90s Football Draft

The era

The 1990s were the hinge decade. The European Cup became the Champions League, the Bosman ruling tore up how clubs bought players, and Serie A paid for the best of them — which is why the era's greatest sides so often wore Italian shirts. It was also the last decade when a squad was built rather than bought outright, so the great teams were genuinely distinct from one another in a way that later, richer football rarely managed. The pool spans the whole arc: Cruyff's Dream Team at the start of it, Capello's Milan in the middle, and the treble winners and Galácticos-in-waiting at the end.

Among the squads you can land on: Inter Milan 1997-98, Real Madrid 1999-00 and Manchester United 1998-99.

This pool is the playable half of a decade. The 1990s era page covers the same squads as a reference — every side, what each won, and the clubs and countries the decade belonged to.

How it drafts

Level with Serie A as the hardest pool in the game, and hard for a different reason: Serie A is top-heavy, the 90s is simply thinner. The ratings are the ones players actually held that season, and 90s squads were shallower — the drop from a club's first XI to its bench was steeper than anything in the modern game. There are only ten players rated 90 or above across sixteen squads, so expect to build around one or two genuine greats and paper over the rest.

The wheel only ever serves squads from this pool, so all 16 of them come up often enough to matter — the whole point of narrowing it. The strongest player you can land on is Ronaldo (94), and the best XI the pool could theoretically assemble averages 90.3. You will not get that XI: you get whatever the wheel gives you, one squad at a time, and you have to build around it.

Runs in this pool count on the global leaderboard exactly like any other — there is no scoring penalty for narrowing the wheel. See how a run works if you haven't played before, or start from the top of the football draft game.