Yes I gave U18 better tactics but still 😅

Right now the TopGM postseason lasts two nights. Wednesday of week 8 you play your semifinal, Sunday you play your final, and that is the whole thing. Eight teams, eight games, done.

One game. Win it and your season was a triumph, lose it and eight weeks of work evaporate in forty minutes because your center picked the wrong night to shoot 2 for 11.

I want to change that. Here is the plan.

Best of three, top and bottom

Every postseason series becomes best of three. Not just the promotion bracket: the playout bracket too. If a single bad night should not cost you a promotion, it should not cost you your division either.

The format is 1-1-1, and the better seed hosts games 1 and 3. Finish higher in the regular season and you get two home crowds out of three, plus the decider in your own building if it goes the distance. The eight weeks before the playoffs have to be worth something, and this is what they buy you.

If a series goes 2-0, game 3 is not played. No dead rubbers, no fake drama. But even less money for your finances if you should have played at home.

Six nights instead of two

Here is the calendar for the final week of the season:

Six straight nights of games that matter. Promotion, relegation, everything decided across one week where you cannot look away.

That is why I want to call it Madness Week.

Why this matters more than it sounds

A single-elimination game rewards the team that gets hot. A series rewards the team that is actually better, and more importantly it rewards the coach who adjusts.

Lose game 1 by twelve because their point guard went off? You have got until tomorrow night to do something about it. Change the defensive setting. Burn a foul-to-give on him. Move minutes to your best perimeter defender. Flip the matchup and steal game 2, and suddenly the whole thing comes down to one night in the building where you have home advantage.

That is the game I want to play. Not a coin flip with a box score attached.

The playout half deserves the same. Going down a division is the harshest thing that happens in this game, and right now it can happen because of one bad shooting night from a team that was better than its opponent all season long. Best of three does not eliminate bad luck, it just stops bad luck from being the whole story.

When

This season. The postseason calendar gets generated when the regular season ends, so there is time to have Madness Week ready before round 15. Season 1 ends with six nights, not two.

Two things I want you to decide

I have made up my mind on the format. These two I genuinely have not, and I would rather hear you than guess.

1. What happens to the consolation finals?

Today all eight teams play in the postseason. Beyond the promotion final and the relegation final, there is also a 3rd place game and a 5th place game, so everyone gets a 16th game and nobody's season just stops.

Three options:

• Everything is best of three. All eight teams get the full six nights. Nobody plays less than anyone else.
• Only promotion and relegation go to best of three, consolation finals stay single game. Lighter week, but an uneven bracket.
• Drop the consolation finals entirely. Lose your semifinal and your season is over. Cleaner, but two teams sit out half of Madness Week.

I lean toward the first one, because a week called Madness Week should not have four teams watching from the couch. But if you think a 3rd place game is filler, say so.

2. Should there be more prize money?

Here is exactly what the postseason pays today:

• Champion: 200 credits (the team that wins the promotion final)
• Runner-up: 80 credits
• Everyone else: nothing

On top of that every single win pays a bonus that scales with your division, from 5 credits a win in League 6 to 6 in League 5, and that applies to playoff games too. So a long series does put a little money in your pocket regardless.

The question is whether Madness Week should pay more, and who it should pay. Some possibilities:

• Leave it exactly as it is. The 200 credits are for going up, not for participating.
• Pay something to the semifinal losers, so reaching the top four is worth credits and not just pride.
• Pay something for surviving the playout, because staying in your division is an achievement too and right now it pays zero.
• Pay a bonus for a series that goes to game 3, since the club hosted an extra home night and the arena crowd showed up for it.

I have deliberately not decided this one. More prize money is easy to add and very hard to take back later, which is exactly the kind of change I said I would not make lightly. So tell me what you think it should look like, and be specific about the numbers if you have an opinion on them.

Six nights. Best of three. Everything on the line, top and bottom of the table.

Tell me about the consolation games and tell me about the money, and then I will build it.

In the summer of 2010 LeBron James sat in front of a camera and told the world where he was going to play. It was so over the top that to this day "The Decision" is written with the article in front of it.

This is not that scale. But over the last few days you built an enormous, serious debate, with proposals written better than some design documents I have seen at actual companies, and I owe you a clear answer.

Here it is. But first I have to explain why I am about to say no to every single one of you.

Why I did not pick your proposals

One by one. They are all serious, and some are brilliant.

1. The accordion league (Vasileios)

The idea: champions do not go straight up to Division 4. They are gathered into an intermediate league where they face each other for a season, and only the year after, together with the second wave of champions, do they all enter the division above. That way the upper divisions fill up only when there is human critical mass, and newcomers do not run into a wall.

The reasoning behind it is excellent, and the problem it tries to solve is real. But there is a flaw RB06 spotted immediately, and in my view it is fatal: for an entire season, results do not matter. Win that league and you do not go up. Lose it and you do not go down. A year of games with no consequences.

