📣 Season 23: Every Word Counts

Season 22 was a big one for us, bringing Academy Upgrades, match balancing, a cheaper way in for your mates and the first beta of our companion app. You played all of it and told us exactly what you thought, and Season 23 is where we do something with that.

The headline feature is Pep Talks, which puts your words straight into your matchday: pick a player, tell him what he needs to hear, and see how he responds. The same idea runs through the rest of the update, because injuries were too harsh and are being pulled back after your feedback, and home game times have been the most requested change in Discord for a long time, so we are asking how it should work before we build it.

Let's get into it.

📅 Season 23 Dates

Pre-season begins: Wednesday 9 September

First matches kick off: Tuesday 15 September

Free Agents drop: Thursday 24 September

Auctions: Thursday 10 to Sunday 13 September

⚡ TL;DR: Season 23

• 📣 Pep Talks arrive: Talk to one of your players before a match, in your own words, and change how he performs. Every player responds differently because of their personality.
• 🏥 Injuries eased: Injury risk now starts at 60 condition instead of 65, and injuries last 25 hours instead of 50.
• 🧟 Zombie results are down: Win rates for much weaker teams have dropped more than 10x since Season 21, and draws by almost two thirds.
• 🔨 A new auction format: Legendary Auctions move to blind bids for Season 23 while we work on the long-term solution.
• 💷 More auction share for the top divisions: Legendary auction proceeds now go to the top four divisions, rather than being split evenly across all eight.
• 🕒 Home game times: Live Match V2 has made this possible and we are actively testing it. We want your input before we commit to a design.
• 👥 Friends Leagues: Get a group of mates into the same Division 8 league so you can play each other from day one.
• 🎁 Referral rewards: FC for every free Caretaker you bring in, more when they upgrade, and a Young Silver player for two referrals this season.
• 🔮 SquadScout6: Joe's free daily prediction game has been paying out serious FC.

📣 Pep Talks

We've all wanted to talk to our star striker and give him the fire he needs to get a hat-trick next match, or tell our ageing centre back that he's just not got it anymore. From Season 23 you can.

Pep Talks let you speak directly to one of your players before a match. Type it out, or record a voice note and tidy up the transcript before you send it, and he'll react to what you actually said.

Every player is different

Pep Talks also introduce a hidden personality for every player in the game, so working out what makes each of yours tick is now part of the job. Some of them want a fight, some want reassurance, some want clear standards and then to be left alone to get on with it, and some just want permission to go and try something ridiculous.

You won't see a label telling you which is which, so you'll find out the way a real manager does, by trying things, watching how he takes it and remembering it next time. Get a player right and you'll feel it in his performance, and get him wrong and you'll feel that too.

How it works

• Your talk moves that player's rating by anywhere from -5 to +5, running from "Heads gone" at the bottom to "Inspired" at the top.
• The effect fades by 1 every 48 hours until it wears off, so it's a boost for the matches in front of you rather than a permanent upgrade.
• A committed Pep Talk costs 5 condition points, which makes it a real decision rather than a free button.
• One Pep Talk per player, per season, so choose your moment carefully.
• One Pep Talk per club, per day, resetting at midnight UK time.
• 200 words maximum, and a word of warning: a lazy four-word team talk will go down exactly as badly as it would in real life.

Pep Talks go live on Monday 14 September, the day before the first matches, so you've got a chance to start practising your speeches now.

We'll have more in Discord and in-game as pre-season gets going, but the short version is that you now have a real way to motivate your players and affect how they perform, one that has nothing to do with formations and everything to do with knowing your squad.

🏥 Injury changes

We changed injuries in Season 22 to make squad management feel more like real world football, and we appreciate that a lot of you found the higher thresholds difficult to manage. Players were going down too often and staying out too long, and rotation stopped feeling like management and started feeling like trying to run Spurs' squad last season.

Halving the duration is the big one, because a player picking up a knock is now a problem for the next match or two rather than most of your week, and the risk starts biting a little later than it did.

The principle behind it hasn't changed though, so the risk still climbs steeply as condition falls and a player down around 20 condition is still very likely to get hurt. Rotate properly and use your squad depth, and injuries should stay an occasional nuisance rather than something that decides your season.

We'll keep watching the data once Season 23 is underway, exactly as we did last season.

