WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027 Save & Backup Guide: Where Saves Live and How to Move Them

A career in WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027 is measured in seasons, and a save is the only thing standing between ten years of squad-building and an empty folder. Yet the game never shows you where any of it lives, and the store page does not either. The official manual does — in five different places, scattered across its parts — and it turns out the picture has one genuine surprise: the game’s own cloud backup has deliberate holes. This page assembles the manual’s statements in one place, separates them from community reports, and turns them into a backup and migration routine you can follow tonight.

What actually lives inside a save?

Three manual statements define what a savegame contains, and they matter for what a backup must protect. The first defines what a save does not contain: “As the user data is managed separately from the save games, from WAF2024 onwards the game also remembers which level you have already reached as a manager” (EN p. 17 / DE S. 18). Your manager level, skills and personal life travel in a separate user-data store — a copied save alone does not carry them.

The second works in the opposite direction: custom content can become part of the save. “Your own events become part of your save files. It is not possible to add or delete events later” (EN p. 215 / DE S. 227). A save is therefore not just your squad and table — it is also frozen custom content, which is exactly why the manual’s editor chapter tells event authors to lean on autosaves.

The third is a scope note for shared evenings: hotseat puts up to four managers into one save, so one backup file protects the whole table’s progress — the multiplayer guide explains how that shared save takes turns.

Where are saves stored?

The manual never writes a single sentence named “save game location”, but it fixes the folder in three independent places — and they agree.

Place 1: the modifications chapter. Part 4 tells modders where user directories go: “The directories must be copied into the game directory under ‘Saved games’” and, more precisely, “The directories must be copied to the game directory ‘\We Are Football’ (next to the save files)” (EN p. 179 / DE S. 191 — German: „Die Verzeichnisse müssen in das Spielverzeichnis unter „Gespeicherte Spiele” kopiert werden (neben die Spielstände)”). The save files sit inside Saved Games\We Are Football — the manual says so itself, twice, by describing everything else as sitting next to them.

Place 2: the editor chapter’s full path. The data editor section prints one path in full: “The raw data displayed in the editor is located at Saved Games\We Are Football\DatabaseWAF2024\WeAreFootball2024.sqlite” (EN p. 215 / DE S. 227). The German edition prints the identical English folder names — that is the only full path the manual ever writes, and it confirms the root: Saved Games\We Are Football.

Place 3: the Steam Deck recipe. “How do you get your own data onto the Steam Deck? The easiest way is to copy all the directories from ‘We Are Football’ (with the exception of the save files) to the Steam Deck. The following directory should be used: home\deck.local\share\Steam\steamapps\compatdata\1951410\pfx\drive_c\users\Steamuser\Saved Games\We Are Football” (EN p. 159 / DE S. 169). Under the Deck’s Proton prefix, users\Steamuser is the emulated Windows user profile — the same “Saved Games” folder again, with the save files explicitly inside it.

Three footnotes to that quote, so you can read it accurately:

• The German manual prints the last folder as „Gespeicherte Spiele” instead of “Saved Games” — the two editions name the same Windows folder in their own languages. German Windows displays it as „Gespeicherte Spiele”, English Windows as “Saved Games”.
• The folder number the manual prints, compatdata\1951410, is the store app ID of WE ARE FOOTBALL 2024, not 2027 — transcribed as printed. A community report in the game’s “Proton Support ???” forum thread (opened 17 September 2026) locates WAF27’s own prefix at steamapps/compatdata/4328570/, the 2027 app ID. Deck players should check both.
• The year-named folder exists too: kits are integrated “via the ‘Kits’ folder under ‘Saved Games’ and ‘We Are Football 2024’ or ‘We Are Football 2027’” (EN p. 203 / DE S. 215). So a We Are Football 2027 folder sits in Saved Games alongside the shared We Are Football directory.

What a community report adds. In the forum thread „Eigenes Logo” (opened by Sero on 17 September 2026), user Opa Glatze spielt answers with the Windows form C:\Users\DEINNAME\Saved Games\We Are Football\Badges\ — and the thread’s opener confirms it worked: „Logo hat endlich geklappt. Bin deinem Pfad gefolgt.” This is a community report we have not verified on a Windows machine, but it matches the manual’s own path in every part, right down to the English folder name.

Two honest limits: the manual never documents the file name or file format of a single savegame, and it never states on which side of the We Are Football / We Are Football 2027 split the save files land on Windows. That is exactly why the backup routine below copies the whole folder rather than guessing at individual files.

What the Steam Cloud syncs — and what it deliberately skips

Steam’s own category list (verified via the store API on 1 October 2026) includes Steam Cloud among the game’s 16 categories. The manual explains what that means in practice, and the details are worth more than the label.

The FAQ answers the sync question directly: “You can enable or disable the synchronisation of game saves on Steam in the game’s properties. Once it’s disabled, these will no longer be uploaded to the Steam Cloud” (EN p. 250 / DE S. 290). So saves do travel into the cloud — and the switch lives in Steam’s properties dialogue, not in the game’s options screen.

