UNDER THE BONNET
What is actually running.
This page is about how the game works rather than what it looks like. Every person at the club keeps their own record of what you did and said. Sponsorship has to be earned. The money moves on real inflation across thirty years, so 1959 money is not 1985 money. The simulation works out what happens, and the game’s own Internal Intelligence puts it into words.
THE CLUB IS A MODEL, NOT A MENU
Every named person keeps a permanent, weighted record of what you did and said: who it happened to, how they were already disposed toward you, how much history you have already. Big things become Gazette stories and move the mood of the town, whether or not the person was in the room.
Six referees run on the same machinery, each with his own temper and his own record of you. The whole squad is rated side by side (form, confidence, value, honours) and the same table exists for every manager in the game (all ninety-two League clubs, and the non-League sides waiting below them) so you can see exactly who you are up against.
The economy is one continuous thread across the whole thirty-season career. Costs rise season on season and are priced honestly for whatever year the story has actually reached. A wage in 1959 is not a wage in 1985.
None of it is decoration. It is the game.
THE WHOLE LEAGUE MOVES, BY THE RULES OF ITS DAY
All ninety-two League clubs play a real season every year, with their own squads, their own managers and their own books, and they go up and down on the real final tables by the real rules of that year. Two up and two down at the top until 1973, three after. Re-election for the bottom four of the Fourth until 1986, when a club that has had to ask once too often can be voted out and a non-League side voted in. From 1987, the drop to the Conference. The play-offs from 1986–87, and if you finish in them, you play the ties yourself: two legs, extra time, penalties, and in 1987 a replay.
The rules of the day are the rules of the game. No substitutes until 1965, and then only for an injury. Goal average until 1976. Two points for a win until 1981. No sponsor’s name on a shirt until 1979. No red card between 1981 and 1987. And nobody in the game (the press, the pub or the board) talks about something that has not happened yet.
Thirty seasons on, the First Division you are looking up at is not the one you started under. In our own thirty-season test runs, around forty different clubs had a spell in it. The real history behind all of it is on THE HISTORY.
SPONSORSHIP IS EARNED, NOT GIVEN
At the bottom of the Fourth Division in 1959, nobody good wants their name anywhere near your club, and no League club carries a sponsor’s name on its shirts until 1979, so until then a deal buys the hoardings, the programme and the matchday. Three tiers exist; your division sets the ceiling, your reputation earns how much of it, and the ladder moves one rung at a time, up when you deserve it, back down if you don’t. Even a signed deal moves with your form: a good run gets it topped up, a bad one gets it cut.
One sponsor on the list isn’t fiction: PITCHWORK STUDIOS, on the same terms as any other small local firm, with a perk of BUG FIXES: training injury risk cut in half. Sign it and the name goes up on the hoardings round the pitch, visible in every match you play. It is the only joke in the game that costs a sponsorship slot to hear.
INTERNAL INTELLIGENCE: EVERY LINE WRITTEN FOR THE GAME
Everyone in THE GAFFER speaks through Internal Intelligence, the dialogue system we built for this game. Every line is written in advance, and the system chooses the one that fits the moment by weight: the situation, the score, the table, the money, the date and the decade, the weather, the place and the hour, and how the person speaking feels about you. It knows Boxing Day from an ordinary Saturday; nobody counts in shillings after 1971 or talks about a red card between 1981 and 1987; and a line is held back until the others in its place have had their turn. When you speak (CALM, RALLY, HAIRDRYER or AUTO) the answer comes back to what you actually said, from a man with his own temper and his own record of you.
Because nothing is generated, we know every word the game can say, and none of it can contradict what the simulation has decided. And because it is so light, Internal Intelligence runs on almost any machine: no dedicated graphics card, next to no processor time, and kind to a handheld’s battery. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is sent anywhere.
