Welcome to the second of our Deep Dive articles on Soccer Manager 2025!
This week, we’ll be looking into the competitions system, including the format changes for the European competitions.
Getting your club into a continental competition for the first time is one of the most satisfying things you can do in the Soccer Manager series. Going from the lower leagues to European glory is the ultimate journey that you can go on with your club, so it was important for us this year to make sure that the competition formats in-game are as realistic as they possibly can be.
The Format
First up – a quick note on how the new format works. European competitions have had their group stage completely overhauled. Previously, teams were placed into a group with three other teams and would then play each opponent twice, home and away, for a total of six games.
The new format has removed the group-based system, making way for the “League Phase” stage of the competition. All of the teams are placed into a single league table. Teams will then be matched against either eight or six opponents, depending on the competition. Half of their games will be played at home, whilst the other half will be played away. The usual league table rules of three points for a win, one for a draw, and none for a loss apply, as will goal difference.
Finishing in the top eight of this new league table will automatically qualify you for the knockout stages (the round-of-sixteen). If you finish between ninth and twenty-fourth, you’ll be entered into a two-legged knockout round, and the results of these knockouts determine the other eight participants in the round-of-sixteen. The knockouts will then carry on as they always have in-game.
Implementing it in-game
As you can probably tell, it’s not the simplest of systems! It’s taken everyone a bit of time to fully understand the new system and plan out a way to implement the competitions. Overhauling a major component of the game was never likely to be a simple task and was always going to take a significant amount of development time, and this new format was no exception.
Accurately scheduling games across a season is a hugely complicated thing to do. There are hundreds of teams across the different leagues that all need to have their games scheduled, but they’re all in different competitions that play on different days so they have lots of different conflicts that need to be resolved. As a result of this near-infinite number of different combinations of matches, the competitions system is easily one of the most complicated ones in Soccer Manager 2025.
Our first step was researching the new format and fully understanding how it will work in reality. When working on an overhaul as big as this one, we spend a lot of time in the planning stages to reduce the risk of something going wrong later in the development process. By spending a few weeks fully mapping out the new competitions system, we were able to make the process of implementing it as smooth as possible.
After planning out how the competitions were going to work in-game, we moved on to implementing them. This task had two major components – both adding the new system, and removing the old system without causing any issues elsewhere in the game. Lots of the systems in the Soccer Manager series are tightly integrated with one another, so changes to one can cause issues elsewhere, so we had to make sure that swapping out the competitions system did not cause any unintended side effects.
With the system now in the game, we’re working on testing it as much as possible. With so many different combinations of matches possible, there are only so many possible ones that our internal QA team can test themselves. Things like this are why we open up a beta version of the game for you to try out before launch; the beta period helps us test anything new on tens of thousands of devices – something that isn’t quite possible in the office! We’ve already made some changes and fixes thanks to the beta, and we’re still working on some more.
Wrapping Up
Thanks for reading through this week’s Deep Dive! This change isn’t quite as visually exciting as last week’s topic, the new UI. The new competitions are a huge part of the game that we wanted to share with you all. Make sure to come back next week to find out more about another major new addition to the Soccer Manager series!