Then the exceptions, which are the part most players never expect. The glossary’s “Cloud sync” entry: “Badges are not synchronised here (unfortunately, this occasionally causes the system to crash) … This also applies to clubs you have founded yourself. From WAF27 onwards, autosaves are no longer synchronised” (EN p. 86 / DE S. 91 — German: „Hierbei werden keine Wappen mitgesynct … Ab WAF27 werden Autosaves nicht mehr synchronisiert”). The FAQ repeats the autosave rule and adds where the game tells you: “a corresponding note can be found on the save screen” (EN p. 250 / DE S. 290).

The practical reading: Steam Cloud is a convenience layer for your manual saves, not a backup system. It never carries club and competition badges — including the ones belonging to founded clubs — and since WAF27 it skips autosaves entirely. If your only copy of a career is the cloud, you are running ten seasons of work on a partial safety net.

How to back a career up properly

The manual’s own backup discipline predates any cloud feature, and it is refreshingly concrete. Section 1.9 recommends: “It is advisable to prepare a savegame right at the beginning, which you can then save as a starting point and reuse later. We recommend the following steps” — and closes with the rule that matters: “Then save the savegame immediately under a separate name, e.g. ‘Start’, so that it is not accidentally overwritten later by other autosaves” (EN p. 39 / DE S. 42 — German: „Speichere den Spielstand dann sofort unter einem eigenen Namen, z.B. „Start”, damit er später nicht aus Versehen überschrieben wird”).

Layered on top of that base save, a complete local backup takes three steps:

1. Copy the folder, not a file. Since the exact save-file names are not documented, copy the game’s folder inside Saved Games — We Are Football plus, if present, We Are Football 2027 — to another drive or a USB stick. Everything the manual places there (saves, badges, kit files, user data directories) travels with it.
2. Let the game write its own checkpoints. The options screen’s autosave dropdown writes weekly, fortnightly or monthly saves and can add a dedicated season-end save — how those switches work is covered in the game options guide. Remember these are exactly the files the Steam Cloud refuses to carry.
3. Separate rule for the editor: back up the database file before your first editor export. The manual is explicit: “You should back up this file before saving your changes so that you can revert to the original data if any problems arise” (EN p. 215 / DE S. 227), and the supplied database is deliberately un-editable “as it is intended to serve as a backup for you at all times” (EN p. 207 / DE S. 219). The database editor guide walks the full editor workflow.

And if you are about to point a memory trainer at a career you care about, the same folder-copy step comes first — the cheats and trainer guide collects what those tools touch and why the copy is non-negotiable.

Moving a save to a new computer

Migration is the backup test with stakes. Install the game on the new machine first (the installation and first-setup guide covers the first launch), then choose one of two routes:

Route 1: let Steam Cloud do it. If cloud sync is on in the game’s Steam properties, your manual saves follow the Steam installation onto the new PC. Two manual-carry items remain, straight from the glossary: “Badges are not synchronised here … so [they] must be manually copied to the relevant ‘\Badges’ directory when transferring save files to another computer. This also applies to clubs you have founded yourself” (EN p. 86 / DE S. 91). Copy your badge files into the new machine’s \Badges folder or your founded club plays under a placeholder crest.

Route 2: copy the folder yourself. Copy Saved Games\We Are Football (and We Are Football 2027 if present) from the old machine to the same place on the new one. This route carries saves, badges and kit files in one move and works offline. It is also the Deck recipe in miniature: the manual’s Deck section is exactly this copy, aimed at ...\compatdata\...\pfx\drive_c\users\Steamuser\Saved Games\We Are Football (EN p. 159 / DE S. 169), and a community report in the “Editor Doesn’t work on the steam deck” thread (21 September 2026) describes saves moving the other way: “if you have a Windows PC, you can create a new save using a different database, and the save will then work on Linux” — a Windows-made save running under Proton.

Two closing cautions. If you re-enable Steam Cloud after a period with it off, the FAQ’s advice is to prune first: “you should delete any unnecessary save files and autosaves beforehand” (EN p. 250 / DE S. 290). And if a crash rather than a move brings you here — a lost evening, a corrupted week — the troubleshooting guide tracks which crash sources Updates 1 and 2 have already eliminated.

What the official sources do not say

The honest remainder, because save questions live in the gaps: the manual names no save-file format and no per-save file name; it does not pin down whether Windows saves sit directly in We Are Football or inside the year folder We Are Football 2027; and neither the release announcement nor the Update 1 announcement (checked 1 October 2026) says whether 2027 saves survive game updates — or whether careers from the previous edition can be continued. The developers’ practice per their own WAF2024 news thread was that “save games can be continued as usual” across that game’s updates, but no equivalent statement exists for the 2027 edition yet, so we print none. What remains certain is the part the manual does say: your saves, badges and user directories share one folder in Saved Games — copy that folder and you have copied everything the game keeps on disk.