🧟 Zombie results, one season on

While we're on the match economy, a quick update on the other Season 22 change.

Zombie results were the thing you told us made Footium hardest to recommend, and Season 22 was our first proper attempt at fixing them, mostly by making routes to goal far more sensitive to player quality. Measured at the same point of the season against Season 21, win rates for much weaker teams are down more than 10x, and draws are down by almost two thirds.

Those are great results and the clearest sign yet that the changes are doing what we hoped. We do appreciate there are still rare instances where a result goes against everything the table says it should, so it's something we'll keep addressing in future seasons.

🔨 Legendary Auctions

As always, a number of Legendary Players go under the hammer during pre-season. These are the highest-potential players in Footium and the only way to get one into your club.

Season 22's auctions ran on OpenSea after GBM closed their doors, and we said at the time that it was a stopgap. It did the job of getting the Legendaries out there, but it wasn't the Footium auction experience any of us wanted, so we're trying something different this season while we work on the long-term answer.

Blind bids

Season 23 auctions run on a blind-bid format. Rather than watching a clock, you send George your best bid before the deadline, and when the window closes he reviews every bid and announces the winners.

• 🕐 No last-second sniping, because there's no clock to lose to and no reason to be at your desk at an awkward hour.
• 💭 You decide what he's worth to you. Work out your number, send it, and get on with your day.
• 🤝 Identical bids are settled by a coin flip, done publicly so everyone can see it was fair.
• 🎁 Reward players stay. Each batch still features Gold, Silver and Bronze reward players alongside the Legendaries.

How to bid

Send George a direct message on Discord before the deadline, in this format:

Player: the player's name

Bid: your bid in ETH, for example 0.1 ETH

Wallet: your wallet address

Your wallet needs to hold enough to cover this bid plus any other live bids you have across the other auctions, otherwise the bid won't be accepted.

Once the window closes, George will let you know if you've won and will list the player as a private listing to your wallet for you to complete the purchase. If a winning bidder doesn't go through with it, the player passes to the next highest bidder and the original bidder won't be able to take part in future auctions, so only bid what you're genuinely going to pay.

Season 23 Auction Schedule

Batch 1: Thursday 10 September, 12:00 BST to Friday 11 September, 12:00 BST

Batch 2: Friday 11 September, 17:00 BST to Saturday 12 September, 17:00 BST

Batch 3: Saturday 12 September, 15:00 BST to Sunday 13 September, 15:00 BST

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

This isn't where Footium auctions are going to live forever and we're not pretending otherwise, but it should make for a much cleaner season of bidding while we build the proper thing.

💷 A bigger share for the top divisions

A quick note on where Legendary auction money goes. Half of everything raised comes back to managers as rewards, allocated across the divisions, and that part isn't changing, but the way that allocation is weighted is.

The managers bidding on Legendaries are overwhelmingly in the top divisions, so it makes sense for more of that money to flow back to where it came from, and for the climb up the pyramid to be worth a bit more when you get there. Up until now that share has been split evenly across all eight divisions, with every division receiving exactly the same amount regardless of where it sat in the pyramid. For Season 23 the divisional allocation of Legendary auction proceeds is being weighted towards the higher divisions instead.

If your club sits in Division 5 or below, this barely moves the needle for you anyway. There are so many leagues in the lower divisions that splitting the auction share between all of them left each club with very little. Concentrating it at the top, where almost all of that money comes from in the first place, makes it worth something real, and gives you a reason to climb.

🕒 Home game times

This is the one we get asked about most, especially by our dedicated down under managers. If your club sits in a league that kicks off at 3am your time then you've never really managed a match live, you've just set your tactics the night before and read the result over breakfast. Plenty of you in Australia, on the American west coast and elsewhere have been telling us this for a long time, and we agree it needs sorting.

Live Match V2 is what finally makes it possible, and we've been testing scheduling approaches internally. The version we originally proposed, and still our favourite, works like this: each club picks a preferred kick-off window during pre-season, your home matches are played in that window, and your away matches are played at your opponent's home time. It gives home advantage extra meaning and it means every manager should get to watch a decent chunk of their season live.

We'll be honest that it got a fair amount of pushback when we first floated it, mostly from managers who already have a kick-off time that suits them and were being asked to give some of that up. That's a fair concern, and we don't think we explained our reasoning well enough at the time.

