Lineup Rules (domain)
The rules a player's lineup must obey. For the code that implements editing (the DraftLineup seam and its pure mutations), see Lineup Editing.
Formation and schema
A Formation assigns contracts to the Positions required by a Formation Schema. A schema (4-3-3, 4-4-2, …) defines both which positions exist and which Chemistry Links connect them.
Every schema has 11 positions, so at most 11 contracts can be placed. That is a property of the schema and not of the team: it bounds the pitch, not the squad.
How many contracts a team may hold
22 active contracts, counted as the contracts a team holds that are not yet settled. A starting eleven and a bench of the same size, which is where the number comes from.
The cap counts unsettled contracts, not placed ones, so a contract counts against it from the moment it is signed until the settlement sweep closes it. A contract that has run past its expire date but has not been swept yet is still one of the 22, which is deliberate, the alternative is a team that can sign its 23rd article in the hours between expiry and settlement.
It was 11 until 2026-07-10, one contract per position, which conflated the squad with the starting eleven and left no bench to manage; PR #433 raised it to 22 and this doc had not caught up. The requirements' earlier "10" was never right at all.
MAX_TEAM_CONTRACTS in model/team.ts is the one statement of the number, and it is enforced inside the guarded INSERT that writes the contract rather than above it, for the same reason credits are (see ADR 0007): two concurrent buys that both read 21 would both commit.
Bench
Contracts a player owns but has not placed sit on the bench: it is where contracts go when they are not on the pitch. It has no limit of its own, it is bounded by what is left of the 22 after the placed contracts, so a team with nothing on the pitch may bench all 22 and a team fielding a full eleven may bench eleven more.
Editing rules
- Placing a contract on an occupied position displaces the current occupant to the bench, it is never dropped.
- Removing a contract from a position returns it to the bench.
- Swapping is symmetric and covers every source/target combination: position↔position, position↔bench, bench↔bench, and bench→position.
- Changing schema remaps placed contracts onto the new schema's positions. Any contract the remap cannot carry over is appended to the bench, never silently dropped.
The invariant behind all four: no contract is ever lost by an edit. A contract is always either on a position or on the bench.
Chemistry follows placement
Because chemistry is evaluated on schema adjacency, any edit that changes which articles sit on linked positions, including a schema change, changes the Chemistry Levels of the formation. Chemistry is a function of the placement, never stored independently of it.
Related
- Chemistry Links
- Lineup Editing
- Scoring & Economy System: the budget the squad is bought with, and what each placed contract scores
- ADR 0007: why the cap is checked in the write rather than before it