PrisonBaLL › How to Play › Manager Guide
You start in Division 3 with £350,000, a wage budget of £4,500 a week and a crew nobody else wanted. You have ten seasons. This is what the game is actually measuring while you spend them.
Every division hands you a different game. Not a harder version of the same game — a different one, because the budget decides which mistakes you are allowed to make.
| Division | Starting cash | Weekly income | Wage budget | Squad rating base |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Division 1 | £950,000 | £14,000 | £9,000 | 22 |
| Division 2 | £600,000 | £9,000 | £6,500 | 18 |
| Division 3 | £350,000 | £5,500 | £4,500 | 14 |
| Promotion / Relegation Pool | £180,000 | £3,000 | £2,800 | 10 |
Read the two right-hand columns together. Division 1 pays roughly two and a half times Division 3's weekly income, but its crews are rated 22 against 14 — so promotion does not make you rich, it makes you poor again against better opposition. The season after you go up is the one that gets managers fired.
Your balance is allowed to go negative. Cross −£100,000 and the board notices; there is a hard floor at −£150,000. This used to be dead code — the balance was clamped at zero on the way in and out every single week, so nobody ever saw it. It isn't clamped any more.
Seven players is a functional squad: exactly enough to field a team with nobody spare. The game aims you at ten, and the target shape is one keeper, three defenders, three midfielders and three attackers.
Those three spare bodies are the whole game in the lower divisions. There are no substitutions, so an injury does not cost you a player for a match — it costs you a player for however many weeks the injury runs, during which you are either playing someone out of position or playing a man short. A crew of seven brilliant inmates finishes below a crew of ten ordinary ones, every time.
You can hold at most eight players on the transfer list at once. That is a real constraint when you inherit a bloated squad and want to clear wages.
Three loads, and they trade against each other rather than sitting on a scale from bad to good.
| Load | Development | Freshness / week | Base injury risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light | 0.03 | +12 | 0.5% |
| Normal | 0.05 | +8 | 1.5% |
| Heavy | 0.08 | −6 | 3.5% |
Heavy training develops players roughly two and a half times faster than light — and carries seven times the base injury risk. Worse, it is the only load that drains freshness: it adds four and then takes ten back, for a net loss of six a week.
That matters because injury risk is multiplied by how tired the player already is. At freshness 50 or below the risk is 1.5×; at 30 or below it is 2.5×. So heavy training does not just carry a higher risk — it actively pushes players into the band where that risk gets multiplied. A young inmate on heavy training for a month is not developing quickly; he is on his way to the treatment table.
Heavy training on your under-22s during quiet weeks, light training on everyone who played, and drop anyone below 50 freshness back to light immediately. Players who are injured or already picked for the coming match are skipped by training entirely.
Each inmate has a focus that decides which attributes actually move. The first attribute in each list gets a small extra chance:
| Focus | Attributes trained |
|---|---|
| Goalkeeping | Positioning · Vision · Teamwork |
| Defending | Tackle · Block · Intercept · Positioning |
| Tactical | Pass · Vision · Teamwork · Positioning |
| Technical | Pass · Dribble · Shoot |
| Finishing | Shoot · Dribble · Solo |
| Balanced | Pass · Dribble · Positioning · Teamwork |
Note that defending trains four attributes and technical only three. Narrower focus means each attribute gets a better share of the same gain — technical is the sharper instrument, defending the broader one.
This is the system most new managers ignore for three seasons and then wish they hadn't. Every inmate sits somewhere on four personality axes arranged as two opposing pairs:
Because the pairs oppose each other, no inmate is high in all four. Where the two dominant axes land places him in one of four quadrants:
| Quadrant | Axes | What he is |
|---|---|---|
| The Anchor | Relation + Stability | Team backbone — builds trust and consistency |
| The Catalyst | Relation + Innovation | Creative leader — inspires and invents |
| The Machine | Results + Stability | Quiet and reliable — results-driven |
| The Maverick | Results + Innovation | Wild ambition — driven by winning and reinvention |
Quadrants are not flavour text. They change how the inmate plays: a Maverick carries a large positive on curve and burst and a heavy negative on hesitation and discipline — he will try the thing, early, whether or not it is on. An Anchor is the mirror image: disciplined, patient, and slower to break a game open.
Within each axis, traits come in three tiers — deficient, balanced and excessive. The same axis that produces Mentoring also produces Unsupportive below it and Overbearing above. Too much of a good trait is its own problem, which is why stacking a crew with maximum personality scores does not work.
When three or more players in the same quadrant reach mutual affinity of 60% or more, they start forming a chain. It takes three weeks to crystallise, and during that forming phase it costs nothing and breaks easily. After that it is a fixture of your dressing room — for better or worse.
Every inmate carries a hidden trait and a hidden ability. The trait reveals itself somewhere between 5 and 15 appearances; the ability takes between 35 and 50.
This is the argument against churning your squad every window. A player you sell at twenty appearances is one whose ability you were never going to see. Continuity is not sentiment here — it is the only way information arrives.
Ages follow the same logic: inmates peak somewhere between 26 and 30 and begin regressing between 35 and 38. A 24-year-old is not finished developing, and a 33-year-old is not finished playing.