Your goalkeeper is the whole game, and above HANDLING 89 they are all the same keeper engine

Every chance comes down to one roll against the keeper's saving number, and that number is his HANDLING plus 10, capped at 99. A keeper on 99 stops 76% of chances. One on 60 stops 46%. Over a match that is the difference between conceding one and a half goals and conceding three.

Which means every keeper from HANDLING 89 upward is literally identical to the engine. Schmeichel costs £8,500,000 and a million a year. Köpke at Olympique M. costs £450,000 and 125,000. Same keeper. Save eight million on the most important position in the game and lose nothing at all.

Never leave the keeper slot empty engine

The save roll is skipped entirely if nobody is picked in the first slot, so an empty keeper slot means every single chance scores. If yours is injured or banned, put somebody in there. Anyone. An outfielder on HANDLING 15 still saves 11% of them.

Squad strength stops paying almost straight away engine

Chances come from your average strength minus theirs, and then they are hard capped at three a half. The cap lands after your advantage, so about eight points of average edge already puts you over it. Past that, more strength buys you nothing. A squad averaging 90 and a squad averaging 82 both get the same capped three chances against a mid-table side.

A man out of position loses a quarter of his strength engine

Before strength reaches the engine it goes through a position check. A defender in a slot too far forward, a midfielder outside the middle band, an attacker not far enough up, each one drops to three quarters. A keeper out on the field, or an outfielder in the keeper slot, drops to half.

Chances run off the average of the eleven, so three men out of position drags the whole team down. It is not fatigue and not form, it is geometry, and it is entirely yours to fix on the LINE-UP screen.

Want a man on the scoresheet? Move him, do not train him engine

Goals are handed out on a weighted lottery over positions and nothing else. Centre forward carries 35. A full-back carries 3. Keepers are skipped. Shooting, finishing and form do not enter it at all, so if you want your man to win the golden boot, stand him in the middle up front and he becomes roughly twelve times likelier to be credited, purely by standing there.

Extra time is the only place a strong squad is properly paid engine

The extra-time loop uses a different formula and it has no cap, so the strength edge that was being thrown away for ninety minutes finally converts. In cup football a genuinely better squad is more likely to win the longer the tie runs. In the league, where there is no extra time, it is not.

Do not build a squad for penalties engine

The shootout is two random numbers nudged until they differ. Not one player attribute is looked at, not the keeper's, not the takers'. The game then picks names at random to hang the converted kicks on, purely for the read-out.

Morale and fitness do not change results, but they do change your job indirect

Neither one reaches the engine. What they drive is the RATING the game shows you, and that is what the computer picks its own team on and what the board looks at when it looks at you.

Worth knowing anyway: playing gives +3 fitness and +3 morale, the bench costs you a little, missing the sixteen costs you more, and your best players sulk hardest about being left out. Results land on everyone at once, so a small club winning away at a giant takes +20 and the giant takes −24. And a superstar on more than eight times the squad's average wage gets no morale bonus from his contract at all, where one on four times average gets +8.

Know your sack dates, there are only four career

The board does not watch you continuously. It reviews you on a fixed schedule, and it only fires if you were below expectation at the last checkpoint and still are at this one:

• Week 10 warning, week 14 sack, big clubs only.
• Week 18 warning, week 22 sack, everyone.
• Week 26 sack, everyone, if you were below at 18 and still are.
• Week 30 warning, week 34 sack, only the very biggest clubs.

Below expectation is league position against your own club's size. In the Premier League that is 8th, 15th or 17th depending on how big you are, and the elite are judged on points instead, in trouble once the leader is seven clear. So one good month timed before week 14, 22, 26 or 34 saves your job outright, and a terrible run between checkpoints costs you nothing at all.

Two sacks have nothing to do with the table. Four weeks running in the red and you are gone. Squad down to fifteen players and you are gone.

The same player is twenty times cheaper at a small club money

A 24-year-old averaging 80 to 84 costs £8,500,000 at a giant, £2,000,000 at a weaker Premier League side, £375,000 at a Division Two club. Same player, same numbers, same age.

So shop downwards, and shop abroad. Shevchenko at Dinamo Kiev is £850,000. Kluivert at Milan, comparable numbers, is £12,500,000.

80 is a price cliff. Buy 79. money

The ability bands are steps, and the step from 79 to 80 is the biggest one in the table. At a top club a young player averaging 79 costs £3,250,000. The same age at 80 costs £10,000,000. Three times the money for one point.

And one point is worth nothing to the engine, because chances are capped anyway. Best value trade in the game. The other cliffs, 84 to 85 and 89 to 90, are mild by comparison.

