This Is Football contains 20,480 clubs across one persistent football world. The number is large, but the structure behind it is deliberately straightforward: 256 league locations, each with 80 clubs arranged into four divisions of 20.
That scale is not there simply to produce an impressive total. It gives managers a world in which local seasons can develop alongside thousands of other club stories, with human-managed and AI-controlled teams sharing the same wider structure.
Worldwide scale, familiar local competition
No manager needs to navigate all 20,480 clubs at once. The immediate football remains recognisable: a division of 20 teams, promotion and relegation, league opponents and knockout competitions. A manager can concentrate on the next fixture while knowing that seasons are unfolding elsewhere at the same time.
Organising the world into league locations keeps that scale readable. Each location has its own four-division ladder and its own competitive history, rather than becoming one enormous global table.
Human managers inside a complete world
A persistent multiplayer game cannot depend on every club finding a human manager before football can continue. AI-controlled clubs keep league structures complete, provide opposition and build histories of their own. Human managers then enter an established world rather than an empty waiting room.
The distinction remains visible. The world view can show how many clubs in a location are managed by people and how many are AI-controlled. It can also distinguish those figures from the number of users who selected that country during registration. A league’s geographical home, its human-manager population and a user’s chosen country are related information, but they are not the same thing.
One world does not mean one identity
League location is also kept separate from player nationality. The game has 256 league locations but 216 represented nationalities. That allows countries, UK home nations, islands and territories to have clear places on the football map without pretending that every league location is a separate nationality.
At club level, the result is a world that can feel local and international at the same time. A club belongs to a particular league system, while its players can come from the wider nationality pool.
Scale becomes meaningful through history
A large database of clubs would feel hollow if every season simply disappeared. The persistent structure gives promotion, relegation, cup runs, records and honours time to accumulate. Human and AI-controlled clubs can both leave permanent competition records, so a manager’s success becomes part of the same history as events elsewhere in the world.
The League Challenge Trophy is one example. It operates separately in every league location for Division 3 and Division 4 clubs, and its winners and runners-up remain in competition history. A local knockout run therefore matters to the club involved without requiring every manager to follow thousands of simultaneous matches.
Built to be explored in layers
The interactive globe provides the visual route into the world, using country shapes where geography is clear and markers for smaller or less easily selected locations. The World Directory remains an accessible alternative, ensuring every league location can be reached without relying on map precision.
From there, the useful questions are practical: where is the league, how many clubs are human-managed, how many are AI-controlled, and what does the current table look like? The world is broad, but exploration should always lead back to football.
Live today: 20,480 clubs, 256 league locations, four divisions per location and a shared persistent world. Future ways for clubs and managers to interact across that world will be introduced carefully rather than presented here as completed features.