WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027 Troubleshooting: Crashes, Editor Fixes and the Update Log

WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027 launched on 16 September 2026 as a fast, budget manager — and like most launches it was not entirely smooth. Editor start failures and a handful of repeating crashes dominated the forums for the first week, and the most-asked question in the community was when the first patch would land. It landed on 24 September 2026, eight days in, and a second one followed on 28 September — two update logs in the first twelve days, roughly one every four days. This page does two jobs: it translates the official fix lists into plain terms, and it keeps track of what players are still reporting, so you can tell a fixed bug from a live one before you troubleshoot in the wrong direction. If your problems are about setup rather than bugs — installation, first launch, language selection — the installation and first-setup guide covers that ground.

Update 1: the first patch, fix by fix

The official announcement of 24 September 2026 opens with „Update 1 is available!“ and then names its fixes in unusually concrete terms. The editor first:

Editor: Starting problems in connection with WAF24 solved

Then three crashes, each tied to a concrete screen or action:

Fix: Crash resolved when setting shirt numbers Fix: Crash on the weekly progress screen because of a free agent youth player Fix: Crash budget section national teams

Around those, the same announcement carries smaller quality-of-life items: an „Improved display of the selected language at the start, making it easier to find the option to change it“, completed English and French text, and the first work on Spanish and Italian versions — their „mix files are available on Discord for both languages“ for players who want to try them early. The plans section teases more to come, including an Austrian German language variant and further editor features, with a second update already on the horizon.

Update 2: eleven fixes, four days later

The second update arrived on 28 September 2026 — „WAF27 - Update 2“, posted by gkoehler at 13:23 UTC and dated 16:00 CET in the announcement text. Counted from Update 1 that is three days and 23 hours, almost exactly the gap Update 1 itself kept after the release announcement: the rhythm announced a rhythm. Where Update 1 was built around the editor and three crashes, Update 2 is a wider sweep — six improvements (a stadium preview with fans, flares and no HUD, new display options such as feet and inches instead of kilometres, Discord in the game’s start menu, and „New city and country descriptions, special focus on Austria“) plus eleven fixes. Four of them have the widest reach:

Fix: Youth players no longer automatically receive a professional contract, which had previously caused issues

The quiet fix with the loudest backstory. Since launch, players poaching youth talent found the game forcing a professional contract on the teenager — a forum thread about exactly this kept collecting replies right up to the morning of patch day, and our youth scouting guide had documented the same behaviour as a suspected bug. Update 2 is the official answer: the automatic professional contract is gone. If you poach or promote youngsters, this is the one line of the changelog that changes your save.

Fix: Add interaction options in 1st/2nd team, e.g. with loan players

New, not repaired: the first and second teams gain interaction options, with loan players named as the example. The second team guide covers the screen this touches. One still-open report from after the update, kept at player-report strength with a question mark: on 6 October a thread titled „Namen der Zweiten kann man nicht mehr ändern. und Spieler Spielberechtigt machen“ (no replies at the time of writing) describes second-team names that no longer change and a player who can no longer be made eligible for the second team — „Nach dem letzten Update“, writes the opener. Same family as the youth-contract thread above, which also began as one player’s observation before Update 2 answered it; until something official says otherwise, a lead like this belongs in the community’s Discord bug section.

Help texts added for scouts (costs) and buildings (meaning of the two figures)

Two long-running forum squabbles answered with in-game text: what scouting a player actually costs, and what the two figures on each building mean — the question behind the build-menu debates in our club facilities guide.

Update of French version

French has been one of the game’s three supported languages since release; this line is the official confirmation that its text received its own refresh in Update 2. No fourth language was added — the store’s language list is unchanged.

The rest of the fix list, grouped: two editor repairs („Editor: Name of the 3rd competition is now displayed“, „Editor: Issues with substitution rules in some cup competitions fixed“); two clarity fixes around matches and talks („Fix: Make it clearer that ‘Cancel’ at the top of the player negotiation screen does not cancel the negotiations, but merely ends the action for the current day“, „Fix: Goals last matchday in the newspaper“); the hotseat repair („Fix: Issues with user order in Hotseat mode“); „Better calculation of the recommended number of leagues at game start“; and „Various text and layout fixes in the game start sequence“.

