Season 4 is fast approaching.Footium’s fourth season, arrives 21st of January, with matches kicking off the 28th of January.It’s the January transfer window in real life, and transfer news is coming to Footium too, with registration system improvements, own goals, injuries, and a plethora of other new updates that will continue to improve, and change, your Footium experience.Join over 2,000 active clubs in our Discord to ensure you’re fully prepped for the launch of Season 4: https://discord.gg/footium

tl;dr

• Reward Claiming : Real money rewards from Season 4 can be claimed directly via the Footium Hub. View updated rewards in your league tab.
• Payout Places: Reward payout places have increased from 5th and up, to 7th and up, improving the experience for promoted teams.
• Registration System Overhaul : Introducing Free Agents, season-long player contracts, and new transfer window types for fairer and more strategic squad management.
• Legendary Players : Auctions continue with high-potential players (95–99 rating) to boost your squad. Proceeds now contribute to rewards split across divisions.
• Injuries : Players at, or below, 45% condition now risk injuries lasting 50 hours, encouraging realistic squad rotation and strategic depth.
• Own Goals : A rare but realistic addition to the match engine, directly addressing an issue in previous season with erroneous goalkeeper goals.

Key Features and Updates

Real Money Reward Claiming

You’ll continue to be able to claim rewards in Season 4, so make sure to redeem your real money rewards on the Footium hub.These rewards will be claimable at the start of Season 4, and will allow you to claim all rewards won by clubs in your wallet in one transaction, as well as displaying a breakdown across which Footium Clubs won which rewards.Season 4’s rewardss will also be updated in-game. To view your league’s current rewards, you’ll need to head to the leagues tab in your Footium hub, and click on rewards in the top right. This figure, updated periodically throughout the season, will increase as Club Owners in your division sign academy players, and make transfers directly contributing to your rewards.For more information on exactly how rewards are calculated, and who will be eligible, read our rewards guide.

Season 4 Initial Rewards

Season 4 rewards will continue increasing throughout Season 4 as more is spent on academy mints, legendary player auctions and player trades. You can read more about how rewards are allocated within Footium here.

Expanded Rewards Structure

• Rewards will now be distributed to the top 7 places in each league, with the following breakdown:
• 1st Place: 37%
• 2nd Place: 23%
• 3rd Place: 14%
• 4th Place: 10%
• 5th Place: 7%
• 6th Place: 5%
• 7th Place: 4%

This updated structure has several key advantages:

• Support for Mid-League Stability: More rewards provides the scope for managers promoted for their skill to remain competitive, enabling them to invest in players and maintain their league standing.
• Reduced Incentive for Deliberate Relegation: Lowering the first-place reward, reduces the incentive to drop leagues, encouraging teams to stay competitive in their current divisions.
• Enhanced Reward Gaps Between Divisions: Coupled with Legend auctions being split across divisions , higher division rewards will now scale more significantly, rewarding players for consistent skill.

With the auction fee split update, this now means auctions have the most impact on the divisions predominantly purchasing Legendary players, incentivising Club Owners to continue reaching for Division 1.

Legendary Players

Legendary players continue in Season 4, through limited-supply auctions. These are players that are a step above almost every other player in the Footium Football League and provide a great chemistry boost to your squad, but still require your focus and time to train. A divisional split of fees is the main change for Season 4 Legendary Auctions — improving the rewards payouts among higher divisions, while still providing significant rewards to lower divisions.

These unique players boast high potential ratings (ranging between 95–99) and add star power to Footium clubs. Legendary players will also unlock potential at a slightly faster rate than normal players.Legend auctions will kick off on the 24th of January, and will be available on OpenSea to view closer to the time. 50% of proceeds from Legendary Player auctions (after OpenSea fees) will be added to rewards, split equally across all Footium Divisions (and subsequently split across seasons in the 60:30:10 split).Please note: this change to a divisional split is an experiment, which we will review accordingly. Legends auctioned in previous seasons with rewards remaining to be distributed, due to the seasonal split, will still have their rewards distributed based on the previous ‘league-split’ approachIn Season 4, 12 Legendary Players will be auctioned, with 50% of fees being split into rewards by division.The Legend auctions will take place in 3 batches of 4 legends (all times in UTC):Batch 1: 24/01/2025 3:00PM Auction Close.Batch 2: 25/01/2025 5:00PM Auction Close.Batch 3: 26/01/2025 7:00PM Auction Close.