So rather than announce a finished feature, we're putting the rough design in front of everyone and opening it up properly for discussion.

We've gone with a thread in Discord rather than a survey on purpose, because this isn't as simple as everyone picking the slot that suits them. One manager's ideal kick-off is another manager's 3am away trip, and the part we most want to hear about is how you'd feel about your matches landing at different times every couple of days as your fixtures change.

👉 Join the discussion: Join the discussion on Discord

Tell us what you make of the structure above, what kick-off time you'd pick in UTC if you could choose anything, and any ideas of your own for how this should work. We'll be reading all of it, and we'll share where we've landed before anything gets built.

👥 Friends Leagues

Footium is a much better game when you're playing against people you know. Until now, getting a group of mates in meant they all signed up and then got scattered across different leagues, which rather defeats the point, so we're fixing that manually for Season 23.

Get in touch and we'll put your group into the same Division 8 league, so they spend their first season playing each other for bragging rights instead of playing strangers.

• 📩 How to request one: open a ticket in our and tell us who's joining. If you're not in the Discord yet, that link will get you in.
• 👥 Group size: realistically around five or six spots per league, since each league also has caretaker clubs in it. If your group is bigger than that we can place you across neighbouring leagues so you all end up together in Division 7 once you're promoted.
• 🕐 Limited leagues available, and once they're gone they're gone, so get your request in early.

Already got a club and fancy it? There's nothing stopping you signing up a new account, starting at the bottom alongside your mates and finding out who actually comes out on top.

🎁 Bringing your mates into Footium

While you're rounding up a Friends League, it's worth knowing what you get for it.

They can play for free

When someone joins through your referral link as a free Caretaker Manager, you get paid for it, with no purchase required from them at all:

• 10,000 FC when they sign up
• 40,000 FC once they've been active for three days

And if they later decide to take a club properly, you still get everything below on top.

Local Backer, $39.99

They get: permanent ownership of their club, their current squad until each player retires (those players cannot be traded), 85,000 FC, and 3 tradable Common players for joining through your link.

You get: 20% cashback, 100,000 FC, and progress along the referral milestone ladder.

Investor Group, $79.99

They get: permanent ownership of their club, 20 fully tradable players, 375,000 FC, plus 5 Common players, 2 Bronze players and 5 Coaching Sessions for joining through your link.

You get: 20% cashback, 200,000 FC, and progress along the referral milestone ladder.

New for Season 23

Get two eligible referrals during Season 23 and you'll also receive a Young Silver player for your squad.

That sits on top of the milestone ladder, which runs all the way from coaching sessions up to a Legendary player. Some of our most dedicated referrers have earned well over 10 million FC through referral rewards alone.

👉 Get your invite link: https://footium.club/game/invite

🔮 SquadScout6

One of the best things about this community is that some of you go and build things for it.

Joe's SquadScoutPro has become the companion tool most of you have open in a second tab, and this season he added SquadScout6, a free daily prediction game built into it. Predict the scores of all six Division 1 matches before 8pm UTC, earn points for results, goals and exact scores, and climb the daily and season leaderboards.

What's on the line:

• Perfect Six: 1,000,000 FC for calling all six scorelines exactly
• Daily Winner: 100,000 FC for the highest-scoring manager on days nobody lands the Perfect Six
• Season Winner: 1,000,000 FC plus a Footium club, provided by Joe himself

There's 100,000 FC going out every single day, and nobody has landed the Perfect Six yet, so that 1,000,000 FC jackpot is still sitting there waiting for someone to call all six scorelines exactly.

It's completely free, it takes a minute a day, and it's entirely community built. If you haven't got an account yet, we're honestly not sure what you've been doing.

👉 Play free daily: https://www.squadscout.pro/predictor

👉 Follow SSP on X: https://x.com/squadscoutpro

👋 Here we go

So that's Season 23. Pep Talks give you a genuinely new way to get something out of your squad, injuries have been pulled back to something far more manageable, auctions get a format that doesn't punish you for having a life outside Footium, and on home game times we're finally in a position to build the thing you've been asking us for, with you helping shape it.

Pre-season begins on Wednesday 9 September and the first matches kick off on Tuesday 15 September.

Get your squad ready, start practising your team talks in the mirror, get your bids in, get your mates signed up, and tell us what you think about kick-off times.

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

Forza Footium ⚽️