Update 3: the promised big step, 54 lines on 14 October

The third update took its time and then some. „WAF27 - Update 3“ landed on 14 October 2026 — its own text dating the release to 16:00 CET, the Steam feed carrying it from 13:47 UTC — which is sixteen days after Update 2, four times the gap the first two patches kept. What arrived matches the yardstick Gerald Köhler had set in the bug collection thread: „Mit Update 3 planen wir den bisher größten Schritt nach Release“ — with Update 3 we are planning the biggest step since release. Counted, the announcement lists 19 improvements and 35 fixes, roughly five times Update 2’s list. The blocks with the widest reach:

New language selection screen Additional official language: Italian Additional Austrian language version with typical Austrian football terms 30 languages will be directly supported if the game finds fan language files, e.g. Spanish, Portuguese or Turkish (it is also possible to select your own variations of the official languages)

The language question, this page’s longest-running report, gets its official answer in one sweep. Italian is official — the store’s language table lists it alongside English, German and French since the update — and the Austrian German variant that Update 1’s outlook promised has shipped with it. Spanish, the other half of that promise, did not arrive as official text; instead the game now „directly supports“ up to 30 fan language files, Spanish named first — a route our Spanish translation guide tracks from the fan side. A matching fix line cleans up the manager’s language choice: „Improved language selection for the manager at game start“.

Fix: In the standard formations, players are now positioned optimally, meaning that automatic downgrading no longer occurs

The position problem, verbatim. Community members had expected exactly this — one opinion-thread reply, quoted on our best formations guide, read „das Position-Problem von Elder Statesman wird im neuen Update wohl direkt gefixt“ — and the official line delivers the wording, with one honest limit: it names the standard formations, and every custom placement beyond them is still yours to measure in your own save.

Fix: Wrong display of next season’s transfer budget on the home screen during the 2nd leg (e.g. after using an option to buy a player)

The one budget line in the list, and it deserves careful reading: it is a display repair on the home screen, not a named fix for the locked-budget family — the board blocking offers while the budget reads zero — that player reports have been collecting since October. The finances guide carries the family in full; whether this line covers its display half can only be tested after the update.

The editor block grows again, this time mostly outward: „Editor events: Greater freedom when setting effects, usually at least doubled; allows for more interesting events“, an „Improved translation screen for own events“, every editor event „also available in French and Italian“, and one repair — „Fix: International finals stadiums can now be edited correctly in the editor“. The still-open report about loans and appearance counts not carrying into the game, carried by our editor guide, is not among them. Negotiations gain behaviour rather than crash fixes: players „might now also increase the fixed transfer fees before waiving them entirely“, a „Squad“ button joins player and club talks, „Offering players is no longer possible, if the player already negotiates with another club“, and „Scouting now also works on the ‘Ongoing negotiations’ screen“ — none of which names the negotiation crash family below.

The rest of the 54 lines, grouped. Youth and second team: „Fix: Youth players make their decisions by 30 June“, „Fix: Youth player pre-selection for contract negotiations“, „Character changes are now also possible for the reserve team and for youth players (previously, these were regularly reset)“, plus corrected best-player displays at the youth camps and a locked skill tree for other clubs’ youngsters — lines in the same territory as the Vormerken reports in our second team guide, though none of them names the signed-but-never-arrives mechanism itself. Tuning: „50% fewer injuries during training at the ‘Easy’ difficulty level and 10% fewer at ‘Normal’“, sponsorship extensions with promotion bonuses, player offers on Deadline Day, and harder loan deals from foreign countries to lower league clubs. Interface and rules: the table screen „allows switching between the leagues again“, the „Ongoing negotiations“ screen closes with ESC, exciting games and surprising results get special icons after each matchday, expiring contracts gain a tooltip and colour coding, the board screen shows the popularity a contract extension needs, away-goal and home-team cup rules are corrected (the away-goal line „only for new save games“), yellow-card warnings and half-time substitution comments behave, cam carpets render twice over, a missing „Goal of the matchday“ no longer crashes, and the „No Budget“ mode updates its account balance daily. Creative Mode, finally, gets the sandbox half of the list: 20 or 10 per cent of gifted money arrives directly with one or two budgets, club creation accepts motto, mascot and president, event probabilities run from 0.5 to 20, and 13 additional wing-play defaults join the tactics screen.

One paragraph of what the 54 lines do not name, because that is this page’s second job: no line for the negotiation crash family, none for the workshop-database start failures, none for the 0x11C7 signature, none for the locked-budget board blocks, none for the editor’s loan and appearance fields, none for chance conversion. Each of those families keeps its section below, now with its Update 3 verdict attached.

Crashes: what was fixed and what is still open

The crash reports of launch week fall into the exact families the patch names: players lost saves or evenings setting shirt numbers, hit the weekly-progress crash with a free-agent youth player in the squad, or crashed in the national-team budget section. With Update 1 installed, those three named crash sources are officially resolved — if you still hit one of them, the first thing to check is whether the patch actually arrived, and Steam’s own “Verify integrity of game files” option is the standard second step. And when a crash does eat an evening, the save and backup guide is the manual-sourced routine that keeps it from eating the whole career.

