Hometown FC: Football Tycoon
Hometown FC is a mobile football tycoon about choosing the town where your club begins, growing that town from a village into a metropolis, and carrying a family legacy across seasons. You are the owner, not the manager: a Sporting Director works the transfer market and a coach runs the squad — they bring the proposals, you make the calls.
InsertCoin: Where did the idea for Hometown FC come from — was there a specific moment when you told yourself “this game needs to exist”?
Adnan: I’ve loved football for as long as I can remember. I’ve supported Milan since I was a kid. And I always had this fantasy in the back of my head: if I were a billionaire, I’d build a real club in my small hometown and take it from nothing. I played a lot of similar games, Football Chairman for example. Great games, but they were too simple for me and I’d get bored quickly. I wanted a simulation with much more than just football: building a club, but also the city around it, watching a village grow into a metropolis. At some point I realised that game simply didn’t exist, so I decided to make it myself.
InsertCoin: You’re building something that tries to combine Football Manager’s depth with mobile accessibility. Did you ever doubt that was an impossible balance to strike?
Adnan: I thought about it constantly. FM has incredible depth, but it demands hours. Mobile games are accessible, but often shallow. The key was making the match a CONSEQUENCE of your decisions, not the main point itself. You don’t pick the starting eleven — your coach does, and you as the owner decide whether his decisions are right. You can fire him, push him to change formation or playing style, and he can listen or refuse. You can influence the sporting director the same way. That way you get depth without hours of micromanagement. That tension — how to keep the depth while fitting it in your pocket — shaped the whole game.
InsertCoin: How long have you been working on this, and what does your team look like?
Adnan: I work completely alone, one man. I’ve been at it for around seven months. Being on my own means every decision — design, balance, what the world feels like — is mine, and I actually like that. I run a lot of tests and long simulations to make sure everything is balanced, because there’s no team to catch problems for me.
InsertCoin: The whole emotional core of the game is the ability to pick a real town. How did you land on that as the central concept, and how technically demanding was it to pull off with real towns?
Adnan: For me that’s the emotional heart of the whole thing. Football clubs are essentially stories about their communities — the club and the city grow together. I wanted you to start from something small, a place that means something to you, and turn it into something big. That comes from my own fantasy: building a club in my hometown. Technically it was demanding because the towns are REAL — even the starting population of each town is based on real data. And then everything changes as you invest: the population grows, prosperity rises, local characters appear and react to what you do. The town isn’t a backdrop, it’s a living system.
InsertCoin: Most mobile games make money through timers, energy and premium currency. You’ve rejected all of that. Was there ever any pressure — from yourself or anyone else — to go down that road?
Adnan: There’s no pressure. I’m not doing this for the money — I’m doing it because I genuinely enjoy it. And I think if you make a game people actually like, the money follows. I hate those models as a player. If a game has to FRUSTRATE you to make you pay, then the design is working against the player. My rule is: you pay for comfort or convenience, never to win. No energy, no premium currency, the game is 100% offline and your save is yours alone. I’d rather earn less with a game I respect than more with something I wouldn’t play myself.
InsertCoin: The coach has his own tactical identity and can turn down your suggestions. That’s a bold decision — why did you want to build in that kind of tension instead of just giving the player full control?
Adnan: Because that’s the whole point of the game. You’re the owner, not the manager. In real football the owner doesn’t pick the starting eleven — he hires people and trusts them, or sacks them when results don’t come. If I’d given full control, it would just be another management game. The tension is intentional: the coach has his own tactical identity, he can reject your proposal, and your decisions build or damage trust with him. It forces you to think like a real owner — who to hire, who to trust, when to step in. That human tension interests me far more than total control.
InsertCoin: The dynasty system — your own life, marriage, children with their own traits — goes way beyond what people expect from a football game. Where does that inspiration come from?
Adnan: Honestly, it came as a natural and realistic choice. A real club owner has a life outside the stadium — family, wealth, decisions that follow him for years. I wanted a game where EVERYTHING is connected and something is always happening, not just clicking through to the end of a season. That’s why the dynasty: your owner ages, has a family, and the children can inherit the club or come through your academy and play for the first team. One generation goes, the next takes over. It gives the game the feeling that you’re building something that outlasts you, not just a single season.
