The S.H.I.F.T.

Acronyms

S.H.I.F.T.—Seasonal Hearing on Interclub Formations and Transfers, the window itself. T.R.A.D.E.—Tribunal for the Registration and Adjudication of Displaced Employees, which convenes it.

The S.H.I.F.T. is the transfer window. It is held once a season, during the intersaison, and it is the only time players move between teams by choice. (From Season 04 an injury can empty a seat mid-season. See ratifications below.)

How a movement happens

1. A team’s front office files an offer.
2. The shareholders of both teams vote, on a roll frozen when the offer opens.
3. The Tribunal registers what survives.

“The Tribunal registers movement; it does not authorize it, and holds that an absence of objection is an objection that was not made.”

Your vote is your holding. Shares bought on the Exchange—or received as a donation—carry weight here, which is why a bloc of supporters who pool their shares can decide what their team does with its roster.

The rules, as run in Season 03

• One for one, in the same seat. Every offer moves one player in and one player out, and the incoming player takes the outgoing player’s seat—third line, second defence pair, in goal. A roster never grows or shrinks, and both teams stay legal.
• All forty-eight front offices file. The twenty-four teams that arrived in Season 03 sat out their first window. They had a front office at the second.
• Both rolls count. The team that files and the team that releases each get a say. A movement falls if either roll refuses it.
• Silence is consent. An offer falls only if holders of at least half of a team’s shares actively reject it. A shareholder who says nothing is recorded as having approved.
• The roll is frozen at open. Shares bought after an offer opens carry no vote on it. You cannot buy your way into a vote already under way.
• Graine Wetsky Funds does not vote at the Tribunal. Its shares are left off every frozen roll. (It does vote elsewhere. See Stewardship.)
• Stewarded teams are not protected. Busan and Helsinki filed, and were filed against, like everyone else.

Three kinds of filing

Kind	What moves
Trade	A rostered player in, a rostered player out to the other team. Same position.
Signing	A player from the unattached pool in, a rostered player out to the pool. Only the filing team’s roll votes; there is no releasing team to ask.
Ratification	A signing the front office already made mid-season, after a career-ending injury emptied a seat. The holders are asked to ratify it at the next window. If they refuse, the signee goes back to the pool and the front office fills the seat again.

A player signed out of the unattached pool arrives having been somewhere. The Tribunal records the signing as a visit to the Sixth: two attributes rise a little, the player is re-rated against their position, and the registry will not hand them a fifth star. A fifth star is earned on the ice. A player can only be signed this way once every three seasons.

Two rounds

The window runs in two rounds of three days. Every filing made in a round, on whichever day, closes at the same instant. Round one is settled before round two is filed.

That gap matters. A player released to the pool in round one can be signed by another team in round two, and at the Season 03 window five of them were.

Competing bids

Several teams may file for the same player. All of those bids are counted together, at the close, and at most one carries. Among the bids that survived both rolls, the releasing team’s front office takes them in its own order of preference—usually the player it would rather receive—which is published on the filing. Where a front office has no preference, the earliest filing carries.

“Shareholders do not choose between bids. They can only reject them.”

To pass over the front office’s first choice, the releasing team’s shareholders reject it, and the next bid still standing carries. A bid that survived its vote but lost the contest is marked Outbid: nobody objected to it, and it lost anyway.

Reading a filing

Every filing carries one of these labels:

Label	Meaning
Not yet open	Filed. The vote has not started.
Open to vote	Shareholders may reject it. Silence is approval.
Awaiting the Tribunal	The vote has closed.
Registered	The movement happened.
Refused	The shareholders objected.
Outbid	It survived its vote and lost the contest.
Withdrawn	It no longer stands.

Front offices are not people

A team does not have a named general manager. It has a temperament: a set of archetypes that decides who it chases and who it will part with. Each filing carries the front office’s own rationale, in its own voice, and names the archetype that produced it.