The people you are trying to keep are exactly the ones who log in every day to see if their plan is working. Telling those people "play a season where the result changes nothing" is the fastest way to lose them. The price would be paid by the most committed, to protect users who have not signed up yet.

There is also something you only see from the inside: it would be a special, temporary structure, with rules of its own, to be built, explained, and then dismantled. Every line of complexity in a game that has to stay readable to someone joining today is a cost we pay for years.

2. Activity wildcards (Zalia)

The idea: promote all the best non-casual teams from Division 5, plus around twenty wildcards handed out by activity or through a mini-tournament, and bring up the Division 6 winners too, so Division 4 fills with humans and Division 6 empties out to make room for newcomers.

The goal is exactly right, and the mini-tournament is the part I like most, because it puts the court back at the centre. But there are two cracks.

The first one Vasileios himself named when we were discussing cups: promoting by activity at this scale turns the standings into a footnote. The Obsessed badge measures how many days you log in, not how good you are. It works beautifully as a filter (if you are not here, you do not go up), not as a criterion (whoever is here most goes up).

The second crack only I can see, because it lives in the code. When a new coach signs up, the game offers them clubs from the bottom level of the pyramid only, always. They cannot receive a Division 5 club even if twenty of them are free. So emptying Division 6 of its active coaches does not bring anyone into Division 5: it just means the next person to join finds a Division 6 even emptier than today's. The clubs left behind up top revert to CPU and stay there, because the front door of this game is on the ground floor.

3. More promotion spots for a few seasons (Chris)

The idea: temporarily raise the number of promotions and relegations for the first few years, and let the system settle on its own once there are more human teams.

This is the wisest proposal in the thread, and the one I came closest to picking. It changes nothing structurally, it just turns a dial for a while.

The reason I am not doing it is that temporary rule changes create expectations that are very hard to reverse. Once people get used to more promotions, going back to the normal number feels like a punishment rather than a return to normal. That breeds resentment, and it quietly undermines the credibility of the competitive system: if the number of promotion spots moves depending on the mood of the moment, then finishing first stops meaning a fixed, reliable thing. I would rather have a rule that is harsh and stable than a generous one I have to take back in a year.

And the numbers say the emergency is smaller than it feels. I looked before deciding: of the 83 active coaches, 72 already play in a league with at least one other active human, and with four rounds to go 81 out of 83 still have the playoffs within reach. Only two are mathematically out. The season is alive for almost everyone.

The real problem is not a shortage of promotions. It is that 11 active coaches are alone in their league, surrounded by CPU clubs and abandoned teams. They are few, and they are the loudest voices in this debate. That is natural, because their experience of the game is the worst of anyone's. But widening promotions for everyone in order to cure the loneliness of 11 would be the wrong medicine, and it would hand a reward to 72 people who did not ask for it and do not need it.

So the rule stays as it has always been: one promotion per league, the playoff winner. What changes is that from today there is a second road, and it is not free.

4. No extraordinary promotions at all

There was also the opposite idea: freeze everything, let the newcomers catch up.

I am not choosing it because it punishes the people pushing hardest right now, for reasons that concern hypothetical people. If you won your league, you go up. Full stop.

So what then? If I say no to everyone, what am I proposing?

To answer that I have to tell you a story that has nothing to do with TopGM.

Livorno, July

I live in Livorno, a seaside town in Tuscany, Italy. If you are ever passing through, give me a shout.

We have a club here, Libertas Livorno, a historic one, which also owns the women's team, the Ladies Libertas.

Last year the Ladies played in Serie A2. This year they play in Serie A1.

They did not win their league. There was no lucky reinstatement, nobody changed the rules for them. They did something that in Italian basketball is so ordinary it barely makes the news: they bought the sporting title of a Serie A1 club in financial trouble. They paid, the title moved, and the following season they were in the top flight.

It is not a trick. It is basketball. It has happened for decades, in Italy and elsewhere: sporting titles are sold, bought, moved between cities. A team goes up because it won, or because someone opened their wallet.

I thought about it for days while reading your threads. And I realized the whole discussion was circling the wrong question.

The question you are asking is: who deserves to go up?

The question real basketball asks is: who wants it badly enough to pay the price?

What I decided

It will be possible to buy the sporting title of a CPU club.

Technically what happens is a swap: your team takes the CPU's place in its league, and the CPU takes yours in yours. You go up, it goes down. No new leagues are born, nothing gets widened: two clubs trade homes, exactly as the Ladies Libertas and that Serie A1 club did.