Inactive Clubs

Inactive clubs will continue to be ineligible for rewards in Footium, and for clubs who are in the Amateur League, you wont be able to train, play matches, or sign new players. To rejoin the FFL, you’ll need to request access by requesting to rejoin on your club page.A small set of clubs will be rejoining the FFL from the Amateur League, reducing inactive club numbers down further.You should continue to keep an eye on if your club is flagged as inactive. If your club is inactive, it will be ineligible for rewards and may be relegated to the Amateur League if it is in Division 8 or the Division 7 relegation zone.Your club will display as inactive in the hub homepage, as well as showing green strikes on your club drop down menu. Make sure you’re active on any clubs you own (by completing one of the actions shown above) to avoid missing out on rewards.

Registration System Revamp

We’re excited to announce a major update to Footium’s transfer and registration system, designed to bring clarity, fairness, and strategic depth to squad management. This new system resolves long-standing challenges around club transfers during the season and the lack of flexibility outside core transfer windows, while also introducing an exciting new player type, allowing registration and trading throughout the season: Free Agents.

Key Highlights:

• Unlimited and Limited Transfer Windows : Unlimited windows allow full squad flexibility, while mid-season limited windows introduce strategic depth with unregistering caps, preventing teams from moving entire squads.
• Free Agents : Players who remain unregistered after a window closes, can now be signed and registered at any time , creating a dynamic new market for Club Owners and Player Agents.
• Season-Long Contracts : At the end of a transfer window, players are now tied to their registered clubs for the duration of the season, ensuring stability for teams and new club owners.

Limited windows will be introduced in a future season, to allow for a smooth onboarding to Footium’s new system for Club Owners, we are limiting Season 4 to a focus on a longer unlimited window, and Free Agents during mid-season.Season 4 will include an extended pre-season window, and no mid-season, to enhance strategy on early season movement, and advocate for free agent signings during the season.

Why Free Agent Metadata Isn’t Included in OpenSea

As we introduce Free Agents into Footium with Season 4, we wanted to clarify why Free Agent status won’t be reflected in metadata on OpenSea. While this might seem like an oversight, the decision has been made to prioritise system stability and prevent potential risks associated with metadata delays.

Key Reasons for This Decision:

Potential Exploits in the Marketplace: Adding Free Agent metadata could create opportunities for manipulation. For example:

• A player marked as a Free Agent might be registered by its owner after a buyer places a bid, allowing the owner to accept the bid under false pretences.
• Similarly, a player could be actively listed for sale, registered by its owner before being purchased, and the buyer might not realise the change until after the transaction.

Metadata Update Delays: Metadata on OpenSea can take several minutes to update after a player’s registration status changes. This delay could result in buyers making decisions based on outdated information, leading to confusion or disputes.Season 4 System Familiarity: With the registration system being newly implemented, we’ve opted to minimise complexities and risks as users adapt to the changes. Keeping metadata updates limited ensures a smoother rollout and allows us to monitor the system for potential improvements in future seasons.

Our Recommendation:

Always use the in-game system to verify the status of a player before bidding or purchasing. The in-game information is the most accurate and up-to-date, so cross-referencing there is essential when dealing with Free Agents.We understand that adding metadata may feel like a missing feature, but rest assured this decision has been made with stability and fairness in mind. As the system evolves and we assess the risks, we’ll revisit whether including Free Agent metadata is viable in future seasons. For now, we encourage players to exercise caution and leverage in-game tools to make informed decisions.This update will drastically impact the game’s approach to players, and therefore we’ll be covering it in more depth in an article coming soon. To dive deeper into the new features and how they’ll impact your squad management, we’ll be releasing a full guide shortly, which will be linked here.

Preseason User Testing

As part of rolling out the new registration system, we’re inviting users to help test the feature early in Season 4 Preseason. This collaborative testing ensures the system is running smoothly, helps us gather user feedback, and gives you a hands-on introduction to how the new mechanics work.How It Will Work:

• Early in preseason, we’ll ask users to participate by unregistering a few players they own , turning them into Free Agents.
• We’ll then close the registration window and ask users to try registering other players and setting lineups to ensure all functionality is smooth.
• Once testing is complete, the registration window will reopen, and we’ll verify that players remain properly registered/unregistered.

Why Get Involved?

• Help ensure the new system is ready for full deployment.
• Gain early experience with the revamped registration process.
• Participate for a chance to win Bronze Players by sharing screenshots of your participation during the test.

Stay tuned to Discord for detailed instructions closer to preseason. We’re excited to bring the community into this rollout and thank you in advance for helping make Footium better!

