eFootball Training Programs Guide: Level Up & Progression Points

Levelling a card in eFootball does not raise its Overall rating by itself. What levelling actually does is hand you Progression Points, and where you spend those points is what separates two copies of the same player. Level Training Programs supply the experience, Progression Points spend it, and Skill Training adds the abilities the card was never printed with.

That distinction catches out almost every new Dream Team manager. You feed a card four EXP 10,000 programs, watch the level bar fill, then look at the Overall number and find it unchanged. Nothing broke. The game simply separates experience from development, and it expects you to make the second decision yourself. Understanding that split is the difference between a squad of nominally high-rated cards and a squad that actually does what you want on the pitch, which is the same reason two managers can own the identical Epic card and get very different results from it.

What are Level Training Programs in eFootball?

Level Training Programs are consumable items that grant Experience Points to a player card. Feeding them raises the card's level, and each level-up awards Progression Points. They come in fixed experience denominations, so the whole system works like currency: you hold experience, then you spend it on one card at a time.

The programs are issued in multiples of 100, 1,000, 4,000 and 10,000 Experience Points. You can feed a card any combination of them, which matters more than it sounds. A card sitting a few hundred experience short of the next level does not need a 10,000 program, and burning one there wastes the surplus that a 100 or 1,000 program would have covered exactly. Managers who top up with small denominations first and only then reach for the large ones get noticeably more levels out of the same stock.

Level Training Programs were previously called trainers in older PES and eFootball builds, and you will still see the old name in community guides. The item is the same; only the label changed. If you are still working out how the card system fits together before you commit experience to anything, the eFootball beginner's guide to player cards, coins and squads covers the wider structure this sits inside.

How do players actually gain Experience Points?

There are exactly two sources of Experience Points: playing matches and consuming Level Training Programs. Match experience accrues automatically to every card in your line-up across all game modes, while programs are the manual route. Most managers rely on programs, because match experience alone is slow.

Match experience is not flat, though, and that is where your manager choice quietly matters. Every manager carries an affinity for a certain group of players, whether that is forwards, young players, or a particular nationality band. Cards inside that affinity earn more experience per match than cards outside it, so a squad built around your manager's affinity levels itself while you play the modes you were going to play anyway. Some cards also generate Progression Points as they level, which compounds the effect.

Because match experience is passive and program experience is finite, the sensible pattern is to let your regular starters level themselves through matches and save your programs for the card you actually want finished this week. Spreading programs thinly across a whole squad is the most common way to end a season with eleven half-developed cards and nothing that feels genuinely upgraded.

Where do Level Training Programs come from?

Programs arrive from three reliable places: event and campaign rewards, releasing players you do not need, and the eFootball Points exchange in the shop. None of them requires spending real money, though the exchange route is the fastest if you already hold Points.

Events are the largest free supply. Tour Events, Challenge Events and seasonal campaigns all list Level Training Programs among their reward tiers, and they refresh constantly. Clearing the low-difficulty tiers of every running event is unglamorous but it is where the bulk of a free-to-play manager's experience stock comes from.

Releasing players is the second source, and it is the one most squads underuse. When you release a card you receive Level Training Programs in return, with the denomination scaled to the released card's stats and card type. Duplicate high-rarity cards are the obvious candidates, because eFootball groups different versions of the same footballer together and you rarely need more than one. A practical habit is to keep the strongest version of a player plus any version you genuinely rotate, then release the rest rather than letting them sit in storage doing nothing.

The shop exchange is the third route. Level Training Programs can be traded for with eFootball Points, and the rate is modest: one EXP 4,000 program has been offered at 5,000 eFootball Points, though exchange listings rotate and you should check the current rate in-game before committing a large balance. If you want to build that Points balance without spending, the guide to the best ways to earn Coins and GP in eFootball walks through the free income streams, and the difference between Coins and GP explains which balance actually pays for what.

What are Progression Points, and why doesn't levelling raise Overall by itself?

Progression Points are the development currency a card earns each time it levels up. Levelling raises the card's level and grants these points; it does not touch the Overall rating directly. The rating only moves once you spend the points on specific attribute categories, which is why development is a decision rather than an automatic reward. For the detail behind that, see how division points, phases and promotion work.