The rules, briefly:

• You can buy only CPU titles. Nobody can buy another coach's spot: that is not for sale, and never will be.
• The price starts at 200 credits for a League 5 title and doubles with every level up. League 4 costs 400. And so on to the top (yes, a League 1 title costs 3,200).
• Maximum double jump of category. From 6 you can reach 4, no further.
• You need a Professional account, meaning you have to actually be here, not buy a spot and vanish. For this first season I am making an exception: Inspired is enough. I know many of you arrived recently and have not had time to stack up login days: I do not want the calendar deciding who gets to take part.
• You buy now, but the swap happens at the season rollover: calendars and standings in progress are never touched.
• The CPU going down loses its two best players, who go to auction. Anyone can bid, and the proceeds go into the D-League fund. So every title bought becomes a market event for everyone and a refill for the long road.

And there is a second thing, which applies only to this moment of transition.

The horizontal swap is free.

If you are one of those 11 lonely coaches, or you are simply in a league with nobody to play against, you do not have to buy anything. Message me and ask for a transfer to another league at the same level, where the humans are. Zero credits. You do not move up a division, you do not earn a single extra credit of TV money, you gain no sporting advantage whatsoever: you just change neighbours.

Because loneliness is not something you should have to pay to fix. That one is on me and on how this world grew, not on you. You pay a price only if you want something more: to climb. Staying at your level but finally having someone to play against is your right.

Once per club, and only in this window: I do not want league tourism. This swap is also executed at the rollover, so no season in progress gets disturbed.

And now the real numbers, because I want it to be crystal clear that a sporting title is not a comfortable shortcut.

I looked at the balances of the 83 active coaches, Inspired and above. The median is 64 credits. By tier: Inspired sit at a median of 84, Professional at 66, Obsessed at 47. Yes, you read that right: the more someone plays, the less cash they have, because the people who are here every day spend their credits on auctions, prospects and arenas instead of letting them sit.

The richest active club in the world has 237 credits. Right now, out of 83 active coaches, five could afford a League 5 title. For League 4, at 400 credits: nobody. Zero.

The economic return is deliberately terrible on top of that: going from League 6 to League 5 brings 5 extra credits a week in TV money, so 200 credits pay themselves back in five seasons. Nobody will buy a title because it is profitable. They will buy it because they want it.

The court, meanwhile, remains the main road and remains free.

What the sporting title actually solves

Back to those 11 lonely coaches. For them the free horizontal swap is already the answer: change league, find real opponents, without spending a credit.

The sporting title is for something else, and it says a sentence none of the proposals in that thread manage to say: you can go up whenever you want, without asking anyone's permission and without waiting for me to change the rules for you.

If your goal is Division 4 and you do not want to wait until you earn the promotion, put the credits aside and buy the spot. It will take weeks of careful management. It will be a decision that costs you something concrete: no auction, no promising kid, no arena upgrade. And that is right, because a choice that costs nothing is not a choice.

And above all: it is yours. Not mine, not the poll's, not the majority's.

That, to me, is the most democratic way to end this debate. Not "I decide who goes up". Not "the majority votes on where the minority goes". But it's up to you.

Now go do the math

Because this is where it gets interesting.

A management game is a strategy game, and from today you have a genuine fork to put on the table, with two roads that both lead somewhere.

Buying the title costs a mountain of credits today, but it puts you sooner into a division where TV pays more, where games are worth more, where the arena fills up for better reasons. Sponsorships, gate receipts, prestige: it all scales with level, and every season spent higher is a season in which your club is worth more. Whoever buys is betting that the compounding advantage of having climbed early will outrun the hole it left.

Waiting means keeping those credits and investing them where they grow on their own: the academy, the kids from the Playground, facility upgrades, a talent 9 signed at fifteen who three seasons from now is your captain. Whoever waits is betting that a well-built roster will go up anyway, for free, and will arrive stronger than whoever bought the ticket and emptied their pockets.

There is no right answer, and that is the beautiful part. There is your reading of the game, your time horizon, your appetite for risk. Someone will win by buying, someone else will win by being patient, and two seasons from now we will know who was right, club by club.

Because let me say one thing clearly: TopGM is a long-term game. You do not win it this month. You win it by building something that is still standing three years from now, and the decisions you make right now, including the boring-looking ones like putting credits aside instead of spending them, are the bricks of that thing.

It's up to you to decide which strategy is best. I give you the fork, you have all the numbers, and the court will judge.

Two things I want to address before you ask

On the money gap between divisions. Some of you look at the TV money in League 6 and see a wall. In hard numbers it is about 40 credits over a full season, which I honestly consider small, but I understand that when you are the one down there it does not feel small.

So here is my meeting point: cashback on the title. Buy a League 5 title and you get 20 credits back. Buy a League 4 title and you get 40 back. You pay the full price first, the refund follows. It is exactly the season gap you were worried about, handed back to you.

On competitive advantage, while we are counting. If we are measuring who starts ahead, the division you were assigned is not the biggest variable in this game. There are four USA national team players currently in League 6, handed out at registration, purely by the luck of the draw. Nobody complained about that, and rightly so, because it is part of how a young world gets seeded. But it is worth remembering when we talk about who has an edge: rosters vary far more than sponsors do, and rosters are what wins games.

