🎓 Season 22: Build Your Academy, Build Your Future

We’re really excited about this Season. After a few months of focusing on the backend with live match V2, we always had Season 22 in mind to be a special one where the focus came fully back onto the game and pushing things that get you (and us!) excited! Behind the scenes, our focus on scaling has been paying off too: Season 21 brought more new managers into Footium than any season in our history, passing 2,500 unique caretakers in a season for the first time, alongside our most new club sales in a single season.

Season 22 brings Academy Upgrades, a brand-new club development system that lets you spend FC on your academy facilities to shape the future of your club. Alongside that, we've made improvements across the game, including game economy balancing, destroying zombie results, our first Companion App on iOS, card payments in the store, and a cheaper way for your mates to get into Footium with an exciting Season 22 referral bonus!

There's a lot to cover, so let's get into it.

📅 Season 22 Dates

Season 22 pre-season begins: Wednesday 12 August

First Season 22 matches: Tuesday 18 August

Free agents drop: Thursday 27 August

✨ TL;DR - Season 22

🎓 Academy Upgrades arrive: Spend FC to upgrade your academy facilities, with a full deep dive on what each building does landing next week.

🏗 Nobody starts from behind: Existing club owners get an FC grant big enough to get your academy up to where it stands today, and it is yours to spend how you like.

⚽️ Match Economy Balancing: Stamina matters more, low condition carries clearer injury risk, straight reds become less frequent and captain leadership has a larger impact.

🧟 Zombie results: We went looking for the cause of results that should not have been possible, and Season 22 makes them much less frequent

💷 Academy economy change: The studio share on academy player and free agent signings moves from 10% to 20%, so 80% goes to rewards instead of 90%.

📱 A Footium companion app: Live scores, goal alerts and a warning when your lineup is not set. On iOS first, as a beta test.

💳 Card payments in the store: Buy FC with a card through Crossmint, no wallet top-up needed.

👂 A new way in: A cheaper $40 club upgrade option that comes with loan players, yours until they retire but not for selling, built to make it easy to get a mate started, and it counts fully towards your referral rewards.

📖 Deep dives to follow: A full Academy Upgrades breakdown lands next week, with more on the match-balance changes before the first matches, plus a community quiz and a live AMA with George.

🎓 Academy Upgrades

The academy within Footium is one of the most unique and exciting things about the game. It’s our mechanism for you to bring in new players in a fresh and exciting way that differs from normal games where things like packs are the norm. Academy reveal day is always a day marked in every Footium manager's calendar, will you get a rare, will you get the position you want, will you get another Cape Verde player to complete your full XI.

New names, new potential, and the first look at the next generation of your club. Until now, that intake has been entirely down to chance within your division. It’s been something you’ve always wanted more control over, and Season 22 is where that begins.

Academy Upgrades let clubs spend FC to develop their academy facilities. Better facilities produce better prospects, exactly as they do at a real club. This is the next step in the club-development layer that began with stadium progression: stadiums gave your club a home that grows, and the academy gives it a future you shape.

How it works

Your academy will eventually be made up of 8 buildings each of which can be developed over time. Developing different buildings will influence unique things about the prospects your academy produces, including:

• How many prospects are discovered
• Their minimum potential
• Their current rating on arrival
• The likelihood of uncovering a rare gem
• The positions you are more likely to see
• Starting stamina and leadership
• The nationalities your academy scouts

What happens to existing clubs

We did not want Academy Upgrades to land as a wall of cost for clubs that have already invested heavily in their stadium.

At launch, every existing club owner receives an FC grant big enough to get your academy in-line with where it is today. Spend it matching what you already have, or put it somewhere else entirely and build the academy you actually want. Two clubs starting from the same place can end up with very different academies depending on what they prioritise.

Academy Maintenance begins after launch, with the first maintenance update taking place during the rollover into Season 23, giving you a full season to build before upkeep has any real consequences.

We will publish a full Academy Upgrades deep dive next week, covering every building, what each upgrade affects, costs, levels and how it all works. With it being another big update to the game, we will listen to your feedback and how you use this feature, but we're really excited to roll out the next major step in club development into the game.

⚽️ Economy balance and squad management

Season 22 includes significant game economy balancing, driven by Academy Upgrades alongside some necessary changes for the long-term health of the game.

Stamina Effect Increased

Stamina has been rebalanced to make individual stamina ratings more meaningful across a season. High-stamina players will be able to contribute consistently across more matches, while lower-stamina players will tire sooner and require more careful rotation. Squad management therefore becomes a more important part of managing a successful season.