InsertCoin: What’s been the hardest thing to build so far, technically or creatively?
Adnan: The hardest was balance over time. It’s easy to make a game fun for one season; it’s hard to keep it balanced through twenty or thirty. Making sure rival clubs don’t become too strong or too weak, that the economy doesn’t fall apart, that progress feels EARNED rather than handed to you. That’s why I run long simulations spanning dozens of seasons, to catch problems I wouldn’t notice otherwise. And creatively: the hardest thing was resisting the urge to add everything. Ideas keep coming, and the discipline to say ‘no’ was harder than anything else.
InsertCoin: The site is available in 13 languages, including Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian — but I’m curious whether that’s planned for the game itself as well. What’s the story behind that decision?
Adnan Zajmovic: The game currently supports several languages — English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian — and more are coming soon, including Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. The reason is simple: I don’t want language to be a barrier to someone enjoying the game. It would mean a lot to me if the game could be played in our language.
InsertCoin: Were there things you planned that didn’t make it into the game? What got cut and why?
Adnan: Yes, quite a lot. The biggest example is a whole system for taking over other clubs that I eventually scrapped. It complicated the game without adding fun. I also thought about online leaderboards, but dropped it: in a single-player game where purchasing advantages is possible, competing on a leaderboard simply isn’t fair. My rule was: if something doesn’t serve the core of the game — ownership, the town, the dynasty — it goes, no matter how much work I put into it.
InsertCoin: What does a typical play session actually look like — how long is a season, how quickly do you feel progress?
Adnan: It depends entirely on you, and that’s what I like about it. You can hand a lot over to your sporting director and fly through a season. Some people finish one in ten minutes. But if you do everything manually and put time into the personal life, the town and the dynasty — which isn’t required — a season takes longer and can run to a couple of hours. Progress comes quickly in small steps, but the real tycoon loop — from a village in the fifth division to an empire in the first — is a marathon across multiple seasons. And the more you put in yourself, the better you do; the simulations show that clearly. I wanted success to be earned.
InsertCoin: The game isn’t out yet and you already have over 300 people on the waitlist. How do you manage expectations and build a community before the game is even available?
Adnan: Honestly, by sharing the story where the right people are — football and tycoon communities, and of course this region. I’m not trying to sell anything. I show what I’m building and ask people what they think. The waitlist is the result of that — over 300 people who want to know when it’s out. I manage expectations through honesty: this is a one-man game, it won’t be perfect on day one, but it has soul. A few hundred people who genuinely understand what I’m making means more to me than ten thousand who expect something else.
InsertCoin: The “coming soon” phase can drag on longer than anyone plans. How do you stay focused and deal with that period of uncertainty?
Adnan: Honestly, I’ve never thought about giving up. I’m so motivated to finish this and let people play it. The problem is the opposite — I’m too much of a perfectionist. I keep testing, simulating, fixing and adding things, so ‘soon’ keeps stretching. I probably need to tell myself to stop and leave some ideas for the next version. What keeps me going is the people who sign up and write to me — they give me a reason to finish. Because of them I don’t want it to be ordinary.
InsertCoin: Football Manager is the obvious reference, but which games personally shaped you as a developer?
Adnan: Championship Manager 01/02, without a doubt. It’s still my favourite game to this day, and there’s probably not a management game I haven’t played. Beyond that, I’ve always loved strategy games. That feeling of building something from nothing where every decision carries weight.
InsertCoin: What does success look like for Hometown FC — is it about numbers, critical reception, or something else entirely?
Adnan: It’s not primarily about numbers. Of course I need enough players to be able to keep working on it. But real success is when someone says: “I played this for months and felt like that club was genuinely MINE.” This is the first game I’ve ever made, and it would confirm to me that a game I love — one I’ll happily play myself — is something others love too. That means more to me than any number.
InsertCoin: If someone is still playing Hometown FC five years from now and tells you one thing that stayed with them, what do you hope that is?
Adnan: I hope they won’t say “I remember the trophies” — I hope they say “I remember the CLUB I built.” The town that grew from a village into a metropolis, the player who came through my academy and became a legend, the child who inherited the club. The best games don’t hand you a finished story. They give you a place to make your own. If someone five years from now remembers THEIR story from Hometown FC, that’s everything I’m after.
