Privacy Policy

Last updated 27 August 2026

Gaffer is a football management game that runs in your browser. Your careers are stored on your own device and are never uploaded. Playing needs no account, and there is nothing to consent to before you do.

This policy explains what Gaffer does with your data, and what it does not. It covers the game at /play/, this website, and the optional account a subscription is sold to.

1. Your careers never leave your device

A career — your manager, your club, your squad, every season you have played — is written into your browser's own storage (IndexedDB) on the device you played it on. It is never uploaded. There is no cloud save, no sync between devices, and no copy of it anywhere but your browser.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. Clearing your browser's site data for this site deletes your careers, and nobody can restore them. And a career does not follow you to another device or another browser unless you export it to a file yourself and import it there.

2. Playing needs no account

The free game asks for nothing: no sign-in, no email address, no name. You can play a career at any club in the world without telling us who you are.

3. If you subscribe: an email address and a tier

An account exists only to carry a subscription. What is stored about you is an email address and which tier you are on. That is the whole list. There is no name, no country, no IP address, no user agent, no password, and nothing at all about what you did in the game.

Signing in is a link sent to your email address — there is no password anywhere, so there is none to leak and none to reuse. The sign-in link and the session it creates are stored only as one-way digests, so the database holds nothing that could be used to sign in as you.

A session is kept in one cookie. It is strictly necessary — it is what being signed in means — and it is used for nothing else: no tracking, no advertising, no profiling. It is marked SameSite=Lax so it is not sent from other sites.

Deleting your account deletes all of it. Ask at the address above and the email address and tier are removed. Your careers are unaffected, because they were never ours to hold.

4. Payment

Payment is taken by a third-party payment provider acting as the seller. Your card details are given to them and never reach us — we never see, hold or process them. The provider tells us only that a subscription for a given account started, renewed or ended. Their own privacy policy governs what they collect from you at checkout.

5. Anonymous usage counts

So that it is possible to know whether anybody arrives and whether the game works for them, a small number of events are counted. They are about nobody: there is no identifier, no cookie, no session, and no IP address is stored — the approximate country is resolved by the hosting provider at the edge and handed over already as a country code, so no address is ever read to derive it.

An event carries at most:

• the time it arrived, and which of a fixed list of events it was;
• an approximate country, and whether the browser reported itself as a mobile one;
• the campaign or link that brought you, and the bare host of the referring site — never a full URL and never a path;
• when a career is started, the club, division, tier and country chosen — which is about a club in the game, not about you; and
• when something goes wrong, which screen was open and where the failure happened — never the error message, and never anything from your career.

Nothing in it can be joined to an account: the usage database and the accounts database are separate databases that cannot be joined, and no query touches both. These counts are not sold, not shared, and not used for advertising. They are kept in aggregate with no schedule to delete them, because there is nothing in them that identifies anybody to delete.

6. What Gaffer does not do

• No advertising, and no advertising or analytics scripts from anybody else.
• No selling or sharing of personal data. Ever, to anyone.
• No profiling, no fingerprinting and no cross-site tracking.
• No third-party fonts, scripts or images — the page loads everything from its own origin.
• No collection of anything at all from children, or from anybody, beyond the above.

7. Your rights

Where the GDPR or a comparable law applies to you, you have the right to ask what is held about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to receive a copy of it, and to object to its processing. For an account that is one email address and one tier, so the answer is short — write to the address above and it will be given or removed.

The lawful basis is performance of a contract for the account and the subscription (there is no way to sell a subscription without an address to attach it to), and legitimate interest for the anonymous counts, which hold no personal data at all.

8. Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change that materially affects what is held about an account will be sent to the address on that account.