In football, the difference between a trophy and a mid-table finish often comes down to one thing: who you sign. Kickoff Boss gives you five distinct ways to build your squad — each with its own strategy, currency, and risk. This is your complete guide to finding and signing the right players.
The Transfer Market
The transfer market is where the biggest deals happen. Any manager can list up to three players for sale at a time, choosing an auction window of 24, 48, or 72 hours. The minimum starting bid is 10% of the player's estimated value, and all bids are placed in Platinum — the premium currency pegged 1:1 to the Euro.
Bidding is competitive and fair. If a bid lands during the final five minutes, the auction clock extends — no last-second sniping here. When a deal closes, the selling club pockets 98% of the fee, with a 2% solidarity payment going to the player's original training club. That solidarity mechanism means developing young talent is always rewarded, even if you sold the player seasons ago.
The search filters are powerful: position, preferred foot, playing side, age, average quality, potential, nationality, special traits, and all twelve individual skill attributes. If you know exactly what your squad needs, you'll find it.
Pro tip: Buy young, train hard, sell at peak value. A single well-timed transfer can fund your entire season's operations.
The Free Player Market
Not every signing needs to break the bank. When clubs release players, those players enter the Free Player Market — organised by geographic zone: Europe, Americas, Africa, and Asia.
Here's the catch: visibility depends on your scouting network. With a scout assigned to a zone, you see every available free player in that region. Without one, you only see a limited subset. Want to check a free player's hidden potential before committing? That'll cost 0.05 Gold per player to individually scout.
Free player auctions use Gold, with each new bid requiring a 5% increase over the current offer. It's a slower, more deliberate market where patience and research pay off. The best free agent signings are the ones nobody else noticed.
The Youth Academy
If the transfer market is about solving today's problems, the Youth Academy is about building tomorrow's dynasty. Every country in the game produces young prospects aged 15, and information about each one is revealed gradually over a 10-day scouting window:
- Day 1: Height and preferred foot
- Day 3: Whether they have a special trait
- Day 5: Average quality rating
- Day 7: Full skill breakdown revealed
- Day 9: Exact playing position confirmed
This progressive reveal is what makes youth recruitment so compelling. Do you sign early based on limited information and potentially grab a bargain before anyone else? Or do you wait for the full picture, knowing a rival might beat you to the punch?
When you sign a prospect, you choose a star rating from 1 to 5 that determines their training speed and development potential. A 5-star signing develops five times faster than a 1-star — but costs significantly more Gold. Your Youth Center level (upgradeable from 1 to 5) determines which star tiers are available and how many prospects you can sign per season, ranging from 3 at level 1 to 11 at level 5.
Your own country's prospects are always visible for free. Scouting other countries requires a scout assigned to that geographic zone. Once a youth player hits age 17, they can be promoted to your first team — as long as you have dressing room space.
Pro tip: Don't sleep on 1-star and 2-star signings. They're cheap, develop reliably, and provide useful squad depth while your premium prospects mature into stars.
Amateur Signings
Sometimes you just need a body on the pitch. The amateur pool is your no-frills option: each country has a pool of available amateur players, and you can sign up to three per season for a flat fee of 10 local currency each.
No auction, no waiting, no bidding war. Pick a player, sign them, done. They won't win you the Champions League, but they'll fill a gap when injuries strike or your squad is stretched thin. Every successful manager knows when to be ambitious and when to be practical.
Scouting: The Foundation
Scouts don't sign players directly, but they make every other recruitment method work better. Hired through your Staff page for roughly 141 Gold each, scouts are assigned to geographic zones — one scout per zone maximum.
Having a scout in a zone unlocks:
- Full free player visibility — see every released player in that region, not just the limited public list
- Foreign youth prospects — browse youth academies in any country within that zone
- Individual player scouting — pay 0.05 Gold to reveal a specific player's hidden potential rating
Think of each scout as an investment in information asymmetry. While other managers bid blind, you'll know exactly what a player is worth. In a game where everyone has access to the same markets, the manager with the best intelligence wins.
Putting It All Together
The best squads aren't built through a single method. They're built by managers who know when to splash Platinum on a proven star, when to hunt for undervalued free agents, when to invest in youth development, and when a cheap amateur is the smartest signing on the table.
Your transfer budget is finite. Your scout network takes time to build. Your youth center needs upgrading. But that's what makes squad building in Kickoff Boss so rewarding — every signing is a decision, every decision has trade-offs, and every season is a chance to get it right.
The market is open. The prospects are waiting. Time to build your squad.