Injuries Changed

Injuries were introduced initially to stop players racking up unrealistic minutes to unlock potential faster. Fatigue and injury are part of what makes good squad management valuable in real football, and this brings that pressure into Footium properly.

Until now, a player could only pick up an injury once he dropped below 45 condition. From Season 22, that moves up to 65. To be clear about what that means in practice: at the top of that range the chance is still very small, around 1% at 65 condition, and it stays low through the 50s. A player finishing a match or training at or below 65 condition begins to have a chance of receiving an injury. It climbs as condition falls though, and by the time a player is down around 20 condition, an injury becomes quite likely. Rotate accordingly!

Straight reds become less frequent

Direct red cards have been one of the most frustrating sources of match volatility because they're largely outside your control. We're reducing how often they occur so season outcomes are driven more by the decisions you make as a manager than by unpredictable sendings off.

Captain leadership matters more

The armband should be a decision, not a formality. Leadership now has a stronger influence on your team's performance, scaled to how good a leader your captain actually is.

🧟 Zombie results

Footium is a game that is best played socially and we’re always encouraging you to get your friends involved. We recently surveyed managers on how likely they were to recommend Footium, and zombie results were one of the biggest reasons they wouldn't.

While our analysis shows zombie teams only get results against active managers in a very small percentage of matches, that number is still too high. We've historically been careful not to reduce zombie results too aggressively, because football should always have upsets. However, we've seen the frustration they cause and the impact they have on confidence in the match engine, so we've made significant changes to drastically reduce the chances of zombie teams getting a result.

One thing we identified was that certain routes to goal were not sensitive enough to player quality. Set pieces were a clear example which handed weaker sides valuable chances.

There should always be upsets in Footium, just as there are in real football. That's part of what makes football so compelling, and we never wanted to remove that possibility. Instead, our goal was to make those upsets feel earned rather than random. In testing, goals scored by the far weaker side in heavily mismatched fixtures dropped by roughly half & zombies getting a result dropped by 5x, while results between well-matched teams stayed close to where they are today. That distinction mattered to us, beating a stronger team should absolutely still be possible, it should just take a decent squad and good decisions!

We'll continue refining the match engine over future seasons and, as always, we'll share the changes we make and why we're making them.

📱 A Footium companion app

We are also trialling something a bit different: a Footium companion app for iPhone.

It is not the game itself, and you will still run your club on footium.club. What the app does is keep you connected to it when you are not sat at a screen:

• Live scores from across the divisions, so you can follow whatever is on
• Goal alerts pushed to your phone as they happen
• Follow any club, including your own, with its fixtures, table and stats
• A kickoff reminder that tells you if your lineup is not set, including when you need to make any changes, i.e. captain missing, player in training, injury etc.

Everyone has lost points to a fixture they simply forgot about, and with captain leadership mattering more in Season 22, a nudge telling you the armband is empty a few hours before kickoff is worth having!

We want to be straight about what this is. It is a trial, not a roadmap promise, we built rapidly it to find out whether it is genuinely useful before deciding how much further to take it, which is why it is going to iOS first and why we are asking rather than announcing.

If it earns a place in your matchday routine we will do more with it, including adding Android. If it does not, we would rather know now than after months of building. It is not quite ready to go yet, we are putting the finishing touches to it and it will land during Season 22!

📈 Where the game is heading

A word on the state of Footium, because the pace of this update did not come from nowhere.

Season 21 was a huge season for us. More F2P managers took on a club than in any season we have run, passing 2,500 new caretakers for the first time, alongside the most club sales we have ever had in a single season. That matters beyond the number: more managers means fuller leagues, more competitive divisions, a busier transfer market and more people to beat. It allows us to really focus on continuing to build out a great game that you want to tell your friends about.

The team is also moving faster than it ever has. Better tooling, tighter processes and a much shorter gap between deciding to do something and getting it live. Compare what is in this post to a season update from the past and the difference in pace is the real story. We are also investing properly in reaching football people who have never heard of Footium, working with football creators and putting real money behind growth. It is working, and we are reinvesting that revenue straight back into more growth.

None of that is a victory lap, it is the reason we can commit to this rate of change and keep it up. Season 22 is not the peak of anything, it is the point where the game starts moving at the speed we have wanted it to move at for a long time!

💷 Academy economy changes

Season 22 also changes the studio share on academy player and free agent signings from 10% to 20%. Meaning 80% will go to rewards instead of 90% now.