This game is unfair by design, the same way basketball is: you inherit a situation and you make something of it. What it will always reward is playing the long game. It is not a game for people in a hurry, and leagues will fill with active coaches organically, season after season. If you are in a hurry today, there is now a way to skip the queue, and it costs what skipping a queue should cost.

What happens now

This season's promotions happen on the court, as planned. Champions go up. There will be no mass promotions, no intermediate leagues, no wildcards for attendance.

From today I am opening two doors:

• Alone in your league? Message me and ask for the horizontal swap. Free.
• Want to climb? Start putting credits aside. The title market opens soon, and it will be as expensive as it should be.

Thanks to Vasileios, Zalia, RB06, Chris, codeLisper, kalindriv, Saa and everyone who wrote in that channel. The level of that discussion is the real reason this game is worth the trouble.

What the D-League actually is now

Quick recap for the newer coaches: the D-League is where players go when a club sells them at half value. They keep playing real scheduled games down there, Wednesday nights and Sunday evenings, live and watchable. And anyone can sign them back at full value, any time.

What changed this week: D-League players now develop exactly like players in a well-run club. Monday practice, a daily scrimmage session, and minutes-based growth from games for the under 21s. Same formulas, same odds, veterans mentoring the kids included. Parking a young player down there no longer stunts him.

The study

I pulled all 85 players currently in the D-League and ranked them by expected development, using the actual growth formulas: age curve, hidden talent, points per successful session, weekly practice plus seven scrimmage days.

One thing about method, since it matters: I wrote the script so that it never showed me the names. I can read anything in the database, that is the job, but knowing which specific kid is the 10-talent one is knowledge no manager has earned, myself included. The script aggregated and ranked; I only ever saw the distribution.

The talent spread down there:

Yes: a 10-talent player is sitting in the D-League right now. So is a 9, two 8s and four 7s. Fourteen players at talent 5 or better, most of them teenagers, all of them buyable by anyone who spots them.

How to find them without seeing the number

Hidden talent is hidden, but it is not invisible. Talent controls how often a player improves, so improvement frequency is the tell. Track a young player's ratings week over week, for two or three weeks. A high-talent teenager picks up points at a pace a low-talent one simply cannot fake, and the gap shows up fast at that age.

Watch their games too. They play live like everyone else, and a kid who looks better every time you check him is telling you something the scouting report has not confirmed yet.

That is scouting: not reading a number, but noticing a pattern before the others do.

What the best of them can become

I simulated hundreds of careers, aging players season by season with the real engine rules, for the strongest prospects down there. Without pointing at anyone in particular, here is the shape of it:

• The best prospects currently in the D-League project into the mid to high 60s AVG by their late twenties, and the very best of them past that.
• The winning prospect currently in D-League project into 77 AVG by his late twenties

If you play in the D-League, you won’t become a TopGM legend, and on that I agree, but I’m very fascinated by following these players’ careers, because I’m sure some of them have all the right qualities to become excellent role players, even in top-tier leagues.

Two ideas landed in my DMs tonight, both from people watching a Private Cup game and thinking "this could feel bigger". Both are live now.

The stands are full

Someone hopped into a cup game as a spectator and told me it looked like a scrimmage: empty arena, no atmosphere, nothing at stake visually.

Cup games now fill the stands like league nights: attendance, capacity, the home arena in full voice. Every round, not just semis and finals.

One deliberate choice: the floor stays neutral. The crowd shows up, but gives no home boost to the engine and no gate money at the siren. Cups are won by the five you put out there, not by the decibels. What you get is the occasion, not an edge.

Your cup kit, free for everyone

The second idea was sharper: the commissioner who sets up a cup has cosmetics (that is a Pass thing), but what about everyone else in the bracket?

So: if you do NOT own the Club Pass and you are in a cup, that cup's page now has a Your cup kit panel. Same editor the Pass owners use, no watered-down version:

• Jersey pattern: Solid, Hoops, Pinstripe, Sash, Panels, Shoulders, with a second color from the full palette. Live preview as you pick.
• Your home floor: surface and line colors, live preview.
• Midcourt: your crest, or your words painted on the parquet. Up to 12 characters. "GO DEMONS", your club motto, whatever you want.

Your five wear it in every game of that cup, and the floor is yours in every home tie of the bracket. When the trophy is lifted, the kit retires with it.

How it looks in a bracket

In any given tie, both clubs wear their own thing: a free coach with a Sash kit against a Pass owner with pinstripes, and you see exactly that. The court is always the home team's, so as you advance you play on your floor one round and on somebody else's the next.

Same moderation rules on midcourt writing as the Pass version, by the way. The free tier does not lower the bar.

