What Update 3 says it added
The UPDATE LOG panel is the game's own changelog, and it is where this page starts. The card is headed TACTICS UPDATE, carries a NEW badge and the stamp NOV 7, 2026, and lists six changes. These are its lines, as printed:
- GAME PLANS Pick Balanced, Tiki Taka, Long Ball or Counter. Your plan changes how your team plays.
- HALF TIME Change your game plan at half time, both clubs vote in a live match.
- SQUAD A brand new squad screen with your full player cards and a bigger game plan.
- DRAG & DROP Grab a player card and drop it on another to swap them, bench players too.
- ANIMATIONS All new realistic match animations: kicks, tackles, saves and headers.
- CELEBRATIONS New goal and win celebrations, and players no longer
The last line is cut by the card's right edge in the frames we have, so it stops where the panel stopped showing it. We read the card, not a press release: the log describes what the build claims, and the rest of this page is what the screen actually printed afterwards.
Where the four buttons are
Open SQUAD from the bottom bar. The right-hand column holds three cards, top to bottom: SYNERGY with its bar and bonus line, then GAME PLAN, then the player list with the ALL / GK / DEF / ATK filters, AUTO FILL and CLEAR.
The GAME PLAN card has four buttons across it, each drawn in its own colour and each with a small diagram of passing routes: BALANCED in blue, TIKI TAKA in green, LONG BALL in amber, COUNTER in red. The plan in force carries an ACTIVE tag on its top edge, and the sentence in the card's top-right corner belongs to that same plan.
Tapping a different button does two things at once. The ACTIVE tag and the corner sentence move to the plan you touched, and a bell toast at the top of the screen prints the same line with the plan's name in front: for example Game plan: TIKI TAKA. Short passes, keep the ball, patient build-up. The toast stacks if you tap two plans in quick succession, which is how two lines appear together in the frames.
What each plan prints
Four plans, four sentences, and the sentence is the only description the screen gives you. Nothing on the panel prints a number, a percentage or a stat change for any of them.
| Plan | The line under GAME PLAN | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| BALANCED | A bit of everything. | The default. It claims no speciality, so it is the one to keep when you do not want to lean on any single route. |
| TIKI TAKA | Short passes, keep the ball, patient build-up. | Possession, built slowly. Choose it when your cards are better with the ball than without it. |
| LONG BALL | Skip the midfield, long balls up to the forwards. | Bypasses the middle of the pitch. Choose it when your forward line is your strongest part. |
| COUNTER | Sit deep and break fast when you win the ball. | Defend first, break quickly. Choose it against a squad that will have most of the ball. |
The last column is our reading of the sentence, not a measurement. The screen prints the sentence and nothing else, and we did not play the same fixture four times to compare outcomes.
Change it, then check three numbers
The whole interaction is short, and the useful part is what it does not change. In one session the player moved through BALANCED, TIKI TAKA, LONG BALL and COUNTER without touching a card, and the three numbers above the card stayed identical every time: SYNERGY 100%, +15% TO ALL STATS, TEAM POWER 92, PLAYERS 6/6.
That matters for a decision you will make often. A game plan is not a rating lever: it does not buy you team power, and it does not repair a squad whose synergy bar is low. If your problem is that a card is too weak or the flag mix is wrong, the plan buttons are the wrong screen. Fix the cards first, then come back and choose how the players you already have should play.
- Open SQUAD and look at the GAME PLAN card. Read which plan carries the ACTIVE tag before you touch anything, so you can put it back.
- Tap the plan whose sentence describes the football you want. Read the corner sentence and the toast, not the button's colour: the colour is decoration, the sentence is what the game is telling you.
- Look at SYNERGY, its bonus line and TEAM POWER on the card above. If any of them moved, you changed more than the plan and you should undo it.
- Play a match and watch whether the shape of play matches the sentence you picked. This page cannot tell you that part: we hold no controlled comparison of the four plans in the same fixture.
The shape controls are a separate row underneath the player list, labelled 4-1, 3-2, 2-3 and 1-4. The formations guide owns those; the synergy page owns the bar above the plan card, which is where your stats actually come from.
Half time, and the thing we have not seen
The log's second line is the one that changes a match rather than a menu: Change your game plan at half time, both clubs vote in a live match. Read it literally and it describes two managers choosing a plan during the break, with the result decided by the votes.
We have not seen that screen. The recording this page is built on plays a full match and never opens a half-time plan panel, and no other recording we hold shows one either, so the only description of it here is the line above. What we can say is where the option should appear: the log puts it at half time, inside a live match, so look for it in the break rather than on the squad screen you use before kick-off.
If you are about to play and want the plan to count, use the sequence that does not depend on the vote: set it on the squad screen before you queue, then treat anything at half time as a second chance rather than the first.
Check the frames yourself
They are in a 4 minute 8 second recording uploaded on 7 November 2026. The UPDATE LOG card fills the screen from about 0:01 and is dismissed at about 0:16. The squad screen opens at about 0:20 with BALANCED active, TIKI TAKA is tapped at about 0:23, LONG BALL at about 0:29 and COUNTER at about 0:32, each with its toast; the SYNERGY, TEAM POWER and PLAYERS readings stay at 100%, 92 and 6/6 throughout.
What we could not verify
Five things are open, and each one changes what this page is worth to you.
- Whether the plan belongs to the squad tab or to the club. The screen carries KIT, SQUAD 1, SQUAD 2 and two padlocked tabs above the card, but the session we read never switched tabs with a plan set, so we cannot say whether SQUAD 2 can carry a different plan from SQUAD 1.
- Whether the plan survives a session. We read it set and changed inside one sitting. No frame shows a plan after a rejoin.
- What the plan does to the match engine. The panel prints a sentence and no numbers. We did not play the same fixture twice with different plans, so nothing here is a win rate.
- What the sixth log line finishes with. CELEBRATIONS is cut by the card edge in our frames.
- What unlocks SQUAD 3 and SQUAD 4. Both carry a padlock and the panel prints no condition for it, the same reading this site published on 6 November 2026 for the older squad screen.
What we can say with confidence is the panel language, because it is printed verbatim above. If a later build renames a plan or changes a sentence, your screen is the authority and the date on this page tells you how old our reading is.