15 FC career-mode challenges you can roll at random

A lot of career saves die the same way: you pick a club you already like, sign the players you always sign, and get bored by January. Rolling the club and the key decisions at random fixes that. The random soccer team generator picks the club, the random soccer player generator picks the players you build around, and a die decides the rest. Below are 15 challenges, with the rules written so you can paste them into a group chat and hold each other to them.

Before you roll

Two facts about the pickers shape every rule here.

The team list has 205 entries, and roughly 40 of them are national teams. One draw can hand you Rangers, the next one Paraguay. The list also includes clubs your copy of FC may not license, and that changes from edition to edition. So the house rule is simple: if the draw isn't a club you can manage in your game, it doesn't count, and you draw again without using up a reroll.

The player list has 250 names, and most of them are retired. Pele, Zico and Laurent Blanc are in there next to Pedri and Harry Kane. Men's and women's players share one pool, so you'll draw names like Sam Kerr or Dzsenifer Marozsan too. Where a challenge needs a player you can sign, a retired or women's name works as a blueprint: you sign a current men's player with the same nationality and position.

Every draw uses crypto.getRandomValues and nothing is weighted. Real Madrid has the same odds as Sydney FC. You can draw up to 12 teams or up to 100 players per click, with no repeats inside one draw.

One reroll per save. Decide that before anyone presses Pick.

The 15 challenges

1. Straight roll

Draw one team. That's your club. No looking at the squad first. Here are 15 example single draws, in order: Nottingham Forest, Club America, Chile, Sevilla, Austria, Switzerland, Galatasaray, Rangers, Universidad de Chile, Paraguay, Barcelona, Greece, Al Hilal, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Barcelona SC. Five of those (Chile, Austria, Switzerland, Paraguay and Greece) are national teams and would be redrawn, which tells you how often that rule kicks in.

2. Worst of three

Draw three teams and take whichever has the lowest overall rating in your game. An example draw: Standard Liege, Nantes and Villarreal. Villarreal is out straight away, and the other two are close enough that you'll need to check the ratings in your edition. Win the league within five seasons.

3. The blueprint signing

Draw one player. Your first marquee signing must share their nationality and position. Draw Claudio Caniggia and you're hunting an Argentine forward. Draw Marcel Desailly and it's a French centre-back. The signing has to start 30 league games in season one.

4. Five-nation scouting

Draw five players. You must sign one current player from each of their five countries before the end of season two. An example draw: Mark Viduka, Sergio Aguero, Abby Wambach, Hugo Sanchez and Pedri, so that's Australia, Argentina, the United States, Mexico and Spain. Argentina and Spain are easy. Australia is where the save gets interesting.

5. System from a name

Draw one player and play the system they're known for, all season, no switching. Andrea Pirlo means a deep-lying playmaker at the base of midfield. Kaka means a number 10 behind two strikers. Cafu or Roberto Carlos means attacking full-backs who play like wingers. If the name doesn't suggest a system (a goalkeeper, say), draw again.

6. National core

Draw from the team list until a national team appears, then pick your club as normal. At least six of your starting XI in every league match must be from that country. Chile came up in the example draws above, which is hard but fair. Greece or Austria would be similar. If you land on Brazil or France, you got lucky and everyone will tell you so.

7. Continental tour

Four seasons, four clubs, four different continents. At the end of each season, draw teams until you get a club from a continent you haven't managed on yet and move there. A run like Wolverhampton Wanderers, then Club America, then Al Hilal, then something from South America is roughly what this produces.

8. Dice budget

Use the dice roller with one d6 before each transfer window. The number is the maximum number of signings, loans included. A 1 in January means you live with the squad you've got.

9. Academy quota

Roll a d4 at the start of each season. That many academy graduates must be in your matchday squad for every league game. On a 4 you'll be promoting teenagers in September.

10. Legend's XI rebuild

Draw 11 players. Rebuild that team with current players: same nationalities, same positions, as close as you can get. Your squad must contain all 11 "replacements" by the end of season three. Draws heavy on old Italians (Bonucci, Maldini, Nesta) make this a centre-back masterclass. Draws heavy on women's players make it a nationality puzzle.

11. Captain by draw

Draw five players at the start of the season. The first one in the list who shares a nationality with someone in your squad decides your captain: that squad member wears the armband all season, whatever their rating. If none match, the youngest player in the squad is captain.

12. Rival roll

Draw one team. If it's in your league, beat them home and away. If it's in another country, you must sign one player from them before the save ends. A draw of Galatasaray would make that a Turkish scouting job.

13. Number 9 hunt

Draw 10 players. The first striker in the list sets your target: sign a striker of that nationality, and he must score 20 league goals in a season before you can sell him. Ten names usually include two or three forwards, so it's rarely a long wait.

14. No reroll, no excuses

Draw one team, and that's it. No redraws for national teams, no redraws for clubs outside your game. If it's not playable, manage the closest playable club from the same country. Draw Paraguay and you're looking for a Paraguayan club in your edition, or the nearest South American side the game has.

15. Stack three

Roll two d20s. Each number points at one of the challenges above (wrap anything over 15 back to the start, so 16 becomes 1 and 20 becomes 5). Play both on the same save. If you roll the same challenge twice, roll again.

Scoring a save

If you're running these against friends, a points table stops the arguments.

Result in a season	Points
League title	10
Domestic cup	5
Continental trophy	8
Top-half finish	3
Challenge condition met	5
Challenge condition broken	minus 5
Sacked	minus 10

Play three seasons, add it up, post screenshots of the final table. Someone who rolled Barcelona will win more trophies than someone who rolled Universidad de Chile, which is why the challenge points are worth half a league title. Hard draws should still be able to win.

What the pickers can't do

They don't know ratings, leagues or positions. The team list is names only, and so is the player list. You can't ask for "only Bundesliga clubs" or "only strikers". When a challenge needs a filter, draw a bigger batch and take the first entry that fits. Twelve teams or twenty players per draw is usually enough.

They also don't remember earlier draws. Each press of Pick starts fresh, so screenshot the result before you start, or someone will "accidentally" refresh.

Other tools for this

The random team generator is handy when four of you want to split a list of clubs fairly instead of each rolling alone. Paste the names, set the number of teams, and it deals them out. For deciding who picks first or who plays which challenge, a random number between 1 and the number of players works fine.

If you want to know where the 250 player names came from, the random soccer player generator page lists them all, and I wrote up how I build lists like these in how Randomly builds its datasets. Or just open the random soccer team generator, press Pick once, and live with what you get. The example run of 15 draws above ended on Barcelona SC, the one from Guayaquil rather than Catalonia. Under challenge 14 that means an Ecuadorian club, or the nearest South American side your game has, and no complaining.