This design is deliberate. Konami separated experience from stat growth so that two managers holding the same card can build it differently, and so that a card's Overall reflects choices rather than time spent. The consequence is that an untouched maxed-level card and a fully allocated one can look identical in your list while performing nothing alike, because all the difference lives in the progression screen.

To reach that screen, open My Team → Players, select the card, and use Level Training to feed programs. Once the card has levelled, reopen it and choose Player Progression. Older builds showed two categories here, Player Stats and Team Playstyle Proficiency, but the Playstyle Proficiency branch was removed in the transition out of the 2023 edition. What remains is the Player Stats tree, and every point you hold goes there.

The tree does not list every raw attribute individually. eFootball groups its underlying stats into roughly ten broader categories, so Place Kicking, Curl and Finishing all sit together under Shooting. That grouping is convenient but it also means a single point purchase moves several hidden attributes at once, which is why spending in the wrong category is more wasteful than it first appears.

Which Progression categories matter for each position?

Allocation should follow the card's position, because each role leans on a small set of categories and gains very little from the rest. Attackers want Shooting and Dexterity, wide players want Dribbling and Lower Body, midfielders want Passing and Lower Body, and defenders want Defending and Aerial Strength.

The position-by-position picture looks like this:

• Centre Forward (CF): Dexterity and Shooting first; then Dribbling, Aerial Strength and Lower Body.
• Second Striker (SS): Dribbling, Dexterity and Shooting first; then Lower Body and Passing.
• Wing Forward (LWF/RWF): Dribbling and Dexterity first; then Lower Body, Shooting and Passing.
• Attacking Midfielder (AMF): Dribbling and Passing first; then Dexterity, Lower Body and Shooting.
• Centre Midfielder (CMF): Lower Body, Passing, Dribbling and Defending; Dexterity after.
• Defensive Midfielder (DMF): Defending and Lower Body first; then Passing, Dribbling and Aerial Strength.
• Side Midfielder (LMF/RMF): Lower Body first; then Dexterity, Dribbling and Passing.
• Centre Back (CB): Defending and Aerial Strength first; then Lower Body and Dexterity.
• Side Back (LB/RB): Lower Body, Dexterity and Defending first; then Passing, Dribbling and Aerial Strength.
• Goalkeeper (GK): the three GK categories first; Aerial Strength after.

Lower Body deserves a note because it appears in almost every row. It carries the movement and balance attributes that decide whether a card can hold its shape under contact and recover position after a sprint, so it improves cards that never touch the ball in the final third. That is why it belongs high on the list for full-backs and central midfielders even though it produces no dramatic number on the card face.

Read the card before you allocate, not after. A card's Playing Style and existing skill set already tell you what it wants to do, and progression should sharpen that identity rather than fight it. Pouring Shooting into a defensive full-back produces a slightly better shot on a player who will take two per season. If you are not yet confident reading a card's underlying numbers, the breakdown of eFootball player card types is the place to start, because card type sets the ceiling that progression then builds toward.

How does Skill Training work, and what are the limits?

Skill Training is a separate system that adds Player Skills rather than stats. Each card can hold up to 5 additional skill slots on top of its printed skills, giving a theoretical maximum of 15. Training consumes a Skill Training token and the skill you receive is random, though you can overwrite an existing additional skill later.

The five-slot cap is firm. A card printed with nine skills still receives only five additional slots, not six, so the ceiling is on the additional skills rather than the total. Within those five you have full freedom to remove and reallocate, which means a bad roll is recoverable but not free, because recovering it costs another token.

To run it, open the card from My Team and select Skill Training. The additional skill section carries a New Player Skill option, your remaining token count sits in the top right, and the Skill List option lets you read what each skill actually does before you commit. Reading first is worth the extra thirty seconds, because several eFootball skills sound broader than they are and only fire in specific situations.

The randomness is the real cost here. Tokens arrive slowly, and a striker rolling a defensive skill is a token gone. That risk is exactly what the next system exists to sidestep.

Is Legacy Transfer a safer way to add skills?