THE SNUG: SIX PEOPLE WHO WANT SOMETHING FROM YOU
The back room of the pub holds the vice-chairman, the sponsor’s managing director, a local businessman, a councillor, the mayor, and the chair of the supporters’ club. They set the gate price, sell the club’s name (and the shirt, once 1979 comes), ask for your best player, and fund the training ground, and every one of them remembers how you answered. Take the sponsor’s money and the supporters’ chair hears about it. Over a long enough career, some of them retire and someone new takes the seat. The boardroom ages with you, the same as everyone else.
On the night you sign your first sponsor, two of them step out of Hooligans Manor and talk about you on the pavement while the last bus waits at the stop, before they go round the back. What they decide in there, you find out later.
THE MATCH IS PLAYED BY THE MEN IN IT
Every man on the ball reads what is in front of him (who is free, who is closing him down, whether there is a clear line to a team-mate or a sight of goal) and chooses: a pass to feet, a ball into a runner’s path, a switch, carry it into space, take his man on, cross it or shoot. How good he is, how old, how experienced and how nervous all weigh in, and so does his side’s style. A direct side goes long and early, a passing side keeps the ball, a counter side breaks, a pressing side hunts it back. Change the style at half time and the men play it from the restart.
The ball only goes where a man puts it. A corner is given because the ball went out off a defender, a goal kick because it went out off an attacker, a free kick because a man was brought down on the ball. The keeper comes for crosses, rolls it out or kicks it long, and every set piece is taken by a named man with the clock stopped while he walks up to it.
THE GROUND, AS IT WAS, SEASON BY SEASON
The matchday is drawn by the year the story has reached. The ball is brown leather, then white, then the League ball with its red band. The keeper wears green in the 60s and anything he likes by the 80s. Collars come and go, shadow stripes and pinstripes arrive, and from 1979 a sponsor’s name can go across the chest.
Before kick-off in the 60s the brass band marches across the pitch, drum major and mace in front and the bass drum banging in step, and fades away as the game starts. Rattles turn in the crowd until the early 70s, rosettes come out for a cup tie, scarves go up round the wrists in the 70s, and toilet rolls come over from the home end when they score. The half time scoreboard slots in the other scores letter by letter. From the late 70s there is a fence along the front of the terrace, from 1987 inflatables, and a few grounds play on plastic. On a frosty morning the straw is raked off to the touchlines, and when one of ours goes down the trainer runs on with the bucket and the sponge.
None of it is decoration added on top. It is drawn with the same sprites as the players, and each piece turns up in the season it turned up in real life, and not before.
A CAREER THAT OUTLASTS THE JOB
Get the sack and it isn’t game over. The phone rings, and you start again at another club, in another town. Every town is a world of its own (its own pub and regulars, its own back room of people who want something from you, its own chairman and office, its own paper and radio station) and none of them have heard of you yet. The town you left keeps its memory of you: go back years later and it is all still there. Do well enough and a bigger club comes for you instead.
However it goes, the career ends at the final whistle of 1988–89, with a report on all thirty years: every club, every honour, every season, the players, the rivals and the moments that mattered.
PLAYERS WHO GROW UP, AND GROW OLD
Every player in the football world (yours, your rivals’, the lad at the club down the road) gets better by playing: his minutes, the level he plays at, how well he played and how old he is all count. Each has a peak age of his own, mostly in his late twenties and later for a keeper, and past it the pace and the engine go first while the touch holds on. A young lad shakes off an injury quicker than a veteran.
Training is two sessions before each game, each one costing you (fitness, attacking, defending, the shape, or the youngsters) with a word afterwards on who has come on.
AROUND THE CLUB
Before a match, MATCH & TACTICS lays out the shape, the style and the approach, what each is worth against today’s opponents and their key men, and every player’s fitness and form. The match plays out with both sides’ shapes laid out beneath it. At half time the floor is yours (CALM, RALLY, HAIRDRYER or AUTO) and it is remembered either way. Afterwards, every game is written up as a page of the Football Gazette: the gate, both sets of scorers, the table, and what the board make of it. Derek from the Gazette will catch you on the doorstep, and local radio wants you live whenever there is news worth having you on for; whatever you say goes out to the whole town unedited.
