Başkan: Football Club Manager

Overview

I love football management games, but most of them put you in the dugout. In Başkan I put the player upstairs instead: you never touch tactics or the starting eleven. You choose the manager and the coaching staff, negotiate fees and wages with the players your scouts bring, sell, promote kids from the academy, build stands and facilities, sign sponsors and try not to sink the club's finances. The matches are watched, not played: the result is decided before kick-off, and the tension comes from the live commentary and the cinematic goal and save moments. I built it in React Native with Expo and TypeScript, for Android and iOS. The heart of the game is a pure TypeScript engine with no React in it: leagues, cup, a 36-team European league phase, the match engine, transfers, academy, finance and season transitions all run there on a seeded RNG, so the same save always plays out the same way and I can run the whole game headlessly. I used that to write balance bots that play hundreds of seasons and tell me whether promotion feels earned and whether the money holds up. The game is fully offline: the save is versioned JSON with three career slots, backed up to Google Play Saved Games through a small Kotlin Expo module I wrote. The stadium on the main screen is a 3D scene I render with Three.js and bring into the game layer by layer, by day and by night, so the ground visibly grows as you build stands. The game speaks 11 languages, including right-to-left Arabic, and the store page is in 12. Rewarded ads come through AdMob with the GDPR consent flow, premium leagues are wired up through RevenueCat, and I build and sign releases on my own machine. It's in closed testing on Google Play now.

A football management game where you're the club president, not the coach: you pick the manager, sign the players, grow the stadium and keep the books, taking a sinking local club from the bottom tier to Europe.