Training Updates

Training for Season 4 will run from 12pm UTC on Gameday 1 (Tuesday 28th January) until 12pm UTC on Gameday 22 (Tuesday 18th of February). Any ongoing training sessions when this window closes will automatically complete, with all intended rating increases, potential point usage, and condition impacts applied as usual.

Academy Refresh

As with all Footium Seasons, you’ll once again have access to new academy prospects to sign on your academy page at the launch of the season. Alongside this, Season 3 academy prospects will be released from your club as of the 19th of January.

Each Footium Club will receive 7 academy prospects at the start of Season 4. Each Club will also have a chance of spawning a rare academy player, with higher division clubs having a greater chance of spawning a rare academy player.Signing players will continue to require you to have Ethereum in your Arbitrum wallet and be on the Arbitrum Network. Signing prospects will add them to your club, with 90% of the payment contributing to rewards in your division.Remember: Academy players when signed go straight into the squad even if the transfer window is closed, they cannot be converted to Free Agents when the window is closed.Academy Player prices are set per division, with an increase towards Division 1, to reflect the talent of the players coming through each division, and there may be some difference between seasonal prices — dependent on a variety of factors.

Player Injuries

Injuries are being introduced in Season 4 to promote fairness and strategic depth. This change addresses exploits where players with critically low condition are repeatedly used to gain unintended advantages, particularly in lower divisions. Injuries will encourage realistic squad rotation and discourage idle gameplay.

How Injuries Work

• Players below 45% condition at the end of a match or training session face an increasing risk of injury, with the likelihood becoming very high at 20% condition, this increase works at an exponential rate .
• Injuries last for 50 hours , during which players cannot play, train, or recover condition.
• Injured players remain injured if transferred, ensuring consistent impact.

What Injuries Mean for You

Club owners must now manage squads more carefully, with players finishing games, or training, at lower than 45% condition at risk of injury. This system reduces idle exploitation and creates a fairer, more strategic experience for all.How will this impact zombie teams using reserve players? It wont. Reserve players are now set to start each match with 100% condition, this ensures that reserves are the lowest bar a team can reach and prevents zombie teams from dropping slowly to injury levels and replacing players with new ones.This change ensures a level playing field for anyone facing a zombie team in their league — removing the challenge for Club Owners facing zombies early in the season, versus those facing them late, with a condition-based advantage.As a manager, you’ll need to pay close attention to your usage of mentalities, and ensure you’re rotating your squads effectively to avoid injury issues within your team.

Own Goals

In our ongoing effort to refine the match engine and improve realism in Footium, we’ve made a significant update: own goals are now officially part of the game. This change specifically addresses a significant type of goalkeeper-scoring scenario, where a fumble or mishandling of the ball would result in a goal. By introducing own goals, we’ve ensured that these errors are accurately represented within the engine as a mistake which concedes a goal, rather than a goalkeeper scoring when making an error.

Why This Change Matters

Last season, we removed a number of goalkeeper goal types to eliminate unrealistic outcomes. However, a significant type of bug — goalkeeper errors — remained. Own goals now further improve this suite of improvements, offering a clear way to define goalkeeping errors while maintaining fairness and immersion. These own goals will act as a rare occurrence, ensuring they are impactful, realistic, but not disruptive to gameplay.

Your Role in Perfecting the Update

While we’ve tested this update to ensure own goals solve this scenario of goalkeepers scoring, we’d ask that players continue to observe matches and report any unexpected goalkeeper-scoring situations when they’ve recently made a save. Your feedback is crucial in helping us identify and resolve any lingering issues.This change represents another step forward in creating a more polished and realistic football management experience. With own goals now implemented, we remain committed to ongoing improvements based on your observations and input, including continuing to address other goal-keeper scoring scenarios with further match engine improvements. Thank you for helping us refine the game!

Mentality Reminder

There’s been a lot of discussion around tactical mentalities, so a quick reminder before Season 4 starts: the mentality slider allows managers to push their team towards a more aggressive or defensive play style during the match. Mentality impacts three core outcomes, the overall focus a team has on it’s attacking and defensive play, the amount of energy a player uses, and the riskiness of a teams play.For example, defensive mentality would increase the overall focus for a team on defensive plays, therefore using defender’s condition quicker, while reducing the overall risk a team takes in and out of possession, making games tighter. The opposite, with attacking play, increases risk, and therefore can result in a higher rate of unexpected outcomes for a team, higher score-lines or large losses.With the impact of mentalities on condition, and the increased punishment of low condition from injuries, managers will need to adapt to these changes, balancing their risk-taking with the potential consequences for their squad’s fitness and performance.

