The clock's ticking, lads. Season 3 closes on July 4, and nothing concentrates a manager's mind like a fortnight to save his job. Out in the data, the run-in is doing exactly what runs-in do: the trapdoors are creaking, the shareholders are reaching for the trigger, and half the gaffers in the game are sleeping with one eye open.

Here's the headline number. A week ago in this very column I counted 20 live manager proposals. Seven days on, the live-votes board is showing manager votes at roughly three dozen clubs — two dozen already open, another dozen queued to fire. Stoke-on-Trent, Cuiabá, Odense, Sabadell, Amazonas, Venezia, Lens, Groningen, Perugia, Peterborough, Taunton, Bristol Red, Edinburgh Green... it spans every continent the game touches. And yes — for those keeping score from last week — Podbrezová are *still* sweating.

The man in the firing line: franONE

Start at Stoke-on-Trent, now scrapping in ENG Division 3 after dropping a tier this season. franONE has been in the dugout since July 2025, and the ledger does not make pretty reading: 78 games, 21 wins, 24 draws, 33 defeats. That's a sub-28% win rate and a relegation on the CV. The shareholder vote on his future is due to close on Monday.

The cruel twist? He actually *won* on Saturday — a 2-1 home job over Wigan in front of just under 20,000. Too little, too late, or a last-day stay of execution? The voters decide.

The club that simply cannot quit trojan7

If Stoke is a slow burn, Cuiabá is a full-blown soap opera. The Brazilian side — also relegated to Division 3 this term — have run trojan7 out of the building and back through the front door so many times the welcome mat's worn through. The game logs him as *voted* manager across spell after spell after spell.

And get this: one of those reigns ran to 49 games for just three wins — eighteen draws, twenty-eight defeats. Three. Wins. Yet every time the dust settles, the shareholders hand him the keys again. He lost 0-1 at home to Novo Horizonte on Saturday, and right on cue another manager vote is set to close on Tuesday. Loyalty or Stockholm syndrome? You make the call.

How the trapdoor actually works

For the uninitiated, this isn't a chairman in a sheepskin coat making the call — it's the influence-holders. The community spelled out the rules in #general-chat this week:

If a manager is inactive for 2 weeks or more you can take the job without a vote.

There's a brake on the chaos, mind: the posted rules state a user can only start a manager-change proposal once a month, and repeat attempts inside the same month that fail to oust the boss are binned. Over in the FA channel, the brutal reality was put plainly:

If they replace him, it's not his choice to leave the club.

No goodbye press conference. Just a tally, and the door.

Help wanted: the jobs board is buzzing

It's not all P45s. The vacancies are flying too. Over in #jobs:

Available job in Germany! I'm looking for a manager to take German club Lehner in Oberliga 2 (div. 9)... it's ofc a paid job.

And in #español, a proper old-fashioned resignation — a boss off to chase a shinier project:

In the next few hours I'm going to stop managing At. Baleares — a new project at a bigger club has come up. Baleares is the team from my city, so I have a special fondness for it.

The view from the dugout: not happy

The mood among the men in the hot seats is, shall we say, fraught. One lower-league boss vented about the cold shoulder from investors:

I think I understand now why noone is investing in the lower level clubs I'm managing. They knew I would get screwed over...

Another, deep in a relegation dogfight, was raging at the new app eating his tactics on matchday:

now I got to hope and pray they win with the auto tactics ... as am in a relegation battle ... ever since this new app ave had nothing but issues crazy

When you're fighting the drop *and* the software, sympathy's in short supply.

Meanwhile, at the summit: a one-point title fight

While the lower leagues burn, the race to be the best manager in Soccerverse is being decided on the head of a pin. DeepSeek sits top of *both* ranking tables — 376 points on the tactician list and 314 on the veteran chart, No.1 in each. But breathing right down his neck is vas, just one point back on the tacticians' table with 375. The catch: vas is only 33rd among the veterans, so DeepSeek's all-round dominance still rules.

The lovely detail? Neither of these two is a Discord loudmouth — you won't catch them holding court in #general-chat. DeepSeek quietly runs AK Hamad Town (rating 67.95, a club war-chest of 13.6M SVC); vas tends Masaya (rating 58.38, 4.5M SVC in the bank). The best in the business are grinders, not gobby — both carrying barely a tenner in their own back pockets (14 and 9 SVC respectively) because every coin goes into the club.

So there it is. At the top, a title decided by a single point. At the bottom, three dozen dugouts where the only question is whether you'll still have a chair come Monday morning. Buckle up — it's going to be a long, sweaty fortnight.

*Stay tuned, you know where I am. — Skez*