We want to be upfront about why. Footium needs to become self-sustaining, and the current take from academies does not get us there. A bigger share means more funding for growth and for building the kind of features you have just read about, and more revenue going back into the game is what lets us keep shipping at this pace. It also lands alongside a set of academy changes that give you considerably more control over the value your academy produces in the first place.

We will keep being open about economy changes as the game grows, and we will keep publishing the reasoning rather than the change on its own.

⚽ A new way in, and a referral reward worth chasing

As mentioned earlier, managers have been clear with us about the parts of Footium that make it harder than it should be to bring a friend in: explaining what the game is, getting someone started without friction, and showing them why it is worth staying.

Season 22 introduces a cheaper way to upgrade: a $40 (£30) club that comes with a squad of loan players, and the lowest tier of stadium and academy buildings already in place. The loanees are yours for their whole careers, right through to retirement, you just cannot sell them on. It is a genuine starter block for anyone jumping into Footium for the first time, a club and a team to run without the bigger commitment up front.

And here is the part we are most excited about: it counts fully towards your referral rewards. Getting a mate properly into a club used to mean asking them to commit to the full price before either of you knew whether it would stick. Now that ask is a lot smaller, and it still moves you up the referral ladder. Get 3 friends in this season and you will get a prime gold (aged 25-27) player for your club as thanks.

While we are on referrals, it is worth a reminder of how far the ladder goes. Some of our most dedicated referrers have earned well over 10 million FC through referral rewards alone (that buys a few swanky academy buildings), as well as gold and rare players! If you have been meaning to get your mates into Footium, Season 22 is the most rewarding it has ever been.

💳 Card payments in the store

A small change that removes a big bit of friction: you can now pay by card in the Footium store, through Crossmint.

Until now, buying anything meant having funds in your wallet first, which is an obvious hurdle if you are new or just want to grab something quickly. Card payments take that step out. Same store, same items, one less thing in the way.

This is part of a wider push to make Footium easier to join and easier to stick with, and it pairs neatly with the cheaper club option above.

📬 Season 21 Wrapped

If you had an email linked to your account and marketing turned on, you should already have your personalised Season 21 Wrapped sitting in your inbox: your season, wrapped up, results, standout performances and the moments worth remembering.

If you did not get one, it is because we did not have an email for you or marketing was switched off, nothing more sinister than that. Easy to sort for Season 22: head to Settings, add your email and turn marketing on, and yours will land at the end of this season.

🏆 New Auction Format

As with every season, our auctions return during pre-season. Headlining them are the Legendary Players, the highest-potential players in the game and the sort of signing that can change your club for the long term. Alongside the Legends, each batch also includes Bronze, Silver and Gold reward players, so there is something worth bidding on whatever your budget.

We unfortunately can’t use GBM anymore, who have powered our auctions for a while now, so for Season 22 we are running the auctions on OpenSea while we look for a permanent replacement. That keeps the Legendaries flowing this season, but it does mean the format is simpler than you are used to: there is no Bid-to-Earn, and bids in the final moments will not extend the auction the way they did with GBM. Get your bids in before the clock runs down.

We know that is a step back on what came before, and finding a proper long-term auction home is on our list.

Auction Format:

• 24-hour auctions with full-day bidding windows
• Bidding on OpenSea in WETH on Arbitrum, you can swap ETH to WETH directly in your wallet on OpenSea
• No auction extensions this season, the auction ends when the clock says it ends. Auctioneers calling is final!

Batch 1: Friday 14th August 12:00pm BST to Saturday 15th August 12:00pm BST

Batch 2: Saturday 15th August 5:00pm BST to Sunday 16th August 5:00pm BST

Batch 3: Sunday 16th August 3:00pm BST to Monday 17th August 3:00pm BST

Player reveals for every batch will be shared closer to pre-season, keep an eye on Discord.

👋 Here we go

That's Season 22. Academy Upgrades give you a say in the players coming through your club for the first time. A rebalance to the game economy, and the results that made no sense are finally being dealt with. There's a companion app on the way, a cheaper way to get your mates involved, and card payments in the store. It's the most we've ever put into a single season, and it sets us up for what comes next!

Come find us in Discord for the quiz and an AMA, and if you missed your Season 21 Wrapped, there is more on that above.

One more thing

Footium has been going for a while now, and we have never actually had a proper place for you to leave us a review so we have just set up a Footium page on Trustpilot.

If you have got a view on the game, we would love to hear it. We are proud of what Footium has become, and honest feedback is how we keep making it better. It is a new thing for us, so bear with us while we get it going.

As always, thank you for playing, sharing feedback and building this game alongside us.

We will see you in pre-season.

Forza Footium ⚽️