Legacy Transfer moves an additional skill from one card to another, which lets you roll skills on a card you do not care about and then transfer only the results you wanted. It trades token risk for GP cost, so it is the safer route for a card you have already invested heavily in.

The method is straightforward. Open the Contract section of your Dream Team home screen, choose the Standard Player List, and sort by Price in ascending order to surface the free, low-rated players. Many of these have no printed skills at all, which makes them clean vessels. Sign one that plays in the same position band as your target card, because position influences which skills the roll can produce, then spend a token on that throwaway card instead of your Epic.

Once the throwaway card holds the skill you want, go back to My Team, open the card that should inherit the skill, and choose Legacy Transfer. Select the vessel card, confirm on the overview page, and complete the transfer. The skill moves across and the vessel card is consumed. Note that this is a skill transfer rather than an experience transfer, so a fully levelled inheritor is fine and you are not sacrificing progression to do it.

The catch is GP. Legacy Transfer is expensive, and a new manager with a thin balance will feel it immediately, which is why the technique suits established squads more than fresh ones. For a genuinely new account the more efficient play is usually to bank tokens until you own cards worth spending them on, since the highest card types keep their value across seasons in a way that mid-tier cards do not. Managers who would rather begin from an established Dream Team than build one from scratch can browse the available eFootball accounts to see what a developed roster looks like before deciding where their own tokens should go.

How should you sequence a card's development?

Work in one order and finish one card at a time: level the card with programs, allocate its Progression Points along its position priorities, then add skills only once the stat build is settled. Reversing that order wastes both tokens and GP on a card you may not keep.

The reason the order matters is that each step raises the cost of the one before it. Progression allocation is cheap to plan and expensive to regret, skills are random and slow to acquire, and Legacy Transfer burns GP that could otherwise sign new cards. Committing tokens to a card before you have confirmed it survives your rotation is how managers end a season with a beautifully skilled squad player and an undeveloped starter.

A workable weekly loop looks like this. Clear the event tiers that pay Level Training Programs, release the duplicates that accumulated from the week's contracts to convert them back into programs, feed those programs into the single card you have decided to finish, and allocate its points the moment they appear rather than letting them pool. Points sitting unspent do nothing, and the card is playing every match at a level below the one you have already paid for.

None of this replaces the card you started with. Progression sharpens a card's identity, but it cannot give a card a Playing Style it does not have, and it cannot lift a low card type past a high one. That ceiling is set at signing, which is why the acquisition side and the development side are two halves of the same decision.

Common questions about eFootball training and progression

Does levelling a card raise its Overall rating? Not on its own. Levelling grants Progression Points, and the Overall only moves once those points are allocated in the Player Progression screen. A maxed-level card with unspent points is still an undeveloped card.

Do Level Training Programs expire? They sit in your inventory as items and are consumed when you feed them to a card. Programs awarded inside a limited event still have to be claimed before that event closes, so claim rewards as they unlock rather than at the end of a campaign.

Can Progression Points be reset or reallocated? Treat allocation as permanent and plan before you spend. This is the main reason to read a card's position and Playing Style first, because the points you commit to the wrong category are not coming back.

What happens to the points if I release a levelled card? The card and its allocation are gone, and you receive Level Training Programs scaled to its stats and card type in return. Releasing a heavily developed card recovers experience, not the specific build you spent time on, so release before you develop rather than after.

Is Skill Training worth using on a low-rated card? Only as a Legacy Transfer vessel. Skills added to a card you will not field are wasted unless you intend to move them, which is precisely the workflow the vessel technique is built around.

Everything above runs on two supplies you have to keep topped up: the eFootball Points that convert into Level Training Programs, and the GP that pays for Legacy Transfers. If you would rather keep your development loop running without waiting on event drops, take a look at the current eFootball top up options and pick the balance that matches the squad you are actually building.

Because Training Programs raise GP and Manager Level together, it's worth reading why Manager Level and Team Strength don't always match before assuming more training alone makes the XI stronger.

GameMarket.gg is a trusted digital marketplace for everything gaming-related. We serve the gaming community by providing secure access that enhances every gaming journey.