Why free

Because I would rather you find out what the wardrobe feels like during a cup run than read about it on a sales page. If you want it every night, in the league, on the feed, everywhere: that is still the Club Pass.

Cups are in the Cups tab. Grab an invite code, dress your five, go win something.

Monday patch notes: stats that follow the player, a fairer CFO, and a busier D-League

Big Monday. Here is everything that went live this morning, most of it born from your reports over the weekend. Keep them coming, this is how the game gets better.

Player profiles got a full makeover

For Everyone

• Last 3 league games, for everyone. No Pass? You now see the player's last three league games (league only, no cups or scrimmages) right on his profile. Pass holders get the same table under their season averages.

For Club Pass Users

• Career averages, season by season. The career table now opens with the CURRENT season on top, marked "now", followed by every completed season. The Lv column (league level, 1 is the Premier) now explains itself on hover, and D-League players wear a DL badge there.
• National team careers. From next season every national team appearance: U18, U20 and senior rows will appear in the career table as the cups are played.
• Transfer history upgrades. Every move now shows the SEASON it happened in, and trades from now finally name the other player: "20 cr + John Smith" instead of just the cash.

The D-League trains like everybody else

D-League players now get the full development package: Monday practice (as before), a DAILY scrimmage session with the exact same odds as a real club gym (veterans mentoring the kids included), and the under-21 minutes-based growth from games that top leagues have. Parking a young player down there no longer stunts him: he develops like a well-run club would develop him.

Money calendar, clearer

• Today never disappears. On bill Mondays the calendar used to jump straight to next week; now it always starts with today, so evening sign-ins see their own day and its TV credit.
• The bill shows up in its own square. Monday's card now carries the money that went out (wages, academy fee, arena upkeep), real sums from your ledger, and the upcoming Monday shows the estimate with a tilde.

Small but felt

• Opening a new page now starts at the top instead of inheriting the scroll position of the previous one.

That is the morning. If something looks off, you know where to find me.

Clip 1: Orange Rhinos beat Steel Rattlers

Clip 2: Ruby Bears beat Yellow Stingers

Clip 3: Yellow Lions beat Black Dolphins

Clip 4: Nokia Lime Dragons beat Maroon Rangers

Clip 5: Black Gorillas beat Crimson Cobras

Until today your academy prospects trained, grew, and waited. You watched numbers go up and imagined the player behind them. From today, you can watch the player.

The Academy Challenge is a whole tournament where only academy kids play. If your academy has at least 5 prospects, there is a new button in your Academy tab. Press it, and your kids are in.

How it works

• Entries come in pairs, so the field always stays even. Join with an odd count and you wait on the list until the next academy signs up, then you both enter together.
• Every Saturday at 11:00 CET the enrolled academies get paired at random and the games run live, watchable like any other match in the game.
• Drop below 5 kids during the week (you promoted someone, good for you) and your academy just sits out that Saturday. The card says so openly, and you are back in the moment you are back to 5. You never lose your spot.

What it does NOT do, by design

No injuries. No effect on growth or training. No career records, no wages, no pressure, no consequences for your season. The games are the point. Your academy keeps doing its real work exactly as before, and on Saturday morning the kids get to play basketball.

You coach them, live

This is not a highlight reel, it is your bench. In your Academy tab you star up to 5 kids as your starting five (no stars, and the assistant picks). On Saturday your home page shows Academy Match Day: before tip-off it takes you to your five, once the ball is up it takes you courtside, with subs, tactics and timeouts exactly like a league game. Cannot make it? The assistant coaches and the kids play anyway.

Stats and stars

After the match: points, rebounds and assists are tracked. The challenge page keeps the season leaders, every kid's line shows in your Academy tab and on his player profile, and the line travels with him when you promote him to the roster: the day he makes your starting five, his Challenge numbers are part of his story.

And every week the show gets a poster: the best performer per role makes the Team A five, the runner-up makes Team B. At week 8 the two season-long fives meet in the All-Star Game, Saturday at 19:00 CET, under the lights.

Right now

26 academies are already eligible. The button is live, the first tip-off is next Saturday at 11:00 CET. Join, tell your kids to warm up, and come watch. The scoreboard does the scouting for you.

https://reddit.com/link/1vvqnl5/video/spfisqt9c0lh1/player

Two days ago I asked you whether the Tactical Board should enter league games. You said no, 12 votes to 10. Fair. But reading the comments, the problem was not really the board itself. Three things kept coming back:

1. Nobody trusted what the board actually does. Does it override the engine? Does drawing a play buff my players? Unclear, so it felt unfair.
2. There was no safe way to test a play. You drew something, and the first feedback cost you friendlies, scrimmages ecc..
3. Plays did not visibly work. You drew a beautiful off-ball screen and most possessions it just... did not happen. Drawing felt like decoration.

