How to Play

Vintage Football Draft is a free browser game about building the football team that never existed. You draft sixteen players, one per round, each from a club and a year the game picks at random — a 2016 defender next to a 2023 winger, teammates a decade apart. Then the game drops your XI into a real season and tells you where you would have finished.

History already picked a winner for every season. Your job is to draft a better one.

1. Pick a league — one of Europe's five biggest — or hit Randomize and let the game choose. The game draws a real season from it, and that season's champion sets the points total you have to beat. You can also pin a specific year instead of leaving it to chance.
2. Sixteen rounds. Each round offers a single club from a single year, drawn at random. Browse its squad, take one player from it — or pass and move on to the next club. A pass costs the round, so spend them carefully.
3. To place a player, select him in the roster, then tap one of the highlighted slots on the pitch. You are filling a 4-3-3 plus five substitutes. A player out of position still plays — just worse — so a striker parked at centre-back will cost you.
4. Watch the tags. Every player carries them: what he won, what he did that season, and who he already knows. Tags stack, and a squad full of teammates who have actually played together is worth real points at the end.
5. When all sixteen slots are filled, submit the squad and face the verdict.

Your squad plays out the full season against the real clubs of the league and year you drew — every match simulated, home and away. The verdict shows your record in wins, draws and losses, your points total, and exactly where you land in that season's actual table, from champions down to relegation.

Under the headline sits the receipt. Every player gets a base rating built from his real historical numbers for that season — goals, assists, match ratings — and then his tags add or subtract on top of that. The verdict itemizes both: the base each player brought, what every tag was worth, and even where you would have finished without them. Nothing is hidden; a bad draft loses on paper you can read.

This is a fan project, and the game is nothing but real data rearranged. Player stats and portraits come from Transfermarkt; per-match ratings come from API-Football; shooting and goalkeeping numbers come from FBref. The seasons, clubs, squads and league tables are all real — only your team is invented. The site is not affiliated with any of those sources, or with any club or league named in the game.

Is it free?

Yes. The whole game is free to play, supported by ads. There is nothing to buy and nothing behind a paywall.

Do I need an account?

No. You can draft, get your verdict and share your squad without signing in. A Google sign-in is only needed for the extras that follow you across drafts: the weekly leaderboard, achievements and the shirt collection. If you do sign in, the site stores only your Google account id and a display name of your choosing — it never asks Google for your email address.

Why is a player I expected missing?

The game only knows what its data sources recorded. Squads are built from covered seasons — roughly 2015/16 onwards — so older legends are out of range, and a player can be absent from a club-year when the sources did not carry enough of his numbers to rate him fairly. Gaps in the data become gaps in the draft; better a missing name than a made-up rating.