Older is cheaper to buy and cheaper to keep money

Fee falls with every age band. Wage does not, it peaks in the 26 to 29 bracket and drops after 30. So 30 to 32 is a genuine sweet spot, cheaper to buy than a 27-year-old and cheaper to pay.

There is no ageing decline in anything the engine reads either. A 34-year-old on 85 plays exactly like a 24-year-old on 85.

Improving your squad makes everything you buy next dearer trap

Your own club's size band is worked out from your squad's average, so it is a squad readout, not a reputation you earn. In the Premier League: average 80 or better is the top band, 76 to 79 the next, and so on down.

That band sets what your players are worth, what wages they want at renewal, and what your ground improvements cost. Cross a threshold and all of it steps up at once. A club at 79 that buys its way to 80 has just made itself a lot more expensive to run.

Insurance Group 3 is the best line in the game, and it is not close money

For anyone earning under £840,000 a year, so nearly your whole squad, Group 3 is a flat £12,000 a year whatever he earns. When an insured Group 3 player is hurt, three things happen and all of them are in your favour: the hospital bill is covered in full, his wage is refunded, and his wage plus a few hundred a week is also booked as income.

An injured, insured, well-paid player is cash-positive. That is the 1998 game's own model, reproduced, not my reading of it. A man on £175,000 a year picking up a three-week injury is worth about a £29,000 swing against a £12,000 premium. One injury pays for the policy twice.

Group 1 reimburses nothing at all, zero percent, so insuring anyone in it is money thrown away. Group 2 pays half.

Do this: put every player you would actually miss on Group 3 and nobody on Group 1. Do not blanket the whole squad though, twenty men is £240,000 a year and that only pays back if they keep getting hurt.

An uninsured injury costs about double what the screen says money

The weekly bill divides the total cost by the weeks remaining, not the weeks total, so it climbs as he heals. A three-week injury reads £4,500 on the INJURIES screen. You actually pay 1,500, then 2,250, then 4,500, so £8,250.

Build your ground while you are still small money

Improvement costs fall as your club gets weaker. The biggest seating job costs Manchester United £10,624,999 and a Division Two club a fraction of that. So promotion makes your ground dearer to extend, which means extend it first.

Cheap wins: TOILETS is £50,000 at any club in the game, one week. Changing rooms and floodlights are nearly as cheap at a small club.

Only home weeks pay money

A matchday brings in tickets, TV and player bonuses, and only at home. A witnessed away week reads income £0 against £233,942 of expenses. Tickets start at £7.50 a head.

Which matters because the sack counter fires on four straight weeks in the red. A run of away fixtures is exactly when it climbs, so time a signing or a ground project to land on a home week.

Europe is the only income you can plan against a number money

Domestic money is a weekly float with no fixed prize table anywhere. UEFA's is fixed:

Six wins in the group is £4,060,000 with the entry fee, and the semi-finals add another £3,125,000 on top of the win money. A win pays exactly twice a draw, so in Europe there is never a reason to play for one.

Train your keeper's HANDLING, and only your keeper's engine

Thirteen staff jobs are hireable and they start empty every career. The six skill trainers do exactly what they say: put a man on a focus in TRAINING and that attribute climbs week by week, up to about twenty points over his shipped rating, and it bleeds back a point a week the moment you take him off it. The numbers are real and they move.

But only one of the six reaches a result. A player's strength in the match is (SPEED + STAMINA + AGGRESSION + QUALITY) ÷ 4, and those four are the ones training can never touch. HANDLING is the exception, because it is the keeper's saving number, so the one focus that changes a scoreline is HANDLING on your goalkeeper, and it is worth doing only up to 89, because 89 plus 10 is already the cap. PASSING is the seed for his PASSES and TAC. columns on STATISTICS, so it fills the match report without moving the result. Dribbling, heading, tackling and shooting rise on the card and the engine never reads them.

The staff that pay for themselves are the youth team scout (no youth scout, no youth players at all), the physiotherapist, who pulls the training injury risk down, and the scout. Youth growth is the only thing in the game that moves those four core numbers at all, and even then only up to the ceiling the boy shipped with, which is why the academy matters more than the training pitch.

On the scout: a better one finds you more names, not better ones. One star brings back 20, three stars 40, five stars 60, and the trim is at random rather than the best of them. So re-run the same search, the player you wanted may just have been binned by the lottery last time.

The youth academy gives you one boy at a time, at random engine

The youth scout scans, filters, and returns at most one player, picked at random from the matches rather than the best of them. They only arrive through him and they only leave by being promoted, so the same scout never finds the same boy twice. Hire him in week one.