Sign a player and he arrives by black cab, with Derek on the doorstep waiting for your answer. And CLUB STATUS shows the whole club and its town from above, live: the ground and your place in the table, the training pitch and the squad’s fitness, the board, the bank, the regulars at the pub and the town’s belief, with the traffic, the shoppers and the lads on the rec going about their day. Underneath, the season in pictures: the form, the league position and the gates game by game, the trophy cabinet and the club’s story season by season. FINANCES & BOARD does the same for the money, down to the last gate.
The manager’s year has its own calendar: the cup draw on the radio on a Monday lunchtime, manager of the month and the bottle that comes with it, the transfer deadline in March, the Christmas do, the supporters’ player of the year, testimonials and the summer tour.
BUILT FOR THE HANDHELD
Every screen has a handheld layout of its own, made for the Steam Deck’s 1280 × 800 display. It comes on by itself on the Deck and on other Windows and Linux handheld PCs, or by hand under SETTINGS > SCREEN > HANDHELD LAYOUT. The whole screen is used, nothing is cut off, and the smallest text is sized to Valve’s guidance for a handheld.
A whole season plays by touch alone. The handheld version comes out alongside Windows, Mac and Linux on 30 October.
Mouse and keyboard. Controller support is coming in a future update.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Small game, ordinary machine.
REQUIREMENTS
- OS
- Windows 10 64-bit or later
- PROCESSOR
- 64-bit dual-core
- MEMORY
- 8 GB RAM
- GRAPHICS
- Integrated graphics, no dedicated graphics card needed
- STORAGE
- 1 GB available space
GOOD TO KNOW
- DISPLAY
- 1280 × 800 or larger
- CONTROLS
- Mouse and keyboard. Controller support is coming in a future update.
- DIALOGUE
- Internal Intelligence, our own system, with no graphics card and next to no processor time
- INTERNET
- Not needed to play; nothing is sent anywhere
REQUIREMENTS
- OS
- macOS 13 Ventura or later
- PROCESSOR
- Apple silicon, or a 64-bit Intel dual-core
- MEMORY
- 8 GB RAM
- GRAPHICS
- Integrated graphics, no dedicated graphics card needed
- STORAGE
- 1 GB available space
GOOD TO KNOW
- DISPLAY
- 1280 × 800 or larger
- CONTROLS
- Mouse and keyboard. Controller support is coming in a future update.
- DIALOGUE
- Internal Intelligence, our own system, with no graphics card and next to no processor time
- INTERNET
- Not needed to play; nothing is sent anywhere
REQUIREMENTS
- OS
- SteamOS 3.0+ / Ubuntu 22.04+, 64-bit
- PROCESSOR
- 64-bit dual-core
- MEMORY
- 8 GB RAM
- GRAPHICS
- Integrated graphics, no dedicated graphics card needed
- STORAGE
- 1 GB available space
GOOD TO KNOW
- DISPLAY
- 1280 × 800 or larger
- CONTROLS
- Mouse and keyboard. Controller support is coming in a future update.
- DIALOGUE
- Internal Intelligence, our own system, with no graphics card and next to no processor time
- INTERNET
- Not needed to play; nothing is sent anywhere
STEAM DECK
- DEVICE
- Steam Deck, LCD or OLED
- LAYOUT
- Handheld layout made for the 1280 × 800 display, on by itself
- CONTROLS
- Touch throughout, built for the handheld’s own screen
- STORAGE
- 1 GB available space
OTHER HANDHELD PCS
- OS
- Windows 10 or later, or SteamOS / Linux, 64-bit
- PROCESSOR
- 64-bit dual-core
- MEMORY
- 8 GB RAM
- DISPLAY
- 1280 × 800 or 1280 × 720
- CONTROLS
- Touch screen, built for the Deck’s own display
The handheld version comes out alongside Windows, Mac and Linux on 30 October. Valve’s Steam Deck compatibility rating will appear on the store page once Valve has reviewed the game.
On every platform, a dual-core processor and 8 GB of memory are all THE GAFFER needs.