Register
First of all you need to register and validate your account.
Head over to the Register tab of the Home page and fill in your details including a valid email. Once you have submitted the registration, you should get a verification email sent to the registered email address. Clicking on the link in the email will validate your account and allow you to sign in. Please check your spam folders just in case.
If no validation email has turned up within 24 hours, send an email from the registered email to fcowner@gmx.com and your account will be validated manually.
Buy a Club
Once your account is validated, you can sign in and head over to the Owner's Office screen.
Here you will see you have a start-up capital of 20,000,000 which should be enough for you to purchase one of a number of lower league clubs. There is a link to the Search Team screen where you can enter criteria to find a club to buy. All non-background clubs are valued on a daily basis, and so you can search by the club valuation to ensure only clubs you can actually afford are returned. The valuation is based on the clubs assets (squad value, stadium, training and youth facilities), and the clubs class and reputation. The stadium may be one of the more important considerations when selecting a club. Buying a lower division club with a 1000 capacity stadium will not bring in a lot of matchday revenue and make it difficult to pay for a promotion-winning squad, whereas buying a club with a bigger stadium will use up a lot more of your starting owner capital.
At this point it may be an idea to also look at the League & Cup guides which are available for each country. This may also influence your decision about which country to start in.
Ideally you want to buy a club which is currently unowned. Such purchases should be instantaneous. However, if you are unlucky enough to be buying the same club as another player at the same time, an error message will be presented to the player who has lost out so they can find another club.
If you do want to buy a club currently owned by another player, you can make an offer but will have to wait for the player to respond, so not the best option for a quick start. The exception here is when the player has listed the club for sale and set auto-accept to Yes, in which case the purchase will be instant.
Now you have bought your club, this will appear in the list of owned clubs in the Owner's Office screen and also in the left hand vertical navigation bar as a link. Clicking on either of these will take you to the football club's overview screen.
Schedule a Friendly
If the game date is currently in June or the first half of July, you can arrange friendlies from the Fixture tab within the Football Club screen. You might want to do this to bring in a bit of pre-season revenue and to assess your squad. The screen will allow you to search for clubs from anywhere in the world to invite to play at your home stadium. Once invited, the fixture is scheduled as TBC until the owner of the club accepts or rejects the invitation - if the invited club does not have a player owner then they will respond in the next end of game day processing which takes place every 3 hours. You can also click the checkbox which will allow the game to schedule friendlies on your behalf one week at a time.
Find/Employ Scouts
To bring in scouts go to the Search screen and then click the Staff tab. You can use the drop-downs to search for scouting staff, put in minimum potential, assessment and experience stats, their country etc. The Potential stat is how good the scout is at finding prospects who's stats are yet to improve into the kind of player you are looking for. The Assessment stat is for finding players currently at the required level. The experience stat determines how many players the scout will find.
Once you have found and hired a scout, you can create a scouting task for him. This is done by going to the Transfers screen and then the Scouting tab. By clicking on the scout, you can then create a scout assignment. This can be by country, league and even division if you want to restrict the search. Once you have created the assignment and confirmed, the cost of the scouting assignment will be immediately deducted. A scouting report will be generated for this assignment once a month until the assignment is complete.
Another option is to assign the scout to look at an individual player. If you have come across a player while browsing who's stats you want to reveal, you can select the Scout Player option in the drop down list, and then select the scout. It will take a number of game weeks for the players stats to become as visible as the scout's ability allows.
Making a Transfer Offer
If you come across a player you like the look of, you can make a transfer offer from their screen. Select the transfer option from the drop down menu and a box will appear to enter the transfer details. You need to select whether you are making a Loan or Transfer offer. For Loan offers, you can enter the % wage you are willing to pay and the term of the loan. For Transfer offers, if the player is currently with a club you need to enter an amount to offer and once submitted this will go to the club to respond - non-player controlled clubs will respond in 7 game days unless the player is already under-offer in which case they will respond at the same time as the existing offer. For free agents, you can immediately offer a contract. The player will tell you what they expect. Enter a signing fee, the contract length, weekly wage and any bonus you want to offer. The player will come back to you after 7 days. Note that for transfer offers to other clubs, you can either wait for the club to accept before sending a contract offer via the Transfers screen, or you can enter the contract details now so that they are immediately sent to the player if the club accepts.
The transfer window runs from 1st June to 31st August, and 1st January to 31st January, and this is the only time a transfer offer can be accepted by a club. If an offer is made outside the window, the club/player can still respond to the offer, but the transfer will not complete until the transfer window opens. If an offer is made towards the end of the transfer window then the club/player will respond on the deadline day which is extended to run longer than normal game days. Free agents, however, can be signed at anytime and do not need to wait for the transfer window to open.
The Results
When a fixture has simulated and match report generated, you should see the "Recent Matches" in the vertical menu bar is highlighted with the number of unviewed results. Clicking on this will take you to a screen which shows you the fixture without revealing the result. You can then click on the link to the match report and read through the highlights, or you can just select the fixture and click the button to reveal the result. The fixture will continue to show as an unviewed recent match until you reveal the result in this screen.
As well as seeing the match report, there are a number of other screens relating to this fixture offering different information. The Overview screen just shows the result with scorers, assists, yellow and red cards, plus a summary of total shots, possession etc. The lineups screen will show the lineup of each team along with ratings. Using the drop down menu, you can change the value shown to be number of passes, tackles, shots etc. The tickets screen shows financial information about the fixture including tickets sold, a breakdown of income/expenditure and a balance.
Have a Go!
This should be enough to get you started. For more information, dive into the game or screen guides.