One crash family deserves its own honest note: the forum thread about crashes during transfer and contract negotiations kept growing after the patch — from single-digit replies into double digits within days — and no fix for it appears in any of the three update lists; Update 3 (14 October 2026) changed negotiation behaviour in four places and still named no crash for it. That does not mean it is universal or permanent; it means that as of 14 October 2026 it is the crash topic to watch. If negotiations reliably end your game, the contract negotiations guide explains the mechanics, but the crash itself is one for the developers, and the thread is where they will see your case.

The editor will not start

The single loudest launch problem: players installed the game, tried the external editor and got nothing. The forum threads about the editor not starting collected roughly thirty replies across several posts in launch week — enough that the update announcement leads with it. The official fix is explicit about the cause being tied to the previous edition’s files: „Starting problems in connection with WAF24 solved“. In practice that makes the checklist short: update the game to Update 1, let Steam verify the files if the editor still refuses, and keep in mind that the editor reads and writes its database under Saved Games\We Are Football in your user profile (EN p. 215), not inside the Steam installation — the editor guide maps that workflow, and the real-name database patch guide is the quickest test case for whether your editor round-trips a database at all.

A workshop database that stops the game from starting (community report, 4 October)

The freshest open report, and an unresolved one: on 4 October 2026 a player described integrating a workshop database — the Originalvereine & Spieler item from our real-name database patch guide — and then getting „Spielausführungsdatei fehlt“ (the game executable is missing) on the next launch, with a second attempt flagged as „unerwünschte software oder virus“ — an antivirus false positive aimed at the freshly modified installation. A complete reinstall reportedly did not help. The thread had no replies at the time of writing, so there is no verified fix — this page records the phenomenon, not a cure, and deliberately so: the author’s own workshop description now points players who cannot download or integrate the database through the Steam Workshop to his ModDB mirror as the alternative channel, which reads as a quiet confirmation that the workshop path can fail on some setups. If your game refuses to start right after a database integration, that is the pattern to recognize — and the workshop and mods guide explains what integration actually does before you run it. Update 3’s notes arrived on 14 October 2026 and contain no line on the workshop, on database integration or on missing-executable reports, so the cluster keeps its open status under this heading. The family has since grown by one more unnamed member: on 5 October a second player reported, in a thread titled „Wokshop download Spiel startet nicht mehr???“ (sic), that after a workshop download their game no longer starts — again with zero replies, again unresolved. Two independent reports in two days make the pattern easier to recognize and no easier to fix; the next update’s notes are the place this cluster will be settled.

A first-launch crash and the community’s rename routine (community report, 5 October)

A different flavour of start trouble, and one with no official answer at all: on 5 October 2026 a player opened a thread titled „Super Spiel,“ — praise first, then the catch. „Nach dem üblichen crash beim ersten Start, hilft meist folgende Routine“, he writes, and lays the routine out: let Steam check the installed files for errors, rename the folder „We Are Football“ under C:/Benutzer/Name/Gespeicherte Spiele/ (the game recreates it fresh), copy the saves and profile pictures back out of the backup folder, and then „anschließend den Editor starten und direkt wieder verlassen“ before launching the game. His own caveat belongs in every retelling: „Das klappt allerdings nicht immer, darum muss man das Procedere, an manchen Tagen, mehrmals wiederholen …“ — it does not always work, and on some days he repeats the whole procedure several times before the game finally starts.

Recorded here as exactly what it is: a player-reported folk remedy, quoted from a thread that stood at seven replies on 8 October 2026 — not a fix verified by us, and none is endorsed here, because no official changelog mentions a first-launch crash of this kind as of that date. Two anchors keep the report in context. The folder the routine renames is precisely the Saved Games folder our save and backup guide maps, so anything you care about should be backed up before such an intervention. And it should not be confused with the one start problem the developers did fix: Update 1’s „Starting problems in connection with WAF24 solved“ concerns the external editor’s clash with the previous edition’s files — a different problem, officially addressed, than this reported crash on the game’s own first launch.

The won’t-start family has grown a third member, and this one is not the game’s doing: on 8 October 2026 sandro.meinunger reported that a launch attempt ends in the message „Eine Anwendungssteuerungsrichtlinie hat diese Datei blockiert (0x11C7)“ — a Windows application control policy blocking the game’s process — and asked the forum what to do. The thread stood at zero replies at the time of writing, so there is no fix to pass on, and none is invented here. One boundary belongs in the retelling: the rename routine above is community-tested for the first-launch crash signature, a different problem from this policy block — it is not a 0x11C7 remedy.

