Every season ends with the same argument in every football pub, real or virtual: who was the best? Soccerverse has just played out its third full season — Season 3 runs to 4 July, but the leagues have crossed their finish lines — and the league tables, the goal logs and the game's own manager rankings have finally stopped moving long enough to settle it. So here are the Soccerverse Times awards: one Player of the Season, one Manager of the Season, and the records that will outlast both. Not official trophies. Just the evidence, laid out, and a verdict I'm willing to defend.

Player of the Season: Metehan Yildirim

Two seasons ago he was a 19-year-old scoring four league goals for V Berlin in the German lower leagues. This season he scored fifty-five — and dragged a club called Reykjavík Fossvogur to the Icelandic title while he was at it.

Metehan Yildirim is 21 years old, German, and on wages of just 1,325 SVC a week — and no footballer on the planet scored more league goals in Season 3. His 55 came in 36 appearances, five of them off the bench, across 2,145 minutes of league football. Do the division and you get a goal every 39 minutes he spent on the pitch. He added nine assists, an average match rating of 8.08, seven man-of-the-match awards, and another six goals in the cup for good measure — 61 in all competitions, more than any player in the game.

Reykjavík didn't win Iceland's Division 1 by being miserly; they shipped 26 goals and only kept the cleanest of records nowhere in sight. They won it because Metehan would not stop scoring. They finished on 108 points, 18 clear of Reykjavik Hlíðarendi, with 162 goals — and 55 of them, more than a third of the entire team's output, came off one 21-year-old's boot. Rated 78, valued at just under 3 million SVC, he is the cheapest superstar in Soccerverse and the easiest Player of the Season call I've had to make.

The chasing pack tells you how alone he stood. Podgorica Blue's Bertuğ Yıldırım — no relation, just a wonderful coincidence of surnames — fired 41 league goals for the most dominant champions in the game. Nay Pyi Taw's veteran João dos Santos and Dublin Green's Johnny Kenny each broke 47 across all competitions. Good seasons, all. None of them touched 55.

Manager of the Season: DeepSeek

If Player of the Season was easy, this one is a genuine debate — and I'll give the other contenders their due below. But the trophy goes to the manager the game's own algorithms have decided is the best in the world.

DeepSeek, the man behind Bahrain's AK Hamad Town, sits first of 12,006 ranked managers on both leaderboards at once — top of the tactician table on 378 points, and top of the veteran table on 318. Nobody else manages that double. And he has the silverware to back the numbers: this season he completed a third straight Bahraini Division 1 title and added the domestic cup, a clean league-and-cup double.

The league campaign was ruthless without ever flattering itself: 118 points from 45 games, 38 wins, 148 scored, 17 conceded, the title wrapped up 26 points clear of West Riffa. And here is the detail that swings it for me — West Riffa still managed 92 points. In Montenegro, by contrast, the team that finished second to the season's record-breakers limped home on 77. DeepSeek won his title against the stiffest resistance any of the runaway champions faced.

His career reads like a love letter to one club. He took the AK Hamad Town job on 30 January 2025, at the very dawn of the game, and has never left: 177 matches, 153 won, 12 drawn, 12 lost. An 86% win rate, three seasons, three titles. That is not a hot streak. That is a dynasty.

The case for the dominators

In all honesty, two men produced more statistically violent single seasons than DeepSeek, and they deserve to be named.

Libertaer's Podgorica Blue wrote the line of the season. Montenegro's champions won 41 of their 45 games, lost once, scored 220 goals, conceded 18, and finished on 126 points — 49 clear of second place. A goal difference of plus-202. If Manager of the Season were a pure dominance award, it would have his name on it.

And canaya5's The Smurfs Amman went the whole Jordanian season unbeaten — 40 wins, four draws, no defeats in 44 games, 124 points, the title won by 44. Add Ghana's Kumasi (blackpanter), who won 37 of 38 and lost none, and Season 3 produced an extraordinary cluster of near-perfect campaigns. I weighed them. I came down on the side of the manager with the dual No. 1 ranking, the strongest opposition and the three-year body of work — but if you want to crown Podgorica's masterpiece instead, I won't argue too hard.

The Season 3 record book

- Most points (top flight): Podgorica Blue, 126 (Montenegro D1). The marquee leagues couldn't get near it — Copenhagen's 102 was the best of the big-nation champions. - Golden Boot: Metehan Yildirim, 55 league goals (Iceland). - Biggest title margin: Podgorica Blue, 49 points. - Best unbeaten season: The Smurfs Amman, 44 games without defeat (Jordan); Kumasi's 37 wins from 38 (Ghana) the most ruthless per game. - Most goals, one team: Podgorica Blue, 220 in the top flight — though France's eighth-tier Bordeaux somehow plundered 225 and went unbeaten, their striker Nicolas Parravicini racking up 58 in all competitions in a division almost nobody watches. - Meanest defence among champions: Dubai (Salama), just 9 conceded in 42 games en route to 104 points in the UAE.

An honest asterisk

A word of caution before you screenshot that points table. The record board leans heavily on smaller nations, and there's a structural reason: those leagues play 44 or 45 games against thinner fields, while England, Spain, Germany and Italy grind through 38 against far deeper squads. It is not an accident that the prestige champions I've chronicled all season sit lower on the raw numbers — Sjow's London Red won England on 76 points with the division's best defence; SoccerversePortugal's Porto took Portugal on 93; Ralek17's Barcelona built the best team in Spain and finished third with nothing.

The exception, and it's a glorious one, is Fatincasa's København. A third straight Danish title, 102 points from 38 games, 116 goals scored — a per-game dominance that stands shoulder to shoulder with anyone in the game, in a league that actually fought back. If you want a Manager of the Season pick that satisfies both the data and the snob, Copenhagen's quiet three-peat is the one I'd hand you next.

But the awards, this year, go north to a 21-year-old in Iceland and east to a desert dynasty in Bahrain. Fifty-five goals and a triple crown. Argue with the trophies; you'll struggle to argue with the maths.