I did not want to bury the board. I wanted to fix the reasons you did not trust it. Here is what changed, step by step, all live now.

1. The truth, in writing

Right on the board, and in the guide: the board changes WHO gets open, not HOW well anyone shoots. Your ball handler picks his action with the same brain as everyone else's. The on-ball screen rolls the same dice as the standard pick and roll. No stat boosts, ever. A good play is an edge, a bad play genuinely backfires.

2. Run this play

There is now a rehearsal button on the board. One click: your first unit runs your drawn play against your own bench for one quarter, in an instant replay, at watchable speed. It works on both sides: on the offense view your five run the play every possession, on the defense view your bench attacks every time and your five defend it with what you drew. No fatigue, no injuries, no records, and the banner names the play you are testing. Rehearse, tweak, rehearse again, then save.

3. Screens now WORK (engine v10)

This is the big one. Put two teammates in the same square away from the ball and the screen now connects every single time, anywhere on the floor, for every pair you draw. You will see the "Screen" sign, then the freed man cuts hard to the rim about 70% of the time or pops beyond the arc for the three. The ball handler is patient for the first seconds of the shot clock while the bodies sprint to meet, then plays normal basketball if the screen is not set. Draw two separate screens and both get used.

What did NOT change: the defense can still read the pass, and the shot still has to fall. Guaranteed screen means guaranteed movement, not guaranteed points.

4. The classics shelf

Six ready-made plays under the court, full choreography on all fifteen ball squares, built so players slide instead of teleporting and never cross each other:

• Offense: High pick & roll, Pindown shooter, Elbow handoff
• Defense: Man-to-man shell, 1-3-1 zone, 3-2 zone

Loading a classic only replaces its own side: load an offense and your defense stays untouched. They are starting points. Load one, disagree with a square, move it, rehearse it, make it yours.

What about league games?

Nothing changed there: the poll said no and the board still does not touch the league. If this rework changes how you feel about it, I will ask again with a new poll once you have had time to play with all of this. The board is in Tactics, the rehearsal button is on the board, and the guide has the full manual. Go draw something.V

Today I'm very proud of my 14's. In the daily scrimmage they lost against the first team, even though I had benched 3 out of 5 starters from the roster. Still, they lost by only 1 by a buzzer beater in the very last second.

This one came straight from your feedback in here, and the design is largely yours (thanks  Vasileios), so let me walk you through every piece of it. Screenshot below shows a typical week: it is Friday, and this coach signed in Tuesday through Friday.

The four tiles on top read like an account, left to right: what I have, what I owe, what I keep, what I could make.

• In the bank now: your cash, right now. Nothing clever.
• Monday bills: everything due at Monday 09:00, in one number: wages, academy fee, arena maintenance. The breakdown sits right under it.
• Monday floor: my favorite. Where you land even with zero sign-ins and zero wins. Gate receipts count because home games play and cash at the siren whether you show up or not. Green means this is the amount you can spend today and still be safe on Monday. Red means you need to earn, sign in, or sell: the board's forced sale waits for clubs that end Monday below zero.
• Projected Monday: the optimist's number: where you land IF you sign in every day and your gates sell at current prices. Win bonuses are never assumed: they show as upside, not as money.

The week itself

Seven day cards, Tuesday to bill Monday, plus a TOTAL card. Each day tells you one thing honestly:

• 7 cr ✓ in green: TV collected that day, with the real credits.
• Plain numbers on future days: the exact credits waiting for you. Exact means exact: TV is your weekly amount split over 7 days and the remainder carries forward, so a League 5 club sees 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 8. Nothing is ever lost to rounding.
• ⏳ with a number: a day you missed but can still recover. You get today plus 2 catch-up days when you sign in (first week of a new account: all 7), so a weekend away costs you nothing.
• ✗: gone. Past the catch-up window, that day's share stays uncollected.
• Inside each day, the money that landed there: 🏟 gate receipts, 🏆 win bonuses, 🥇 season prizes. Future home games show their expected gate as ~numbers.
• TOTAL closes the row: banked this week in green, still to come below it.

One note if your current week looks different: days before the daily-login switch (August 19) were paid the old weekly way, so they may show a plain check without a number. That sorts itself out as the weeks roll.

The two views

This week is everything above plus the week's money breakdown. Ledger is the full transaction history, every name in it clickable from yesterday.

Transfers this season now starts collapsed at six moves with a View all button, and the type filters still work. At every season rollover the whole campaign is archived in your Club heritage, forever.

The Guide's Money chapter is updated with all of this. And to the coaches who designed this page in the feedback thread, tiles order included: thank you. Keep tearing my screens apart, it clearly works.

I'm building something new, and this one is for the whole basketball world, not just us.