Archetype	Temperament
Brawler	Wants big hitters. Chases physicality regardless of scoring.
Star-Struck	Wants famous players. Chases star rating even when the numbers don’t justify it.
Drawn to the Changed	Collects players who have been to the Sixth. The more visits, the better.
Thrifty	Shops the unattached rather than raiding other teams.
Meritocrat	Pure production. Chases the hot, cuts the cold.
Sentimental	Won’t cut long-serving players. The roster quietly ages.
Loyalist	Protects the top line. Only ever trades from the bottom of the roster.
Ruthless	Nobody is protected. Will cut their best if the maths says so.
Parochial	Won’t trade inside their own conference. Only looks across the divide.
Impulsive	Files on the first day of each round, and files more than most.
Patient	Files on the last day of each round, and rarely—leaving the least time to organise a refusal.
Stubborn	Re-files for a player whose move was already refused once.
Grudging	Won’t deal with teams it holds a grudge against. Not to buy, not to sell.
Poacher	Raids the teams it holds a grudge against, and goes for their stars.

Every team’s temperament is published on the Front Offices page. Nobody has said who decides it. Le Council has stopped asking.

Following a window

The S.H.I.F.T. page lists every filing, open and settled, and can be filtered by team. Each movement has its own page: the two players side by side, attribute against attribute, the rationale, and both rolls with how close each came to the refusal line. Movements keeps the record of everything the Tribunal has registered.

Each team page on this wiki lists that team’s registered movements.

The record

Season 02 window

Opened 10 August 2026 and resolved on the 14th. Only the twenty-four teams of Season 02 filed.

49 offers filed · 16 ratified · 33 refused.

Le Council notes that the shareholders refused twice as much as they approved, and offers no interpretation of that figure. One of the sixteen was a signing from the unattached pool: Cillian Byrne, a goaltender, to Winnipeg. He came off the bench late in the first hour of the Season 03 Final and was in net when Winnipeg won it.

Season 03 window

Opened 12 October 2026, on the night of the first All-Star game, and closed at 23:00 UITC on the 17th. All forty-eight front offices filed.

200 offers settled · 85 ratified · 108 refused · 7 outbid.

The 85 were 41 trades and 44 signings. Shareholders refused 107 trades and one signing. Nearly every signing that reached a vote went through; most trades did not.

Notable movements, Season 03

• Winnipeg traded its Final goaltender. The champions sent Cillian Byrne to Dublin for Tadhg O’Sullivan, then added Bongani Mthembu from Johannesburg and Elina Heikkinen from Helsinki in round two.
• Tokyo filed nothing that carried and lost five players. Yuki Sato, Shūta Tanaka, Valtteri Lehtonen, Sōta Watanabe, and Haruto Nakamura left for Amsterdam, Monaco, Prague, Singapore, and Wellington. Tahiti also sent five players away, and took four in. Moscow sent four.
• Ushuaia and Gander made five moves each, every one of them a signing from the pool. Ushuaia released Diego Fuentes from its first line to do it. Gander released Brian Mercer, the first player Blanched at a parish.
• Dublin had eight filings refused and none ratified, the most refusals of any team. Kyiv had six refused.
• Round one released, round two signed. Andrés Quintero (Medellín to Dakar), Nomsa Mahlangu (Johannesburg to Moscow), Otabek Nazarov and Sevara Ibragimova (Samarkand to Gander), and Carlos Morales (Guadalajara to Ushuaia) each went into the pool and came back out of it days later, on another roster.
• Repeat movers. Valtteri Lehtonen (Helsinki, then Tokyo, now Prague), Kaito Itō (Tokyo, then Helsinki, now Busan), and Sipho Nkosi (Johannesburg, then São Paulo, now McMurdo) have each moved at both windows.

Between seasons, everyone changes

The S.H.I.F.T. is not the only thing that happens to a roster in the intersaison. Season 03 went into the ratings before Season 04 opened.

Of the 720 rostered players, 360 rose and 310 fell. Fifty did not play enough to be measured, and were not. 119 gained a star. 128 lost one.

Forty-six players retired. None held a seat; all forty-six were waiting in the unattached pool and stopped waiting. Ninety more arrived in the pool after them. Ninety-four players are unattached on the eve of Season 04. Le Council expects several of them to be needed, because from Season 04 players can be hurt.

See also

• The Exchange—where the votes come from.
• Donations—the cheaper way to assemble a voting bloc.
• The season cycle—when the window opens.
• Teams—the rosters it rearranges, and every movement registered so far.
• The Sixth—where a signing from the pool has been.