First, a big thank-you to SoccerGaming.com for featuring Play Strikers on their website! If you found us through their social media channels, welcome. Play Strikers is an indie football game built in Unreal Engine 5.
We also passed $1,000 pledged on Kickstarter. Thank you to every Founding Backer who believed in us early. It tells us there's real appetite for a football game where the club matters as much as the match.
Which brings us to this update. Career mode has a new Club Info screen, and with it two big features: the buildings your club runs on, and the people who run it.
Facility upgrades
Every club has twelve facilities, each rated from level 1 to 5:
- Matchday: parking, concessions, fan zone, club store, seating and bathrooms. Better matchday facilities bring in more money every home game and keep your fans happy, and happy fans fill the stadium.
- Football: pitch, locker room, training ground, medical center and youth academy. A better pitch strengthens you at home, the training ground speeds up player development, the medical center gets tired legs back faster, and the youth academy produces higher-potential prospects.
- Stadium capacity: add seats 5,000 at a time, if you can afford it.
Upgrades aren't instant, and they aren't cheap. A top-flight training ground runs into the tens of millions, and building work takes weeks, with no more than two projects at once. Your owner covers part of each bill, and every facility costs upkeep each season, so a grand stadium is only a good idea if you can keep paying for it. The AI clubs invest too, so standing still means falling behind.
Staff upgrades
Your backroom has seven roles: head coach, assistant manager, goalkeeper coach, fitness coach, medical staff, chief scout and academy director. Each one has a qualification ladder (C License all the way up to Pro License for coaches) and a leadership rating, and both shape how they help your squad.
- Train them: send staff on license or leadership courses. Courses cost money and take weeks, but you keep the person you trust and they come back better.
- Replace them: sign better staff from the market. Free agents are cheap to bring in; poaching someone from another club means paying compensation, and letting your current person go means paying off their contract.
Every hire comes with a wage, and those wages come straight out of your budget.
Club Finances
Every upgrade, owner contribution, course fee, compensation payment and contract pay-off shows up as its own transaction in your club's finances. Open the Finances tab and you can see exactly where the money went, and why the bank balance looks the way it does at the end of the season.
Winning on the pitch is only half the job. ⚽️
Shipped: facility upgrades · construction over weeks · owner funding · staff courses & licenses · staff market · wages & compensation · every transaction in the ledger