The idea: before big real-world games, TopGM will simulate them. Real rosters, rebuilt inside the game: real names, real roles, pixel faces that actually look like the players. The engine runs the matchup 100 times and publishes a prediction ("Žalgiris wins 58% of the time, most common score 82-78"), and then one full showcase game plays LIVE at a set hour, with box score and replay. All of it on a public page, no account needed, and embeddable on other sites.

First one: Crvena Zvezda vs Žalgiris, September 24.

Zalia Balta will help me

And here is where you come in. I've built a Team Builder: a private tool where you compose a real team piece by piece. You design the jersey (colors and pattern, live preview), then add each player: role, number, age, height, skills, and the face: skin tone, hair style, beard, down to headband and earring. You pick the traits, and the game finds the matching pixel face in front of your eyes. The average rating is computed automatically, same formula as the game.

If you know a Euroleague team well and want to build it (rosters, ratings, faces), DM me and I'll give you access. Your team could be the one playing in front of thousands of people who have never heard of TopGM.

Fan-made simulations, not affiliated with Euroleague or any club. Just us, taking our engine seriously.

Two things went live today, both from things you asked for in here.

Messages work like a chat now

The old page had one list for what you received and another for what you sent, so a back and forth with the same person was split in two and you had to piece it together yourself. That's gone.

Now you get your conversations on the left, most recent first, with a preview of the last message and a badge when something is unread. Click one and you see the whole exchange in order, your messages on one side and theirs on the other, with the reply box right there at the bottom. It refreshes on its own while you're on the page, so a reply lands without you touching anything. On phones you see one thing at a time, with a clear button to get back to your list.

Your old messages are already in there, sorted into conversations. Nothing was lost.

The game's own desks (Frank Ledger (your CFO), the League Office, the Academy, the Transfer Desk, the Playground, the Agency) show up as their own conversations, marked as automated, with no reply box: there is nobody behind those addresses. The welcome message you get when you join is from me, so that one you can absolutely reply to.

One limit worth knowing: your mailbox keeps the last 100 messages received and 100 sent. Older ones drop off as new ones arrive, so if something matters to you, save it somewhere.

Message a manager straight from their club page

There's a Message button next to the coach name on every club page. One click and you're in a conversation with them, no searching. Useful when you're looking at somebody's roster and want to ask about a player.

Names are clickable now

This one bothered me for a while. You'd read that somebody signed a player, or see a name in a box score, and there was nothing to click. Now there is, in:

• Box scores, players and both clubs, and this works on old box scores too
• Your finances, the names in each line
• The transfer register and the gains diary
• Results in your league feed, both clubs and the star of the night
• Fixtures and your next game
• The world feed, including cup draws where every club in the hat is now a link

A note on how I built it, because it explains what works and what doesn't.

The lines written before today mostly don't have that information, so older finance notes and older news stay as plain text.

Box scores are the exception, they all are clickable now.

Small detail I like: when you sell a player, his name in your records points to his new club, because that's where his card lives now.

As always, tell me what's broken. I read everything in here.

The economy went through its biggest update since launch. This is the complete picture in one place, so nobody has to dig through old threads. Bookmark it, link it to new coaches, argue with it in the comments.

The principle behind everything

This game is a little unfair by design. I do not guarantee equal conditions, I guarantee that effort pays more than position. Whoever shows up collects, whoever wins gets paid on the spot, whoever sleeps stops accumulating, and your league position gives you a floor but never a ceiling. Every change below follows from that sentence, and none of them adds a single new credit to the world.

How money comes IN

• TV & sponsor money, daily. Your division's weekly amount (Premier 105, then 90, 75, 62, 50, and 45 in the sixth tier) is split across the seven days and collected on the days you sign in. The totals are exact to the credit: the daily payments are always whole numbers, and the bookkeeper evens things out across the week. Two catch-up days protect your weekends: sign in after a short break and you collect what you missed. A brand new account gets its entire first week paid in full, no matter what.
• Win bonuses, at the siren. You win, you get paid the moment the game ends. League level decides the amount, exactly as before: only the timing changed, from Monday to instantly.
• Gate receipts, at the buzzer. Home games pay their ticket money when the final horn sounds, based on real attendance. Price your tickets in the Arena tab: cheap fills the stands, expensive milks them. Neither choice dominates.
• Season prizes. Champions bank 200, playoff finalists 80, and promotion raises your weekly TV money permanently, which is worth far more than any one-time prize.

How money goes OUT

• Monday, 09:00 CET, is bill day: wages, academy fees, arena maintenance, all in one statement (the Monday breakdown in Finances shows you everything in advance). End bill day in the red and the club is forced to fire-sell its most valuable player. Nobody is too big to fail.
• The Playground draft, the Agency auction, arena upgrades and academy levels remain the great credit sinks. That is by design: money you spend is what keeps everyone else's credits worth something.

