The Domestic Cup

Alongside the league season, every country in Goal Legends also runs its own Domestic Cup: a straight knockout open to clubs from that country, separate from whatever's happening in the league table.

Single elimination, no group stage

There's no group stage here, and no table. Every club registered to that country enters, top division and second division alike, all dropped into the same single bracket. The Domestic Cup is a bracket from the very first round: win and you advance to the next round, lose and your run in that season's cup is over. Every round, all the way through to the final, is settled in one match at one venue. It's a much shorter path to a trophy than a league campaign, which is exactly the appeal of a cup competition structured this way.

The bracket is entirely separate from your country's league table. A club fighting relegation and a club that's already secured the title can meet each other in a Domestic Cup tie, and the result there has no bearing at all on where either club finishes in the league that season. If two sides are still level after 90 minutes, the tie moves into extra time, and if that doesn't separate them either, it goes to a penalty shootout. There's no away-goals rule and no replay, so one side always leaves that fixture through to the next round.

Byes in the first round

A clean knockout bracket needs a number of entrants that halves evenly round after round: 8, 16, 32, and so on. The number of clubs playing in a given country's Domestic Cup doesn't always land on one of those numbers, so the first round can include byes: a handful of clubs sit out the opening round entirely and go straight through to the second, rather than the whole bracket being reshuffled to fit a tidier number of teams. Every round after that first one divides evenly, since a bye only ever exists to fix the starting count. A club with a bye doesn't play a fixture that round at all; it simply appears in the draw for round two alongside whoever won their round one tie. Byes aren't handed out at random, either: they go first to whichever clubs finished highest in the top division the previous season, and only spill over to a random pick among the rest if there are more byes to give out than there are top-division clubs to give them to.

A different shape from the Elite Champions Cup

The Domestic Cup and the Elite Champions Cup are both knockout competitions, but they're built differently. The Domestic Cup stays entirely within one country's pool of clubs and settles every round, including its own final, in a single match. The Elite Champions Cup crosses borders, opens with a group stage, and plays every round from the Round of 16 to the Semi-Final over two legs before its final reverts to a single match. A club can be competing in both at once, entirely independently of how the other one is going, and doing well in one carries no guarantee about how the other will go.

Running alongside the league, not instead of it

Your Domestic Cup matches don't replace your league fixtures; they're scheduled around them. That means a busy stretch of the calendar can have you playing a league match and a cup tie within days of each other, both counting fully, both needing a lineup set in advance. See Fixtures & Friendlies for how the calendar fits everything in, and Substitutions & Lineup Planning if you want to stage a different lineup specifically for a cup tie rather than reusing your default one.

Winning the Domestic Cup adds a permanent trophy to your club's honours and a flat boost to Reputation, on top of whatever your league form has already earned or cost you that season. There's no prize money attached to it the way there is for final league position; see Club Finances Explained for what Reputation actually does for a club.

Every Domestic Cup match played also earns your squad Experience Points, at a reduced rate compared to a league fixture but a real contribution all the same. See Player Attributes Explained for how Experience Points actually get spent.