40 club-and-era pools · 11 slots · no second chances on Hard
The 38-0 draft is the part of the game you actually control. You do not choose a player from a list of everyone who has ever played in the Premier League — you spin, and the spin hands you one club from one decade. Whoever that club had in that era is your entire menu for the pick. Draft eleven times, place each player in a slot that accepts his position, and the season simulation takes over. Every run draws differently, which is why two managers with the same formation and the same difficulty can finish twenty points apart.
The player pool is 482 Premier League names spread across 14 clubs and four decades — the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Crossing those gives 40 club-and-era pools, and one of those 40 is what a spin lands on. A pool only appears if it can still help you: the draft checks whether that club, in that decade, still has an unpicked player for one of your open positions. Once your defence is full, pools that only offer defenders stop coming up, so the draw narrows as the XI fills.
Slots are strict about position. Each of the eleven slots belongs to one bucket — goalkeeper, defender, midfielder or forward — and only accepts a player from that bucket. A right-back and a centre-back are interchangeable for eligibility purposes; a midfielder cannot fill a forward slot no matter how highly he rates. You can draft in squad mode, taking the player you want and then choosing where he goes, or in position mode, naming the slot first and spinning to fill it.
There are two kinds of reroll and they do different jobs. A club reroll keeps the decade and swaps the club, which is what you want when a strong era hands you a thin side. An era reroll keeps the club and moves it to a different generation — the way out when you like the badge but not the squad that came with it. Difficulty sets the budget: Easy gives two of each, Normal one of each, and Hard gives none at all and hides player ratings while you draft.
Because the budget is small, spend rerolls on structural problems rather than on disappointment. A pool that cannot cover the position you still need is worth a reroll. A pool with a good player you simply did not expect is usually not. One thing to know before you set up: if you switch the era filter on to lock the draft to a single decade, era rerolls are disabled, because there is no other generation left for them to move to.
Every combo the draft offers comes with a strength score and a coloured bar. The score is the average rating of that pool's six best players, and it sorts the 40 pools into four tiers: strong at 88 or above, solid from 84, vintage from 80, and lean below that. The cuts sit roughly on the quartiles, so about a quarter of the pools fall in each band. The bar is a shortcut for the question that matters at speed — is there a great player in here, or just a competent one?
A strong tier is not a guarantee, because the six best players in a pool may all be forwards while you need a keeper. The bar tells you how much talent the pool holds, not whether the talent fits your open slots. That is the real skill of the 38-0 draft: matching the pools you are offered against the shape you committed to at setup, and knowing which of your remaining slots is hardest to fill well. The goalkeeper carries the heaviest weight in the simulation, so leaving him to the last spin is how good drafts fall apart.
Which formation to draft into →
Post your run to the leaderboard →
← Back