Terms and Privacy

01Who we are and what FMBackroom is

FMBackroom is operated by [legal entity or trading name, and registered address], contactable at [support email address]. In these terms "we" and "us" mean that operator, and "you" means the person using the service.

The service has two parts. The website at www.fmbackroom.com and the application at app.fmbackroom.com let you read, plan and change things about your Football Manager career. The companion app is a small Windows program that reads your save file on your own computer, sends a decoded layer of it to your account, and applies changes back to the save when you ask it to.

02An unofficial tool

FMBackroom is an unofficial community tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Sports Interactive, SEGA, or any football club, competition, player or association. Football Manager and all related marks belong to their respective owners.

Because the service reads and writes a file format we do not control, a Football Manager update can stop features working at any time, with no notice to us. We will restore support where we reasonably can, but we cannot promise a timescale and we cannot promise it will always be possible.

03Your account

You need an account to use the service. You must give a working email address, confirm it, and keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account, so tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to it.

One account is for one person. Please do not share logins, and do not create multiple free accounts to work around the limits of the Free tier.

You must be at least 16 years old to hold an account. If you are younger than that, ask a parent or guardian to hold the account instead.

04Plans and prices

There is a Free tier and one paid tier, Backroom. Prices are shown on the pricing section of the home page, are in pounds sterling, and include VAT where it applies. At the time of writing Backroom is £2.99 a month or £19.99 a year.

What each tier includes is described on the site and may change as the service develops. If we remove something material from a tier you are paying for, we will tell you by email before it takes effect, and you may cancel.

05Billing, renewal and cancelling

Payments are handled by Stripe. We do not see or store your card number. Stripe holds your payment details and we hold only the identifiers Stripe gives us so that we know which subscription belongs to which account.

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from your account, and cancelling stops the next payment rather than ending the period you have already paid for. When the paid period ends, your account returns to the Free tier and keeps one career.

If a payment fails we will retry it and tell you. If it keeps failing, the subscription ends and the account drops to the Free tier.

06Your statutory right to cancel

As a consumer you normally have 14 days to change your mind about a purchase made online, and to get your money back.

07Refunds

Beyond your statutory rights, we would rather refund someone than argue with them. If the service did not do what the site said it would, tell us what happened and we will refund the current period.

Nothing here affects your legal rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, including the right to a service carried out with reasonable care and skill.

08The companion app and your save files

Some features change your save file. Takeovers and youth intake edits both write to the game. Editing a save always carries risk, and the risk is yours.

The companion only reads the files you point it at. It never uploads your save file. See the privacy policy below for exactly what does leave your machine.

The numbers the service shows you, including Effective CA, attribute projection and estimated values, are calculated estimates derived from the game's own data. They are our interpretation, not facts published by the game, and they will sometimes be wrong.

09Generated faces

Face generation and face aging apply only to newgens and regens, the players the game invents. They are not offered for real people. Faces are produced by a third-party image generation service on our instruction, and we describe what is sent to it in the privacy policy.

Generated images are for your own use in your own game. Please do not resell them or present them as photographs of a real person.

10Names, likenesses and third-party rights

Player, club and competition names are read from your own save and used descriptively, to identify who or what they are. Nothing in the service implies that any player, club or competition is associated with FMBackroom or endorses it.

Everything else on the site and in the applications, including the code, the written content, the scoring models and the design, belongs to us. You may use it through the service; you may not copy it, resell it, or build a competing product out of it.

11Acceptable use

Please do not:

• use the service for anything unlawful, or to infringe someone else's rights;
• try to break into other people's accounts or data;
• scrape, resell or redistribute the data the service produces;
• reverse engineer or circumvent the tier limits and paid features;
• upload anything that is not a Football Manager save layer produced by the companion;
• put load on the service that interferes with other people using it.

FMBackroom is for single-player use. Using it against other people in a shared or online save is not something the service is designed for, and is between you and the people you play with.

