About

23 May 2030
Thursday
Process

OpenFootball is a project that simulates the real world of football and helps predict results, player transfers and careers.

Clubs, leagues, players, transfers, finances and reputations all move on their own. You explore the world; the engine plays the football.

  • v1.4.300
  • Single binary
  • Runs offline
  • Open source

What is this?

A football world simulator, not another manager game.

Open Football simulates clubs, leagues, matches, players, transfers, reputations, finances and long-term football dynamics, with no manual match control.

Everything sits in one connected ecosystem: a transfer changes a career, a career changes a squad, and a squad changes the league table. Matches are resolved by the engine, never by your input.

Questions it exists to answer
  • Which club becomes dominant after twenty simulated seasons?
  • How does a single transfer reshape a career and a club's future?
  • Can data-driven simulation produce believable tables and results?
  • What happens when a whole football world keeps running without you?

How does it work?

Run one file, press Process, watch the seasons pass.

A release is a single self-contained binary: the simulator and the web application in one file. Start it and your browser opens on the world.

  1. Run the binary
    No install, no runtime to set up, no account.
  2. The world loads
    Countries, clubs, squads and players are built in memory at startup.
  3. Press Process
    Every click moves the calendar on. Or go on holiday and let ten years run in one go.
  4. Close the app
    The world ends with the process. Nothing is written to disk.
The world lives in memory

There are no save files. The whole football world exists only while the app is running. Close it and the next launch begins a fresh world from the same database.

Run it on your own machine

Download a release, run it, and open the address in your browser. On a remote server, use that server's address with the same port.

Open Football uses every core it can find. It has been tested on machines with 256 CPU cores and still runs comfortably on a laptop.

$./open-football
→http://localhost:18000

Why I built it

I was tired of relearning the same game every year.

Football Manager changes its interface, its editor workflow and its database format with almost every release, and the work you did last year has to be done again.

Open Football keeps a stable shape instead. The interface and the data model stay familiar, while the simulation logic, the mechanics and the football intelligence keep improving.

It is also a laboratory. Move any player to any club, run the simulation, and see what the squad, the tactics, the finances and the match engine make of it: a realistic rebuild, a wonderkid in a stronger league, or Messi at Wolverhampton.

The database is open too

Club data, player details, league structures and country data live in their own repository, so the football world can improve without touching the simulator. Pull requests are welcome.

About me

Ivan Artemov
Author and developer Moscow, Russia

I build Open Football on my own, in evenings and at weekends. Found a bug, want a league added, or want to argue about the match engine? Write to me, I read everything.

Email zoxexivo@gmail.com