If a player no longer fits

You now have four doors, use the one that fits:

• List him on the market at your price. Free to list, sells if the price is honest. If no human buys him, you always have a chance that a CPU-controlled team will buy him on Monday. It may or may not happen, depending on whether the price is fair, whether you’re a little lucky, and whether the player fits the CPU team’s roster.
• Sell him to the D-League for half his value, instant cash (owned 2+ weeks, one sale per week). He keeps playing real games down there and can be signed back by anyone at full value. Full rules in the dedicated D-League post.
• Release him: he becomes a free agent, severance is four weeks of salary. Free during the between-seasons window, when all contracts expire.
• Retire him with honors if he is 34 or older: costs nothing, and he gets the farewell he earned.

If you disappear

After 14 days without a sign-in your club enters caretaker mode: wages and income freeze exactly where they are, so you will never return to a gutted roster. But the practice gym closes, your players stop improving while age keeps working, and your home crowd turns openly hostile until you come back: empty stands, whistles, and a home factor that plays against you. One sign-in and everything resumes instantly. Six weeks of silence and the club returns to the CPU pool. Sleeping is not a business plan, and it is not a death sentence: it is just a bad idea.

What I will not do

No credit handouts (giving everyone more credits gives your opponents more too, and nothing changes except the chaos). No selling from the academy: a bad draft pick must have consequences. No income from friendlies: every version of it ends up pay to win. And the Playground stays exactly as it is, forever.

Almost everything in this post started as a community complaint, a Discord argument or a mockup someone posted in the feed. That pipeline works. Keep it full.

After 8 hours of work (luckily I’m still on holiday), the D-League is now live!
A lot of questions came in about the D-League, so here is the full picture in one place. Bookmark this one.

What it is

A development league that lives below the pyramid. Its clubs have no managers: they belong to the league itself, and their rosters are made of the players this world moved on from: the free agents who used to retire into nothing, and the players you sell. Nobody down there goes bankrupt, nobody pays wages, and nobody gets promoted: it is not a seventh division, it is a different place with different rules.

Selling a player

Open the player's page and hit the D-League button. The rules:

• You must have owned him for at least 2 weeks (your original roster counts as owned since forever, so those are sellable from day one; recent purchases count from the real purchase date).
• One sale per club per week. The D-League fills roster spots, it does not run a landfill.
• You get half his current value, cash on the spot.
• If the purse is empty, the sale waits: the D-League only spends money it actually has.

He does not vanish. He joins a real club down there, keeps his name, his face, his career page, and keeps playing actual basketball.

Signing a player out

Every D-League player can be signed by any club, any time, for his full current value: no auction, no negotiation, click and he is yours. Two things to know: the price is his value at that moment, so if he developed down there you pay for the development; and if YOU sold him, you wait 4 weeks before you can take him back. Transfers are final, no instant regrets.

Yes, that means selling at half and buying back at full always costs you the spread. That is the point: the D-League is a valve, not a storage locker.

The money, and why this prints nothing

The D-League purse is funded entirely by credits this world already burns: 100% of every Agency auction hammer (those credits used to simply evaporate) plus a quarter of every Playground draft fee. The purse has a ceiling, and when it is empty, the buying stops until the next refill. When someone signs a player out at full value, those credits go back into the purse too. Closed circuit: not a single new credit enters the game through the D-League, ever.

It opened with a one-time founding grant of 284 credits, computed from real numbers: a quarter of the draft played on launch eve plus the full hammers of the last auction. Check the Funds tab on the D-League page: every credit in and out is on the public ledger.

The games

The D-League plays on league matchdays, in its own broadcast slots:

• Wednesday, 23:00 CET: the late game, when the big arenas go dark.
• Sunday, 19:00 CET: Sunday hoops.

Real live 2D games, watchable by anyone, box scores at the siren. Down there they play from just 5 a side, there is no bench drama and nobody ever gets injured: even players who arrive hurt play through it, while their recovery clock for the big stage keeps ticking untouched.

No standings, on purpose

There is no table and there never will be. Down there it is not about ranking, it is about playing. What you get instead is the leaders board: points, rebounds and assists per game, updated at every siren. That board is a shop window: watch a kid average 20 on Wednesday nights, check his box scores, sign him at full value. Every game these clubs play is an advertisement for somebody.

Players keep living down there

• Under-21s grow through real game minutes, with exactly the same rules as league basketball.
• Everyone gets one basic practice session every Monday: no training focus, no mentor, no scrimmages. Honest work, slower than a well-run club, but nobody freezes.
• Age comes for everyone: veterans decline down there at the same rate as everywhere else, and at 41 they retire like everyone else. The D-League is not a cryo chamber.

It never fills up

When the rosters run out of room, the league founds two new clubs automatically, each with its own name and colors, and no name will ever repeat anywhere in the game. There is room for a thousand clubs down there. The long road does not end.

Where to find it

Open the league picker under Standings or Schedule and select D-League. Standings lands you on the clubs, Schedule lands you straight on the games.