12Availability and changes

We aim to keep the service running, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may take it down for maintenance, and we may change, add or remove features.

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties about fitness for a particular purpose. This does not limit your rights as a consumer.

13Ending your access

You may delete your account at any time, which removes your careers and the data described in the privacy policy.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that is being used fraudulently, or where we are required to. Where it is fair to do so we will warn you first, and if we close a paid account for a reason that is not your fault we will refund the unused part of the period.

14Liability

We do not exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Otherwise, and to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss of save data, loss of game progress, or indirect or consequential loss. Where we are liable, our total liability is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

This is a tool for a single-player video game. Please keep that proportion in mind, and keep a backup.

15Changes, governing law and complaints

We may update these terms. If a change matters to you as a paying customer, we will email you before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the change.

These terms are governed by the law of [England and Wales — confirm] and the courts there have jurisdiction. If you live elsewhere in the UK or in the EU, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, and you may bring proceedings there.

If something has gone wrong, email [support email address] first. We would much rather fix it than have you go anywhere else.

01Who is responsible for your data

The data controller is [legal entity or trading name, and registered address]. For anything in this policy, including a request to see or delete your data, email [privacy contact email address].

02What the service collects

03What never reaches us

The save file itself never leaves your computer. The companion reads it locally, decodes the parts the service needs and uploads only that layer. We never receive the file, and we cannot reconstruct your save from what we hold.

We also never receive your card details, and we do not ask for your real name, address or date of birth.

04Why we use it, and our lawful basis

• To provide the service you asked for — your account, your careers and everything calculated from them. Lawful basis: performance of a contract.
• To take payment and manage subscriptions. Lawful basis: performance of a contract, and legal obligation for tax records.
• To keep the service secure and working — logs, rate limits, abuse prevention, debugging. Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in running a service that stays up and is not abused.
• To email you about your account — confirmation, password resets, payment problems, and material changes. Lawful basis: performance of a contract.

We do not use your data for advertising, we do not sell it or share it with data brokers, and we do not profile you.

05Who else handles it

A small number of processors handle data on our instructions:

We will also disclose data where the law requires it, and we would tell you unless we were forbidden from doing so.

06Cookies and the marketing site

The application uses cookies and similar storage to keep you signed in and to remember your settings. These are strictly necessary for the service to work, so they do not need consent and there is no cookie banner.

There is no analytics, advertising or tracking on this site. The only third-party request the marketing pages make is to Google Fonts, which loads the typefaces and in doing so receives your IP address. [Consider self-hosting the fonts to remove even that.]

07How long we keep it

• Account data — until you delete your account.
• Career data — until you delete the career, or delete your account.
• Payment records — kept as long as tax law requires, currently six years, even after an account is closed.
• Server logs — [retention period, e.g. 30 or 90 days].
• Sign-in and reset tokens — expire automatically, within hours or days.

Deleting your account removes your careers, shortlists, snapshots, settings and generated faces. Backups are overwritten on their own cycle, so a copy may persist there for a short period after deletion.

08Your rights

Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict what we do with it, or hand it over in a portable form. You can also object to processing we do on the basis of legitimate interests.

Email [privacy contact email address] and we will respond within one month. There is no charge.

If you are not happy with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or to the data protection authority where you live. We would appreciate the chance to put it right first.

09Security and transfers

Passwords are stored hashed, never in plain text. Sign-in tokens are stored hashed and can be revoked. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to the production database is limited to what is needed to run the service.

No service is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data and is likely to be a risk to you, we will tell you and the regulator as the law requires.

Some processors are outside the UK and the EEA. Where data is transferred there, it is protected by an adequacy decision or by standard contractual clauses. [Confirm which applies for each processor above.]

10Children, changes and contact

The service is not intended for children under 16 and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has an account, tell us and we will remove it.

If this policy changes materially, we will email account holders before the change takes effect and update the date at the top of this page.

For anything in either document, email [support email address].