Staring at the Rematch Loading Screen? Diagnose It in Under 10 Minutes

Where Exactly Does It Stop?

Before applying any single fix, identify the exact point where loading stalls. Rematch has three distinct loading phases, and the phase where it gets stuck tells you exactly which system failed. Guessing wrong means you spend an hour reinstalling the game when the problem was your router, or troubleshooting your network when the problem was a corrupted cache file.

Phase 1: Initial Boot. The developer splash screens and logos appear, then the screen either goes black or stays on the loading icon indefinitely. The game engine is initializing and loading core Unreal Engine assets from your storage drive into memory. Network is not involved at this phase at all. A stall here means the game cannot read the files it needs, either because the files are corrupted on disk or because the storage drive is too slow or failing to stream them.

Phase 2: Match Connection. The main menu loads successfully. You can navigate settings and queue for a match. The match is found. The loading screen with the pitch graphic appears, but it never transitions to gameplay. The progress bar may move partially and then stop. This phase involves connecting to the match server, downloading match-specific data, and synchronizing your client state with the server and other players. A stall here is either a network timeout or a server-side matchmaking failure.

Phase 3: Pre-Match Synchronization. You see the 3D pitch, hear the ambient stadium sounds, maybe even see your character model on the field, but the referee's whistle never blows and the match never starts. The connection to the server established successfully, but the server is not sending the match-start signal. This is almost always a server-side or peer-synchronization issue where one player in the lobby has a connection too unstable for the server to synchronize.

Identifying your stall phase narrows the diagnostic checklist from a dozen possible causes to two or three. Read only the section below that matches your phase.

Phase 1 Stall: Local File and Hardware Checks

Corrupted cache files are by far the most common Phase 1 culprit. Unreal Engine games store compiled shaders, asset indexes, and temporary data in a cache folder. When this cache gets partially overwritten or corrupted, often during a crash or forced shutdown, the engine cannot parse its own cached data and hangs during initialization.

Close Rematch completely, including checking Task Manager for any background Rematch processes. Press Win+R, type %localappdata%, and press Enter. Find the folder named Rematch or the developer's studio name. Navigate into it until you find a Cache or Saved subfolder. Delete only the contents inside the Cache folder. Do not delete the folder itself. If you are unsure which files are safe, rename the entire Cache folder to Cache_backup. The game will recreate it with fresh, uncorrupted data on the next launch.

Launch Rematch. If the game now passes Phase 1 and reaches the main menu, the cache was the problem and you fixed it in under two minutes. If Phase 1 still stalls, move to file verification. On Steam, right-click Rematch in your library list, select Properties, go to the Installed Files tab, and click the button labeled Verify integrity of game files. On Epic Games Store, click the three dots next to Rematch in your library and select Verify. On console, use the equivalent repair or verify function in the system storage management menu. This process downloads a fresh manifest of the correct file checksums from the game servers and compares every local file against it. Any file that does not match gets replaced with the official version. The process takes a few minutes depending on your download speed. Let it complete fully. Do not cancel it partway through.

If cache clearing and file verification both fail, the problem is your storage drive hardware. Rematch streams assets continuously during loading. A slow mechanical hard drive may be unable to feed assets to the engine fast enough, causing it to stall waiting for data. A failing drive with bad sectors may simply be unable to read parts of the game files at all. Open Task Manager and switch to the Performance tab while Rematch is attempting to load. Find your storage drive in the left panel. If the Active Time percentage sits at 100 percent during loading and never drops, your drive is the bottleneck. The definitive test: install Rematch on an SSD if it is currently on an HDD. The improvement to loading times alone justifies this regardless. SSDs are cheap enough now that gaming on an HDD is a self-imposed handicap.

Phase 2 Stall: Network and Server Checks

A Phase 2 stall means the game client cannot complete the connection handshake with the match server. Start with the simplest diagnostic that rules out the widest range of possibilities: launch any other online multiplayer game and attempt to connect to a match. If other games also fail to connect, your internet connection or router has a general issue affecting all online play, not just Rematch. Restart your modem and router. Unplug both from power for a full 60 seconds, then plug the modem back in first and wait for it to fully reconnect before plugging in the router. Test another online game again. If it connects, test Rematch.

If other games connect without issue and only Rematch fails at Phase 2, the problem is specific to Rematch's network path or port requirements. Begin with the fastest check: visit the Rematch developer's official Twitter account, Discord server announcements channel, or the game's Steam Community Hub. Look for recent posts about server outages or matchmaking issues. If multiple players are reporting the same Phase 2 stall at roughly the same time, the servers are having issues and the only solution is waiting for the developers to fix them.

If servers appear operational based on community reports, check your port accessibility. Rematch likely uses specific UDP ports for match connections, even if the exact port numbers are not publicly documented. In your router's admin panel, enable UPnP. This universal setting allows any game to request port forwarding dynamically without you needing to know the specific ports. If UPnP was already enabled, also check Windows Firewall. Open Windows Defender Firewall, click Allow an app through the firewall, and verify that the Rematch executable has both Private and Public network permissions checked. If the Rematch entry is missing, add it by browsing to the game's installation folder and selecting the main executable. After making firewall or UPnP changes, restart both your router and PC before testing Rematch again.

If port access is confirmed and the Phase 2 stall persists, your ISP's default route to Rematch's servers may be failing. This type of failure is specific to the network path, which is why other games on different servers work fine. A network optimizer provides an alternative route for Rematch traffic specifically. After installing GearUP and launching it, search for Rematch in the application's game library. The tool displays available server regions and their current latency in milliseconds. Select the server with the lowest number, click to activate the boost, and then launch Rematch. GearUP redirects your game traffic through its own optimized backbone to Rematch's servers, bypassing whatever ISP routing issue was preventing the Phase 2 handshake from completing. The software's real-time statistics panel shows the connection latency and packet loss so you can visually confirm the connection is healthy before you even see the game's main menu. Phase 2 stalls caused by routing failures should resolve immediately on the first attempt after switching to an optimized path.

Phase 3 Stall: Server-Side Synchronization Wait

A Phase 3 stall where everything loads, the pitch appears, ambient audio plays, but the match never starts is nearly always a server-side synchronization problem. The most common cause is that one player in the match lobby has a connection too unstable for the server to complete the pre-match sync, and rather than starting the match with a disconnected player, the server waits indefinitely.

There is no fix you can apply on your end for a Phase 3 stall. Cancel the matchmaking search, wait 60 seconds, and queue for a new match. If Phase 3 stalls happen repeatedly across multiple queue attempts, try switching to a different server region in the game settings if Rematch offers that option. Alternatively, use GearUP to select a different server region with more available players and potentially lighter server load. A different region may connect you to lobbies where every player has a stable enough connection for the server to complete synchronization.

Test and Confirm

After working through the diagnostic for your specific stall phase, verify the fix conclusively. A successful load to the main menu proves Phase 1 is resolved. Successfully loading into a complete match and hearing the opening whistle proves Phase 2 and 3 are resolved. If the stall recurs at the same phase, the fix you applied within that phase was not appropriate for the specific cause. Move to the next diagnostic step within that same phase. Do not jump between phases. Most Rematch loading stalls resolve at the cache level or the network route level within the 10-minute checklist above. You should not need to reinstall the game or factory-reset your router.