Notable Known Bugs

• Division + League in search bar doesn’t update with promotion + relegation
• Players in training don’t show in the best alternatives list on tactics
• Goalkeepers infrequently take and are involved with set pieces
• Sometimes events will freeze when streaming a live match (refresh fixes)
• Sometimes players are unable to train when showing 45% condition in the UI (this is due to rounding, they are likely 44.8 for example, and you’ll need to wait up to an hour for them to actually reach 45% before you can train them currently)
• Can’t move red-carded players into different positions on the pitch during games
• It sometimes takes a while to be able to access matches when they start, meaning you miss the first few minutes of the game
• Penalties aren’t counted as shots in stats
• Shots can be cut off by half or full time before their result occurs
• On mobile, time til injury status ends does not appear.

From the Desk of George

As we look ahead to Season 4, we’re excited to share some reflections on our development journey and what’s coming next for Footium. Over the past few months, our focus has been on solidifying the core product to ensure it’s as stable and engaging as possible.With the introduction of key features like the new registration system, player injuries, and the inclusion of goalkeeper own goals, we feel we’ve rounded out the foundation of the game over the last three months. These updates address key exploits and unintended gameplay strategies, ensuring both the product and its economy are stable and ready to grow.Now, our attention is shifting towards the heart of the game: the match engine. While it’s been well received overall, we know there are areas for improvement. Our immediate focus will be solving existing bugs and ironing out sequences of events that don’t align with expectations. Balance is another key area we’re tackling — ensuring very weak teams have even less chance of pulling off surprising results, while still maintaining a fair and realistic simulation with room for upsets.In tandem with these improvements, we’re laying the groundwork for our Match Engine v2. This upgrade isn’t just about refining what’s already there; it’s about building a platform for future features that allow for “more ways to play.” We’re listening closely to feedback and understand the appetite for deeper strategic decision-making, a more robust simulation that allows for historical stats, and a smoother, more immersive experience overall.We’re incredibly grateful for the passion and insight from the Footium community. Your feedback has been instrumental in guiding these priorities, and we’re excited to continue developing a game that’s as rewarding and competitive as it is dynamic. We’ll aim to update our roadmap further as we close out on the first round of improvements, and will bring you updates in the near future on our next steps. Here’s to a bigger, better Season 4 and beyond!

• Signed, George, CEO and King of Footium . (This bit wasn’t written by Roland, I wrote it myself, the rest of this section was Roland though, what great prose!)

How do I prepare for Season 4?

• Step 1: If you haven’t already, set up your wallet on Arbitrum, and transfer ETH in preparation — find out how here:
• Step 2: Buy a club! Make sure you’ve budgeted for players, or negotiated a deal with a club owner in our discord for a club & players. Here’s our official guide:
• Step 3: Use the transfer market and academy effectively to strengthen your team, keeping an eye on the strategic composition and potential of your squad.
• Step 4: Get involved with our Twitter, Discord and Newsletter for upcoming announcements and competitions for the chance to upgrade your club for the launch of Season 4.

How you can help

Word of Mouth

As we gear up for the full launch of Footium’s Season 4, we need your help! If you know anyone who already owns a Footium club — friends, fellow managers, or people you’ve convinced to join in the past — give them a nudge. Let them know that Season 4 is about to start, and they’ll want to get their club sorted ASAP for to be able to excersise their skill to earn another season of real money rewards.The same goes for anyone who’s shown interest before, or members of the web3 groups you’re part of. Now’s the time to remind them that Footium is LIVE with serious rewards on the line.

User Feedback

As always, your feedback and thoughts are important to us. Your feedback is invaluable, and this season provides another opportunity to gather insights and make adjustments based on your experiences and suggestions.To submit feedback, bug reports, or to request help, make sure to head over to our official discord, and keep an eye out for feedback forms at the end of the season.

What’s Next?

Post-Season 4

We recently published an article on the future of Footium, and what we’re working on so-far. If you’d like to read more, head here: https://medium.com/footium/footiums-roadmap-q4-2024-f6e33dd08730Footium is continuing this path with Season 4, with development full steam ahead.Get ready for the Season 4 launch on 21st of January, and prepare your club for the exciting updates ahead. Make sure to join our Discord for real-time updates, Q&As, and to stay connected with the Footium community.Your football management journey is about to kick into high gear — see you on the pitch!