Real clubs, in twenty-one countries

Until this week every club in the game was invented, and named to a formula: a real city plus a colour. Manchester Blue. Turin Black & White. Rio Red & Black. Recognisable enough that you know where you are, obviously not a claim to be the club itself.

That rule now has an exception covering 21 countries, where the clubs carry their real names and crests. 950 of the 1,055 clubs in the game fall inside it. The rest of the world keeps the invented scheme.

Why everything was invented in the first place

Football club names, crests and competition names are trademarks, and the licences for them are the reason there are so few football games. Building a game around a licence you do not have is building a game that can be switched off by an email. The city-plus-colour scheme was chosen so the whole thing could exist without anyone's permission.

It also had a real cost, and the cost showed up in playtesting: a player who signs for "Manchester Blue" spends a moment translating, and that moment is taken out of the fiction. The game asks you to care about a transfer. It is harder to care about a transfer to a placeholder.

What changed, and what did not

What changed is the legal reading, not the ambition. Using a club's name and crest to identify the club — this is Arsenal, they play in London, they are a five-star side — is a different act from claiming Arsenal endorses, sponsors or is affiliated with the game. The first is nominative use. The second is what we do not do, and the footer of every page on this site now says so in three sentences.

What did not change is more interesting:

• No real footballer appears anywhere. Not in the 21 countries, not outside them. Every player, manager, agent and rival in the game is generated, ages, declines and retires inside your save. Player likenesses are an entirely separate legal question from club marks, and the answer to it is no.
• The other fifteen countries stay invented. The rule is still the rule; 21 countries are the documented exception to it, listed in the project's own design notes rather than decided case by case.
• The engine still owns every number. A real crest does not come with real ratings. Club strength is the same star system it always was, tuned for the simulation rather than copied from anywhere.

The data is generated, and that is deliberate

All of it — clubs, divisions, domestic cups, crests — is produced by a script from a single structured source file, into Dart files marked GENERATED at the top. Nobody edits them by hand.

That is not tidiness. A dataset of 950 clubs across 21 countries needs corrections constantly: promotions, relegations, a rebrand, a crest that turned out to be the wrong revision. If those corrections land as hand-edits scattered through a generated file, the next regeneration silently discards them and nobody finds out until a player reports the same wrong crest twice. Corrections go into the source, the source regenerates, the diff is reviewable.

What it cost

Roughly a tenfold increase in the club list, which moved several things that had quietly been tuned against the old, smaller world: the transfer market has far more destinations, the gap between divisions is wider, and a career spent entirely inside one country is now a much more plausible shape than it used to be. Those are balance consequences, and they are being measured rather than assumed — which, as the last entry covers, is a lesson we have already learned the expensive way once.