Competitions

The Competitions page is where your season runs. Every club plays a League, and the clubs managers run also play a knockout Cup. Each has its own tab: the League tab holds the clubs you play, the fixture list and the standings, and the Cup tab holds the bracket. Your own matches from both sit beside them, in the order they are played.

Getting placed

You don't pick a league. When an admin starts a season every club is placed into a 10-club league and the fixtures are drawn; a league short of ten is filled up with bot clubs. Sign up mid-season and you take over a bot's place in an entry-division league instead of waiting for the next season.

One calendar

League fixtures are grouped into rounds, and the matches in a round are played around the same time. Two league rounds make a week, the beat that money, training, injuries and transfers settle on. Cup rounds share that calendar: a cup round is played between the two league rounds of a week, and a very large cup field plays its first rounds before the league starts.

Trophies

Winning a league puts a trophy in your club's cabinet, on your Overview, and so does winning the cup. Each one is named for the competition, the achievement and the league it was won in. While the game is in alpha they all carry an Alpha prefix, so a 3rd Division title won in the league called Lighthouse reads Alpha 3rd Division Champion - Lighthouse. The league name matters because a division holds several leagues. The cup has none: it is one competition a season, so its winner reads Alpha Cup Winner.

The higher the division, the richer the metal: a 1st Division trophy is gold, and each division below it drops a step, down to the entry division. A trophy keeps the metal of the division it was won in forever, so an old title is never repainted by a later promotion. Titles won before divisions existed (the Alpha League Series) are grey. The cup belongs to no division, so it is not on that ladder at all: it takes the top rung of the rarity ladder, orange, because a cup sits above a league title, and a cabinet tells the two apart at a glance.

Only the league champion and the cup winner are awarded a trophy. There is no trophy for the runner-up, for the cup runner-up, or for climbing a division: promotion is its own reward.

Forfeits

A club that cannot field seven fit players forfeits the match. In the league that is a 15 to 0 loss, and if neither side can field seven it counts as a 0 to 0 loss for both clubs, with no points for either. In the cup it is a walkover: the side that can field goes through, and if neither can, the club seeded higher in the draw does.

Ending a season

When the last match of the season is played, the off-season starts on its own: trophies and prizes are handed out, and the final tables and the bracket stay open to browse. An admin then starts the next season, with clubs promoted, relegated and placed into their new leagues. From then on the old season lives on in your trophy cabinet and your players’ career statistics.