The 0x11C7 family has since grown a second, far more detailed member — from a familiar hand. On 11 October 2026 (11:43 UTC) Alzheimy — the same player who opened the rename-routine thread above — posted a support-ticket-style write-up titled „WE ARE FOOTBALL 2027 startet nicht – Fehler 0x11C7 / Windows 11 Smart App Control blockiert Spieldateien“ (zero replies at the time of writing). Where the 8 October report named only the blocking message, this one reads like a diagnosis: on his Windows 11 machine (Build 10.0.26200, Smart App Control enabled, no group policies applied) the Event Viewer log «Microsoft-Windows-CodeIntegrity/Operational» records entries with event ID 3077 stating that waf2027.exe violates the active code-integrity policy when loading two of the game’s shipped DLLs — CEGUIOpenGLRenderer-0.dll and minizip.dll, neither of which carries a digital signature as far as he could check. Both entries cite the same policy ID, which he attributes to Microsoft’s VerifiedAndReputableDesktop policy — the machinery behind Smart App Control. Even the rename routine’s territory makes a cameo: deleting the folder under „Gespeicherte Spiele“ revived the game exactly once — «Nachdem ich den Ordner „We Are Football“ im Windows-Verzeichnis „Gespeicherte Spiele“ gelöscht hatte, ließ sich das Spiel starten und lief anschließend mehrere Stunden einwandfrei» — after deleting the “We Are Football” folder in Windows’ “Saved Games” directory, the game started and ran cleanly for hours — but the next day it refused again, and this time re-deleting no longer helped, nor did repeated Steam file verification. That is two independent reports of the same error code, and in the newer one the operating system’s own event log pointing at a concrete mechanism; an official response has not appeared in either thread as of 11 October 2026 — and Update 3’s notes, published on 14 October, name neither the 0x11C7 signature nor Smart App Control, so the family stays open exactly where it stood. What this page deliberately does not add is a remedy: whether Smart App Control should be on or off for a game installation is a Windows security decision we leave to you — the reporter himself asks the developers for «eine sichere Lösung, bei der Windows-Sicherheitsfunktionen nicht deaktiviert werden müssen» — a safe solution that does not require disabling Windows security features. His sign-off, in true Super-Spiel fashion: «Ansonsten: Wenn es läuft, super Spiel!» — otherwise: when it runs, great game.

Language at first start

A smaller but persistent report: the game not starting in the language players expected, and the switch being hard to find. The developers acknowledged exactly that in Update 1 — the „improved display of the selected language at the start“ exists „making it easier to find the option to change it“ — and Update 3 rewrote the whole picture: a „New language selection screen“ arrives, Italian joins as an official fourth language, an Austrian German variant ships, and the game „directly supports“ 30 fan language files, „e.g. Spanish, Portuguese or Turkish“. Spanish itself remains without official text, so the community gap-closer still matters: our Spanish translation guide documents the fan pack that puts the whole interface into Spanish today.

Proton, Steam Deck and the platform question

A separate support thread asks about Proton — running the Windows build on Linux — and has grown steadily without an official verdict either way. The store lists Windows only; the manual states the game „can also be played on the Steam Deck“ (EN p. 11 / DE S. 11). What that means in practice — the Deck’s recommended controller mapping, the Mac and Linux situation and the streaming detours — is collected in the system requirements and compatibility guide, and we keep it off this page because it is a platform question, not a bug list.

Where to check next

Three places, in this order: the game’s Steam news feed, where every official update is announced (Update 1 is the model — concrete fix lines, plain language; Update 3 of 14 October kept it), the community discussion hub, where recurring problems surface as threads days before an announcement addresses them, and — new since 2 October — the developer’s own Steady page: in the bug collection thread, Gerald Köhler pointed to steady.de/we-are-football, an address that now 301-redirects to steadyhq.com/we-are-football (the platform has moved its domain), where a dedicated post listed, updated daily, everything Update 3 would fix and add. His own yardstick: „Mit Update 3 planen wir den bisher größten Schritt nach Release“ — with Update 3 we are planning the biggest step since release — a promise the 54-line announcement redeemed. This page mirrors the official fix lists as updates land and keeps the still-open reports below them, so it is the short version of all three. If you are weighing a purchase against the rough edges, the review guide collects what players praise and criticize; if the bug that bothers you is the fictional names rather than the crashes, the real-name database patch is the fix that already exists.