Frequently asked questions

38 Wins is a free football draft game. You spin for a real historical squad, take one player from it, and repeat until you have eleven. Then the game simulates a full season — or a World Cup — to see how far your XI gets.

The name is the target. A 38-game league season won without a single defeat or draw: 38 wins, 0 draws, 0 losses. No team in football history has done it. Arsenal's Invincibles of 2003/04 came closest and still drew twelve.

Four steps, repeated eleven times. Spin to land on a real club-season or national squad. Read the players it offers. Pick one. Place him in a position on your pitch.

When all eleven slots are filled you simulate. Every match is played out from your squad's attacking and defensive rates, so the result reflects the team you built rather than a single overall score.

Free, and there is no account. There is nothing to sign up for, no email to give, and no personal data collected — your results are stored in your own browser and never leave your device.

No — the whole game runs in your browser, on any device. But there are iOS and Android apps, and on a phone they are the better way to play: built for touch, smooth to move through, and they work without a connection.

Downloading one is also the simplest way to support the game, which is free and made by a very small team.

Thirty-eight wins, zero draws, zero losses — every match of a league season won. At three points a win that is 114 points. The record in the English top flight is 100.

A draw ends the run just as surely as a defeat does. That is what makes it hard: you need an XI that not only wins but almost never fails to score.

In the club competitions, yes — but never on consecutive spins. A club that has just come up sits out the next three, so a draft can revisit a great side without ever handing you it twice in a row. There is no cap on the total.

That is safe because you can never take the same player twice, so a second visit to a club is a second choice from what is left of it, usually a different season of it as well. In the World Cup competition each nation still appears at most once: eighty-eight nations is too thin a pool to repeat.

A few other rules run quietly alongside it: your spins spread across different eras, squads you saw in recent drafts are less likely to come back, and if three spins pass without a strong option the next one is guaranteed to have one.

A third competition alongside European league and World Cup, drawing only from English clubs — every side that has played a season in the top division across the years the data covers. Same eleven spins, same thirty-eight games, same target.

It keeps its own leaderboard, because a score set in a pool of thirty-odd clubs is not comparable to one set across five divisions. More about English top flight mode.

Neither, by design — the pools have nearly identical average squad quality, and the simulation does not know which competition you picked. Your season is played out from the eleven players you drafted and nothing else.

What differs is texture. The European pool is deeper and will show you clubs you have never watched. The English pool is smaller, so the great squads come round more often and the decision is more often which Manchester City you want.

No. A player often appears in several squads — Cristiano Ronaldo can be reached through six different club seasons and six different World Cups — and those squads will still come up. But once he is in your XI he is shown crossed out and cannot be taken again.

Players who merely share a name are treated as different people, so drafting the Luis Suárez who played for Spain in 1962 does not block the Uruguayan.

A grade is a player's overall rating expressed on a thirty-step scale from A++ down to F--. It exists because "82" and "79" look almost identical while B+ and C do not.

The scale is not evenly spread. The median player in the game is a C--, and A++ is the top 0.4% — roughly twenty players out of five thousand. A squad full of B grades is a genuinely strong squad.

Because a centre-back is not a left-back, even though the game lets you put him there. Each slot asks for two specific attributes — a left-back is judged on defending and pace, a striker on shooting and physicality — and a player who does not have them underperforms his rating.

This is the single biggest lever you control. Reading the six attributes instead of sorting by the overall number is most of the difference between a mid-table finish and a title race.

Your XI produces an attacking rate and a defensive rate. Every one of the 38 matches is then played out from those rates against a league-average opponent, so scorelines vary and an identical squad will not return an identical season.

Squad balance feeds those rates too: quality through the spine, a sensible shape, players from one era, players who knew the same league.

Your squad does. If every player you drafted comes from a tournament before 2026 you play the classic 32-team bracket — seven wins to lift it. Draft even one player from a 2026 squad and you play the expanded 48-team tournament, which adds a Round of 32 and an eighth win.

It is a real trade-off rather than a detail: 2026 squads are strong, and taking one costs you an extra match to survive.

It is reachable, and it is meant to be rare. The game is tuned so that a perfect season is a genuine achievement rather than a lottery win or a formality.

It has never happened in real football, which is the point of chasing it here.

Measured over 30,000 simulated drafts per competition, at the game's current settings. In European league mode:

Roughly 1 in 3,600 for someone who takes the highest number in every squad and drops players into whatever slot is open. Roughly 1 in 120 for someone who reads the attributes, fills each slot with a player who genuinely suits it, and protects the spine.

That is a thirtyfold difference, and it is the number the whole game is built around. Skill, not luck, is what moves you between those two figures — the bonuses you can decide are worth about five times the bonuses you are dealt. A careless drafter will very rarely see 38-0-0. A good one can expect it in a hundred-odd attempts.

English top flight mode runs easier — about 1 in 1,700 careless and 1 in 47 careful — because the great sides are a much larger share of thirty-five clubs than of a hundred and sixty-five. It is the accessible board, and the two are kept separate for exactly that reason.

No. Every player, every squad and every bonus is available to everyone from their first draft. Nothing about how your XI performs can be paid for.

From real match data, not hand-typed opinions. Each player's six attributes are derived from what he actually did on the pitch — goals and shot quality feed shooting, build-up involvement feeds passing, defensive actions feed defending, and so on.

Because he was a different player in different years. Each card is a specific season, so you are not drafting "Ronaldo" — you are drafting Ronaldo at Juventus in 2019, or at Manchester United in 2022, and those are not the same footballer.

This matters when you draft. A player at his peak and the same player late in his career are separate cards with separate attributes, and choosing which version of a great player you want is part of the game.

European league mode covers 1,074 squads from 165 clubs across Europe's top five leagues — England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France — from 2015 to 2025.

English top flight mode is the English slice of that: 220 squads from 35 clubs over the same span. A club appears once for each season it played, so the Arsenal of 2018 and the Arsenal of 2025 are separate squads with separate players.

The World Cup competition covers 482 squads from 88 nations across all 20 tournaments from 1950 to 2026. Together that is 32,755 player cards.

The club pool starts at 2014/15, so a player who retired before then will only appear through his national team in the World Cup competition. Pelé, Cruyff and Maradona are all in the game — just not in a club shirt.

It cannot go back further. Every rating here is derived from shot-level expected-goals data, and that data does not exist publicly for earlier seasons — it was never recorded. Going back would mean a second, incompatible rating system sitting in the same pool.

Players with very little playing time in a given season are also left out, which keeps squads to the men who actually played.