unsure about what would happen next. From Season 16 onwards, caretakers are guided through a clear set of options at rollover, depending on their situation.

These options include:

• Continuing to manage their previous club (where eligible)
• Upgrading to a full club owner to unlock rewards and long-term progression
• Starting again with a new caretaker club via the sign-up flow

The aim is to introduce real continuity for caretaker managers between seasons, rather than resetting their experience each time rollover happens. Active caretakers are now guided through what comes next, with a clear path forward instead of starting from scratch or needing to search for answers.

💵 USD Pricing

We’ve had consistent feedback that pricing shown in ETH can be confusing for new managers, particularly those who aren’t experienced with crypto.

To reduce this friction, the initial interaction with the game is now USD-denominated, with MoonPay using a USD default currency. This makes it easier for new users to understand pricing at a glance without needing to mentally convert from ETH or think about volatility.

For caretaker upgrades, purchases are handled in USDC on the backend, allowing pricing to remain stable while keeping the underlying settlement consistent.

The goal here is clarity first, especially during the earliest moments of a manager’s experience.

👤 Owner Profiles

Season 16 introduces Owner Profiles, adding more personalisation to how managers appear across the game.

Owners can now:

• Set their manager name, which will be shown throughout the game
• Link a verified email address to their account

The verified email allows us to send important updates and notifications when needed, while manager names help give clubs more identity and personality. This is an early step for Owner Profiles, and we plan to build on this feature over time with additional personalisation and profile-related improvements.

🌍 New Nation: Colombia & Legendary Auctions

Season 16 welcomes Colombia as the newest nation in Footium, expanding the player pool and adding more variety across squads and leagues.

Alongside this, Legendary Auctions return during pre-season. Legendary players have 95–99 potential, do not enter the game anywhere else, and can genuinely change the future of a club.

Colombian Legendary players will be introduced via these auctions, with Colombian prospects also appearing across academies throughout the season. You might just uncover the next James Rodríguez or Hugo Rodallega and shape their legacy from the very start.

All Legendary Auctions will run for 24 hours, with GBM rewards available for participation.

📅 Legendary Auction Schedule (UTC, February)

• Friday 13th, 1pm → Saturday 14th, 1pm
• Saturday 14th, 4pm → Sunday 15th, 4pm
• Sunday 15th, 6pm → Monday 16th, 3pm

📌 Team Focus Update

Our current development focus remains on onboarding, marketing and conversion. Ultimately, Footium needs to grow in order to keep adding to the gameplay and achieve the full potential of this game. The first 3 years of Footium were spent almost entirely on game development - Adding new features, testing through playtests, iterating and improving.

Getting to profitability with the current size of our paying userbase is not feasible, and therefore in the second half of 2025, we shifted focuses towards Growth. We initially worked to make the game accessible to all football gaming fans (wallet abstraction, in-game market, fiat onboarding, sessions etc.).

We are now focusing on making their initial experience with Footium great and getting as many new users as possible buying their own clubs and becoming full Footium managers - Contributing to the game economy and also supporting us to keep building the game in future.

Once managers are properly set up, Footium performs strongly in terms of retention and engagement. The biggest opportunity right now is growing the number of active, paying clubs in a sustainable way.

Recent changes like the new sign-up flow, Friends Leagues, the Caretaker Homepage and improved continuation flows are already showing impact, including large increases in caretaker signups despite similar marketing spend,

As this funnel continues to improve, our focus will increasingly shift towards retention and gameplay improvements, guided by real player behaviour and data. That work will inform future changes across areas like match dynamics, tactical depth, stadium upgrades, and other progression systems, without committing to fixed timelines before things are ready.

Season 16 ships a set of practical changes that improve onboarding, caretaker continuity and core quality-of-life across the game.

Some of these updates are more visible to new managers than existing ones, but they’re an important part of making sure Footium can grow and support deeper gameplay improvements over time We’d love as a team to be working on improving pure gameplay constantly, but ultimately this is a business and we need to ensure our ability to continue improving gameplay long into the future, and growth is a necessary part of that.

Thanks, as always, for playing and for continuing to share feedback.

We’ll see you in pre-season.

Forza Footium ⚽️