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The World Cup may have ended, and we loved it, but Goalman lives on. Please email us your feedback and let us know how you'd like to see Goalman evolve.

🙏 Thanks for playing GOALMAN! ⚽

Updates like this one used to live only on the website. Now they live in the game too: tap the newspaper button on the main menu and these posts open right there, one story at a time. Swipe left and right to move between them, and a little badge on the button tells you when there is something new to read. It is the same feed the website runs on, so there is only ever one set of notes to keep up with.

The global leaderboard learned a new trick as well. Instead of a flat top-of-the-world list you would never appear on, it now shows the top 50 and then a window centred on your own rank, with a tidy divider marking the players in between. So you get the giants at the top and your own neighbourhood in the same glance, however far down the table you are.

There is more to make your Goalman your own, too: a fresh kit, new hair and a new face join the shared pool in the customisation screen, and they turn up on the crowd behind the goal as well. Mix them into what you already wear, or hit randomise and see what turns up.

When you fire off a challenge, the moment afterwards used to be a bit of an anticlimax: a quiet confirmation and back to the menu. Not any more. The new challenge-sent screen puts your Goalman in front of a crowd of your friends, with a share row for sending your challenge link anywhere and a QR code that zooms up so a mate standing next to you can scan it straight off your screen.

First-time challengers now get a short guided tour of what happens next: your opponent gets your challenge, sets their own shots and goalkeeper, and the shootout plays out for both of you. The tour, like the rest of the game, is fully translated into all nine supported languages.

We also snuck the spinning football from the main menu into the inbox illustration, because it was too good to use only once.

Goalman is a landscape game: you need the full width of the goal in front of you. But plenty of phones open links in browsers that are locked to portrait, and until now that meant an awkward "please rotate your device" wall that some players could never get past.

Version 1.01 introduces what we call fake landscape: if your device refuses to rotate, the game now rotates itself instead, rendering sideways into the portrait screen so you can simply turn your phone and play. No settings, no fuss; it just works.

Matches also start with a proper bit of theatre now: the Goalman logo splashes up and peels away to reveal the stadium, replacing the old hard cut.

Tap any player in Goalman and you now get a proper player page: their Goalman posing under stadium lights, your full head-to-head record against them, and a challenge button right there. You can manage friendships from the same screen.

Alongside the redesign came a batch of quality fixes. Leaderboard ranks no longer squash together once they reach three digits, the friends screen animation was reworked so your friend count is actually readable while it settles, and new players get a smoother first run, including a name screen that builds a starter character for you to customise.

With the World Cup on, Goalman went properly international. The whole game and website are now playable in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese and Arabic, right-to-left layout included. Your language choice follows you between the site and the game, and switching mid-game is instant.

The stadium got more personal too. Your friends now appear in the crowd behind the goal, each stand's seats tinted to match its owner's shorts, so a busy friends list literally fills your ground. Generated crowd faces got a pass as well, with realistic skin tones and eyes that no longer inherit the shirt colour of whoever they sit near.

The football you see spinning on the menu and rolling across scene transitions is no longer a flat picture of a ball. It is now drawn live by your device, catching the light as it spins, and it quietly simplifies itself on older phones so nobody pays a frame-rate cost for the shine.

Late June was also a speed month. Leaderboards that slowed to a crawl when lots of players shared the same rank now load instantly and centre on your own position. Checking your inbox is quicker, and the whole game is a smaller download than it was.

goalman.club itself got a full redesign at the end of June. The home page now carries a live standings widget showing the World League, top players and this week's form, pulled straight from the same leaderboards you see in the game, so you can check whether your country is on top before you even press play. There is a refreshed About page covering how to play, how to challenge friends and how customisation works.

Smaller wins from the same batch: background music that had quietly stopped playing is back, Android users who pinned Goalman to their home screen once again land directly in the game, and the post-match Play Again flow was streamlined.

More next month. If you have not played yet, the goal is waiting.